Kelly welcomes renowned playwright, poet and teacher Sarah Ruhl back to the podcast. Sarah is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur Genius Fellowship. She has a new book, it’s called “Lessons from My Teachers.” 

You offer a wonderful idea in the book that will never happen and that’s funding theatre artists out of the public health coffers. 

“Well, certainly not at the moment. Maybe if we had a different administration, it could have happened. But I truly believe that it’s medicine. I think theater is medicine for loneliness and for the malady of not being able to be present. So, yeah, maybe at some point when the NIH replenishes itself, we can go back there. And I increasingly think that actors will be these strange avatars who are some of the few people who know how to be present because they are able to react in real time without digital distraction for two hour stretches. And what person can say that about themselves anymore?” 

I speak about improvisation at a lot of future of work conferences and it’s really a fraught but fascinating place for artists and technologies like AI. 

“Right. Yeah, it’s all fascinating. My husband for Mother’s Day thought it would be funny or interesting to put in some prompts to AI to write a poem for me. And he had AI do it in my style and mention all my children and my dog. And it wasn’t bad. The poem wasn’t bad. And so, then you think, okay, so has the collective unconscious just become more available digitally? I mean, is there any positive way to view this in terms of access to the kind of collective mythic mind and all that humanity has known stretching back to the beginning? Because my first impulse is really terror.” 

You have a beautiful essay about a piano teacher who taught you to play through a mistake. 

“It’s an incredible lesson and I see it with my own kids playing instruments now. I mean, the impulse I had when I made a mistake in music was to stop and start over again, stop and start over until I got it right. And she would teach us how to move through the mistake, especially in performance, to move through the mistake. And what an incredible lesson. I mean, I see it with students now. I call it Penelope Syndrome sometimes when they can’t finish and they undo their work because of a perceived mistake. I call it Penelope Syndrome because of Penelope in the Odyssey, unweaving what she weaves every night. But of course, she was doing that purposely. But I see students who are perfectionists do that sort of not purposely, but they’ll write, they’ll get to a point, they’ll stop, they’ll judge themselves and then they’ll start over again and that just keeps happening instead of pushing through the area of difficulty or the area of where they’re judging themselves. And I do think that’s where improvisation comes in too as a technique that you keep going forward, you keep playing.” 

Photo Credit: Gregory Costanzo