(Bonus Episode) Giant: A Conversation with Playwright Mark Rosenblatt

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Today is an exciting one for me, because I get to sit down with a writer behind a huge new Broadway play, All About Roll Doll. Now, bear with me for a second here. When I was young, the movies Armageddon

and Deep Impact came out with in a couple months of each other. Both were big studio movies with pretty much the exact same premise about a space object coming to a narrator. Very weird.

A few years later, two movies about Truman Capote's experience writing "Incle Blood" were released back to back. Even though "Incle Blood" had come out 40 years earlier. This strangely happens a bunch. There were two big movies about volcanoes one year

for no apparent reason. Both DreamWorks and Pixar came out with movies about ants, six weeks apart, one fall, and there were competing Pinocchio adaptations not a long ago.

I don't know if a great explanation for why this happens. Other than the writers are all sort of drinking from the same tap to some extent, consuming the same news, having the same fears and anxieties about the world, and sometimes we arrive at the same place

at the same time without ever speaking to one another. All of this is to say, I sort of hoped this podcast about world doll was gonna be the place to spend time with his biography this year. And I was wrong.

And really happily so, a fascinating play called Giant, which is centered on one afternoon in Doll's life, has just begun his Broadway run. I've been thinking about it,

“and I think that shared tap between me and the writer of Giant”

is a world where antisemitism has stopped feeling like a historical footnote and started feeling like a very live wire. Mark Rosenblatt is the playwright behind Giant. John Lithgow plays the lead role.

He is a perfect role doll. The play transferred to Broadway from London where it was a huge, huge hit, and won the Olivier Award both for Lithgow and for Best New Play.

I went to see it in New York the other night with my wife and my closest friends. Lots of celebs and taste makers were in the audience. This plays a big deal, and deservedly so. It is a really smart, fra, complicated depiction

of a thorny issue, while doubling as a vivid portrait of doll. Mark was recently profiled in the New Yorker. For a writer, there may be no greater stamp of approval. It's the same magazine, of course, that published dolls early short stories

and jump started his career. Even cooler, the profile on Mark was written by the legendary critic John Larr. Over decades, Larr has profiled people like Tennessee Williams, Edward Alby, Mike Nichols,

and now Mark. In his piece, which is a rave for the play by the way,

to think for themselves, a rarity on Broadway." Larr also understandably lingers

“on the most astonishing thing about the play.”

It's the first one, Mark has ever written. Mark has spent years as a theater director,

but he had never even attempted to write a play

before giant, and now is on Broadway. There's a funny corollary there with doll. Doll didn't write what he's most famous for. Children's books, until his mid-40s. And now here's Mark, maybe the most talked about play

right in the world right now, also in his mid-40s, and also starting on an exciting new path. On today's episode, I sit down with Mark for a wide-ranging conversation. We do references play a little, of course,

so let me give you a very quick summary. It takes place on a single afternoon in 1983 at Doll's Home in England. Doll is in his late '60s at this point, and at the peak of his fame.

The witch is about to be published, and it looks like it'll be a hit. The big complication at the center of Mark's play is that Doll has just written a book review about Israel's invasion of Lebanon.

In that book review, doll writes some very anti-Semitic things. The kinds of things we talked about in earlier episodes of this show. In the play, Doll's publishers descend on his house to try to convince him

to publicly apologize. He refuses. And he goes one step further. The play ends on a really dark note with Doll picking up the phone, calling a young journalist,

and doubling down on his bigotry. I sat down with Mark in a small studio in Midtown, Manhattan, a short walk from the music box theater where his play is running. We're just a couple of writers who've spent a lot of time

thinking about and writing about Roll Doll, Talking Shop. If you've liked our show so far,

“I think you're really going to enjoy this.”

The conversation reminded me of all the big themes and fascinating questions that may me want to write this podcast in the first place. Now, here's John Lithgau, accepting his award for Best Actor at the Olivier's, for Mark's play.

[APPLAUSE] I can't tell you how much this means to me. Giant is one of the best experiences I have ever had on stage. This is largely thanks to a handful of very dear friends.

Some old, some new, our director, Nicholas Heitner. That's the old friend. Our debut playwright, Mark Rosenplan. That's a new friend.

I've obviously never worked anywhere near Broadway,

but it seems that it's both very glamorous. I also just incredibly workman-like. Yeah, I think anything, it's just-- to me, it just seems to be that there were obviously little moments of glitz.

There were parties and stuff at the delivery end. But most of it's just a lot of people working really hard. I kind of getting tired and grumpy and being trying to smile. So like I told you, I love the play.

“I think it's also such a good idea for a play.”

It's one of those ideas that I am so mad. I didn't come up with myself. Where did it come from? Can you take us back to the first germ of the idea? The origins of the play doll was not part of.

Really? Yeah, I was not thinking about doll. There seemed to be a lot of active conversations about the rights from wrongs of his role, Palestine, and then there seemed to be moments where it was tipping over

into more antisemitic stereotypes, I think.

And I just was thinking, as I've never written a play before,

and I was working as a theatre director, and you're a freelance theatre director, you're trying to think of ideas for a play or a project. And I thought it would be really interesting to see if we could find a way to prize a part

of the difference between one thing and the other. And then I thought, I don't want to write about that. So I don't want to write about the contemporary British political system. I remembered, 'cause I'd grown up absolutely,

you know, dolls of all paper of my childhood as I love, loved his work. And I remembered that he had been accused of antisemitism. I looked up the nature of that accusation, what it was, and the article on Wikipedia

that I got linked to was, I read it, they wrote this book review that he wrote. And it seemed to me a perfect mirror of those kinds of conversations that were happening in the British political system.

I thought, oh, that's interesting. Totally, that makes the ton of sense. I mean, it's, and it's also the opposite of what I've done with the podcast, and with the podcast, I very much wanted to get deep into role doll.

And I was very happy to find all these themes that resonated with me and very much resonated with where we were as a culture, and what was happening in the news. But mostly I just wanted to get into this really complex guys.

But I'm curious for you. And you said, your play takes place entirely

entire life.

“Did you have to learn about his entire life”

in order to be able to write that one day when he was an old man? - Yeah, my research process was some form of like, I mean, first of all, I didn't have a process.

I'd never written a play before.

But my instinct was to just dig deep and kind of go method on dial. I sort of, my memory, I started writing really actively writing it. I pitched it in like 2018, but by the time I came to write it was COVID,

I was at home, and I was just hiling through the biography. My intention right in the play was never to, as a dramatist, was not to smash the role doll Pinyata on stage, it to do a hatchet job. It's not interesting to watch that.

And I think a more hopefully, you know, for 10 minutes, it might be interesting to portray him as some kind of, you know, villain.

But for a meaningful play to invite difficult questions,

you can't go and go into those binaries. So hopefully with the play, it's not just dull, but the other character in the play, everyone's, I hope our sense of who's writing, who's wrong, is, is, is used for the helpfully excitingly destabilized.

And there's that, through the experience of watching the play and, and, and dull is no exception. But I would say, so, so for me, like, you know, there is obviously a red line, which is, and centres of, you know, bad, very bad.

“I'm a Jew, I, yeah, that's what brings me to the material.”

So to prize a part, the difference between what, political debate and, and racism is where my interest lies. I, I think that, for me, dull's trauma and his tragedies, a part of something psychological, they play into something psychological with dull.

And this is may not be a very profound thing to say, but I find it used, found it very useful, which is that, um, I dull seems to me a pathological fixer. Hmm, he, he believed in his, he really backed himself to fix things with a way, dull, till, well, exactly.

He, when, when tragedy came, when challenge and adversity came, dull felt that, that, he's rolling that was to fix the problem. And the, and the value, that you, that you describe, that was the perfect example. I mean, even though that valve, it was patented, you know,

after Theo had recovered, and wasn't part of Theo's recovery, you know, he was his ability to extrapolate from the, the, those, that specific circumstance and, and fix the problem that he witnessed, now, with, with, with Patricia, the same. He, yes, there were many, kind of ethical issues about how he

approached her rehabilitation. There's a lot of kind of criticism you can make of the bullishness, almost the bullying nature of that rehabilitation. But he worked with a expert in the field, and they, not only did he, help her restore her motor skills within a year,

to the point where she could go on stage, then following year and present the best actress Oscar to the, the person you want at the year after she did in the most extraordinary moment where the whole of Hollywood stood there, because they knew how it should be, that was dull, that was dull, working with someone

creating a, you know, they basically did us an equivalent job.

They, they, the, the work they did together, the methods they, by which they helped get her back on her feet, literally, became part of standard practice in, in rehabilitating people. He was a fixer, but when he couldn't fix problems, he was, he met, he collided with that failure

in a, in a spectacular way. Now, of course, if you lose your seven year old daughter to, um, and stuff like this, it is, it is unimaginable. It is, the grief that any father would feel is unimaginable, but, and I'm not saying that he didn't, he felt,

it's a pathological rebound that made him feel so kind of wildly grieving. He just lost his daughter tragically in the, in a space of a few hours.

“But I think that he, it's also about his lack of control over those circumstances.”

He tried to get the, the, the, the, the, what's it called? The, he, the, he Macloben. Yeah. He tried to get it for her, because they've been an outbreak at her school. He, he, he pulled levers to get a family friend, a doctor, the doctor would only issue it for Theo.

Right. He tried to prevent it, it happened.

I think, to cut a long story short, I but I think that when he opens that book review,

and he sees these dead children, all these mained and, and disabled and amputee, you chilled this, this carnage in February, in 1983, of the conflicts in Beirut, 1982. And this is someone who we know had raised money for children around the world in the years leading up to it had had had done fundraising for Palestine in the years leading up to that. He sees these photographs and he wants to fix the problem.

He doesn't want to just raise money or raise money or raise money. It was actually solve it. Yeah.

“And that I think is the pathology at work.”

I think that the anti-semitism which is real, but there is nothing, there is no greater tool, even though it's a completely useless tool in reality, but there is no more compelling tool than a conspiracy theory to fix the problems of the world. It simplifies everything, it gives you control. And I think that it becomes, it becomes, you know, for doll, it is, it is like fixing other things.

It is the thing he rushes to. Right.

The enemy is this, the problem is this, they need to be dealt with, and this article is like the valve.

Yeah. It's like, it's just that it's, it causes so much damage and so much offence, because he is not equipped to deal with the complexities and nuances of a global political system, but he, he wants to, that's his pathology, his co-analysis. It's just so frustrating because he could have used his platform to just denounce the

Israeli leadership, to denounce the Israeli government for what they were doing in Lebanon, but instead he broadens it, because he tacked Jews everywhere. Yeah. Because to simply denounce them, it doesn't give you the fix, that you can't fix the problem through meaningful criticism.

“It's too big and wild problem. You need to hold it in a, in a system of, of simplified, you know,”

reductive, you know, logic. Yeah. I think that makes sense. I want to go back to what you said about how you think that he's a guy who just tries to fix everything. When he sees a problem, even if it's like hydrocephalis with his son's brain, he just, he gets a toy maker together with a neurosurgeon and he builds a valve. I'm wondering where that came from. Like, from my theory, it's sort of that,

he went through his life like this kind of force gump character where he just had triumph after triumph after triumph. I mean, he was a spy in wartime Washington, and he didn't just befriend, you know, a lowly staff at the White House. He got invited by Eleanor and FDR to go to Hype Park.

He became buddies with the first family. And when you go through life like that, you start to feel

like nothing is, is out of reach. Like, you can solve any problem. Do you think that that's where

“it is? Or do you have a sense of, of why he always felt like he could be the guy to solve things?”

Was it just pure ego? It's certainly, obviously, true that he was a very traumatized child. And a lot of his friends were too. They had the, they had the crap beaten out of them through their childhood. They were, they were, they were beaten in, they were being trained to run the empire. They were, they were beaten and then expected to then administer the beatings. They were taught what it was to be on one side of the stick in order partly in order to to be the

wielder of the stick when they grew up. And they were taught to organize the world into very simple, easy categories of racial difference and cultural difference in order to kind of crudely organized governance in far-flung countries that they had absolutely no idea truly about. So there was a, there was certainly a kind of a schooling, a mode of schooling that they were all part of that was about a preposterous entitlement to govern the world that you could only have if

you truly didn't understand the world. And so maybe the ability to fix things comes a little bit from there. Also, I mean, this is someone who discovered that they were right at relatively late in their life and the excitement and confidence that that must have brought him when he realized they had this innate skill that could make him money. Must have also kind of fueled some of that, that confidence to be in the world and to make something of himself.

for a Socialist Book until it was 45. He had lived all of these other lives before doing that.

“And, I mean, it's sort of ironic because the thing that took him to FDR in Eleanor was a book.”

He wrote The Greenlands, this amazing, you know, short story that was sort of propaganda. But Eleanor loved it and read it to her grandkids and it was a bit of a children story and it got him invited to the White House and to Hyde Park. And so kind of the answer to what would lead to his later success in life was there from his early 20s. But he wasn't ready for it, he wasn't there yet. I do think one of the reasons that he wrote this book review or one of the

reasons that the book review became so problematic is because he always felt kind of ashamed of being a

children's book writer. I mean, I'm curious what you think about that. But he always wanted to be a New Yorker writer, a writer for sophisticated adults. And here he was relegated to children's books. He was the most successful of all time. But still, he felt a little bit ashamed of that. And so now, in 1883, he hears his chance to write a grown-up book review that's going to be read by grown-ups and he's like, I'm going to take my shot here. I'm really going to. I don't know.

I mean, no, I totally, you're absolutely right that he was a kind of grumpy that he wasn't taken seriously. That he hadn't successfully made it as an adult writer and he was, I mean, I, my play kind of jokes about being jealous of Kingsley Amis, the great British adult novelist who was knighted and, and the kind of, an adulation that the adult writers got. And the fact that the children's

writers were not taken seriously. All of that is very much at play. And there's always a duality with

“him. I think he's, and a son, I must excuse me, sometimes I'm talking about the character of”

a dull dull that I wrote. I don't know if this is absolutely true of the real-world ill. But I sense that there was a duality that, on the one hand, on the one hand, and this is where his charisma comes from. On the one hand, he's angry that he's not an adult writer. On the other hand, and that he's sort of relegated to being a children's writer. On the other hand, he loves being a children's writer. And fully is fully grumpy about the fact that people don't understand and take

seriously what a children's writer does, which is the ability that adult writers don't have. He, in his view, to create work that, you know, for him, an adult writer only needs to persuade a reader to read their book once. For him, the genius of the mechanism of what he's doing is to persuade a child to read his book 40 times. It has to be read multiple times that the end of a chapter has to come at the perfect moment. The illustration has to be in the perfect place. The grizzly jokes

need to push you forward. The mechanics of writing children's work is in his view as sophisticated and as challenging as anything an adult writer might face. And he gets really grumpy that he can't be taken seriously. Is there anything in your research that you weren't able to answer? Like, are there any holes? Or is there anything like, if, if Rolldall was alive and came to your performance, terrifying. Very dare if I came back stage afterwards, a confronted you. Even more terrifying.

Is there anything you would need to ask him? Is there anything you felt like you just never quite

“got deeper than the surface on? No. I mean, not because I think I got everything, but just because”

I mean, I don't try in the play to sort of identify a moment when he became an anti-semit or there's no kind of attempt to find some root cause to it all. And I probably, I suspect there wasn't one. Yeah. I also don't know. I mean, in the play, he is extreme. I mean, he's a, you know, dolls and intelligent man, but I don't think that he would necessarily have engaged in the kind of lively agile political debate with, as happens in my play, the back and forth of that, that he

doesn't play. I don't think he would have, I think in some ways there are, there's some very big differences between the doll that I wrote and the doll of real life. I don't know. It's a really good question. I don't think it would get answered. Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is Back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting. Every episode is a little different,

but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Levy, Mavis Staples, Remi Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name. And this season, I've sat down with Olesia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more. Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.

So coming out with us in the studio and listen to playing along on the Iron Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lori Siegel, and I'm mostly human. I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future. This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley,

“open AI CEO Sam Alman. I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products”

bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to participate out in the world. From power to parenthood.

Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI. This is such a powerful

and such a new thing. From addiction to acceleration. The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop. Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others. And it's a multiplayer game. What is the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility? Find out on mostly human. My highest order

bit is to not destroy the world of the AI. Listen to mostly human on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Handgun was recovered at the scene. From iHeart Podcasts and best case studios. This is Worshack,

Murder at City Hall. To lie, 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest. Both men are carrying concealed weapons. And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead. Everybody in the chambers of dogs, a shocking public murder, a scream, get down, get down, those are shots, those are shots, get down. The charismatic politician, you know, he just bent the rules all the time. I still have a weapon. And I could shoot you.

“And an outsider with a secret. He alleged he was effective flat down. That may have”

been political. It may have been about six. Listen to Worshack, Murder at City Hall,

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Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeart Media, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds of marketing. I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance in everywhere in between. This season of Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of liquid death, Mike Siseria,

finance, and public health advocate, Mike Milkin, take to interactive CEO, Strauss Elnett. If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business. Sesame Street CEO, Sherry Weston, and our own cheap business officer, Lisa Coffee. Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it,

really makes it vice of the top. Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. One of the central ideas of my podcast is, um, Dahl spent his entire life trying to figure out kind of not only what kind of man he was,

“but what it even meant to be a man in his part of the century. One of the reasons I think it”

works so well is a podcast is because there are all these distinct chapters. He was a business man for short oil and he was a fighter pilot and he was a spy and a playboy and a struggling Hollywood screenwriter and a writer of adult sophisticated fiction and then a children's writer. I don't know, does that, what do you make of that? Do you think that's right? I mean, this is a guy who lost his father when he was three years old. He was surrounded by women,

he had all sisters and a mother. I'm just curious if, if in any of your researcher, any of your thinking about his relationships with other men in his life, if that feels like it holds water for you? Well, you mean the shapeshifting? Yeah, and just trying to figure out masculinity. It felt like he wore all these different masks of masculinity, like trying to figure out, am I this kind of man? Am I this kind of man? Am I this kind of man? It was,

he had a search for identity that was more for some than almost anyone else I've ever written about. Yeah, hmm, I mean he was certainly an opportunist and and he and I think he

stemmed from the sort of mercantile success of some of his ancestors, the grandfather,

“that the images of of of entrepreneur share and and X and trusty and doing it yourself,”

self the self-made man, the moving from one country to another, the the hustling and sure that that he drew from that. I and I'm sure as you're right that the death of his father throughout sort of just sort of through created a chaos that he then had to pick a path through because nothing was certain after that. The paths of us being a son to a father had been shattered, especially as you say because his family was so much more female than it was male. So the

stepping up into a role that he hadn't had time to step into, the club the grasping for it

for being something for being something successful, being something powerful, being something

“someone who could move in the world. The desire to do that was there, but perhaps the the”

guide ropes weren't there because he didn't have a father shepherding him through that stuff, but then also the world changed around him, you know, a world war happened and that in itself was chaos, enabled people to do all sorts of things that perhaps in quite a times they might have ended up in a solid job in a bank somewhere, you know, so there was like a conference of factors, but he was certainly in my play, the self image of being a kind of heroic RAF pilot was a big

part of it. It's also easy to forget that by the time we meet him in the plays very charming and charismatic and funny, but he's also broken physically and he's lost his hair and he's heavily smoking and he has to, he's been humiliated by his body, he's had six laminectomy, he can't climb the stairs, he has to, let's see, he has to build a bedroom on the ground floor because he's in so much pain, it's easy to forget that he was this dashing handsome RAF pilot and in his heart that's who he still is,

it's no coincidence to me that he's writing his memoirs at in the summer that this happened, he's not only writing a review of what of an instant that takes place in out of Israel, out of that was what had been Palestine, but he's also doing that against the backdrop of sitting in his shed and writing, writing going solo, where he's remembering and he was an extraordinary rememberer, a vividly remembering hypha and this beautiful land that he felt had been stolen

from these wonderful locals who would make him make them cakes and give them tea as they flew out to save the world from the access of evil. So for him, yeah there's a real romance that he's conjuring in the last part of his life, he spends half of this book review reminding the reader

of his own honour and shivalry, he talks about being an RAF pilot who would never, he describes

being an RAF pilot who flew over a French airfield to and waited for the pilots in the airfield who were having a picnic with their girlfriends to clear before he to loop back and shut up all the planes and he compares that act of honour and to the awful, anti-honorable act of the Israeli army. So everything to him is a kind of reference back to this who he was without even the tiniest for self-awareness that he was part of an imperial complex. He never occurs to him that as he sits there

in his fight to play in his horror cane, that the terrified locals of of Haifa might be bringing

him cake and tea because they're terrified of him, only in his head he is always, and that is

a baseline for him that is vital. Yeah, yeah I couldn't agree more. I reading your play, I mean,

“I think that that is the image most people have of dull of this sort of old, bold man shaped”

like a spoon, his back hurts, he's just sitting in a chair, broke in, he's divorced, he's with a woman over 20 years younger than him, which is always a little bit ridiculous and they have trouble

20 is when he was the most dashing man in the world and he was hanging out with Ian Fleming and

and Ogilvy and coward and they were just like playing spy games and DC in New York. That fall from grace, especially for someone who had such a good memory, such a good recall I keyed it,

“must have been just so hard to remember you were James Bond and now you're this and you're pissed.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, as I was writing my show, I felt like I was sort of infecting my day-to-day life, I was thinking about him a ton, certainly about the subject of weather and now we can separate the art from the artist because the end of some of just some bothers me so much and I have two little kids and I'm very much thinking about whether or not I'm going to share the books with them. What is your relationship like with all now? You know, I love what you said about

him being sort of the wallpaper of your youth, but now that you know so much about him, what's the relationship like? Well, I, I read, I have two boys four and six, the four girls just too young for doll, but my six-year-old, I read doll to him. I don't want to lose it, you know, the, there's part of the part of, in some way part of writing the play was trying to kind of hold these two truths in my head. Yeah. I don't want to deny him the pleasure that I got from reading these

amazing gruesome, grizzly funny books with these amazing illustrations. So I'm, I'm a very happy

reader. I mean, I make certain kind of adjustments when I read them, but they're not really about the things we're talking about. They're more about them. There are things I don't want to put in his head, for instance, you know, there's misogyny in, and there is misogyny in writing and there's those things like, like, as an example, we love reading the twits, but when he goes on his riff about how Mrs. Twit used to be pretty, but she had bad thoughts through her life and that made

her ugly. That's like not cool, I think, to tell a six-year-old, but maybe someone who isn't conventionally attractive, pretty is like that, perhaps, because the thoughts they had, there's a very, there's a kind of moral cruelty that I don't want to put in his head. So I just like improvise around that stuff. But, you know, the question of, should we read his work or not? I mean, I think obviously

“you have to take each case, artists, and their work on their own merits or de-marits. In the case”

of doll, I mean, we raise it in the play, there is a sort of, in the disaster meeting, the crisis management, disaster management meeting, that dolls, American and British publisher have with doll. At one point, his New York publisher raises the issue that, that, in the context of his anti-Semitic book review, the witches, which is the book he's currently proofing, and it's about to, about to be released, may be construed as having some anti-Semitic stereotypes in it,

but that's not the same to me as saying they are anti-Semitic, it's his anti-Semitic. I'm not sure that doll is even with the witches is being, you know, consciously or even maybe you could, that's impossible, he's not unconsciously drawing on anti-Semitic stereotypes,

“but I don't even think that's where his head is. I think in mainly in the books, the prejudice”

is on presence. Yeah. There is certainly a simplification of the world. You know, plucky resourceful little people fighting against the awful, kind of capitalist farmers or the,

you know, the adult, you know, there's always baddies, and the world is simplified,

and that extrapolation that doll makes into, into conspiracy theories is definitely there is definitely a connection between that kind of binary thinking that's necessary to a children's writer, and then the jump into using that kind of logic to explain Israel Palestine, not helpful. Well, in terms of the books themselves, I don't see, you know, I don't see those things, I don't see that at play, it's just that it's one instinct leading into something political that

isn't not helpful. So yeah, I love the work, I want to be able to read them to my kids, and I approach it in the full knowledge of who he was. Yeah, and that's my job as an adult to hold those things. I think, you know, I'm not saying with every single person who has

there may be people who we just cannot better read anymore, especially if the transgression or crime

“in their life is present in the work. Exactly, but I don't necessarily let's true of Joel,”

and I think we sometimes have to do the difficult work of being an adult in the world, and hold complex opposition, opposing truths in our heads, and hold the things that are good about that artist, like my desire to share it with my kids, and just be a grown-up, but that's not necessarily, I'm not equally saying that people that feel they can't read his books are not, that's their own adult decision to make too. So it's, you know, it's not a rule

for living, it's just my rule for how I go about my life. I feel very similarly, I think if the

endosemitism, if I could point to it in the text, it would be an easy decision for me. I'm not

into, I'm Jewish, I'm not interested in giving my kids an endosemitic text, obviously, I can't really. I mean, you're right, the witches, maybe you can see some tropes there, but, you know, when some people say, you know, the swan, you can see a little bit of anti-Semitism, but, you know, I also don't stop myself from reading Hemingway where you can see some anti-Semitism. You know, I told you, I watched a Woody Allen movie last night, like I am capable,

you know, as you are of watching movies of reading books by people who are, you know,

“were sometimes monsters in their personal lives. People like Bill Cosby, I think, are different”

for me, I have no interest in watching the Cosby show and part because I think that that sort of

familiar dad persona that he created was in many ways, it feels to me now, anyway, like his way of getting away with all of his crimes. And so that feels different to me than dull. But yeah, I also feel like everybody has to decide for themselves, did you, in your research, did you spend time on all the censorship controversy where his publisher went in and changed the word ugly and changed? Well, that was happening once I was further, I was quite long-awaited to writing it

when that started to happen. And as I said, like I don't know whether the execution was just flawed, I haven't looked at those those texts and seen what they've done. They're in an optimal world for people that when they're reading their reading a book to their children, don't feel a can improvise. That's not their strength to improvise as they're reading and adapt just to kind of clear out some of the stuff they don't want to put in their kids' head. Maybe it's useful to have

a sort of guide of a way of doing that. I don't want to, I feel I back myself to do that when at bed time. And that maybe not everyone does. So if there's a that in an optimal version, maybe it's useful for people to have some kind of glossary of some kind of awareness, raising alternative that could help them not pour some of the kind of less, you know, the fan of analytical stuff and the kids is, but you know, I don't know, I think it's, you're just, yeah, it's just, it's, it's make, I don't

know, just thinking on your feet. Totally. Do you watch any of the West Anderson doll out of your hands on Netflix? What do you think? Do you think, I mean, obviously doll would have different feelings about those and he does about your play. He's not a character. Well, he is a character in those West Anderson ones, but they're very faithful to what he wrote. What would you think of those? I, within those four, four films, I think that's the swan as well, isn't there? Some I absolutely

are told and I thought they released all of the, some of the complexity of like, you know, the of dolls, dark imagination and, and then just occasionally, you think the framework that West Anderson uses to tell those stories, the self-consciousness of it, just overloaded a bit for me and I took me out of the story a bit too much and that that slight archness of storytelling. You know, he's a genius. Where does that, where's Anderson? What he does at full tilt is just,

you know, something you admire and occasionally it doesn't allow you into the heart of the story.

“Right. That's what really well said. But I do think that that's sort of the partnership of”

Anderson and doll in death. It's just like a perfect melding of two very idiosyncratic artists but being brought together in a way that I think kind of advances both of them. Similar to him in Hitchcock, you know, I'm sure you've watched her or read her, know of the Hitchcock TV show where were doll-roats have all the scripts that are fantastic. Doll and Disney did not work out so well, I think that makes a lot of sense. They are completely opposite sensibilities. Do you have

a favorite of the doll movies or do you, any, you showed your kids? Well, I was just thinking

reclaiming what he's done with fantastic Mr. Fox is the books are so defined for a generation

“by Quentin Blake's drawings and somehow Anderson has created an alternative visual language”

by which to run those that story through your mind. He's kind of done an equivalent to Quentin Blake's

extraordinary work as well, so there's a power to that is amazing. There are so few movies

TV shows I can think of where doll is a character and obviously writing about writers is hard, a lot of times they're not active, they're too much going on in their head, which may be the reason, but it is just so surprising to me that he's such an important figure, he shaped so many of our childhoods and no screenwriter, director of very few of them have ever made him a character. Did you have any thoughts about that? No, only the, I mean, first of all, there's a lot of

material that he wrote to get on with and he's a children's author so in a way whatever is

complicated about him as an adult may be less interesting to the children who want to read his

would rather see fantastic Mr. Fox than a kind of adult look at who this guy really was. I mean, as I said at the beginning, I didn't come to it thinking I want to write a piece about role doll. I would have had something to say about something in the world to say, I guess, and then

“he happened to be a vector for that and I think that sort of sideways into doll has meant that”

because the material and the thing I'm writing about is about where is the truth in these debates that then when doll becomes the character, you then ask where is the truth in doll,

it becomes the way of opening up a person through the lens of a theme. What do you expect

your audience to be like in New York? I think the audience from what I can tell of the podcast are people who very much grew up with doll or are currently reading doll to their kids and want to know more about him. I assume that will be the same for you. I also assume that the New York audience is going to be very different than your lens and audience. People are going to be here to learn more about the anti-Semitism. People are very interested in the issue. I'm sure you'll

have a lot of journalists. Let's go, fans. Yeah, any thoughts on what the audience reaction

“might be here? No. I think that the play deals with some pretty third rail, hot button”

issues that are alive in New York because they are in London. Artists versus the artist, the difference between meaningful political debate and great and prejudicial prejudice. But I guess like, and one thing I wonder is because there's an American character in the play who visits a New Yorker who visits dolls, eccentric, ramshackle home in Great Missondon for British audience, maybe we're closer to the Great Missondon home waiting for an outside

as a comment maybe for American audience. It's the other way around. We're waiting for one of our own to kind of come into this strange world. So we're really interested to see if that there's a perspective shift as the audience watch it. And I guess I guess that what I hope in a way, like for those people that really do love his work, and even some of his, you know, his dark stories for adults, the play, I know we've talked about, I've talking about it in

kind of tons of debate, and let's call it a debate. But it's quite a kind of hopefully, it's a funny tense, hopefully gripping story about whether a famous man will, you know, apologise for something he's done, and the suspense of the evening is to find out what this, you know, there's charming, naughty, mischievous, impish, loving, compassionate, cruel man will do. And funnily enough, I don't kind of conscious of it as I was writing it, but it was certainly was an intention,

but there is something tales of the unexpected about the play, and it's partly because one of the things that I didn't realise happens in the play, and consciously, until I'd got to the end of it, was that Dull, as a character, does a lot of what Dull's own characters do, which is he's endlessly playing tricks on people, that Dull's stories are full,

the twists, characters in the short stories, the pain tricks on the spouses, is all about tricks

“and control, and the play is about control, losing control, what happens when Dull loses control,”

how does he rest it back, how does he, what, what are the extent to, of cruelty that he goes to to pull back power, and they're sort of chilling nasty, funny way in which he does that in the play, I hope his sort of, is part of what gives the play, it's kind of causes sparks to fly. Where can people see the play, when does it open? The play opens, it's first previews on March the 11th at the music box theatre, it on Broadway, and our open night is the 23rd of March, and we're

playing until June 28th, so we're here for 16 weeks. Fantastic, so exciting, well, this has been

really amazing, thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me.

“The secret world of "Roll Doll" is produced by Imagine Audio and Paralax Studios for iHeart Podcasts,”

created and written by me, Aaron Tracy, produced by Matt Schrainer, post-production by Windhill Studios, with editing, scoring, and sound design by Mark Henry Phelps, music by APM, executive producers, Nathan Clokey, Kara Welker, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Aaron Tracy. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review the secret world of "Roll Doll" on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Copy rate, 2020-6. Imagine Entertainment,

IHeart Media, and Paralax. I'm Laurie Seagull, and this is mostly human, a tech podcast through a human lens. This week

“an interview with Open AI CEO Sam Altman. I think society is going to decide that creators of”

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You even know what that's for me. Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom of that. That's so funny. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeart Media, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Market. Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries

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