Skirball Tapes: Anne Bogart

The Skirball Tapes conversation with Anne Bogart, a globally esteemed director of plays and operas, will be on Wednesday, May 10, at 11 a.m.  

Significantly, given our authoritarian and post-Roe times,  she recently (2019) directed an opera based on The Handmaid’s Tale.

On the next evening, Thursday, May 11,  I will walk to the LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club on East 4th Street in New York, mask in pocket, to see Anne’s latest directorial adventure, That Beautiful Lady, a musical by Elizabeth Swados (1951-2016) and Paul Schmidt (1934-1999).  

The Skirball Tapes talk with Bogart will begin by asking her two linked questions, “What should I expect from That Beautiful Lady on Thursday?” and “How can I be a good audience member?” Few theater artists have been as adventurous and experimental as Bogart.  However, she has also  thought as rigorously as any about the arts, artists, and us, the audience.  

Adventure and rigor:  that combination is one of the reasons why Bogart’s voice has been so powerful and why I am delighted she will be with us

Bogart was born in 1951, the same year as Elizabeth Swados.  Her father was a naval officer; her maternal grandfather a famous WWII admiral. Cutting her own path, in 1974 Bogart became a part of the now legendary  downtown artistic scene in NYC.  Think living with others in an unheated loft in Soho, now the site of expensive lofts and shops that have actual a.c. and heating systems. She became a director, organizing two productions that became either cults or infamous assaults on convention, the label depending on the observer. 

Conversations with Bogart matter—not only  because of her range and influence as a director and not only because of her co-founding of the SITI theater  company. SITI=Saratoga International Theater Institute. Do not confuse it with Siri.  The company’s website is now creating and making accessible a fascinating digital archive of its productions. 

Here are two of the several reasons why conversations with Bogart (and her writings)  matter. 

1. She offers relevant capsule autobiographies—about the feelings, failures, hopes, insights, dreams of a major figure.  Person and context react with each other.
2. She is a wide-ranging but incisive student of this historical moment and argues for the arts. especially theater, as necessary for human flourishing now.

Do join us.

P.S. Bogart and I share a love for gossip, but, alas, this episode of the Skirball Tapes may be too richly exploratory of her ideas to indulge that predilection.