FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... BILLY CRUDUP

CRUDUP, "THE MORNING SHOW"'S CORY ELLISON, IS GETTING EVEN FURTHER TO THE CORE OF ANOTHER CHARACTER AT BERKELEY REP IN A REVIVAL OF DAVID CALE'S "HARRY CLARKE"

(Above: Billy Crudup photographed by Philip Cheung for The New York Times.)

David Cale’s one-person multi-character play Harry Clarke, directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Billy Crudup in a tour-de-force performance, has been revived for a sold-out run at Berkeley Rep seven years after its hit runs in New York at both the Vineyard Theatre and off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane.  It is scheduled to close on December 23th. Crudup and Cale and Silverman are revisiting this play and the wild “abouts” of Harry, delving even more deeply into the character and his narratives that unfold like an origami of gaslighting and impulse and a natty, nattering self-awareness seemingly without enough mindful knowledge of the self - even if it is finally about healing that ur-self by streaming it into the many selves it takes to do so. It all leaves us - well, it left me when I saw it a few times back in 2017 - with this question: Is sociopathy really just neediness italicized?

Harry Clarke is a kind of The Talented Mr. Ripley-Believe-It-Or-Not told in Cale’s seductively circuitous way with words.  It is the story of Philip Brugglestein whose Illinois sissy childhood is one fractured emotionally but one he survives by creating a Cockney character for himself that later morphs into the insouciant Harry Clarke when he moves to New York City and into the wealthy bohemian orbit of those who are charmed by Harry’s insouciance  – as is Philip himself.  The fractured childhood gives way to a refracted adulthood that is itself mirrored in Cale’s play as Crudup as Philip and Harry are both seen through the finely wrought other characters Crudup portrays in the play with which they intersect.  Because of Crudup’s genius as an actor - that both exalted yet creepy credibility of the indelible that all great actors possess in their artistic makeups that manifest in the made-up - it is that emotional intersection that is so dizzyingly dramatic as well as keenly delineated with a kind of diabolical precision.  It is a funhouse mirror of a play and a performance that is profoundly, disturbingly felt even as it is displayed with such a lightly deft touch.  It is mesmerizing to behold as we are confronted with questions of the mutability of character (not just characterizations), the mutability of sexuality, and even the mutability of morality itself. “Watching Billy alone onstage is like watching a dazzling, emotional magic show,” David Cale messaged me when I asked him what it is like to witness this revival of his work in Berkeley. “I’ve never seen an actor do what Billy can do. He’s continuously astonishing. He takes my writing - and Philip’s story - to a place I’d never dreamt it could go.” Me? I’d love to see Crudup as George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, maybe with his former wife Mary-Louise Parker with whom he has a 19-year-old son, William Atticus. In his 60s, he’ll have a great Willy Loman in him and a magnificent James Tyrone. In his 70s: Lear.

(Above: Crudup in Harry Clarke at Berkeley Rep. Photo by Kevin Berne)

Crudup and I talked on Zoom earlier this week on the day it was announced he had received a Golden Globe nomination for his role as Cory Ellison on AppleTV’s The Morning Show. The Globes are, shall we say, rather problematic and I have always been bemused by the performative seriousness with which those in the audience take them when they are being given out - so I got my bemused congratulations out of the way early in the video call. “You get three kinds of calls to congratulate you,” he says of the nomination. “You get calls from people on the show. You get calls from your agents. And you get calls from people you knew in high school. People from the show know it will be good for publicity. My agents know they can use it for a kind of chit if they want to. And my high school friends think it’s something important.”

“You’ve just accepted my congratulations with a kind of grateful wit,” I tell him. “I hope you get to be gratefully witty on the night of the show at having won the award for your work on The Morning Show.” Crudup is more grateful, however, to talk about theatre. So why did he return to Harry Clarke? Was it, in fact, being a part of episodic television with The Morning Show and another AppleTV series, Hello, Tomorrow! so they engendered a need for some more episodes within him of Harry, a title character who lives a rather episodic life? “I wish I had a better answer other than somebody asked,” he says, mentioning his friend, Berkeley Rep’s Artistic Director, Johanna Pfaelzer. “Her idea was to do the play at Berkeley for five weeks and then partner with someone in London to do it there.”

“Wow. I sure hope it comes here,” I tell him. “I now live here in London for half of each year,” I say, telling him also about my donating or selling almost everything I own to live life as a pilgrim in small rooms around the world. “‘We shed as we pick up,” I continue, giving him his cue, “‘like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march.’”

“Ahh .. the great Septimus speech,” he says, picking it up, that cue I let fall. Indeed, the first time I saw Crudup on a stage was in 1995 when he played the role of the young tutor Septimus Hodge in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre and then in Bus Stop the next year at Circle in the Square in which he played Bo Decker. I have followed his career ever since, including the revival of Arcadia on Broadway in 2011 in which he played an older character, literary critic Bernard Nightingale. Billy Crudup is not only a great stage actor but he is even a fellow theatre nerd who loves talking about all aspects of the theatre - as well, as it turns out, living life as a simple pilgrim. “I love it,” he says of my choice to live this way. “I confess I have a bit of that ascetic streak in me. I like having things as spare as possible. I like the experiential mandate of life. This journey that you’re taking sounds rather enticing. To go into the theatre each night is a job right now, but when I’m not doing it I dream of it. So …”

“I think of you, Billy, each time I go into the National Theatre here in London to see a play or sit at a cafe table and write for hours. I remember you telling me once that it is like a temple to you.”

“It is, Kevin,” he confirms. “It’s a temple. My wife and I were there recently,” he says, mentioning Naomi Watts whom he married earlier this year, “and we saw The Motive and the Cue. It’s opening on the West End. You will adore it when you see it as someone who adores the theatre. It is simply a love song to theatre and the craft of making it,” he says of the play that is about John Gielgud having directed Richard Burton in Hamlet on Broadway in 1964. “It’s really beautifully done. We saw it when it was at the National and I could have just sat there for hours in the bar area or the cafe or the bookstore.”

“I just saw Infinite Life at the National. It has the same cast that was at the Atlantic in New York. It’s an Annie Baker play about a Northern California health spa where people in different stages of chronic pain for different reasons go to fast,” I tell him, knowing that as a fellow theatre nerd he’ll take that cue, too.

“Annie Baker is the future of theatre as far as I’m concerned,” he says.

“I was trying to explain to British friends what it was like to see this American cast take the curtain call the other night and the looks of astonished gratitude that they all had at taking the call at the National in London,” I tell him. “It moved me on a whole other level after the play had already moved me so deeply on its own levels. They were themselves so moved to be experiencing a curtain call at the National. I could see it in them.”

“I am getting chills thinking about it,” Billy says quietly. “People who are drawn to Annie Baker’s work are people who adore the theatre. She creates theatrical craft at a high level. You have to be ingenious, willing, committed to taking a part in one of her plays because she asks a lot of the actors in the complexity of her work.”

“It’s almost as if she strips things down narratively in the way that director Jamie Lloyd strips down things visually and then they each conjure from that a heightened theatricality. It is alchemical in its way, not just theatrical,” I offer. “I’d love to see him direct one of her plays. I saw his own revival of The Effect by Lucy Prebble at the National which is coming to New York to be done at The Shed. Don’t miss it.”

“I remember when I first saw Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation and The Flick, the sentence that formed in my mind was that she has created the theatre of the banal,” says Billy. “What she has uncorked is what is most rich and dramatic in the simplest of human experience. To me that is such a gorgeous enterprise. Pinter did it in a very arch way; he did it with sparsity of language. She does it with people seemingly going about these mundane experiences. I adore her work. I do wonder what her process is like. I certainly hope to find out someday … You go too long without doing a play and your muscles begin to atrophy and your interests in performing onstage pale in relation to the anxiety that intensifies because your muscles have atrophied. It has always been on my agenda to return to the theatre - yearly if possible because I did do it yearly for many years. Unfortunately, it is David Cale’s fault because Jennifer Aniston and her producing partners came to see Harry Clarke in New York and that’s why I got The Morning Show which has kept me very busy and then that got me Hello, Tomorrow!. Basically three years went by which was filled with work.”

(Above: Billy Crudup as Septimus Hodge with Lisa Banes as Lady Croom in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at Lincoln Center in New York. 1995. Photograph by Joan Marcus.)

At the end of our conversation the other day, you will read below that I invoked the name of our friend, Lisa Banes, with whom Billy starred in that initial New York production of Arcadia and with whom I attended Juilliard in the 1970s. Lisa was killed in a freak accident during the summer of 2021 when someone on an electric scooter ran her over and caused her to hit her head on the curb on a corner between where Billy starred with her at Lincoln Center and I went to school with her at Juilliard. She was both a singular actor and a special person. I watched Billy’s eyes well up with tears along with mine as we talked about dear Lisa. We both felt her presence Zooming from wherever she is now to join us in our conversation in a kind of melding that can occur when one is aware of time’s simultaneity itself which is at the heart, come to think of it, of Arcadia, that counterpoint of existence that can also be felt when those who are dead are divined still in our midst. Time can divine itself if one no longer believes in its being linear but part of the realms revolving around and within each other in … well .. real time. It, that concept of time being parallel realms, was one of the many gloriously challenging aspects of that particular Stoppard play churning with so much wit and wonder.

Seven years ago, Crudup talked to me with wit and wonder himself about portraying Harry Clarke and the art of acting. I, like time, revisit some of that conversation because it has proved to be both timely and timeless. Combining our two conversations that did not, for the sake of the temporal Stoppardian simultaneity theorem, take place in the past and the present, but finally and forever all at once is not only a homage to that dramatic device which Stoppard employed in Arcadia - which Billy also revisited when he returned to it to play another character in its narrative about “first love, Newtonian physics, hustling pedants, landscape gardening, sexual infidelity, class, the mathematics of deterministic chaos, manners” - but also an homage to Lisa’s affect that still lingers so effectively that it can assert itself still with that grace with which she imbued so much when she was conjured in the physical sphere.

And isn’t that what Billy Crudup’s own divine grace as an artist is all about: conjuring in the physical sphere based on a soul-level simultaneity.

QUESTION ONE

You have a history with Berkeley Rep. You did Pinter’s No Man’s Land there with Ian McKellen as Spooner and Patrick Stewart as Hirst.  You played Hirst’s menacing secretary.

I’d always wanted to work at Berkeley Rep.  It’s such a great theatre and a great town for supporting art – the whole Bay Area is. Those audiences were really attuned to Pinter’s art – which is not the easiest.   They were so smart.

Once that production made it Broadway it was paired in repertory with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which you played the slave Lucky who has no lines until he has the one that has 700 words in a nonsensical sentence. How did Pinter and Beckett inform your work in Cale’s Harry Clarke?  

In that sense, I’d say that textually they are very similar parts in so far as the writing leaves a great deal to your interpretation and to the interpretation of the production.  One of the great things about playing Pinter is that he gives you so many opportunities to explore your point of view about how these people are relating and what the event actually is.  And with that Lucky monologue, it is up to you as the actor to find where that stream of consciousness comes from.  Beckett doesn’t give you a lot of hints about that kind of eruption coming from someone  who has been that accommodating for all of the play.  To that end, both Pinter and Beckett are quite cerebral in trying to understand them.  One of the things we tried to do with Lucky was  a kind of physicalized journey of oppression.  We wanted to see how far we could take someone being beaten down.  We wanted the audience at a certain point to really recoil from the appearance of Lucky.  Because I think that is one of the things that Beckett is after and that is that you oppress people and then you discard them because you can’t view  the oppression.

Sort of like God Himself or Herself.

There you go.  Exactly.

Or maybe it is God Themselves since I think God must be gender-fluid.

Yes, God could be many incarnations.    The interesting thing about doing those parts, even though they were supporting ones, was that it was such a grueling schedule.  I think we were all together for nine months between Berkeley and then pairing the Pinter with Godot on Broadway.  I was tired enough from it all that I didn’t even approach any theatre material for a while.  And I usually get pretty itchy after a year.   And three years had passed before I took this on [in 2017].  So what happened by taking that much time off from the stage, it left me really hungry.  When I was sent this script for Harry Clarke my first response was of-course-not; this seemed like a ludicrous idea.  But then whatever that engine is that keeps drawing me back to the theatre got activated. This was a singular opportunity.

The Pinter and Beckett repertory experience was so much about being in a company of actors and sharing the space with them.  To go from that to this as your next theatrical outing must have been extra daunting.   There is always a collaboration with a director and a playwright in any rehearsal process but in a one-person show there is a sense of having to channel that collaboration in ways that do not come into play with a cast filled with other actors.  It is almost as if the audience each night by default becomes your scene partner.

There’s no question.  The audience is one hundred percent my scene partner.  Leigh Silverman articulated that early on very clearly.   I didn’t quite understand it as a theatrical event – what a one-person show is.  The people who write and perform them almost universally take that for granted.  You ask them who the audience is and they say they are the people who come to the theatre to see it tonight.  That is not how I think of acting.  I don’t think of my character as being at the Vineyard Theatre or the Minetta Lane [or at Berkeley Rep].  So where is he?   And who is he talking to?  This became a central part of our collaboration.  Add to that, that David’s writing in this particular setting is not only narration and storytelling but then scenes erupt which imply that they could be rendered and you could actually play both sides of them.  On top of that, the narrator then changes and alters his persona to the audience.  All of that is quite a complex theatrical vocabulary so if you don’t have an agreement with your director and your playwright then there is just no way to approach it.   Truthfully, what I’m doing up there is I am interpreting Leigh’s idea of David’s work.   We all kind of triangulated trying to understand what the work is. 

[You can see a YouTube video from The New York Times of Billy discussing his techniques for doing the one-man 19-character play, Harry Clarke, here.]

QUESTION TWO

In keeping with the doubling theme of the play and Harry being Philip and Philip being Harry, are you the real Billy here with me today or the Billy who presents himself as “Billy” to do this kind of thing?

Most of the actors I know leave their Harrys at work. 

And yet talking to me is part of your work, if not your art.

You know, I enjoy talking about acting and the theatre and the creation of art and I don’t think of conversations like this as work.   I do think of press junkets when you sit in the same place and someone comes in every two minutes and asks you the same questions – that’s hardcore work.  Because all they want is something click-y they can blast out.  But when you’re sitting here talking to someone who is interested in the theatre and the process, those are things that are very close to me so I don’t have to muster up any kind of special energy.  This is what I talk about with my friends all the time anyway.  We are invested in this art form and have been for a long time now.  And also we’re all arriving at different points in our lives now.  We are no longer the young ones coming up.   The renegades.

I’m in the veteran phase now.  Older parts are beginning to come up.  And you do begin to think of yourself differently.  But we had this instilled in us early at NYU by Ron Van Lieu and other acting teachers there – if you don’t have some sort of self-awareness of your instrument, meaning your mind and your body and your voice, you’re not going to be able to modulate your career over a long period of time.  If you’re stuck in the same idea then you’re going to be stuck in the same kind of work.  If you want to evolve – and the people I always admired did do that – then that seemed like something to aspire to. 

QUESTION THREE

I love John Keats.  I was trying to remember a line of his “Eve of St. Agnes” which kind of describes the use of music in Harry Clarke.    So I Googled the poem and found it: “the music, yearning like a God in pain.”  That’s what the music in David’s play reminded me of.  But when I found the poem online, I also found some stain glass images of St. Agnes that were done by an artist named – ready? – Harry Clarke.

That.  Is.  Un.  Real.  Wow. 

“Everything connects” is one of my mantras. I call that getting in the research zone, as well, when I am preparing for one of these conversations just as actors and artists have to find a zone when they are working.  How did you find the zone for this role and this production since there are just so many words to keep in your head and in the right order - how does it not come out like Lucky’s squawking, “quaquauquaquaqua …” in Waiting for Godot?

This play requires something different.  My typical trajectory of attacking a piece a material for the theatre is comprehension first, collaboration, physical preparation, and then the execution is when you forget things and just allow it to happen.  The reason you can do that is that you are collaborating with other people in real time and the audience typically defines the level of immediacy so that you want to participate in something that feels alive even though you’ve already collaborated on everything very precisely.  With this – because Leigh and I envisioned it and David has written it as a thriller that has a certain kind of cinematic conformance  – there is a driving force that stays ahead of the audience just enough that keeps them anticipating what is going to happen.  Because of that I have to stay on top of it and I can’t let go.  It’s a different kind of experience.  Usually my experience on the stage is about relaxation – relax your expectations of yourself, relax the expectations of the audience – and play moment-to-moment.  With this, when I am standing backstage waiting to go on all I am thinking is that Philip has an 80-minute story to tell and he has to tell every single bit of it.  When I get offstage each night I’m so mentally exhausted by what I’ve just done that I go home and I will just sit and stare at my silverware drawer and go, okay, I know one is a fork and one is spoon but, fuck it,  I’ll just use my hands. 

I’m a recovering addict.  There is the subplot in  the play about drug addiction - but on another level Philip is addicted to being Harry. 

No question.  You know the play is a memory play.  So he’s recovered from this stage of his life whatever it was and he’s sharing it with others

There is something called a qualification in recovery when someone gets up in  front of a room and shares the experience, strength and hope of their story.  And there were moments of watching this play when I thought, shit, this is like listening to a really great qualification.

Usually – most frequently – I come out of the theatre with this play, put my hat on, and run home.  Usually because I am filled with an overwhelming sense of shame.   I have a friend in recovery who said what I was feeling was share-shame which some people can get after they share in a recovery meeting and then recoil from having exposed so much.  I feel that having performed this some nights.   But I think Philip feels it too because although he feels gratified that he’s gotten it all off his chest he’s also feeling a little bit lost.   Even though this was his mission of how he navigated through his adult life and it is thrilling, hilarious, and horrifying.   

But one of the main things I responded to from David’s point of view as the playwright was his sense of the humane.  David has a vision – a wide-field view – of what is humane and what is comprehensible. I guess I tend to share that point of view.  And I try very much to walk the edge of letting the audience be seduced by the behavior and understand the need and the desire to connect.  When Philip says that he suddenly felt as if he were on a ride and he couldn’t get off, you don’t want the audience to go, shame on you. 

QUESTION FOUR

Are there any aspects of Harry and Philip in Corey - or vice versa? Cory Ellison in The Morning Show is one of the great television characters. Your take on him is almost jazz-like. That’s its feel to me. There is a contrapuntal pulse to it.

I would say of Harry that he occupies a creative and a humanely realized id - if there can be such a thing as a humanely realized id. He doesn’t have a concept of forethought. He doesn’t have a concept of afterthought. He lives in the present. He lives as a vital engine. Cory, on the other hand, is looking around walls. He’s walking down a corridor and he’s imagining what he’s seeing and imagining people coming up behind him with knives. He’s always on-the-ready. So this is a person who’s interested in consciously manipulating the situation for his own self-sense of satisfaction, his own sense of pride and ego, and also his joy for being a part of this weird, wicked game of entertainment and news and broadcasting. Harry, I think, might participate with the same kind of infectious joy - those two things are similar between them - because they both revel in the opportunity they have at navigating their way through rather complicated lives. That’s an unusual trait. Most of us - like myself - are really often plagued by the experience of living. You know: things are hard. You carry baggage. You have to walk over broken glass. The travel is not always easy. It’s compounded when you’re a parent - that’s for sure. The kind of joy I get from playing Harry and Cory … well, not this last season in particular for Cory. I was begging the writers, no, there’s so much pressure for him. I like him having fun.

I began to feel empathy for him - which surprised me. I didn’t want to feel anything for Cory. I just wanted to enjoy him.

Exactly. I am truly grateful to the writers for that invention. I remember the first season that I kept asking Kerry Ehrin [the showrunner for the first two seasons of The Morning Show and the first writer with whom AppleTV signed an overall deal], “Are you sure you’re okay with that choice?” It was just instinctively how I imagined this guy. And she would go, “Yes, I’m writing to that now.” And I’ve never had that experience before with someone who said whatever complex thinking is going on - or I should say, whatever awkward conversation is going on in your head about how to create this character, I’m going to do my version of it as a writer and let’s see if I can do it. That’s why maybe you get that jazz-like feel from it.

It’s almost like that time element in Arcadia - those independent streams of being flowing together into a oneness.

For sure. The experience of doing it because television moves rather quickly and some of those monologues are quite textually complicated is a little sweaty. It’s not the most joyous experience. And that’s not unlike playing Harry.

QUESTION FIVE

What is your own humane take on Corey?

I believe that he is a person who believes in capitalism as representative of meritocracy. He wants to live in a world where people are trying to promote their best interests by putting on display their greatest assets - whatever the field is. He’d have the same amount of respect for a professional athlete as a school teacher as someone who crafts landscapes - anybody who is interested in competing in their work to try to be as expressive as they can as a human being. I believe that is at the core of his philosophy. So from my perspective certainly from my playing him that is a rather joyful way to live. It’s a way that celebrates humanity and also celebrates enterprise. It’s not particularly the way I would …

He seems lonelier than you, Billy.

Harry Clarke is a labor of love. It is a glorious thing to be able to do. And one of the reasons I wanted to do it again was not only because it had been some time since I’d been in the theatre but also it makes me feel useful. It makes me feel that the things I’ve been trying to do and I’ve invested in trying to build or exercise are being put to use. And they are being put to use in a way that I almost can’t manage. So that is really a rare gift.

It’s almost as if you’re having to keep up with yourself. There is your talent over here as its own entity and you are here beside it trying not to be in awe of it but to meld with it. It’s like “Fuck. I’m that good? Well, shit.”

I have to thank Leigh and David for pushing me actually in the way they did. I was in a constant state of trying to understand what they were asking of me. When you have collaborators who press you in that way and engage in a kind of creative collaboration undoubtedly - and I think this is one of the things that draws me so to the theatre and what I think is important about the theatre - it brings in disparate personalities to conjure an event which has nothing more to it than a moment of communing with people over a shared experience of humanity. It is one of the great enterprises that I can be a part of. So I want to continue that as long as I can. Harry Clarke is one of the greatest iterations of a true creative collaboration among people who speak wildly different languages.

BONUS QUESTION AND AN INVOCATION (WHICH IS A BENEDICTION)

Cory’s mother’s manta is not “everything connects” but “don’t flinch.” He references that in the last episode of The Morning Show this season. What can still make you flinch?

Ah, waking up.

Talking to people on fucking Zoom.

No, this is a pleasant conversation between people who are interested in theatre. The Golden Globes will make me flinch a little bit. I suppose I have a kind of nervous attachment to creative ambition. I really want to be tested to the best of my abilities and the experience of that test is often very uncomfortable. There’s rarely a performance that goes by that I don’t have at least a minuscule panic attack where I’ll go up on a line or get blinded by a light or somebody will walk out or fall asleep or something that will throw me for a moment and since in Harry there is nobody to lean on, it can be difficult to conjure the support that you need. I confess it is a very safe way to be scared. I’m just doing a play. Not going to be any worse than that.

I’ll tell you in a very real sense what makes me flinch is the growing apathy toward theatre in America. It’s been long-growing since the NEA became so defunded. You must have a National Endowment for the Arts in order to create plays. Plays are something that take a lot longer to curate than a film script or television script. Those can be modulated while you’re doing them and it can also be recreated in postproduction. When you arrive at the theatre you must have a play that is your idea and you have to execute it. That takes some time. In order to do that, you have to go through some shitty versions of it. The fact that we were able to preview Harry and open it in New York initially was shocking. Most of all, because the first week I was terrible. I couldn’t keep anything straight. The show runs an hour and 18, 19 minutes usually. There was one show when I came offstage and it had been 50 minutes because I forgot half an hour of the script.

I’ve only booked half an hour on Zoom and I wanted to talk about your breathtaking scenes with the brilliant Lindsay Duncan, who plays Cory’s political macher mother, this past season on The Morning Show and your own mother having worked in advertising for local politicians in Dallas and your father, whom she married and divorced twice, being a kind of salesman hustler which might just be elements in both your roles as Cory and as Jack in Hello, Tomorrow!. But I want to get this in before we say goodbye, Billy. This is more important to me. I want to invoke the name of Lisa Banes. I loved her and I know she meant the world to you, too. She was in my Group - Group VIII - at Juilliard’s Drama Division. We were accepted on the same day after being in the same herd to audition. And she was in Arcadia with you 20 years later across the way at Lincoln Center. This is another “everything connects” moment. Let’s end with our love of Lisa. I say her name every morning in my litany of prayers and meditations when I get to a list of people who have died and whom I daily want to remember. I said her name this morning. Life can change in a second. She was a very special person. A remarkable woman. Let’s say her name: Lisa Banes.

Kevin, I could not agree more. Lisa Banes. She was one of my favorite people in the world. We stayed in touch superficially throughout the years and every time we encountered each other was an absolute love fest. It’s incredible you were accepted the same day to Juilliard. As I’m still a New Yorker, I confess when I’m walking down the street - and this is a daily experience - and I see those motherfuckers on those electric scooters I have this protective instinct for her spirit to strangle all of them. I invoke her spirit, too. I was just with Jennie Dundas [whom he tutored in the 1995 production of Arcadia in which she played 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly]. We wasted no time in celebrating Lisa.

Thank you for doing this, Billy. I know it was basically a favor. It was really kind of you to make the time.

It’s been a pleasure, Kevin.