And as we talk, all of our conversations seem to circle back to time; the passage of time, generations over time, geologic time that the mind can hardly fathom. “It’s hard to ignore when you think about things like climate. Suddenly you feel really small – in time.”
Maybe the political statement is that it’s not political. We can exist together, we can live together, without it being some message or some signpost in the sand, some marker of who you are.
Each time we stumbled across a new challenge, we took note of how we could prepare for it in the future. Such is the reality of doing something new — you don’t know until you know, and once you do you never make the same mistake twice.
There’s a genial kind of, I don’t know, Brechtian disruption going on when you hurl that sound at people. They just lose their shit and do not know what to do with themselves. It is somehow a punk rock gesture.
I was hired to perform as a sort of Vanna White car model at an auto show in New Hampshire. I had to memorize 2 pages of facts about a new model of Subaru, which I repeated over and over into a mic in an alluring manner while walking around gesturing at the car.
This question of power comes up – who are we listening to the most? And who are we not listening to, or are somehow unable to listen to, or fall asleep while they’re talking?
Alex Borinsky & Chana Porter interview each other
The other morning, Lila woke up and her first question was “Mama, how do you start to write a musical?” which, I admit, made me feel proud.
But no: There is one, really stupid joke, and we made sure that we put it on an altar, as: This is the stupidest joke. Do you want to hear it loudly, and pronounced with such courage?
You can get close to truth but you can’t ever – in my opinion – I don’t think any story is ever true.
Yilong Liu is a Chinese-born playwright who writes plays in English. Michael Leibenluft is an Obie-winning, American-born director who directs in Chinese. Together, they’ve been working on the New York premiere of Liu’s play, June is the First Fall in a production by Yangtze Repertory
We are constantly delighting each other with things and discoveries and even in scenes where the characters are brutal and cruel beyond imagination to each other—as soon as we get out of character, everyone is so full of laughter and joy.