Creativity Jijiji
Creativity Jijiji: "Conversations about creativity"
This podcast amplifies the voices of our true leaders—the artists. Writers, composers, producers, singers, actors, and poets show us new ways to see ourselves and the world around us. They illuminate the invisible threads that connect us, revealing the deep ties of our shared humanity.
At a time when we must come together as citizens of a small and fragile planet, the voices of artists matter more than ever.
Creativity Jijiji goes beyond the spotlight to explore the mysteries of creativity—where it comes from, why it moves us, and how it shapes our world.
Join us as we listen, learn, and celebrate the creative minds guiding us into the future.
Creativity Jijiji
Theatre as Sanctuary: Peter Green on Connection and Empathy
Peter Green's journey is inspiring. He reveals the profound impact that the performing arts can have on individuals and communities alike. His story is a testament to the power of art in building connections and fostering a sense of belonging. Join us as Peter shares how his initial desire for validation evolved into a deeper pursuit of communion with audiences, highlighting the healing and unifying potential of theatre.
We discuss the importance of intentional kindness in theatre, the challenges of power dynamics, and even muse about how political leaders could benefit from such transformative experiences. This episode shines a light on how theatre can serve as a sanctuary for connection and empathy, offering a refreshing escape from our screen-dominated world.
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This is Creativity GGG with Chris McHale. Today we are talking to Peter Green, a good friend, a social worker, a school counsellor, a therapist and what I believe is an integral part of his life. A community theatre director is an integral part of his life. A community theatre director. Peter rolls all his empathy into a big ball of cotton and wraps the artists who work with him in the community into a beautiful patchwork quilt of emotional and generous performances. When we started to think about the crazy town state of the world, we began to think what can we do? We started to think about Peter and his devotion to the shared art of community theatre. Let's meet him.
Speaker 2:I first met Peter at a party on the Upper West Side, which was a lot of years ago. He was an IT guy when I first met him. Then he went into sales, production sales, selling production companies to the advertising schools, helping young people. And there's been a long journey for Peter Green, but there's been a spine of his journey all along which is a love and a passion for community theater which he shared with his wife, karen Zakes, and the two of them became very entrepreneurial and very active in community theater and to me their embrace of community theater was taking the essence of what theater actually is and shaping it and using it as a community buildingbuilding healing tool. That's the way I saw their work and I wanted to ask Peter how he got from where I first met him as an IT guy to where he is now.
Speaker 3:God, how do I even begin? I'll begin like this. If you ask me how I identify myself at this stage of my life, which is sort of far along, you know I'm pushing 70. I would say that I'm a performing artist.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:As a kid as a little kid, earliest memories I wanted to be an actor and you know, I think that we I don't know if it's genetic that we're artists or something else I know that my reason for wanting to be an actor as a little kid was all about being looked at and being validated and being, you know, adulation and getting laughs and applause and all that stuff. And I think many of us who take this path discover, as we learn our craft and as we deepen our connection to creativity, that our reasons for wanting to do what we do go, you know, 180 really radically altered. It's been a long time since I have felt that the reason for wanting to be an artist was because I wanted something from an audience.
Speaker 2:Right. What does that mean? Exactly?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that what I want to now is to share something with an audience.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:If I want something from an audience, it's communion. It's not validation.
Speaker 2:I got you, I understand.
Speaker 3:And I'll just say one more thing about the genetic idea One of my acting teachers, the person who was my advisor through college I had a conversation with her years later and I had gone to a conservatory and she said that she thought that artists were the descendants of the hunters and gatherers, not the agrarians. And what we're hunting for, of course, is impressions and connection. So I feel like that's the background I need to say before I start this. So here's where the story gets interesting. I guess it's also where the story gets religious.
Speaker 2:You say religious.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I did. I got invited to be a youth advisor at a Unitarian retreat, a week-long conference for religious educators, on an island called Star Island, which is a beautiful and haunting place 11 miles off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And at the end of the week, on the last morning, I attended a theme talk by this person who was the minister that week, a brilliant speaker, theologian, minister, writer, a woman named Nancy Crumbine the right way, by Nancy Crumbine, who was up in New Hampshire and who I revere to this day, and she was talking about universalist theology, so unitary universalism, those are merged denominations. And the question she asked was if you had no shame, if there was no reason to be ashamed, if everything about you was entirely acceptable both to you and to all of existence, what would you do with your life? I was on the train, my little commuter train, one night reading. We used to have these things called newspapers that you could read on the train.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I heard about those.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and in the back of it, they used to have these things called newspapers that you could read on the train. Oh, yeah, I heard about those, yeah, and then the back of it, they used to have these little ads, like they called them, classified ads. Oh, wow, yeah, that's how we found stuff.
Speaker 3:So I'm reading this newspaper, I'm putting quotes around it because it's such a relic idea. I'm reading this newspaper and I see a classified ad in the back that's a casting notice for a community theater production of Glenn Gary, glenn Ross, at a theater in White Plains. And I walk into my house and there's my lovely wife and my lovely kids and the you know, like just all this bustle and activity. It's dinner time and I looked at my wife and I said it's dinner time. And I looked at my wife and I said I think I want to go play. And she said go play. So I went and auditioned. I don't want to feel very emotional about this right now. It's funny. Yeah, it's an emotional story.
Speaker 3:I went and auditioned and, because I had once upon a time been as trained as I had been and had done as much theater as I had done, I walked into that audition knowing what I knew and knowing that I knew what I knew, like it was all there, right, and I auditioned and I got the role of Ricky Romo, which is the Joe Mantegna part, the Pacino part, I get you know. It's the he's sort of the anti-hero of the piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I felt like I'd come home. But I don't think of myself as an actor anymore, although I'm comfortable on stage. I think of myself as an actor anymore. Although I'm comfortable on stage, I think of myself as a performing artist. And whether I'm doing whether I'm directing or I do a lot of sound design and or if I'm running a board you know a soundboard or if I am being house manager and taking tickets, I don't care. I don't give a shit what the job is Right. I want to touch the work when I think about social work and religion and theater.
Speaker 3:My understanding is that love right and by love I mean acceptance, understand, like you know, unconditional the way that we understand somebody all the way through and we appreciate all of them. If we can do that for ourselves, we can do that for other people. And if we can do that for ourselves, we can start to think about other people and think that they deserve what we deserve, which is at the root of empathy. And empathy and compassion are at the root of justice, because if we want for ourselves, then we want for each other. Empathy is what makes us want a just society. Right now we are witnessing a moment when the control is about to be put into the hands of the unempathetic, and God help us. But because empathy is at the root of a just society, we need as much empathy as we can engender and the standing with people and loving them, which is like seeing them and accepting them, making space for them to be themselves. That is social work and that is ministry. And the presentation, the sharing of authentic human experience so that audiences can have that communion. That's theater.
Speaker 3:Alan Schneider, the director, who you know was a prominent director in New York and America and Broadway and in the West End in the 1960s and 70s. He came to talk with us at Purchase once he was directing a show there and he did a colloquium and somebody asked him like okay, you travel all around, you do all this stuff. What's the most amazing theater you think is going on today? And they were hoping, like I think there was somebody who wanted to hear him talk about experimental theater. He was not an experimental theater artist and he said, actually he said you know, a few weeks ago I was at somewhere in the middle of America and I saw a community theater production of Oklahoma. He said that had been put on by literally the whole town. He said it was the most exciting thing I've seen in years.
Speaker 3:A couple years ago I got drafted into a professional production of the musical Parade, an equity production, and I was the only sort of non-professional in the cast and it doesn't really matter why and how I got there. I had an amazing time. I had an amazing time. But I also saw a lot of what I see everywhere, no matter where I make theater, which is that you're in a collaborative art form, you're making art in community and usually by the time you go up. What you see on a stage represents a compromised vision. It's not anybody's pure vision, because there are vicissitudes, right, we didn't have the money for that set piece, we didn't have the money for this, we didn't have the time for this, that musician can't quite play it the way we wanted, so they have to whatever it is right.
Speaker 3:Community theater is not different in that regard. It's usually a compromised vision, and I will also say that every now and then in the professional theater you get the dream of something that is what you describe like six artists who all know their shit and what they make is, you know, divine, and sometimes we get that too. We get that too. This last spring, actually about a year ago, this community theater organization up in Connecticut reached out to me. They had on their schedule in the spring a production of Alice in Wonderland which you know I think they were planning on doing sort of in a very pink and white. You know Alice like mainstream sort of a way, and you know, to me Alice is a that's a dark and interesting story written by a dark and interesting human. And the production that that latched onto me in in the early 70s, as I was beginning my conservatory training, was a production by a company called the Manhattan Project, which was led by Andre Gregory. He recruited six performers who were all trained in the work of Jerzy Grotowski, who was sort of the god of experimental theater. He was from Wrocław, poland, jerzy Grotowski to be technically correct, from Wrocław, poland, jerzy Grotowski to be technically correct, and they spent two years working on the text and they created this wild, anarchic, deeply resonant and weirdly funny oh my God piece of work of Alice and it was an instant sort of a smash in the world of experimental theater. It was a sensation. Everybody saw it. It toured the world, they played it for like five years.
Speaker 3:So when this theater company said to me, would you direct Alice in Wonderland? I said well, only if I can do this. And they said yes, so the text can be licensed and I I budgeted more time than we usually have. I I'd scheduled 30 rehearsals, which for community theater is quite a bit, and I cast six wonderful artists as cast, which is to say I didn't give them roles, I just said come and do this with me. And they all said yes. By the time we started rehearsals I had assigned roles. We ranged in age from an 18-year-old to a 70-year-old, and they all from word one.
Speaker 3:From first rehearsal they were all, every one of them, all in. I mean all in and all in for each other, and we built this very layered physical score. That was not easy, and especially for some of them, like who, just for them, you know, like this woman on the cast. Just standing up and sitting down is tough Her knees, you know, like that. And they were all in.
Speaker 3:Whatever I brought in a choreographer, I brought in a fight choreographer and the theater re-engineered their space so it was more like a theater in the round with a thrust area in the middle than like the proscenium space. It is. They literally rebuilt the theater for me Xenium's base, it is. They literally rebuilt the theater for me. And this art director, friend, art handler, friend came in and built this underworld environment so that what you saw around you were the roots of trees. So it looked like you had literally gone. The audience was sort of underground. And my friend, keith Levinson, who was one of my longest time collaborators and a composer, wrote this haunting, evocative, celtically inflected score. In a lifetime of making theater I couldn't be prouder than I was of that work.
Speaker 2:This world that we live in has flattened out. You know it's like it screens. You know it screens from morning till night. You know you're on your phone, you're in front of your computer, you're watching your TV. You know it's just screen time which engages exactly the same part of your brain. So it's been no surprise to me that that. You know, live theater is one of the more dynamic and successful parts of the entertainment industry because it is, it is in its own unique space, and community theater, you know, is part of that. And you know, when you think about people who are working in the city all day, maybe working at City Hall or working in a lawyer's office or something, and then they drive out to their home and then they, instead of sitting in front of their screen, they get back in their car and they go to a rehearsal hall somewhere in their town and they have a live, emotional interaction, they build this emotional thing. The power of that is untouchable.
Speaker 3:The play I'm doing right now. It's like, ok, if I think about the cast, there's a school teacher, there's a hedge fund manager. There's a high school student. There's a high school student. There's a fine men's clothing salesperson, there's me. You know, it's pretty random in terms of how we spend our days. It's really random, yeah, but what we look for as a director and a producer doing community theater, what I want to do every single time is make the beloved community.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And I mean that in a very religious way.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:I learned when I started doing, when I started directing and producing Shakespeare, rather as I, in the same way that I learned when I started doing school social work that sarcasm was a luxury I could not afford. You know, I grew up as a really like as a theater kid. We were all really bitchy, you know. We were really proud of how funny and bitchy we were and it was all like. You know, it was like RuPaul's Drag Race all the time.
Speaker 3:And as a theater, as a community theater artist, I have to intentionally model a kindness and acceptance and I, like I will make fun of me, you know, or a moment, but I will never, ever. There's an Albert Schweitzer quote that I love that says never let it. No, it's not, it's Elie Wiesel and it says never let anyone be humiliated in your presence. And I have to live like that as a theater artist. There's this old school way of teaching theater. Right, that's this idea that I'm going to be a threshold. Right, I'm going to. If you have to be able, you have to get through me and you have to be, I'm going to toughen you up, and I just think it's bullshit on the face of it. I understand a profession that you need to be like. It's a business of failure. You're going to audition a thousand times. God knows I did it. Business of failure. You're going to audition a thousand times, god knows I did it.
Speaker 3:But art acting, being on stage is the activity of being naked in front of people. You have this false exterior right, I'm not really an 85-year-old ship captain or whatever the fuck I'm playing. But the heart I'm carrying on stage with me is all mine and wide open, or the performance is dead and we can't scare people into vulnerability. It doesn't work. What you end up with are those very, very shiny, polished Broadway performances that leave you feeling nothing except oh, they were really good. The director is look, if we do a really good job, an audience will come out and they'll go. That was really great. And if we do a better job, if we go all the way, an audience will come out and say something happened to me during the time I was watching that show.
Speaker 2:I'd love to hear from you about your process of creating that beloved performance where you start, how you bring these people along, you know, what are the milestones you're going through, and how do you lay this thing out in your mind?
Speaker 3:Okay. So, god, it's like you know how do you make a tribe ever, how do you make a community ever? Right, at the very first meeting, you set out, you make promises to them, you make agreements with them. Here's what you can expect from me, here's what I need to expect from you, here's what we can expect from each other. And I say day one moment when I say this is going to be a respectful and a loving environment. We are going to be intentionally kind to each other. Um, we are not going to, and we're also going to be aware of our status and power. You know, if there are differences in ethnicity, age, gender in this room, and if you have some of the privilege that attaches to those differences, you are not going to use them in any kind of exploitative way in this room, in this community. So we're really clear from the front what we are about, that we are about the business of acceptance and helping people be supported so they can open up and blossom and grow.
Speaker 3:And I also say, and have said for a very long time, that I don't weigh the word community heavier or lighter than the word theater. They have equal weight to me the quality of the community in which I make theater is as important as the theater I make in that community. That's sort of like a what profit a man if he gets the whole world and loses his soul If I make this really wonderful show but we want to all fucking kill each other? I don't want to fucking kill each other. I don't want. I don't want to. All right, I'm not being paid, I don't need that shit. Right? Either we're going to be in love with each other and we're going to be delighted to see each other every time we show up and we're going to throw our lot in together and see what we can create, or I don't want to.
Speaker 2:I don't need to how does that work? I how many people actually buy into that and kind of go for it? Everybody.
Speaker 3:So I've been doing this long enough now. Yeah, I don't. Certainly there are people that I have worked with before who know me and they know who I am, and Karen as well, because we work similarly. They know who we are, they know the kind of theater we make, they know what it feels like to do theater with us, um, and there are people who, um, don't get it, and we know don't get it because we've worked with them in other theaters, in other contexts. There are places where I've directed, where I'm like, yeah, this is not my like, I will bring what I can to you but out, but but the culture, uh, I'm an alien here. You know, um, and you know not everybody can do what I ask here, right, you know, we're all, we all, we're all broken in one way or another.
Speaker 3:We just are, um, and I like one of the things I have said as a social worker is that hearts break two ways open and close. So, um, for some people whose hearts have broken closed, there's a limit to how much they're going to give themselves to this. And some people insist on bringing this, uh, bringing a, you know, a competitive or a snarky, whatever spirit to the work. And then you know we deal with them as individuals. We sit down with them and go. I don't think you're necessarily getting what we're doing here. You know, see, if you can notice what's going on around you and roll with us, and if it doesn't work, then you know like, we all deal with it the best we can. And we know we're not likely to cast that person again, but I would say that for a lot of people, when they find their way into a production that's being done the way we do it, they come to crave it.
Speaker 3:You know, I was talking to a friend who was in one of my shows recently. This is somebody I really value, but we hadn't worked together. Karen had directed her, but she was in this cast of Alice and she was talking about having gone to audition for a show at a theater that doesn't necessarily work in this kind of a way and that the director was like I forget what they were, just like asking for a particular accent, whatever you know. But the other performances I guess they were down to callbacks or people were all in the room and the other performers were like going in this direction. That was very sort of I don't know histrionic fake, whatever.
Speaker 2:And this friend of mine, she, I decided to peter green them in studio digigi, I've got a platform called community theater of the mind. That's an idea I haven't quite executed yet, but it's in my mind and I'm like, well, what the hell? We're just going to have to do this in a remote way, you know, offer people, offer voice actors and people, you know look a community around an art piece, and for no other purpose than to have a communal experience, you know, just to keep us in touch with each other. I also think it'd be a really good idea if we had all of cabinet members. Before they're confirmed by Congress, they take part in a community theater production.
Speaker 2:I think, that should be the first thing. I don't want to make a play with some of these people. I'm sorry. No, they have to, but they have to.
Speaker 3:Well then, with somebody other than me, please.
Speaker 2:This has been Creativity to Gigi, produced by Studio to Gigi. I think Peter Green has some answers for us, honestly, and a place to go which are key to us right now. Key to us. Find a place to connect beyond your screen, beyond the news, beyond weird leaders telling us what's good for us. Forget all that weird leaders telling us what's good for us. Forget all that and find a performance to participate in, a place to practice the beautiful art of theater. Thank you, peter Green, for sharing your compassion. Join us, subscribe Studio2GGio. Please help us build the next generation of creativity that puts artists first, beyond the pocket of the digerati those guys have made enough money and into the center of our hearts, our shared hearts. Thanks for listening. Until next time. This is Chris McHale and this has been Creativity Gigi, gigi, gigi.
