The story that we're told about the American theater or about theater in general is kind

of trying to create an illusion of truth and I think part of our work is trying to break

through that illusion and kind of allow everybody to kind of see the truth of what was in

a new way. Welcome back to working I'm your host June Thomas and I am your other host

Isaac Butler. Isaac I need to know whose voice we just heard but first it feels like

ages since we were on the show together. I feel like it's been ages since I've done

this show. And I know in part that's because you've been traveling to some book events

and I'm just curious how that's going. I know this isn't your first book exactly but

your first book was an oral history of angels in America and you wrote it with a co-writer

or pal Dan Coise. So I'm curious how this book is different. Yeah it's really different.

For one thing there's COVID so I'm actually doing more book events than we did for the

world and they spent forward but very few of them are in person and I say yes to anything

that comes over the trance. If someone wants to talk to me about the book I'll do it you

know like I just want to get the word out. I enjoy talking to people about it. It's been

a lot of fun. So I've been doing a lot of events but most of them are over zoom except

for this little West Coast tour I just did to Portland and LA. But the other thing is that

when we did the in person events for the world only spins forward they were these like

really raucous book events much more raucous than normal because what we would do is you

know it was an oral history so we'd get a group of people together local actors and writers

and people we knew and we would force them to do staged readings of a chapter of the book but

they wouldn't be given the script until right before they walked out on stage that was the joke.

And so it just had this really great energy but you can't recreate that in a regular old book

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