the happy new year and everything is so good it's been far too long and everything and in the audience is a pleasure to welcome to the program a stalwart member of the new york city intellectual leadership element if i may say if not the planet and that's in the lower east side after having been all over the world and so forth and she's a dear friend of the world and myself and judith thank you very much for coming to the studio and so good to see you thank you for having me here to be able to talk about  plays and i hope and i did that's what it was and we got a whole fifty eight minutes right and i do want to say i'm really sorry i want to say and i'm sorry i'm really impressed because we've done many a program with you and been well with you and hannah and you also you know with julie and we did want julie we're going try and get up and so forth and hand in past i was shocked out of my wish i was so sorry i think yeah and it's been going for so long great it's been called that i wonder if we could maybe we'll get to that that's really good and she's a great poet she was french you know well and good all over and she's been on the scene for a long time and justice and so forth and a real what did she write it for the four of as a play a playwright or did she have a story i don't know how that gets done between the people that are in theater and so forth she she wrote a play with six  and you still did i think when you were down at the thing you did the brig at the clinton theater you got his new theater that's the point is you're back in town and i do want to talk some if you don't mind that's really interesting we'll get to that and let people no i was born in germany yeah and i came to new york when i was two years old so i really was brought up in new york but i was brought up in a very specific community a german jewish community i  middle of everything on the east side ok and you went to school there and all that sort of i went to school there and because my father was working trying  to rouse americans to what was happening to the german jew yeah how far away i was trained to do a lot of recitation as a little child yeah even in madison square garden young yeah the big house was it but yes it was a different house than yeah yeah yeah yeah i know i understand but it was a big theater and they were in court and they were they were involved on that issue were they involved on the issues you become identified with you're very much the gruesome american quota system which through franklin roosevelt did not allow the german jews that could have been the saved come to america we oppose he strongly and wanted influx of the people we could save it was so horrible wasn't it must have been terrible not to have that taken account of by the leadership of this country at that time when it wasn't really very good the leadership of this country that's true i still don't have any faith in the leadership of this country none or of any country no of any country at all no i think there's a better way to organize things you know beautiful and kissed form that's open to everyone with decision making is not made by an a league group but he's made by the populace it's all a very different kind of world when you know see it through the optimistic eyes of an a kid to the more humanistic forms of organizing right that we can do if we had the will and the and at that time it was unthinkable that you could be a rabbi's wife and and an actress there ever was your dad the rabbi was my debt and he was idealistic very idea ok that's what i was trying to get at it was idealistic yeah ok right ok and so these two young people decided that they would come to new york and that my mother would give up her the ethical aspirations and of her being an actress they would have a daughter who would serve in my mothers as a surrogate actress for my mother and that's why i am too bad they weren't able to get a body who ever daughter was able to become interested in and taken over i see ok right ok and that's that's it and then you had an education in the family was idealistic intellectually curious interesting trying to make this thing so you had a privileged upbringing you were and believe in your daddy's eyes that you know right ok that's good and you're picking up on that and then you did that and then you went in and did you do it was when did you meet julie and if i could say i met you again when i was seventeen years old i would be soon after you met pierce you were doing the work down the newsroom in fact before i before i joined for scott and you're were politically active then you were political i was political but i had no idea really what capitalist world can you answer that yeah we did you know yeah you didn't get you didn't you get away with saying i'm a pastor is not a go at that yeah and yeah and i said to him while i do my dramatic like the a studies i'm going to study that as a parallel study of what i mean by the possibility of a nonviolent form of social organization and i studied and i barcelona a beautiful city that was run by an accused councils yeah we're here we're here it works where ever it been tried running because it's a more sensible and reasonable form of human organization wiped out by the spanish civil war and the coming fascism that followed so of course these wonderful experiments if you wipe everybody out with a bloody ba you know all that and everything and somehow they had to get make a visit and some of the food appeared and everything happened and it was in the pits and it was grand it was in the anarcho tradition of everything just sort of happened like a jam session or something like that and or yeah the living theater there at twenty thousand street in is down lower east and grand i've been down there number of occasions hearing is really good to get that plays i'm happy for that picking up on that when did you meet julian and if i understand julian was in that movement and when i graduated from the scattered a we talked together and i said what can i do now i don't want to go into the broadway commercial theater and there is no off broadway theat forms that were new forms did you have to bring him to that in the theater over a period of time because you met and there were sparks and things and yet you you got him interested in these theater thing or i think how do they already have your  it yeah i know i know i know where your i've done a lot but i mention it because it's a living legend i mean the living theater and it continues and everything and so you got interested in that and from that predict and you took a jaundiced view of much of what was to liberate those people and my father was trying to enlighten people about the horrors that were going on in germany and the american people said although the german i remember exactly what she said because it touched me very much and it's actually something that she wrote in her cell the night of her execution again f you've got a whole nation whose sole cheered up and sort gend up to go and do something and to go against the tide of that that's where it gets really tough sometimes yes i don't say when you were doing that with your thing is you do your commitment to that poem i love that idea running against the grain again right the grain is the green yeah the human heart that doesn't want to do harm to another human being right is another thing when they're telling everybody's business to go over and kill people yeah  we wake up in time to understand that we have an obligation to help each other in this play that we're doing now with and waldron's there's a beautiful scene where we show a movie of the violence in afghanistan to the audience and our actors have a chorus of reach out to the middle east reach out to the middle east because that's the answer to this terrible problem is to reach out to each other to begin to understand each other and to begin to understand where the violence came from and abolish the root to the violence  that is very often economic political and and these economic motives have to be discredited and that that's a lot part of the work with trying to do thank you very much or many a talk with hannan and a little bit when we did the program with julian way back in forgive me i'm not as you know you were in everything and it was the economy is the transcending scarcity bucky fuller used to talk about and there was the economist within the article i still can't remember his name it'll come to me but we've talked many times who did the same thing that we may be actually in terms of our capability transcending the ironclad laws of scarcity zero sum if i when you have to lose all those d kind of things characteristic of jimmy joyce as you told me one time james joyce said history is a nightmare from which i'm attempting to awaken yes is there something blowing in the when bobby dylan set about this time that we said among other things one thing he said in the program was the one he wrote he would write a book like i would write a letter home to mother you know he would write a book on everything astrophysics everything the only thing he could not get  mind around was economics he couldn't get around he could not understand economics wrote on everything else economics in forms of political process but so he did that and he said what did he say he said we live two hundred thousand years we've been here mitochondria we know now with clarity the evolutionary process of which we are a part ten thousand generations and he said this is the most privileged generation and i think it was going let's say as is apparently the case destroy the whole species with weapons systems that are so sophisticated now that the war making that has been used with such regularity is really in truly out of date right ok it's always been like that put in or we're going to greece a situation where there's going to be something like liberation of the coming upon the trends ending of scarcity which have been the condition  alternative they want to make the change and they want to examine what kind of change is necessary you said it economic change i think it is don't you i get it we gotta get rid of the money  young people are beginning to realize that we're going to replace the monetary system with other systems of distribution and production because money really has nothing to do i  if you get a lot of money you're going to be happy and he said he was amazed that having the money that everybody's after and that's the main thing that motivates the society is the money quest and all that kind of thing is that it doesn't create happiness right he said he was mentally humanistic mentality i think we need something i mean i think we need something a place a stage where we can provide we should call it the living theater where you think you're like that i like that came up with that i don't know but i thought that was a good idea time to save it well think about it for a minute i think as moses great guy and if you think back a nd world war we're trying to do it i mean as far as i can tell with all kinds of thing to kill each other just as hard as we possibly could ri that great art in the south of france in a right but they were doing but this really is a time of qualitative you could live in the th century took decades and decades to invent attack now every day there's a new revolution babies three grandchildren and two so you know what it is to birth a baby ok and there is a time when the water breaks and it's nine months and it's not ten months and it's not eight hundred and ninety nine months and it's a big broad and then they have the same thing in evolution and we're coming up their pollution or trail up the evolutionary path and we're getting to the point where there's going to have to be a call punctuated equilibrium yes stephen jay gould eldritch an it guy and there's quantitative change there's gestating  and so what i'm trying to get at is this is a time of birth to a new way right a qualitative ending and a call a quantitative what you call it punctuated equilibrium we're about to come into a new relationship to the cosmos right and we've got the weapons that the modeling shows are now species lethal i do believe that is the case yes you tube was and is earliest for movement yeah that is now coming to plow it as we realize that what will make the change what will what will make the change right is a different attitude about who we are to win young what's not  economic core or rather organizational but it's economic and organizational in so far as what we ought to reach out to reflects in our economic and our organizational they had so if you're talking about liberation yes that's something that's never been you're talking about something new a synergistically out there beyond the warm beyond the you know the evolutionary pattern leaving the white so you know so we you know that's that's something that makes this time particularly interesting work and the more you're ensconced in that system the less you're able to see it is the artists that are the intent of the right back to the i have to be the goldfish can't see the water  we are going to find a way to prevent another nation and and realize you realize liberation of the human species yes and the at the level of capability we had a way to work with book to book she was hanging out at the living theatre and had his group the crazies yeah at the living theatre in the sixty's really oh yeah he was very much what we're hope they follow us to an understanding that the st step of economic change is to abandon the terrible money system because the money system is a disaster from beginning to end completely unnecessary what has money got to do with health care it has to do with you know you have to take care of sick people not whether they're insured or not said even i did a lot of studying you know he said you're going to be confronted we had this thing do you did you follow it through do you ever look at the world is like theater the absurd liking of our there the whole world i mean it it i mean and and if you couldn't laugh i think i would crawl over and die if you couldn't laugh at it but they're going and that thing that happened in real time in the real world where mr paulson came on september th two thousand and eight he had three pages did you follow that he had a three page thing he went to everybody in the congress he said got down his hands and knees we must get this through the congress by this week and i haven't signed by the president of the united states or the whole world economy is going to fall apart do you remember that  moment when the whole thing was going to fall off the deep end and everything like the theatre of the absurd and they so were going through that and now they've done and they still do not have that was a signal and they still do confronted by technologically induced unemployment people are going to be ups are going to be unemployed massively because the technology is going to outdate the principle by which you can distribute income to be able by their having a job within the economic machine and they're now talking about we're going to have a recovery the stock market's coming is going to be jobless and the only way they have distribute income to the people within a slave like kind of way or serve like way is through having these a income distribution through labor or through jobs and it's going to be a jobless recovery we're on a has a head of a dilemma and they have not come up with an alternative understanding within that bubble of understanding within the system that the future requires right so it's up to the artist and the intellectual act they don't you think after provide some sort of an alternative and where is that yeah and also democracy in a sense like a one hundred trillion cells in the human organism you realize that life in the human organism a human or you me or go human or there's something like one hundred trillion cell and they all work as a system and they all interconnect and every one matters yes so in the humanity thing six thousand and sixty percent of the world's going to live with women who have to figure out which child they're going to starve to death because they don't have food to give the kid when you've got the ability to provide but you don't have a system that can distribute the demand for people to be able to have what they need to be able to live so they can be conserved the things that really matter like art and some of the things that really really talk about those principles which julian was thirty years ago for seeing as the necessary steps toward what you're talking about would you send me a link or brad brad said are you good  whatnot and a kid was playing the piano seven years old his feet couldn't touch the floor and he's sitting there and he's playing the computer like blood everywhere or was played the piano i mean it was very encouraging you know and all the youth do and it's something urging us to overthrow the old forms i adopt the new forms that are available to us could i suggest maybe what we're going to have to do you go back to your thing where you read intro your dad whatever you said we've got to love is not caesar's i think got to love everybody love everybody including the nazis yes who were doing that was a problem between you and your dad apparently yes and how did but now the question is we get to this point we've got liberating of the people and the ecology and we have a capability of doing that but it would also be the trickiest part we it would be able to subsume rather than overthrow subsume the old order in the way th pacifist roots were telling you we have to include everybody if that's different than overthrowing in a political sense or finding the bad guy rather than fight we're all caught up in a in a in a situation that requires a qualitative change and we're coming down to the end of that birkenau and we need something there so to be include everybody on their own terms right if you're an addict or you want everybody to behave on their own terms if you possibly can right right even the suppose a bad guys there are no bad guys there are no bad guys ok just be able to do bad things the people do bad it's different isn't it yes it is different it is different and  somebody is doing bad things it's up to us to help that not do bad things help them see the way so that they won't do better so they don't have to tell you that happens is that really is strange is seeing you and i sit here talking you know the people that are in the van look at everything's reported by the stars of the food tracker see and all these really but i think they need from the artistic community where the new ideas come they need vision yes and i edge living theatre we're still living in a world and that there is that that that's a characteristic of the time in which we find ourselves in everything now like that i really believe that it was a time to be alive  it is in terms of the chinese argue or argue that is terrible that's that's a terrible curse you understand the chinese to live in interesting times because it's all very conflicted and things like that yes but we're doomed for that because this is the most interesting times ever in the evolution of our species right and we're privileged to be alive and participate in that link to history and with a vision toward the future so i can think of anything more important and trying to fulfill that don't you really in a certain sense outside the envelope relevant to the future and we need that and this should be a place where those kind of ideas can be done and so then it might be possible to be optimistic but it would be i like your thing t everybody's included yes everybody's included and there's no enemy other than ignorance of how we get things right so that we all collectively as a whole evolutionary process can get out of here and get in touch with the very hard fast enough we've made a very hard decision judah's we decided rather than annihilation were for liberation yes and that's the choice that may be really uniquely now in this time up to humanity so we ought