The New Yorker Radio Hour - Terrific, Tremendous New Health Plans, and Lynn Nottage on her play “Sweat”

Episode Date: March 31, 2017

Ideas to replace Obamacare that will blow your mind; Lynn Nottage’s new play about racial tension in the Rust Belt; and Jessica Lange’s foray into the art of mime. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy. And also, I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there. This really subversive, strange thing in rap, especially, and see what their lives are like on both sides of the border. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Republican Health Bill was dead on arrival.

But we haven't heard the last about the effort to replace Obamacare with something much better, something great, tremendous, the best health care you've ever seen. Believe me. The White House is proud to present brand-new health care plans that'll save billions of dollars and possibly several lives. The Platinum Plan For a monthly premium of $250,000, this plan gives you private. access to all health care options. No referrals or ailments required. The gold plan. The same as the platinum plan, but only available to people who own a gold mine. The silver plan. For the incredible price of just $49.99 a month, you'll receive a 500-millimeter bottle of an unbelievable liquid

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It was performed for the radio hour by Chiracrodo Dunlap. Now, one point of clarification, that's a work of fiction, at least as of now. A few years ago, the playwright Lynn Notting, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, began working on a play set in Reading, Pennsylvania. Reading is an old factory town, where the manufacturing jobs have been drying up for years, and in their place, there's unemployment, poverty, and outlet malls. Nottage, whose Black, was interested in how racial tension is linked to economic hardship. And she tells that story through three working-class women, along with their

sons, the owner of the bar they hang out in, and the bus boy. The play is called Sweat, and it premiered in 2015, and over the last year, as the presidential campaign of Donald Trump gathered steam pitting the frustration of the white working class against minorities and immigrants, Sweat began to look remarkably prescient. It's just opened on Broadway in a terrific production, and the morning after I saw it, I sat down with Lynn Notage and the director Kate Wariski. I began by asking them about the initial research on the play when they traveled together to Reading, Pennsylvania. So what happens the first time you show up?

You announce yourself, you just drive down there, and here I am, Lynn Notting, and Kate Warisky, and here we are to take the pulse of, reading, is it as weird in experience as it is for a journalist? It is really weird, and it's probably much more familiar to you than it is for me, because those are not muscles that I have. And Kate and I, for ruined, we had experienced sort of going into a place that was completely unfamiliar and sort of... There, you're writing about East Africa, writing about Congo, and you went to Uganda. We went to Uganda, and we didn't know anyone in Uganda, and we thought we just have to be brave and

begin to ask questions, and I think that our approach in Reading was really similar. We reached out to the mayor who was very welcoming. We reached out to the Reading Film Office. We reached out to some of the places like the United Way, and from there, we met people and then rippled out. And you show up, and how do you conduct your research sessions? You just have conversations? Now, if I go there, I'm there with a notebook, and I get people's name spelled correctly in their ages because that's the nature of journalism. For a play, you're doing something maybe a little bit different, no? I mean, part of it is experiential. There is someone who we met who is a Vietnam veteran,

and his work is to help other veterans who are homeless, and so he will go and give them food, cigarettes, whatever. And so on my first trip, actually, to Redding, Lynn invited me to go with him, And we just walked for a long time to find these men. And so the interesting thing is the experience and what you say is that it is a very strange time when you're walking with a stranger and you're trying to get to know them and see what their daily life is like. So paint a picture of Reading for people who live elsewhere who are listening. What does the place look like? I was surprised because of the physical beauty.

And it's a combination of sort of colonial home. and homes that were built in the early and mid-20th century, you know, the architecture is quite striking, and you don't immediately see the poverty on the surface. It's a beautiful city. So how do characters begin to form? How do you begin to see a play out of the raw stuff of reality? You're starting to talk to people about losing their jobs

and the conditions of their lives. How do you begin to transform that into an imaginative work? as opposed to journalism? Well, I think for me, it's the moment of transition came when I was sitting in the room with these steelworkers, and they told me a story that literally broke my heart. And I thought, oh, I'm feeling something so profound and something different. I have to go inside and investigate this feeling. These were, by and large, middle-aged white men who had worked in the same.

same factory for between 25 to 40 years, who had completely bought into the American dream, had a whole notion of how their lives were going to proceed probably for the next 25 years. They arrive at their factory one day and all of the machines are gone and they're told basically they don't have jobs. And if they want jobs, they're going to have to make these serious concessions, which involves giving up perhaps, you know, 50% of their day. And these are guys making how much money? These are guys who are probably making $35 to $40 an hour. These were people who were solidly middle class, you know,

who had homes and mortgages and who were taking vacations two weeks every year. Yeah. Yeah. And then woke up the next day and they had nothing. For a while, I think there was a belief that they would be able to get back into their factories. They were locked out. So they refused to sort of meet the company's demands. And they weren't even given sort of the privilege of striking, which is really the new tactic that's being used today.

The factory actually remained with a couple of the machines intact, but they brought in what I think a lot of the industry is doing today is they're bringing in attempts, people who will work for significantly less, and they can employ those people for a couple of months and then push them out without giving benefits. And what's interesting of the many things that are interesting about the play, sweat, is that the dynamics and the friendships are at least, in many ways so easy

that it's only when two women who are competing for the same job, one African-American, one white, the African-American woman gets the job, does that relationship suddenly become uneasy and much worse? Right. That their friendship is incredibly longstanding, beautiful, and other friendships and other dynamics in the play, the same thing.

Did you find that to be part and parcel of Reading or your own experience or what? It's interesting because a lot of times we're in conversation with people in Reading just under the surface was this unspoken racism. And when pressed, you'd say, well, why isn't Reading working now? And they sort of pushed the microphone aside, let me tell you the truth. It's not working because of them. And when you press, well, who is them? And them is always who they consider the interlopers, the outsiders, the people who came and sort of changed the status quo.

And the person who exemplifies this most is at the center of the drama eventually is Oscar, who is eventually seen as a great focus of resentment because he's crossing a picket line. And you saw that play itself out in Reading? Yeah, it definitely plays itself out in Reading, is that you have a new generation of immigrants. Where are they from? who in Reading, it's predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants who are entering into town, who are seeking opportunity the same way that the wave of German, Italian immigrants, and African-American immigrants that came, saw their fortunes. And in some instances, because you have companies that are pushing out some of the higher wage employees,

you have some of the new immigrants that are willing to take those jobs. And there's a lot of resentment. So you come home, essentially, both of you, and you have stacks of material, you have films, you have tapes, you have transcripts of interviews and notes and so on. Then what? How does it go from being that material, that empirical material,

to the play that swept me away last night? It's interesting because I think that this is where I take a different path from perhaps. You are a journalist is that I push aside all of the research and then I don't look at it again. I need room to sort of be free and to roam. Now, as a playwright and as a director, what political plays, what political theater that you've seen as growing up or as you've come along impressed you and influences you in terms of what's really strong and effective and moving at the same time. For me, Athelfugard, even when I was a child, I remember thinking that his work was... South African playwright.

And what impressed me about his writing is it felt both personal and political. So it wasn't easily digestible. Lynn? Yeah, for me, I think of when I came of age in the playwright is with Angels in America. Tony Kushner's play, which I remember seeing it, and it spoke so in such an extraordinary way to sort of, at least the internal struggle that I was having, having lived through an age in which a lot of my friends and a lot of people who I admired were dying and trying to just digest that fact. when you're only in your early 20s. And then also, it's the work of Anne DeVir Smith, Fires in the Merrow.

I remember seeing that and just being so struck by how she engaged with a subject matter at the right moment when we needed to be inside that conversation. Yeah. Are there particular perils of political playwriting as opposed to other forms? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think one of the perils

is that people will resist what has to be said, which is something that we've definitely encountered. I think, and I actually could go on and on about this. I think that there is a real resistance in our culture to engage with political topics in the theater. And when you do, you're sort of immediately accused of being didactic or having an agenda. And I'm really one of these people

who's not afraid to say, yeah, it's okay to be... What's wrong with having an agenda, by the way? It's like a lot of the writers I admire had agendas, you know? Aristophanephanie's head agenda. Everyone. It's like if you don't have an agenda, then why bother? Right. One of the most amazing things, one of the theater productions that I wish I had seen is that you took this play to Reading itself.

Yes. When it had finished at the public theater some months ago, you went on a road trip, essentially took everybody to Reading. Tell me the story of that, how it played, how the audience reacted. Why was it different from being in, you know, a stage in New York or Oregon or wherever? It was a wholly different audience And what was really exciting When the actors came, of course, They were so scared to do it in front of the Reading audience

They were worried that they may not seem like people from Reading And so they had so much concern And through the course of the evening They were embraced and celebrated in such a wonderful way How did you feel that? Well, they were very vocal, first off, but also we also had a talk back But what was interesting to me is how much the acting just slightly changed,

and particularly the role of Tracy, because in New York... The White Factory Worker, who's one of the main characters. She has to really do quite a balancing act to constantly be liked. So she'll do something that's not really something that people will like, and then she immediately tries to be charming. And it's a real balancing act that she holds. And in Reading, when she said that she was angry at her friend for taking a management job, there was a kind of loyalty that that audience gave her. And so she played the role wildly differently, though it was very close to the same narrative.

And so what was interesting is that the journey with that audience was this is the woman who is right. She is right in what she's doing. And then you watch her step by step, and then we go to the scene which I cannot talk about. But what's interesting is the audience was so devastated by the end to watch the progression of that thought. So interesting. And then you had a talk back at the end of the play, a question and answer session between you guys and the cast as well. What were the questions like? What was the back and forth like?

Well, you know, the thing that was most interesting is that it began as a Q&A, but ultimately it became a testimonial where people stood up almost like at a revival meeting and told their stories. Like one woman stood up and she said, basically, thank you. I have been in this situation in which I've actually felt ashamed that I'm not working because it's been what has defined me for so long. One of the words that keeps coursing through the play, one of the notions that keeps coursing through the play is visibility and invisibility. no less than it is in Ralph Ellison

and so in a sense these people are being seen yes but there's also a woman who I thought articulated something beautiful she was she said in the talk back she said everyone gives eight to ten hours a day of their life to something and all of us have that privilege but many of us are not seen in in what we do for those eight or ten hours so thank you for presenting the work that we do for

eight to ten hours a day. Now, when you were researching this play, Donald Trump was still a kind of joky real estate guy. Yes. When you went back for the talkback and a performance in Reading, he had been elected president of the United States. How is this affected the way we're looking at the play, the way the audience in Reading or New York is looking at the play, and your own view of it? What's interesting is the moment that Trump was elected, the play shifted in meaning. And the actors had done maybe a week or, I guess it was three weeks of performance before he was elected. And once he was elected, it became the play that articulated the voice of, quote, unquote, the other side. The Trump voter.

Yeah. And so people. And did that come out in the talkbacks when you went to Reading? No, interestingly, no. Why do you think that is? You know, I think people were really very focused on the content of the play and not so much on the politics, because for them it was not a political play. For them, it was a play about their reality. Nevertheless, you get the sense that the people whom you talk to in your research are Trump voters.

Some of them are. It's 50-50, right? It's 50-50, and even amongst some of the steelworkers. that we interviewed, some of them were like staunch Bernie supporters and would never pull the lever for Trump. And then there's some, like, there's one guy in particular who is a staunch Trump voter, but only, you know, as he said,

because he wants to keep his gun, and he believes that he's going to bring back jobs, not that he philosophically is in alignment with much of what Trump stands for. It seems to be almost unfair for the play to be called the play of the first, play of the Trump era. It's been around for a while. It has. But do you sense even in New York that you're going to get a different reaction now that it's moved to Broadway because of Trump

in the White House? You know, I'll say that this Broadway audience has been kind of tremendous in that it's surprisingly is more diverse than the audience was at the public theater. And I also think that it's an audience that doesn't come in with a certain set set of expectations. They sit down and they engage with the play in front of them rather than the play that they've read about. And a lot of those people are from out of town. A lot of the folks are from pockets in the country that are very similar to Reading,

and so it resonates for them. What does that feel like sitting there last night? Where are you? Are you together? Are you backstage? Are you in the audience? What are you doing? How are you feeling?

We were doing multiple things. I mean, we had like a... Big Tumblr, a Scotch backstage, age, nothing like that? Well, yes. A little bit. We actually had a little... Your secret is out.

Little pink champagne. There's pink champagne. Not exactly. Keith Richards. A little pink champagne, that's it? That's what we're doing. God, you guys live on the wild side. We live right on the edge.

No, but I began watching the show with my son, who was eight years old. We saw the first two scenes, and then I went down to the green room, and I hung out with some of the designers, and then Lynn had watched the first act in the theater, and then we met. We met, and we decided to watch the second act. Half drunk on pink. Yes, actually, sipping pink champagne. Well, you deserve it.

And do you have any idea, now that it's well-launched on Broadway, do you know where you're going with the next thing? The next play? Yeah. Well, I actually have a sequel called Floyd, which is set in Reading, and it's a comedy. Well, there's a piece of news. And it's, you know, I think it's kind of, yeah, you know, I felt like we need to laugh a little bit now.

Thank you so much, Lynn and Kate. All the best to you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Because we're great. Terrific. Well, thank you. Thank you.

Director Kate Warisky and playwright Lynn Notting, whose play's sweat just opened on Broadway. ahead this hour, the early days of fake news. We tend to blame the Internet, but Jelani Cobb is going to tell us about an epidemic of fake news from the days when absolutely everybody still read a newspaper. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Now we're going to get a little history lesson here. In 1942, the South was on the verge of a rebellion. Black men were stockpiling weapons. the notorious agitator Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling around organizing secret clubs of black domestic workers who were going to turn on their white employers. And the slogan was, not a maid in the kitchen by Christmas. This wasn't some rumor, this was news reported and discussed across the South. It was real. Except that, of course, it wasn't.

Historian Joshua Zeiss recently wrote in Politico about this episode. epidemic of what we now call fake news. And he sat down to discuss it with a fellow historian, New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb. So we've had this conversation now about, you know, the way that our landscape, media landscape has changed, especially the kind of digital proliferation of rumors and, quote-unquote, fake news and so on. But this is obviously very far before the Internet's existence in 1942. How did this information spread? Sure. A lot of it spread by word of mouth, but I also did a search of southern newspapers as many as I could that were digitalized. And it was very clear that the larger city dailies were dismissive of the rumors, if not skeptical of them. But a lot of the small town dailies and weeklies bawled into them and affirmed that these rumors were in fact true. They had heard from reliable sources that Eleanor Roosevelt had been at a town nearby organizing black domestic

servants or that it was definitively true based on police reports from nearby sheriffs that African-American men were stockpiling pickaxes and other weapons in expectation of an uprising. So a lot of it was word of mouth, but some of it was also spread through the local media, which is a pretty old tradition in American history. The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about this, and famously his essay, the paranoid style of American politics. And just this is a long tradition of what we would now say, describe as conspiracy theories.

And he called it the paranoid style, almost as if it was a kind of artistic expression style, like a school of thought. And he makes this interesting point in that essay too. He says that the early American conspiracies tended to be about kind of subversive elements trying to undermine American democracy from abroad, that the most dangerous elements are there, that you are being corroded from within. I thought it was fascinating, especially if we're looking at what you were talking about in

1942, what made people susceptible to this idea that this was happening or this would happen to them, that there was a black conspiracy afoot in the South? Well, it's such an important reference because, you know, when Hofstadter was writing his frame of reference, of course, was the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and McCarthyism in more recent American history. And he looked at these populist movements that oftentimes were so accepting of wild and rife rumor of a type that were conspiratorial and really improbable on their face. And his point was not that these were aberrations, but that they were deeply ingrained in Norman of American politics. So when we look at the Comet Pizza incident of January or December of. recently. It seems crazy, but it's got plenty of precedent in American history. And I think

part of it is that we see these types of fake news pandemics, so to speak, flare up when America or part of America is undergoing extreme economic or demographic or political change, and it becomes a way for people whose lives are really being upended in ways they have a hard time articulating to explain that change. And that's certainly true of the American South in 1942. To begin with, a good deal of U.S. war manufacturing was focused in the South. When you suddenly had millions of African Americans participating in a cash economy in war production plants, they didn't get the best jobs, but they got jobs that paid cash and took

them out of either a cashless sharecropping or tenant farming economy or took them out of domestic service into better paying war production jobs, they suddenly enjoyed a certain autonomy, both economic and political, potentially, you know, there was the prospect that they would take these wages and start paying poll taxes, which had been something that was out of reach before. So this is very destabilizing. And poll taxes was a mechanism that prevented them from voting, that's right, and prevented many poor whites and blacks in large parts of the South from voting.

So there's a lot of, just a lot of demographic, economic, and political change in the wind, and it was a situation that was really threatening to the old order. So the FBI was called to investigate these rumors, and what did they find? Yeah, Jay O'Gar Hoover wanted to prove them. He was no fan of Eleanor Roosevelt's, but they concluded pretty quickly that there was no basis for them. The best that they could figure out was that the rumors about the Eleanor clubs, about black women organizing the clubs. Their motto was supposed to be a white woman in every kitchen by 1943, meaning that they were going to completely subvert the South Racial Order and make domestic servants of their former white employers. The rumor was that they were demanding to be called Mrs. or Ms.

that they were insisting on entering through the front door rather than the service entrance. They were demanding increases in pay as best the FBI could figure out. The small kernel of truth behind these rumors was the very real fact that many women in domestic service had surfeit of options. They could go and make better money working as cooks or domestic servants in army camps. They could go work in war production plants. So I think on some level, many white people probably did perceive that they're formally, you know, subservient domestic, you know, help were suddenly feeling quite empowered. You know, one of the other things I think that's interesting is the way that this maps onto other kinds of histories. Certainly our history of immigration, we've seen that this conspiratorial thinking has had a kind of correlation to the history.

immigration as well. Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the, you know, the nativist movement in the 1830s and 1840s, there's a famous episode in right outside of Boston, the Charleston fire incident where a Ursuline convent was burned to the ground. Luckily, no one died, but there were rumors that the nuns inside were sexually torturing, you know, young Protestant girls. I mean, again, this not too far removed from Pizza Gate, you know, America was rife with

rumors in the 1890s and early 1900s. And then again, right after World War I about Italian and Jewish immigrants and they were anarchists and they were socialists and they were, you know, again, deeply embedded in and fifth column type threat to the U.S. So yeah, I think anytime we're in this kind of demographic flux, we do tend to see rumor develop into fake news, develop into kind of defining political debate. And I think there's a kind of broader thing that I think is equally troubling here, which is that democracy kind of requires that we take rationality for granted. And we've seen these ideas, irrational, outlandish, false, incredible ideas, gain a significant

amount of traction as actually a kind of motive force in people's electoral behavior. I think that's exactly right. I don't know that this is true of every flare-up. of what we today would call fake news or rumor in American history. But certainly, the South in 1942 was the easiest mark for this type of thing. It had, you know, a creaky public education system. Only 10% of Southern children who entered the first grade would go on to graduate from high school. Funding for these schools was deeply inadequate.

It had a broken political system, poll taxes and other mechanisms, made voter participation rates the lowest in the country, not just among African Americans, but among working class whites as well. There was a kind of lack of a strong civil society. And so I would argue that, you know, it was easier for these rumors to take root and deeper root in the south than in other parts of the country. Today, we clearly do have a disenfranchisement problem in this country and it takes many forms. There is, you know, the kind of assault on expertise, whether it's on medical and scientific expertise or the assault on journalism and media, it's taken a toll. And so I think Americans are very distrustful of institutions and experts.

And when you have such weak civil society institutions, not only do rumors and fake news, so to speak, take root. But I think we also become an easy target for outside. I mean, now I sound like the conspiratorial kind of, you know, like conspiracy theorists I'm talking about. But we do become an easy target for anybody who wants to manipulate. that kind of gullibility. So what really do you kind of divine from this in terms of how we interact with or what we can see from 1942 and say this is pertinent and relevant to how we approach this vastly more complicated media situation, but sharing some of the same parallels in 2017?

I think the bad news, obviously, and you're listening to two historians talk here, is that, you know, the historians don't have a magic antidote. for these types of ailments. So there's no easy way out. But what's helpful when we can find one or two good historical parallels is not that they're going to show us the way out, but that we can look at the same methodology we apply as we study the rumors in 1942 or in an earlier era,

look at the conclusions we drew from them and see whether those don't offer a starting point today. I can't with any more ease go back to 1942 and fix the American South, then I can tell you how we find our way out here. But I think it's a helpful example 75 years later to look at to understand people who were both spreading those rumors and who were the target of those rumors. And then it's really up to, I think, you know, activist and political figures to figure out how to fix those problems. The New Yorker's Jolani Cobb talking with the historian Joshua Zights.

We've got a link to Zights's article in Politico at New Yorker Radio.org. In a minute the New Yorker's Hilton Alls sits to. down with one of the great leading ladies of our time, Jessica Lang. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Time just flies. How can it be 40 years since Jessica Lang was first on a movie screen, a wide-eyed ingenue making her debut in the clutches of King Kong? Just like that, the ingenue is a grand dame, an actress with an incredible list of roles behind her. Now Lang is playing another leading lady, Joan Crawford, in the amazing TV series Feud, directed by Ryan Murphy. Lang co-stars with Susan Sarandon, who's Betty Davis.

And this show is a look at the psychological toll that Hollywood took on actresses of that generation. Lang recently sat down to talk with the New Yorkers' theater critic Hilton Alls, and they started at the very beginning. Lang dropped out of college in Minnesota to work on a documentary about flamenco dancers. It was the late 60s. Lang was now in Europe, broke, free as a bird, and loving every minute of it. We're driving up in a land rover from southern Spain to Amsterdam and came into Paris in May of 1968, which was when the students and workers and there was the whole revolution basically going on in the city of Paris.

And I thought this is the most thrilling thing I have ever seen in my life. And I want to come back and live in Paris. So about two years later, I did. I moved back to Paris after having become aware of Aetienne de Crewe, who was a great kind of the master, mime. Yeah. It wasn't pantomime in the way that you think of Marcel Marceau or, you know, that kind of street mime. This was very classical. And we worked extremely hard on the tiniest little things.

and I never wanted to leave, but at some point I thought, well, I've got to go back because I don't know what I can do with this. Information. Yeah, and this practice that I'm, like, obsessed with. So I went back to New York, got a job at the lion's head, waiting tables, serving drinks to all the crazy writers that were hanging out in there in those days. and started taking acting classes. And somehow with the acting, everything kind of came together. As much as I had loved the mime, it felt like there was something, some element that was not there.

Words, do you think? Yes, I think it was. Because I remember the very first scene I did from the Dutchman, Leroy Jones play. Oh, my God. That is one of my favorite. Yeah. You know, he wrote that in a day. Did he really?

I didn't know that. He wrote that play. And it has some of the most extraordinary language about violence, right? Yes. And the young man that I was working with, we were rehearsing in this apartment that I was subletting on the ground floor. And we were rehearsing this scene. And suddenly there was like this pounding on the door. Wow.

And one of the neighbors had called the police. because they thought that I was in trouble. Whoa. Because she's accusing him of rape and everything. The police came in and was like, so this is the power of text. I get it. And I think really partly what happened was the idea of voice.

When are you going to learn, Edy? You can have your cake and eat it too in this life. No, you can't. month, darling. Edie, find a man who will give you a long leash. Get married. And then you can do whatever you want. I remember when I was doing Grey Gardens, I would come to the trailer in the morning before I'd go into hair and makeup. And I would just put on either a DVD or a CD of Big Edie speaking. And it would take me about five or ten minutes and I could feel her voice kind of settled down and deep inside me. And as soon as that happened, I had the character.

But it was always through the voice. Yes. Yeah. And the same was true with Joan, although her voice, what became interesting about the voice was the pretense. Yes. Was the performance. That's right.

Because obviously, I mean, she was from San Antonio, Texas. dirt poor, no education whatsoever. When she talked about coming to Hollywood and first reading scripts, she'd have to sit with a dictionary because she knew so little vocabulary. So when she arrives at MGM, you know, and she's working her way up, suddenly it's talkies and suddenly she's a starlet. And I think she embraced that whole MGM speak 150%, so that she could always feel above her station in a way. How does it feel when you, I mean, every character is different,

but when you play quote-unquote real-life persons? I find in a way playing real characters, more interesting. For a couple reasons. One, because it pushes you to get it as perfect, as close to perfect as you can within what you're able to do and what's written. But also it, I mean, for instance, with Joan,

which was amazing, was the idea that you were playing Joan Crawford. You were actually Lucille Lassour playing Joan Crawford. So you had layers. You had layers that were happening all the time simultaneously. Guess what, Betty?

I have finally found the perfect project for the two of us. It's always been my dream to work with you. Do you remember how I beg Jack Warner to put us together in Ethan Frome? With Mr. Gary Cooper. You do remember. You wanted to play the pretty young servant girl, and I was to play the old ag of a wife.

Forget it. But this is different. These are the parts of a lifetime. No, thanks, Lucille. I've got plenty of better offers. Bullshit. I know what kind of offers you've been getting exactly none, because the same is true for me. They're not making women's pictures anymore.

And for her, the stakes were so high. Mm-hmm. she never let her guard down in any interview that I ever watched of hers except there was a radio interview she arrived at an airport and she was obviously drunk the drunk interviews are great the drunk interviews were really whoa but she was doing her best to be Joan Crawford and she's talking and she's doing her best MGM speak, and you can hear how hard she's working because she's obviously drunk. And all of a sudden, these children come up, and she turns to them,

and she says, how are you? Yeah, I don't think you can take the Texas out of them. Tell me how did the project come about with your – adorable Ryan Murphy. Actually, I'm longing to know how you and Ryan started anyway, because it was started with American Horror. Well, that was just out of the blue, really. Since I don't watch TV, I wasn't really aware of who Ryan was,

but the phone rings. It's Ryan Murphy, and we start talking. And he was so funny. He said, do this with me. He said, I'm going to write you the greatest parts, and you're going to win all the awards, and you'll make a lot of money. And he was like, just one thing after. I mean, he is a master. Seduction. Yes.

Seducer. Tell me about the great genius, Bob Fawsey. I love you so much as Angelique. And we're talking about all that jazz. Yeah. Where Jessica plays the very fetching. Angel of death. Yes.

Well, I mean, he saw me in King Kong and where so many people just more or less dismissed me. But Fossey really, he made a point of reaching out to me and wrote that part for me. I mean, obviously it was a musical and it was a Fossi musical, and I don't sing or dance or do any of that. But he wanted to help me, I think. So this was what he came up with,

because that was really the second film I did. It was your second film, wasn't it? Did you know that Meryl Streep had seen De Laurentis for King Kong? Did you know that? People have mentioned that to me over time. Yes. And he said something in Italian thinking that she'd didn't understand. And she said, I'm sorry I disappoint you. But you know, the truth is he didn't

want to test me either. He didn't? No. I had come back to New York. I was studying with Herbert Berghoff and I was approached by this Willamina, who's a modeling agent, saying, I understand your studying acting. We've been contacted by Dino de Laurentis. They're casting. They want to cast an unknown for the remake of King Kong. I thought, ho, ho, ho. This is not of interest to me at all. Right. I like my basement with my Dutchman. That's right. But they were paying for me to fly to California. And I thought, okay, well, I want to get to California because my sister's living on a sailboat out there. And I haven't seen her for a while, so this would be great. I could like, you know, maybe get on the boat and sail with her for a while.

They took one look at me and were not in the least bit interested. Finally, somebody said, you flew her out there, just put her on camera. So I went in in the morning and I had a scene to play. Neither the producer nor the director nor the first assistant director. None of the right, nobody was there. Oh, no, Jessica. Yeah, no. And there was just some skeleton crew.

And I played a scene. And the next thing I know, they've got the first assistant director there. The first AD comes in and watches. And after lunch, John Gillerman, the director shows up. And the next thing I know, there's De Laurentis. Wow. I mean, they offered me the part before I even left town. And how did you know how to play it to the camera?

I don't think I did. I had this certain naivete, I guess, this innocent. Like a self-consciousness. And not really an awareness, no self-awareness in doing it. Did you think that you did become more aware of it as the work went on, or is it something that you can shut out very easily? Well, now, I mean, the camera becomes almost like a lover in a way. It's that thing of them gazing upon you and you really kind of flowering for them.

It was different when the director used to be right next to the camera, which was then it became this kind of alchemy, this exchange of energy. and you were doing it for the camera and for him. He was the audience. Yes, and there was a, you know, there was a sensual feeling to the scene because his head would be right there next to the lens. And it, you know, once it became video village and the director was off in another room,

then it all became the camera. Was it hard to be? being that reality and to also have children? Well, yes. It's very difficult, I think. And that's another thing I think we touch on in Feud. Completely. How do you balance a career and ambition and desire

and the need to make a living? How do you balance that with being a good mother? I mean, it was always torturous for me. It really was. I never found a way to do it and feel at ease and that I was doing justice

to either one, really. When it came right down to it, the choice was always my children, was always my family, and I think in some way, your career suffers for that. But in the long run, I'd rather look

back and say, oh, I didn't do that part because I didn't want to, you know, whatever, then to say, oh, those were the biggest regrets. Why did I do that and spend that time away? Jessica Lang talking with the New Yorkers Hiltonalls. She was recently seen in Louis C.K.'s series Horace and Pete, and she co-stars in the series Feud. And to close the show this week, here's the New Yorker's Josh Rothman. Wait, I'm trying to remember which, I'm trying to remember which apartment he's in.

Nope, sorry, I took us to the wrong floor. Josh is a writer and the archives editor for New Yorker.com, and his interests are wide-ranging to say the least, from philosophy to technology to pop culture. His interest in the music made by Joe Williams seems to involve all those things at once. All right. Hey, Joe, how's it going? Good to see you.

Thanks for having me. Yeah. Joe's a musician, and he makes music under the name Motion Graphics. Motion Graphics is an old term from the early days of computer. animation. I came out with an album with that title last year. It's music that, I guess, for lack of a better way of putting it, it sounds like the internet. And, you know, that's kind of vague sounding, but there's actually a lot of music that sounds like technology. That's part of the

history of pop music. So there's, you know, the Beach Boys made a lot of songs that sounded like cars and car culture. Craft work made a lot of music that sounded like computers and calculators. You know, pop music reflects the technologies that we're all using. And I just felt that motion graphics really captured something about what the internet feels like. In this song, it's sort of like a ringtone is interrupting the music. But then it's also like the ringtone is the music. And, you know, a lot of Joe's songs, they sort of embody the distracted feeling of digital life. I definitely have a short attention span.

I definitely, like, grew up, like, ADHD. on Riddleman, grew up in front of a TV. It's not that different from that, like, you know, the commercial break. Pop-ups and advertising, Twitter, and aggregated news, and it's just normal. Yeah. I didn't set out to make a record about the internet, but you did. But it's just kind of like, yeah, exactly. If you walk into his studio apartment and you look at his setup,

what you'll see is a piano keyboard, a synthesizer keyboard, hooked up to his laptop. through something called MIDI. It stands for a musical instrument digital interface. And it basically means that he can associate any sound he wants with the keys on the keyboard. So he's invented a lot of new instruments this way. One of them, as he plays the keyboard, the sound that emerges is different syllables drawn from audiobooks. Another one is, he calls it a scrolling instrument. Basically as he plays, it plays each note using a randomly selected instrument.

The same way that as you scroll through your Twitter feed, you just see tweets from random people. Nowadays, like music made for television and film is done with computers through kind of like this really meticulous sampling. So once it's in the software, you can kind of do things with it that you wouldn't be able to do in real life. like even if you were a saxophone player like um so if you so what instrument is that that's an alto sax um if i hit the piano note harder it'll play louder and and also like if i use the expression it's pretty good one thought i had on the way in this mornings i was thinking like everyone has a computer and a sequencer and a keyboard and a certain set of tools and actually it is kind of like these are like the folk instruments of of the present like right right it's like you there was a time

when like if you were interested in music and you were a teenager you would have a you'd get a guitar and obviously people still do get guitars but now there's also this other thing this tool that actually like everyone has that has amazing musical possibilities in it that you can teach yourself how to do this from youtube basically right yeah it makes total sense to think of the midi controller as like a folk instrument i think that's like totally true you know if you listen to music from 10 years ago, it sounds really almost science fictional and futuristic. And that's not what's happening with motion graphics. It reflects the fact that we're just surrounded by technology and that the internet is just

pervasive and everywhere, and that it's hard to tell the difference sometimes between interacting with a person, with something human or with something digital. Joe's just doing what musicians have been doing for a long time, which is make music that reflects the world as he experiences it. The New Yorker's Josh Rothman. He spoke with Joe Williams, who records under the name Motion Graphics. And that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining us.

And if you missed any of the show, you can hear everything we did today on our whole archive at new yorkerradio. I'm David Remnick. See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.