House, Divided
 La Tempestad
 The Ballad of John Wesley Reed
 Girl Science
 The Allure of Oriental Wisdom
 Memorial Day (formerly Varia)
 Pride of the Lion
 The Dostoyevsky Man


 Monica for Chanukah
 Angie and Arnie Sanguine
 Edward and Ellie Supine
 The Lion Eats His Lunch
 The Lion in His Lair
 The Lion Leaves His Mark
 Prayers


 But Who's Counting?
 Emma Goldman Imagines the Millenium


 Just Before the War Between the Plates
 I Can Handle That


 Talking  with Lee Blessing

...with Tom Coash
...with Mary Fengar Gail
...with Richard Kalinowsky
...with Jamie Pachino
...with David Rambo
...with Jason Sherman
...with Naomi Wallace
...with Tom Gibbons
...with Dick Goldberg

A Conversation About It's All True Between Playwright Jason Sherman And Interact Theatre Company Literary Manager And Dramaturg Larry Loebell

InterAct: Its All True is about a fascinating time. In John Houseman's autobiography he describes the intense union activity in this country police shootings of strikers, massive demonstrations, long work stoppages. These form the background to the incidents in the play. However, this history is unknown to most Americans these days. Even in the Tim Robbins film about this story, serious unionism and that fact that the American communist party had a million members in the late 30s never comes up. Why do you think that our sense of political history has disappeared? Do you think the theatre can help us retrieve it?

Jason Sherman: Of course it's unknown to most Americans. Can you imagine what might happen if people found out that not so long ago millions of ordinary citizens formed a united front and rose up against unfair, unsafe working conditions, poor wages, etc., etc., and won? Good Lord, it might inspire people today to do the same thing. But it is about as likely as newspapers renaming their business pages "labor." Theatre can be about political history (it isn't very often, which is a shame). But unless theatre is also about the place of the individual within that history, and unless that history is more or less similar to something going on in our own time, no one is going to take anything away from it, except a souvenir program.

InterAct: The nearly mythical status of the story of the staging of Blitstein's opera has far eclipsed the actual opera Cradle Will Rock itself. Which attracted you to the story first, the actual opera or the story of is staging?

JS: The latter. I was browsing in a bookstore and saw a thin, yellow-covered volume called The Cradle Will Rock by Orson Welles. I'd never heard of it, which was reason enough to pick it up, since I considered myself something of a Welles fan (not aficionado, or devotee, just a fan). Skimming through it, I wasn't even sure what I was looking at. It seemed to be a play about the staging of a play, with Welles himself a major character. (It turned out to be a screenplay, which Welles wrote late in life and tried unsuccessfully to finance in Hollywood.) I didn't buy the book that day, but I did think that there might be a story there for a play. Perhaps a month later, Richard Rose (who directed the premiere of Three in the Back, Two in the Head) asked me if there was something I wanted to develop with his company (Necessary Angel Theatre). By then, I'd read the screenplay and fallen head-over-heels with the story, the people and the times, and knew I had to write something about the original staging.

InterAct: Lets talk about the three men who are the central characters in Its All True. Blitzstein was an interesting character, a man of many contradictions. A homosexual who married a woman he deeply loved, and a man who in his later life apparently had difficulty making interpersonal commitments, but who was deeply politically committed all of his life. A communist who was represented by the William Morris agency. However, there are many ways in which he seems to me to be cut from a similar cloth as Houseman and Welles. Like Houseman he seems to have been very indulged as a child, given a taste for material success. And like Welles, he was recognized at a very young age as having great talent, perhaps even genius. Do you feel that the contradictory elements in these men's backgrounds and personalities encouraged them to take artistic and political risks?

JS: Even communists need agents. But as to the question, I offer a qualified yes. Just about everyone has contradictory elements in their backgrounds; artists just happen to explore theirs in public, and so we tend to think that artists are more fucked-up than the rest of us. The value of biography, it seems to me, is that you can find in someone else's life the key to understanding your own. I can't imagine it does any good to be told you're a genius, especially when you're a child, because you have to spend the rest of your life failing to live up to those early expectations. You might even decide, consciously or not, to prove those expectations wrong. (This is the current theory about Welles, that he brought about his own downfall.) In any case, the contradictions of these three men might not have led any of them to take risks unless the times in which they lived encouraged, or perhaps allowed, them to do so (to a point). And I'm not sure that Welles or Houseman saw themselves as risk-takers. Blitzstein certainly did, but he was the ideologue of the group.

InterAct: Welles remains the poster child for artistic genius and rebellion. The Mercury Theatre, an outgrowth of the company that produced Cradle, produced War of the Worlds, the famous radio play that caused national panic, and Citizen Kane, which remains number one on virtually every critics top 100 list of all time great films. Your Welles is domineering, bossy, manipulative and brilliant. What are your feelings about the real Welles?

JS: Like the rest of the world, I think I prefer him dead.

InterAct: Welles talks about the magic of theatre, the fact that theatre is illusion and distraction like a magic trick. Do you agree with him?

JS: I gave Welles that argument not because I believe it, but because it's the dominant force in American and Canadian culture, so someone has to be believe it. Anything that encourages people to think, to question, to imagine is denigrated as "high art," "elitist puffery," "self-indulgent nonsense," while the sentimental products of the entertainment industry dominate our stages, screens and pages. Welles argues that art which does not also entertain is deadly, and that I agree with; the problem with that argument is that it often hides its true agenda, which is to snuff out dissent of any kind, to ensure that art is free of meaningful discourse. If The Cradle Will Rock had been staged according to Welles' original, grandiose plans (a full bore Broadway musical attack), it would have been remembered not for its agit-prop message of defiance, but for the machinery of the production. The state always does art a favor when it resorts to censorship.

InterAct: John Houseman's biography tells the story of the staging of Cradle Will Rock as a triumph of artistic unity over the forces of segmentation and repression. You have refocused the lens of the story a little toward the personal struggles by individuals. Can you talk a little about how Olive Stanton, who is given only the briefest of mentions in the Houseman autobiography, developed into the heroine of your story?

JS: It may be a brief mention, but it's a powerful one; maybe the greatest entrance in the history of theatre (impromptu or not). It was in fact Houseman's version of events that led me to make Olive the hero. Yes, Blitzstein took to the stage that fateful night; but what did he have to lose? He was already committed to the cause. Defying the government was a matter of course. But Olive Stanton, and the dozens of other actors and musicians who sat in that audience tearing themselves apart over whether or not to take part, they represent the forces of change. And Olive, in particular, stood out among all the others. She was apolitical, says Houseman (though I don't know what that means; everyone believes in something). The point is, she didn't want any part of the fight, yet she found herself in the middle of one, and, as one of the other actors wrote later, if Olive Stanton hadn't stood up, it's doubtful the rest would have as well. That would have meant that Blitzstein would have done the show as a concert, without actors standing up from where they sat in the audience, without the communal feeling, the camaraderie that followed Olive Stanton's brave gesture.

InterAct: Reducing this sprawling story -- which includes everything from the union firemen who helped Jean Rosenthal unload the piano at the Venice Theatre, to Washington politicos -- down to seven characters meant cutting a great deal out of the story, Hallie Flannigan, the director of the Federal Theatre Project, for instance. What guided your choices of what to leave in and what to jettison?

JS: In the early period of development, nothing guided my choices. I did indeed try to tell as much of this fantastic story as I could, including those firemen and Hallie Flanagan. But, after a while, the details began to overwhelm the main characters. I needed to give Blitzstein and Welles (in particular) more stage time, and that meant eliminating everyone and everything that had no affect on these two men. Hallie was certainly an important figure historically, but theatrically she seemed to serve no other purpose than an expositional one. Her arguments ended up in the mouths of other characters who were more central to the action, and therefore were more active in the drama.

InterAct: When you read the biographies of the primary participants, it is hard to feel that any of them who were in the thick of this event were having much fun. Yet your play is funny and you find ways to make the argument that artistic endeavor is lots of things, including a pretty good time. Is this your own view?

JS: It's almost always fun at first, but once you're into the thick of rehearsals (and, in my case, of rewrites) fun seems like a rumor. It's a difficult thing to keep your humor about you when you're tired, your nerves are frayed, you're fretting over how your work will be received, you wonder if you've gotten anything right, if anyone will give a damn, etc., etc. So yes it can be a good time, but it's never only that.

InterAct: My last question is: Do you feel there is any impact of your being a Canadian on your perspective on this story?

JS: Probably, but I'm too polite to point out what it might be.