Wally (narration): The life of a playwright is tough.

It's not easy, as some

people seem to think. You work hard writing plays and nobody puts them on.
You take up other lines of work to try to make a living, I became an actor,
and people don't hire you. So you just spend your days doing the errands of
your trade. Today, I had to be up by ten in the morning to make some
important phone calls. Then, I'd gone to the stationery store to buy
envelopes. Then, to the Xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do.

Wally (narration): By five o'clock, I'd finally made it to the post office and
mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile, checking constantly with
my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In
the morning, the mailbox had just been stuffed with bills. What was I
supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was already
doing my best.

Wally (narration): I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East
Side and when I was ten years old I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding
around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and
music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money.

Wally (narration): It was now seven o'clock and I would have liked nothing
better than to go home and have my girlfriend, Debbie, cook me a nice,
delicious dinner. But for the last several years, our financial circumstances
have forced Debbie to work three nights a week as a waitress. Afterall,
somebody had to bring in a little money. So, I was on my own.

Wally (narration): But the worst thing of all was that I'd been trapped by an
odd series of circumstances into agreeing to have dinner with a man I'd been
avoiding literally for years. His name was Andre Gregory. At one time he'd
been a very close friend of mine, as well as my most valued colleague in the
theater. In fact, he was the man who had first discovered me and put one of
my plays on the professional stage. When I'd known Andre, he'd been at the
height of his career as a theater director. The amazing work he did with his
company, The Manhattan Project, had just stunned audiences throughout the
world.

Wally (narration): But then, something had happened to Andre. He dropped

out of the theater. He sort of disappeared. For months at a time his family
seemed only to know that he was travelling in some odd place like Tibet.
Which was really weird because he loved his wife and children, he never
used to like to leave home at all. Or else you'd hear that someone had met
him at a party, and he'd been telling people that he'd talked with trees or
something like that. Obviously, something terrible had happened to Andre.

Wally (narration): The whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous. I
mean, I really wasn't up for that sort of thing. I had problems of my own. I
mean, I couldn't help Andre. Was I supposed to be a doctor or what?

Wally: Hello.

Coat Check Girl: Hello. There you go.

Wally: Thank you.

Maitre D': Yes sir.

Wally: Uh, sir, my name is Wallace Shawn. I'm expected at the table of Andre
Gregory.

Maitre D': That table will be a moment, sir. If you like, you may have a drink
at the bar.

Bartender: Good evening, sir.

Wally: Uh, could I have a club soda please?

Bartender: I'm sorry sir. We only serve Source de Pavilion.

Wally: That'd be fine. Thank you.

Wally (narration): When I'd called Andre, and he'd suggested that we meet in
this particular restaurant, I'd been rather surprised because Andre's tastes
used to be very ascetic. Even though people have always known that he has
some money somewhere. I mean, how the hell else could he have been
flying off to Asia, and so on, and still have been supporting his family.

Wally (narration): The reason I was meeting Andre was that an acquaintance
of mine, George Grassfield, had called me and just insisted that I had to see
him. Apparently, George had been walking his dog in an odd section of town
the night before, and he'd suddenly come upon Andre leaning against a
crumbling old building and sobbing. Andre had explained to George that he'd
just been watching the Ingmar Bergman movie "Autumn Sonata" about 25
blocks away, and he'd been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the
character played by Ingrid Bergman had said "I could always live in my art,
but never in my life."

Andre: Wally!

Wally: Wow! My God!

Wally (narration): I remember, when I first started working with Andre's

company, I couldn't get over the way the actors would hug when they
greeted each other. "Wow. Now I'm really in the theater," I thought.

Wally: Well, you look terrific.

Andre: Well, I feel terrible.

Bartender: Good evening, sir. Nice to see you again.

Andre: Thank you, good evening. Ah, I think I'll have a spritzer, if I could.

Bartender: Yes, sir.

Andre: Thank you.

Wally (narration): I was feeling incredibly nervous. I wasn't sure I could stick
through an entire meal with him. So we talked about this and that. He told
me a few things about Jerzy Grotowski, the great Polish theater director, who
was a friend, and almost like a kind of a guru, of Andre's. He'd also dropped
out of the theater. Grotowski was a pretty unusual character himself. At one
time, he'd been quite fat, then he'd lost an incredible amount of weight, and
become very thin and grown a beard.

Waiter: Your table is ready...

Andre: Oh.

Waiter: ...if you feel like sitting down.

Wally: Oh.

Andre: Yes, thank you.

Wally (narration): I was beginning to realize that the only way to make this
evening bearable would be to ask Andre a few questions. Asking questions
always relaxes me. In fact, I sometimes think that my secret profession is
that I'm a private investigator, a detective. I always enjoy finding out about
people, even if they're in absolute agony, I always find it very...interesting.

Wally: By the way, is he still thin?

Andre: What?

Wally: Grotowski. Is he still thin?

Andre: Oh, absolutely. Oh, waiter? Uh, I think we can do without this.
Waiter 2: Yes, sir.

Andre: Thank you.

Wally: What about this one?

Andre: Seven swimming shrimp.

Waiter: Ready for your order?

Andre: Ah...yes. Uh, the aranygaluska. How...how do you prepare that?

Wally (narration): Andre seemed to know an awful lot about the menu. I
didn't understand a word of it.

Waiter: Very good, I think.

Andre: Mmm...no, I...I think I'll have the cailles aux raisins...

Waiter: Very good.

Andre: ...the quail.

Wally: Oh, quails! I'll have that as well.

Waiter: Two.

Andre: Great.

Wally: Great!

Andre: And then I think, to begin with, the terrine de poissons.

Waiter: Yes.

Wally: What is that?

Andre: Uh, it's a sort of pâté...light...made of fish.

Wally: Does it have bones in it?

Andre: No bones. Perfectly safe.

Wally: Well...um. What is the, um, bramborová polévka?

Waiter: It's a potato soup. It's quite delicious.

Wally: Oh, well, that's...great. I'll have that.

Waiter: Thank you very kindly.

Andre: Thank you very much.

Wally: Well. And when was the last time...

Wally (narration): So we talked for a while about my writing and my acting.

And about my girlfriend, Debbie. And we talked about his wife, Chiquita, and
his two children, Nicolas and Marina.

Andre: And I...I'd stayed back...

Wally (narration): Finally, I got around to asking him what he'd been up to in
the last few years.

Wally: ...I'm just dying to hear it.

Andre: Really?

Wally: Really.

Wally (narration): At first, he seemed a little reluctant to go into it. So, I just
kept asking, and finally, he started to answer.

Andre: ...conference on paratheatrical work then. And, uh...this must have

been about...five years ago and, uh, Grotowski and I were walking along Fifth
Avenue and we were talking, you see, he'd invited me to come to teach that
summer in Poland, you know, to teach a workshop to actors and directors
and whatever and...I had told him that I didn't want to come, because, really,
I had nothing left to teach. I had nothing left to say. I didn't know anything. I
couldn't teach anything. Exercises meant nothing to me anymore. Working
on scenes from plays seemed ridiculous. I...I didn't know what to do, I mean,
I just couldn't do it.

Andre: So he said, "Why don't you tell me anything you'd like to have if you
did a workshop for me, no matter how outrageous, and maybe I can give it to
you."

Andre: So I said, "Well, if you could give me forty Jewish women who speak
neither English nor French, either women who've been in the theater for a
long time and want to leave it but don't know why, or young women who
love the theater, but have never seen a theater they could love, and if these
women could play the trumpet or the harp, and if I could work in a forest, I'd
come."

Andre: A week later, or two weeks later, he called me from Poland and he
said, "Well, forty Jewish women, that's a little hard to find." But he said, "I do
have forty women. They all pretty much fit the definition." And he said, "I
also have some very interesting men but you don't have to work with them.
These are all people who have in common the fact that they're questioning
the theater. They don't all play the trumpet or the harp, but they all play a
musical instrument, and none of them speak English." And he'd found me a
forest, Wally, and the only inhabitants of this forest were some wild boar and
a hermit. So that was an offer I couldn't refuse. I had to go.

Andre: So, I went to Poland and this wonderful group of young men and
women. And the forest he had found us was absolutely magic but, you know,
it was a huge forest, I mean, the trees were so large that four or five people
linking their arms couldn't get their arms around the trees. So we were
camped out beside the ruins of this tiny little castle and we would eat around
this great stone slab that served as a sort of a table. And our schedule was
that usually we'd start work around sunset and then generally we'd work
until about 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning, and then, because the Poles love to
sing and dance, we'd sing and dance until about 10:00 or 11:00 in the
morning, and then we'd have our food, which was generally bread, jam,
cheese, and tea, and then we'd sleep from around noon to sunset.

Andre: Now, technically, of course...technically, the situation is a very

interesting one because, if you find yourself in a forest with a group of 40
people who don't speak your language, then all your moorings are gone.

Wally: What do you mean exactly?

Andre: Well, what we'd do is just sit there and wait for someone to have an
impulse to do something. Now, in a way that's...that's something like a...a
theatrical improvisation, uh, you know, if you were a director working on a
play by Chekhov, you might have the actors playing the mother, the son, and
the uncle all sit around in a room and do a made-up scene that isn't in the
play, for instance, you might say to them "All right, let's say that it's a rainy
Sunday afternoon on Sorin's estate and you're all trapped in the drawing
room together." And then everyone would improvise, saying and doing what
their character might say and do in that circumstance.

Andre: Except that in this type of improvisation, the kind we did in Poland,
the theme is oneself. So, you follow the same law of improvisation, which is
that you do whatever your impulse, as the character, tells you to do, but in
this case, you're the character. So there's no imaginary situation to hide
behind and there's no other person to hide behind. What you're doing, in
fact, is you're asking those same questions that Stanislavsky said the actor
should constantly ask himself as a character: Who am I? Why am I here?
Where do I come from...and where am I going? But instead of applying them
to a role, you apply them to yourself.

Wally: Hmm.

Andre: Or, to look at it a little differently in a way, it's like going right back to
childhood, where a group of children simply come into a room, or are brought
into a room, without toys, and begin to play. Grown-ups were learning how to
play again.

Wally: So, you would...uh...all sit together somewhere and...uh...you would

play in some way but what would you actually do?

Andre: Well, I could give you a good example. You see, we

worked...uh...together for a week in the city before we went off to our forest
and, of course, Grotowski was there in the city, too, and...I heard that every
night, he conducted something called a beehive, and I loved the sound of
this beehive so...a night or two before we were supposed to go off to the
country, I grabbed him by the collar, and I said, "Listen, about this beehive,
you know, I'd kind of like to participate in one, just...instinctively, I feel it
would be something interesting." And he said, "Well, certainly, in fact...why
don't you, with your group, lead the beehive instead of participating in one?"
Well, you know, I...I got very nervous, you know, and I said, "Well, what is a
beehive?" He said, ''Well...a beehive is...at eight o'clock a hundred strangers
come into a room." And I said, "Yes?" He said, "Yes, and whatever happens is
a beehive." I said, "Yes, but what am I supposed to do?" He said, "That's up
to you." I said, "No, no. I really don't want to do this. I'll just participate." And
he said, "No, no. You lead the beehive."

Andre: Well, I was terrified, Wally, I mean, in a way, I felt on stage. I did it
anyway.

Wally: God, well...tell me about it.

Andre: You see, there was this song. I have a tape of it, I can play it for you
one day. And it's just unbelievably beautiful. You see, one of the women in
our group knew a few fragments of this song of Saint Francis, and it's a song
in which you thank God for your eyes, and you thank God for your heart, and
you thank God for your friends, and you thank God for your life, and
it...uh...it repeats itself over and over again, and this became our theme
song. I really must play this thing for you one day because you just can't
believe that a group of people who don't know how to sing could create
something so beautiful. So, I decided that when the people arrived for the
beehive that our group would already be there singing this very beautiful
song, and that we would simply sing it over and over again.
Andre: One of the people decided to bring her very large teddy bear, you
know, well, she's a little afraid of this event, and...uh...somebody wanted to
bring a...a sheet, and somebody else wanted to bring a large bowl of water,
in case people got hot or thirsty, and somebody suggested that we have
candles, that there be no artificial light, but candlelight. And I remember
watching people preparing for this evening. Of course, there was no makeup,
and there were no costumes, but it was exactly the way that people prepare
for a performance, you know, people sort of taking off their jewelry and their
watches, and stowing it away, and making sure it's all secure. And then,
slowly, people arrived, the way they would arrive at the theater, in ones and
twos and tens and fifteens and what have you, and we were just sitting
there, and we were singing this very beautiful song, and people started to sit
with us and started to learn the song.

Andre: Now, there is, of course, as in any performance or improvisation, an

instinct for when things are gonna get boring. So, at a certain point, it may
only have taken an hour to get there, an hour and a half, I suddenly grabbed
this teddy bear and threw it in the air, at which a hundred and forty or thirty
people suddenly exploded, you know, it was like a...a Jackson Pollack
painting, you know. Human beings exploded out of this tight little circle that
was singing the song, and before I knew it, there were two circles, dancing,
you know, one dancing clockwise, the other dancing counterclockwise, with
this rhythm mostly from the waist down. In other words, like an American
Indian dance, with this thumping, persistent rhythm.

Andre: Now, you could easily see, cause we're talking about group trance,
where the line between something like this, and something like Hitler's
Nuremberg rallies is, in a way, a very thin line.

Andre: Anyway, after about an hour of this wild, hypnotic dancing, Grotowski
and I found ourselves sitting opposite each other in the middle of this whole
thing, and we threw the teddy bear back and forth. You know, on one...on
one level, you could say this is childish. And I gave the teddy bear suck,
suddenly, at my breast, and then I threw the teddy bear to him, and he gave
it suck at his breast, and then the teddy bear was thrown up into the air
again, at which there was another explosion of form into...something, and
these...suppose it like, you know, this is the...this...there's something like a
kaleidoscope, like a human kaleidoscope, the evening was made up of
shiftings of the kaleidoscope.

Andre: Now, the only other things that I remember, other than constantly
trying to guide this thing, which was always involved with either movement,
rhythm, repetition or song...or chanting, because, uh, two people in my
group had brought musical instruments, a flute and a drum, which, of course,
are sacred instruments...was that sometimes the room would break up into
six or seven different things going on at once, you know, six or seven
different improvisations, all of which seemed, in some way, related to each
other, it was...it was like a magnificent cobweb.

Andre: And at one point, I noticed that Grotowski was at the center of one
group huddled around a bunch of candles that they'd gathered together. And
like a little child, fascinated by fire, I saw that he had his hand right in the
flame and was holding it there. And as I approached his group, I wondered if I
could do it. I put my left hand in the flame and I found I could hold it there for
as long as I liked, and there was no burn and no pain. But when I tried to put
my right hand in the flame, I couldn't hold it there for a second, so Grotowski
said, "If it burns, try to change some little thing in yourself." And I tried to do
that...didn't work.

Andre: Then...I remember a very, very beautiful procession with the sheet,
and there was somebody being carried below the sheet, you know, the sheet
was like some great biblical canopy, and the entire group was weaving
around the room and chanting. And then at one point, people were dancing,
and I was dancing with a girl, and suddenly our hands began vibrating near
each other like this...vibrating...vibrating, and we went down to our knees,
and suddenly I was sobbing in her arms, and she was sort of cradling me in
her arms, and then she started to cry too, and then we...then we just hugged
each other for a moment, and...uh...then we joined the dance again.

Andre: And then at a certain point, hours later, we returned to the singing of
the song of Saint Francis, and that was the end of the beehive. And then,
again, when it was over, it was just like the theater after a performance, you
know, people sort of put on their earrings and their wristwatches and we
went off to the railroad station to drink a lot of beer and have a good dinner.
Oh, and there was one girl, who wasn't in our group, but who just wouldn't
leave, so we took her along with us.

Wally: Huh. God. Well, tell me some of the other things you did with your
group.

Andre: Well...oh, I remember once, when we were in the city we tried doing
an improvisation, you know, the kind that I used to do in New
York...uh...everybody's supposed to be on an airplane and they've all learned
from the pilot there's something wrong with the motor. But what was unusual
about this improvisation was that two people who participated in it fell in
love. They've, in fact, married. And when we went...yeah, out of fear...of
being on this plane, they fell in love, thinking they were going to die at any
moment. And when we went to the forest, these two disappeared because
they understood the...the experiment so well that they realized that...to go
off together in the forest was much more important than any kind of
experiment the group could do as a whole. So...uh...about halfway through
the week, we stumbled into a clearing in the forest and the two of them were
fast asleep in each other's arms. It was around dawn, and we put flowers on
them to let them know we'd been there, and then we crept away. And then,
on the last day of our stay in the forest, these two showed up and they shook
me by my hands, and they thanked me very much for the wonderful work
they'd been able to do, you see. They understood what it was about. I mean,
that, of course, poses the question of what was it about. But it has...has
something to do with living.

Andre: And...and then on the final day of our stay in the forest, the whole
group did something so wonderful for me, Wally. They arranged a
christening...a baptism for me and they...they filled the castle with flowers
and it was...just a miracle of light because they had literally set up hundreds
of candles and torches, I mean, no church could have looked more beautiful.
There was a simple ceremony, and one of them played the role of my
godmother, and another played the role of my godfather, and I was given a
new name. They called me Yendrush. And some of the people took it
completely seriously and some of them found it funny, but, uh...I really felt
that I had a new name. And then we had an enormous feast, with blueberries
picked from the field, and chocolate someone had gone a great distance to
buy, and raspberry soup, rabbit stew, and we sang Polish songs, and Greek
songs, and everybody danced for the rest of the night.

Wally: Hmm.

Andre: Oh, I have a picture. See...this was...let's see. Oh, yeah, this was me
in the forest. See?

Wally: God!

Andre: That's what I felt like. That's the state I was in.

Wally: God. Yeah, I remember George...uh, told me he'd seen you around that
time. He said you looked like you'd come back from a war.

Andre: Yeah, I remember meeting him. He...uh...he asked me a lot of friendly

questions. I think I called you up, too, that summer, didn't I?

Wally: Huh. I think I was out of town.

Andre: Yeah, well, most...most people I met thought there was something
wrong with me. They didn't say that but I could tell that that was what they
thought. But, you see, what I think I experienced was, for the first time in my
life, to know what it means to be truly alive. Now, that's very frightening,
because with that comes an immediate awareness of death, cause they go
hand in hand, you know, the kind of impulse that led to Walt Whitman, that
led to "Leaves of Grass", you know, that feeling of being connected to
everything means to also be connected to death. And that's pretty scary. But,
I really felt as if I were floating above the ground, not walking, you know, and
I could do things like go out to the highway and watch the lights go from red
to green and think, "How wonderful!"

Andre: And then, one day, in the early fall, I was out in the country, walking
in a field, and I suddenly heard a voice say, "Little Prince." And, of course,
"The Little Prince" was a book that I always thought of as disgusting, childish
treacle, but still, I thought, well, you know, if a voice comes to me in a field, I
mean, this was the first voice I had ever heard. Maybe I should go and read
the book. Now, that same morning I'd got a letter from a young woman
who'd been in my group in Poland, and in her letter she'd written, "You have
dominated me.", you know, she spoke very awkward English, so, she'd gone
to the dictionary, and she'd crossed out the word "dominated" and she'd
said, "No. The correct word is 'tamed.'" And then when I went to town and
bought the book and started to read it, I saw that "taming" was the most
important word in the whole book. By the end of the book, I was in tears, I
was so moved by the story.

Andre: And then I went and tried to write an answer to her letter, cause she'd
written me a very long letter. But I just couldn't find the right words, so,
finally, I took my hand, I put it on a piece of paper, I outlined it with a pen,
and I wrote in the center something like, "Your heart is in my hand.",
something like that. And then, I went over to my brother's house to swim,
cause he lives nearby in the country, and he has a pool. And he wasn't
home. And I went into his library and he had bought at an auction the
collected issues of Minotaure. You know, the surrealist magazine? Oh, it's a
great, great surrealist magazine in the twenties and thirties and
I...never...you know, I consider myself a bit of a surrealist. I had never, ever
seen a copy of Minotaure. And here they all were, bound, year after year.

Andre: So, at random, I picked one out, I opened it up, and there was a full-
page reproduction of the letter "A" from Tenniel's Alice In Wonderland, and I
thought, that...well, you know, it's been a day of coincidences, but that's not
unusual that the surrealists would have been interested in Alice and I did a
play of Alice, so, at random, I opened to another page and there were four
handprints. One was André Breton, another was André Derain, the third was
André...I've got it written down somewhere...it...it's not Malraux...it's, like,
someone...another of the surrealists. All "A"'s, and the fourth was Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry, who wrote "The Little Prince". And they'd shown these
handprints to some kind of expert, without saying whose hands they
belonged to, and under Exupéry's, it said that he was an artist, with very
powerful eyes, who was a tamer of wild animals. So, I thought, this is
incredible, you know. And I looked back to see when the issue came out. It
came out on the newsstands May 12th, 1934, and I was born during the day
of May 11th, 1934. So, that's what started me on, uh...Saint-Exupéry and
"The Little Prince".

Andre: Now, of course today...today I think there's a very fascistic thing

under "The Little Prince", you know, I...well, no, I think there's a kind of...I
think a kind of S.S. totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere. You know,
there's something, you know, that...that love of, um...well, that masculine
love of a certain kind of oily muscle, you know what I mean? I mean, I can't
quite put my finger on it, but I can just imagine some beautiful S.S. man
loving "The Little Prince". Now, I don't know why, but there's something
wrong with it, it stinks.

Wally: Well, didn't George tell me that you were gonna do a play that was
based on "The Little Prince"

Andre: Hmm. Well. What happened, Wally, was that fall I was in New York,
and I met this young Japanese Buddhist priest named Kozan, and I thought
he was Puck from the "Midsummer Night's Dream", you know, he had this
beautiful, delicate smile. I thought he was the Little Prince. So, naturally, I
decided to go off to the Sahara desert to work on The Little Prince with two
actors and this Japanese monk.

Wally: You did?

Andre: Well, I mean, I was still in a very peculiar state at that time, Wally. You
know, I would...I would look in the rearview mirror of my car and see little
birds flying out of my mouth. And I remember always being exhausted in that
period. I always felt weak, you know, I really didn't know what was going on
with me, I would just sit out there all alone in the country for days and do
nothing but write in my diary, and I was always thinking about death.

Wally: Huh. But you went to the Sahara.

Andre: Oh, yes, we went off into the desert, and we rode through the desert
on camels, and we rode, and we rode, and then at night we would walk out
under that enormous sky and look at the stars. I just kept thinking about the
same things that I was always thinking about at home, particularly about
Chiquita. In fact, I thought about just about nothing but my marriage. And
then I remember one incredibly dark night, being at an oasis, and there were
palm trees moving in the wind, and I could hear Kozan singing far away in
that beautiful bass voice, and I tried to follow his voice along the sand.

Andre: You see, I thought he had something to teach me, Wally. And
sometimes I would meditate with him. Sometimes I'd go off and meditate by
myself. You know, I would see images of Chiquita. Once, I actually saw her
growing old and her hair turning gray in front of my eyes, and I would just
wail and yell my lungs out out there on the dunes. Anyway, the desert was
pretty horrible. It was pretty cold. We were searching for something, but we
couldn't tell if we were finding anything. You know that once Kozan and I...we
were sitting on a dune and we just ate sand. No, we weren't trying to be
funny, I started, then he started, we just ate sand and threw up, that's how
desperate we were. In other words, we didn't know why we were there, we
didn't know what we were looking for, the entire thing seemed completely
absurd, arid, and empty, it was like, uh...like a last chance or something.

Wally: Huh. So what happened then?

Andre: Well...in those days I went completely on impulse. So, on impulse, I

brought Kozan back to stay with us in New York after we got back from the
Sahara, and he stayed for six months. And he really sort of took over the
whole family, in a way.

Wally: What do you mean?

Andre: Well, there was certainly a center missing in the house at the time.
There certainly wasn't a father, cause I was always thinking about going off
to Tibet, or doing God knows what. And, so, he taught the whole family to
meditate, and he told them all about Asia, and the East, and his monastery,
and everything. He really captivated everybody with an incredible bag of
tricks. He had literally developed himself, Wally, so that he could push on his
fingers and rise off, out of his chair. I mean, he could literally go like this, you
know, push on his fingers and go into like a headstand, and just hold himself
there with two fingers. Or if Chiquita would suddenly get a little tension in
her neck, well, he'd immediately have her down on the floor, he'd be walking
up and down on her back doing these unbelievable massages, you know.

Andre: And the children found him amazing, I mean, you know, we'd visit
friends who had children and immediately he'd be playing with these
children in a way that, you know, we just can't do, I mean, those children,
just giggles, giggles, giggles about what this Japanese monk was doing in
these holy robes. I mean, he was an acrobat, a ventriloquist, a magician,
everything. You know, the amazing thing was that I don't think he had any
interest in children whatsoever. None at all. I don't think he liked them. I
mean, you know, when he stayed with us, in the first week, really, the kids
were just googly-eyed over him. But then, a couple of weeks later, Chiquita
and I could be out, and Marina could have flu or a temperature of 104, and
he wouldn't even go in and say hello to her. But he was taking over, more
and more.

Andre: I mean, his own habits had completely changed. You know, he started
wearing these elegant Gucci shoes under his white monk's robes. He was
eating huge amounts of food. I mean, he ate twice as much as Nicolas ate,
you know? This tiny little Buddhist when I first met him, you know, was
eating a little bowl of milk, hot milk with rice, was now eating huge beef. It
was just very strange. You know, and we tried working together, but really
our work consisted mostly of my trying to do these incredibly painful
prostrations that they do in the monastery, you know, so really, we hadn't
been working very much.

Andre: Anyway, we were out in the country, and we all went to Christmas
Mass together, you know, he was all dressed up in his Buddhist finery, and it
was one of those...one of those awful, dreary Catholic churches on Long
Island where the priest talks about communism and birth control. And as I
was sitting there in Mass, I was wondering, what in the world is going on, I
mean, here I am, I'm a grown man, and there's this strange person living in
the house, and I'm not working, I mean, you know, I was doing nothing but
scribbling a little poetry in my diary, I can't get a job teaching anymore, and I
don't know what I want to do. When all of a sudden, a huge creature
appeared, looking at the congregation, it was about, I'd say, six foot eight,
something like that, you know, and it was...it was half bull, half man, and its
skin was blue. It had violets growing out of its eyelids and poppies growing
out of its toenails, and it just stood there for the whole Mass. I mean, I could
not make that creature disappear, you know, I thought, oh, well, you know,
I'm just seeing this cause I'm bored, you know, close...I could not make that
creature go away. Okay, now, I didn't talk with people about it, because
they'd think I was weird but I felt that this creature was somehow coming to
comfort me. That somehow, he was appearing to say, "Well, you may feel
low and you might not be able to create a play right now, but look at what
can come to you on Christmas Eve, hang on, old friend. I may seem weird to
you, but on these weird voyages, weird creatures appear. It's part of the
journey. You're okay. Hang in there."

Wally: By the way...uh...did you ever see that play...uh..."The Violets are
Blue"?

Andre: No.

Wally: Oh, when...when you mentioned the violets, it...it reminded me of that.
It...it was about...um...people being...uh...strangled on a...on a submarine.

Andre: Hmm.

Wally: Well. So that was...that was Christmas. What happened after that?

Andre: Do you really want to hear about all this?

Wally: Yeah.
Andre: Well. Around that time...I was beginning to think about going to India,
and Kozan suddenly left one day, and I was beginning to get into a lot of very
strange ideas around that time, now, for example, I'd developed this...well, I
got this idea which I...now, it was very appealing to me at the time, you
know, which was that I would have a flag, a large flag and that wherever I
worked, this flag would fly, or if we were outside, say, with a group, that the
flag could be the thing we lay on at night, and that, somehow, between
working on this flag and lying on this flag, this flag flying over us, that the
flag would pick up vibrations of a kind, that would still be in the flag when I
brought it home.

Andre: So I went down to meet this flag maker that I'd heard about, and, you
know, there was this very straightforward-looking guy, you know, very sweet,
really healthy-looking and everything. Nice big, blond, and he had a
beautiful, clean loft down in the village with lovely, happy flags, and I was all
into The Little Prince, and I talked to him about The Little Prince, these
adventures and everything. How I needed the flag and what the flag should
be. He seemed to really connect with it, so...

Andre: Two weeks later, I came back. He showed me a flag that I thought was
very odd, you know, cause I...well, you know...I'd expected something gentle
and lyrical. There was something about this that was so powerful it was
almost overwhelming. And it did include the Tibetan swastika.

Wally: He put a swastika in your flag?

Andre: No, it was the Tibetan swastika, not the Nazi swastika. It's one of the
most ancient Tibetan symbols. And it was just strange, you know? But I
brought it home, because my idea with this flag was that, before I left, you
know, before I left for India I wanted several people who were close to me to
have this flag in the room for the night to sleep with it, you know, and then in
the morning to sew something into the flag.

Andre: So I took the flag into Marina, and I said, "Hey, look at this. What do
you think of this?" And she said, "What is that? That's awful." I said, "It's a
flag." And she said, "I don't like it." I said, "I kind of thought you might like to
spend the night with it, you know." But she really thought the flag was awful.

Andre: So then Chiquita threw this party for me before I left for India and the
apartment was filled with guests and, at one point Chiquita said, "The flag,
the flag. Where's the flag?", and I said, "Oh, yeah. The flag." And I go and get
the flag, and I open it up. Chiquita goes absolutely white and runs out of the
room and vomits. So the party just comes to a halt and breaks up.

Andre: And then, the next day, I gave it to this young woman who'd been in
my group in Poland, who was now in New York. I didn't tell her anything
about any of this. At 5:00 in the morning, she called me up and she said "I
gotta come and see you right away." and I thought, "Oh, God." She came up,
and she said, "I saw things. I saw things around this flag. Now, I know you're
stubborn, and I know you want to take this thing with you, but if you'd follow
my advice, you'd put it in a hole in the ground and burn it and cover it with
earth, cause the devil's in it." I never took the flag with me. In fact, I gave it
to her, and, uh, she...she had a ceremony with it. Six months later, in France,
with some friends, in which, uh, they did burn it.

Wally: God. It's really, really amazing. So, did you ever go to India?

Andre: Oh, yes, I...I went to India in the spring, Wally, and I came back home
feeling all wrong. I mean, you know, I'd been to India, and I'd just felt like a
tourist. I'd found nothing.

Andre: So I was...I was spending, uh, the summer on Long Island with my
family and I heard about this community in Scotland called Findhorn where
people sang and talked and meditated with plants. And it was founded by
several rather middle-class English and Scottish eccentrics. Some of them
intellectuals, and some of them not, and I'd heard that they'd grown things in
soil that supposedly nothing can grow in, cause it's almost beach soil, and
that they'd built...not built...they'd grown the largest cauliflowers in the world
and there are sorts of cabbages, and they've grown trees that can't grow in
the British Isles.

Andre: So I went there. I mean, it is an amazing place, Wally, I mean, if there

are insects bothering the plants, they will talk with the insects. And, you
know, make an agreement, by which they'll set aside a special patch of
vegetables just for the insects and then the insects will leave the main part
alone. Things like that.

Andre: And everything they do they do beautifully. I mean, the buildings just
shine. I mean, for instance, the icebox, the stove, the car, you know, they all
have names, and since you wouldn't treat Helen, the icebox, with any less
respect than you would Margaret, your wife, you know, you make sure that
Helen is as clean as Margaret, or treated with equal respect.

Andre: And when I was there, Wally, I remember being in the woods and I
would look at a leaf, and I would actually see that thing that is alive in that
leaf. And then I remember just running through the woods as fast as I could,
with this incredible laugh coming out of me and really being in that state,
you know, where laughter and tears seem to merge.

Andre: I mean, it absolutely blasted me open. When I came out of Findhorn, I

was hallucinating nonstop. I was seeing clouds as creatures. The people on
the airplane all had animals' faces, I mean, I was on a trip, it was like being in
a William Blake world suddenly. Things were exploding.

Andre: So immediately I went to Belgrade, cause, uh, I wanted to talk to

Grotowski, and Grotowski and I got together at midnight in my hotel room,
and we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream, and we
talked from midnight until 11:00 the next morning.

Wally: God. What did he say?

Andre: Nothing. I talked. He didn't say a word.

Andre: And...and then I guess really, the last big experience of this kind took
place that fall. It was out at Montauk on Long Island and there were only
about nine of us involved, mostly men, and we borrowed Dick Avedon's
property out at Montauk, and the country out there is like Heathcliff country,
it's absolutely wild.

Andre: What we wanted to do was we wanted to take, you know, we wanted

to take All Souls' Eve, Halloween, and use it as a point of departure for
something, so, each one of us prepared some sort of event for the others,
somehow in the spirit of All Souls' Eve.

Andre: But the biggest event was three of the people kept disappearing in
the middle of the night, each night, and we knew they were preparing
something big, but we didn't know what. And midnight on Halloween, under
a dark moon, above these cliffs, we were all told to gather at the topmost
cliff and that we would be taken somewhere. And we did. And we waited, and
it was very, very cold.

Andre: And then the three of them...Helen, Bill, and Fred showed up wearing
white, you know, something they'd made out of sheets, looked a little
spooky, not funny. And they took us into the basement of this house that had
burned down on the property, and in this ruined basement, they had set up a
table with benches they'd made, and on this table they had laid out paper,
pencils, wine, and glasses, and we were all asked to sit at the table and to
make out our last will and testament, you know, to think about, and write
down, whatever our last words were to the world, or to somebody we were
very close to, and that's quite a task.

Andre: I must have been there for about an hour and a half or so, maybe two.
And then one at a time, they would ask one of us to come with them and I
was one of the last. And they came for me, and they put a blindfold on me,
and they ran me through these fields, two people, and they'd found a kind of
potting shed, you know, a kind of shed, on the grounds, a little tiny room that
had once had tools in it. And they took me down the steps, into this
basement and the room was just filled with harsh white light.
Andre: Then they told me to get undressed and give them all my valuables.
Then they put me on a table, and they sponged me down, well, you know, I
just started flashing on...on...on death camps and secret police. I don't know
what happened to the other people, but I just started to cry uncontrollably.
Uh, then...then they got me to my feet and they took photographs of me,
naked. And then naked, again blindfolded, I was run through these forests
and we came to a kind of tent made of sheets, with sheets on the ground,
and there were all these naked bodies huddling together for warmth against
the cold. Must have been left there for about an hour.

Andre: And then again, one by one, one at a time, we were led out. The
blindfold was put on and I felt myself being lowered onto something like a
stretcher. And the stretcher was carried a long way, very slowly, through
these forests. And then, I felt myself being lowered into the ground. They
had, in fact, dug six graves, eight feet deep. And then I felt these pieces of
wood being put on me. And I cannot tell you, Wally, what I was going
through.

Andre: And then, the stretcher was lowered into the grave, and then this
wood was put on me, and then my valuables were put on me, in my hands,
and they'd taken, you know, a kind of sheet or canvas, and they'd stretched
about this much above my head, and then they shoveled dirt into the grave,
so that I really had the feeling of being buried alive.

Andre: And after being in the grave for about half an hour, I mean, I didn't
know how long I'd be in there, I was resurrected, lifted out of the grave,
blindfold taken off, and run through these fields, and we came to a great
circle of fire, with music and hot wine, and everyone danced until dawn. And
then, at dawn, to the best of our ability, we filled up the graves, and went
back to New York.

Andre: And that was really the last big event, I mean, that was the end, I
mean, you know, I began to realize I just didn't want to do these things
anymore, you know? I felt sort of becalmed, you know, like that chapter in
Moby Dick where the wind goes out of the sails. And then last winter,
without, uh, thinking about it very much, I went to see this agent I know, to
tell him I was interested in directing plays again. Actually, he seemed a little
surprised to see that Rip Van Winkle was still alive.

Wally (looking at his quail dinner): Mmm, God. I didn't know they were so
small.

Andre: Well, you know, frankly, I'm sort of repelled by the whole story, if you
really want to know.
Wally: What?

Andre: Ah, yeah. Who did I think I was, you know, I mean, that's the story of
some kind of spoiled princess. You know. Who did I think I was, the Shah of
Iran? You know, I really wonder if people such as myself are really not Albert
Speer, Wally. You know? Hitler's architect, Albert Speer?

Wally: What?

Andre: No, I've been thinking a lot about him recently because, uh, I think I
am Speer. And I think it's time that I was caught and tried the way he was.

Wally: What are you talking about?

Andre: Well, you know, he was a very cultivated man, an architect, an artist,
you know, so he thought the ordinary rules of life didn't apply to him either. I
mean, I really feel that everything I've done is horrific, just horrific.

Wally: My God. But why?

Andre: You see...you see, I've seen a lot of death in the last few years, Wally,
and there's one thing that's for sure about death, you do it alone, you see,
that seems quite certain, you see, that I've seen. That the people around
your bed mean nothing. Your reviews mean nothing. Whatever it is, you do it
alone, and so the question is, when I get on my deathbed, what kind of a
person am I gonna be, and I'm just very dubious about the kind of person
who would have lived his life those last few years the way I did.

Wally: Why should you feel that way?

Andre: You see, I've had a very rough time in the last few months, Wally.
Three different people in my family were in the hospital at the same time.
Then my mother died. Then Marina had something wrong with her back and
we were terribly worried about her, you know, so...so, I mean, I'm feeling
very raw right now, I mean, uh, I mean, I can't sleep. My nerves are shot. I
mean, I'm affected by everything.

Andre: You know, last...last week I had this really nice director, uh, from
Norway over for dinner, and he's someone I've known for years and years,
and he's somebody that I think I'm quite fond of. And...I was sitting there just
thinking that he was a pompous, defensive, conservative stuffed shirt who
was only interested in the theater, you know, he was talking and talking, you
know, his mother had been a famous Norwegian comedienne. I realized he
had said "I remember my mother" at least four hundred times during the
evening, and he was telling story after story about his mother, you know. I'd
heard these stories twenty times in the past, he was drinking this whole
bottle of bourbon very quietly. His laugh was so horrible, you know, I could
hear his laugh, the pain in that laugh, the hollowness, you know, what being
that woman's son had done to him, you know, so, at a certain point I just had
to ask him to leave, nicely, you know, I told him I had to get up early the next
morning, cause it was so horrible. It was just as if he had died in my living
room, and then, you know, then I went into the bathroom and cried cause I
felt I'd lost a friend.

Andre: And then after he'd gone, I turned the television on, and there was
this guy who had just won the "something something", you know, some
sports event, some kind of a great big check and some kind of huge silver
bottle, and he, you know, you know, he couldn't stuff the check in the bottle,
and he put the bottle in front of his nose and pretended it was his face, you
know, he wasn't really listening to the guy who was interviewing him, but he
was smiling, huh, malevolently at his friends, and I looked at that guy and I
thought "What a horrible, empty, manipulative rat." Then I thought, "That
guy is me."

Andre: And then last night actually, you know, it was our 20th wedding
anniversary. And I took Chiquita to see this show about Billie Holiday, and I
looked at these...show business people who know nothing about Billie
Holiday, nothing, you see, they were really kind of, in a way, huh, intellectual
creeps. And I suddenly had this feeling, I mean, you know, I was just sitting
there crying through most of the show. And I suddenly had this feeling...I was
just as creepy as they were...and that my whole life had been a sham...and I
didn't have the guts to be Billie Holiday either. I mean, I really feel that I'm
just...washed up...wiped out, I feel I've...just squandered my life.

Wally: Andre, now...how can you say something like that, I mean...

Andre: Well, you know...I may be in a very emotional state right now,
Wally...but since I've come back home I've just been finding the world we're
living in more and more upsetting. I mean...last week I went down to the
Public Theater one afternoon, you know, when I walked in, I said hello to
everybody, cause I know them all, and they all know me, they're always very
friendly. You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I
looked? And then one person...one...a woman who runs the casting office,
said, "Gee, you look horrible. Is something wrong?"

Andre: Now, she, you know, we started talking, of course, I started telling her
things, and she suddenly burst into tears because an aunt of hers who's
eighty, whom she's very fond of, went into the hospital for a cataract, which
was solved, but the nurse was so sloppy, she didn't put the bed rails up and
so the aunt fell out of bed and is now a complete cripple, you know, so, you
know, we were talking about hospitals. Now, you know, this woman, because
of who she is, you know, cause this had happened to her very, very recently,
she could see me with complete clarity.

Wally: Uh huh.

Andre: She didn't know anything about what I'd been going through. But the
other people, what they saw was this tan, or this shirt, or the fact that the
shirt goes well with the tan, so they said, "Gee, you look wonderful." Now,
they're living in an insane dreamworld. They're not looking. That seems very
strange to me.

Wally: Right. Because they just didn't see anything, somehow, except, uh,
the few little things that they wanted to see.

Andre: Yeah, you know, it's like what happened just before my mother died.
You know, we'd gone to the hospital to see my mother and...I went in to see
her...and I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or
Dachau. And I was out in the hall, sort of comforting my father, when a
doctor, who was a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went
into her room and came out just beaming. And he said, "Boy, don't we have
a lot of reason to feel great? Isn't it wonderful how she's coming along?"

Andre: Now, all he saw was the arm. That's all he saw. Now, here's another
person who's existing in a dream. Who, on top of that, is a kind of butcher,
who's committing a kind of familial murder, because when he comes out of
that room, he psychically kills us by taking us into a dream world where we
become confused and frightened. Cause the moment before, we saw
somebody who already looked dead, and now, here comes a specialist who
tells us they're in wonderful shape. I mean, you know, they were literally
driving my father crazy. I mean, you know, here's an 82-year old man who's
very emotional, and, you know, and if you go in one moment, and you see
the person's dying, and you don't want them to die, and then a doctor comes
out five minutes later and tells you they're in wonderful shape, I mean, you
know, you can go crazy.

Wally: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Andre: I mean, the doctor didn't see my mother. The people at the Public
Theater didn't see me, I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog.
I think we're all in a trance. We're walking around like zombies, I don't...I
don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things,
we...we're just going around all day like unconscious machines and
meanwhile there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up
and building up inside us.

Wally: That's right. It just builds up, uh...and then it just leaps out
inappropriately. I mean, I remember when I was, uh, acting in this play based
on "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov. And I was playing the part of the
cat. But they had trouble, uh, making up my cat suit, so, I didn't get it
delivered to me till the night of the first performance. Particularly the head, I
mean, I'd never even had a chance to try it on.

Wally: And about four of my fellow actors actually came up to me, and they
said these things which I just couldn't help thinking were attempts to destroy
me, you know, one of them said, uh..."Oh, well, now that head will totally
change your hearing in the performance, uh, you may hear everything
completely differently, and it may be very upsetting. Now, I was once in a
performance where I was wearing earmuffs and I couldn't hear anything
anybody said." And then another one said, "Oh, you know, whenever I wear
even a hat on stage...I tend to faint."

Wally: I mean, those remarks were just full of hostility. Because, I mean, you
know, if I'd listened to those people, I would have gone out there on stage,
and I wouldn't have been able to hear anything, and I would have fainted.
But the hostility was completely inappropriate, because, in fact, those people
liked me, I mean, that hostility was just some feeling that was...you know,
left over from some previous experience. Because somehow, in our social
existence today, we're only allowed to express our feelings, uh...weirdly and
indirectly. If you express them directly, everybody goes crazy.

Andre: Well, did you express your feelings about what those people said to
you?

Wally: No. I mean, I didn't even know what I felt till I thought about it later.
And I mean, at the most, you know, in a situation like that, uh...even if I had
known what I felt, I might say something, if I'm really annoyed, like, uh, "Oh,
yeah, well...that's just fascinating...and, uh, I probably will faint tonight, uh,
just as you did."

Andre: I do just the same thing myself. We can't be direct, so we end up

saying the weirdest things. I mean, I remember a night, it was a couple of
weeks after my mother died, and I was in pretty bad shape, and I had dinner
with three relatively close friends, two of whom had known my mother quite
well, and all three of whom had known me for years. You know that we went
through that entire evening without my being able to, for a moment, get
anywhere near what, you know, not that I wanted to sit and have this dreary
evening in which I was talking about all this pain that I was going through
and everything, really, not at all, but...the fact that nobody could say..."Gee,
what a shame about your mother." or "How are you feeling?"

Andre: It was just as if nothing had happened. They were all making these
jokes and laughing, and I got quite crazy, as a matter of fact, you know, one
of these people mentioned a certain man whom I don't like very much, and I
started screeching about how he had just been found in the Bronx River, and
his penis had dropped off from gonorrhea, and all kinds of insane things,
and...later, when I got home, I realized I'd just been desperate to break
through this ice.

Wally: Yup.

Andre: I mean, do you realize, Wally, if you brought that situation into a
Tibetan home...that'd be just so far out. I mean, they wouldn't be able to
understand it. I mean, that would be simply...simply so weird, Wally. If four
Tibetans came together, and tragedy had just struck one of the ones, and
they spent the whole evening going "Ha ha ha ha ha ho ho ho ho hee hee
hee!" I mean, you know, Tibetans would have looked at that and would have
thought that was the most unimaginable behavior. But for us, that's common
behavior.

Wally: Mm hmm.

Andre: I mean, really, the...the Africans would have probably put their spears
into all four of us cause it would have driven them crazy, they...they would
have thought we were dangerous animals or something like that, I mean...

Wally: Right.

Andre: ...that's absolutely abnormal behavior.

Waiter: Is everything all right, gentlemen?

Wally: Great.

Andre: Yeah.

Andre: But those are typical evenings for us. I mean, we go to dinners and
parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of...sickly
dreams because people are talking in symbols. Everyone is sort of floating
through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what
they're really thinking about. Then people will start making these jokes that
are really some sort of secret code.

Wally: Right. Well, what often happens in some of these evenings is that
these...really crazy little fantasies will just start being played with, you know,
and everyone will be talking at once and sort of saying, uh, "Hey, wouldn't it
be great if Frank Sinatra and Mrs. Nixon and blah blah blah were in such and
such a situation?" You know, always with famous people, and always sort
of...grotesque. Or people will be talking about some horrible thing like...like,
uh...the death of that girl in the car with Ted Kennedy, and they'll just be
roaring with laughter.

Wally: I mean, it's really amazing, it's just unbelievable, that's the only way
anything is expressed, through these completely insane jokes. I mean, I think
that's why I never understand what's going on at a party, I'm always
completely confused. You know, uh, Debbie once said, after one of these New
York evenings, she thought she'd traveled a greater distance just by
journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York
evening, than her grandmother had traveled in, uh, making her way from the
steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago.

Andre: Oh, I think that's right. You know, it may...it may be, Wally, that one of
the reasons that we don't know what's going on, is that when we're there at
a party, we're all too busy performing.

Wally: Uh huh.

Andre: That was one of the reasons that, uh, Grotowski gave up the theater.
He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that
performance in the theater was sort of superfluous. And, in a way, obscene.

Wally: Huh.

Andre: I mean, isn't it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our
expectation of how a doctor should look? When you see a terrorist on
television, he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which
fathers, or single people, or artists are all trying to live up to someone's
fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist should look and
behave. They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct
themselves at every single moment and they all seem totally self-confident.
Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves...

Wally: Yeah.

Andre: ...they don't know what they should be doing with their lives. They're
reading all these self-help books.

Wally: Oh, God, and I mean, those books are just so touching, because they
show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are
really getting on in life, even though, by performing these roles all the time,
we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live
in such ludicrous ignorance of each other, I mean, we usually don't know the
things we'd like to know, even about our supposedly closest friends, I
mean...I mean, you know, suppose you're going through some kind of hell in
your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced
similar things, but we just don't dare to ask each other.
Andre: No. It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.

Wally: I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality, I mean, on the
contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called
careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because, if
your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just
doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort
of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way, you can sort of turn on the
automatic pilot. You know, just the way your mother's doctor had on his
automatic pilot when he went in, and he looked at the arm, and he totally
failed to perceive anything else.

Andre: That's right, our...our minds are just focused on these goals and plans,
which in themselves are not reality.

Wally: No. Goals and plans are not...I mean, they're...they're fantasy. They're
part of a dream life. I mean, you know, it always just does seem so
ridiculous, somehow, that everybody has to have his little...his little goal in
life, I mean, it's so absurd, in a way, when you consider that it doesn't matter
which one it is.

Andre: Right. And because people's concentration is on their goals, in their

life they just live each moment by habit. Really, like the Norwegian telling
the same stories over and over again.

Wally: Mm hmm.

Andre: Life becomes habitual. And it is today. I mean, very few things happen
now, like, that moment when Marlon Brando sent the Indian woman to
accept the Oscar, and everything went haywire. Things just very rarely go
haywire now. And if you're just operating by habit, then you're not really
living. I mean, you know, in Sanskrit, the root of the verb "to be" is the same
as "to grow" or "to make grow".

Wally: Huh.

Andre: Do you know about ROC?

Wally: Hmm?

Andre: Oh, well. ROC was a wonderful man. He was one of the founders of
Findhorn. And, he was one of Scotland's...well, he was Scotland's greatest
mathematician and he was one of the century's great mathematicians, and
he prided himself on the fact that he had no fantasy life, no dream life -
nothing to stand be...no imaginary life...nothing to stand between him and
the direct perception of mathematics. And one day when he was in his mid-
fifties, he was walking in the gardens of Edinburgh and he saw a faun. The
faun was very surprised because fauns have always been able to see people,
but you know, very few people ever see them and...you know, uh...those
little imaginary creatures. Not a deer.

Wally: Oh.

Andre: You call them fauns, don't you?

Wally: I thought a fawn was a baby deer.

Andre: Yeah, well, there's a deer that's called a fawn, but these are like those
little imag...

Wally: Oh! The kind that Debussy, yeah...

Andre: Yes. Right. So, he got to know the faun, and he got to know other
fauns, and a series of conversations began, and more and more fauns would
come out every afternoon to meet him, and he'd have talks with the fauns,
and, then one day, after a while, when, you know, they'd really gotten to
know him, they asked him if he would like to meet Pan, because Pan would
like to meet him. And, of course, Pan was afraid of terrifying him because he
knew of the Christian misconception which portrayed Pan as an evil creature,
which he's not. But ROC said he would love to meet Pan, and so they met,
and Pan indirectly sent him on his way on a journey in which he met the
other people who began Findhorn.

Andre: But ROC used to practice certain exercises, like, uh, for instance, if he
were right-handed, all today he would do everything with his left hand. All
day, eating, writing, everything...opening doors...in order to break the habits
of living. Because the great danger, he felt, for him, was to fall into a trance,
out of habit. He had a whole series of very simple exercises that he had
invented just to keep seeing, feeling, remembering. Because you have to
learn now. It didn't used to be necessary, but today you have to learn
something, like, uh...are you really hungry or are you just stuffing your face
be...because that's what you do, out of habit? I mean, you can afford to do it,
so you do it, whether you're hungry or not.

Andre: You know, if you go to the Buddhist Meditation Center, they make you
taste each bite of your food...so it takes two hours, it's horrible, to eat your
lunch. But you're conscious of the taste of your food. If you're just eating out
of habit, then you don't taste the food, and you're not conscious of the reality
of what's happening to you. You enter the dream world again.

Wally: Now, do you think maybe we live in this dream world because we do
so many things every day that affect us in ways that somehow we're just not
aware of? I mean, you know, I was thinking, um, last Christmas, Debbie and I
were given an electric blanket. I can tell you that it is just such a marvelous
advance over our old way of life, and it is just great. But, uh, it is quite
different from not having an electric blanket and I sometimes sort of wonder,
well, what is it doing to me? I mean, I sort of feel, uh, I'm not sleeping quite
in the same way.

Andre: No, you wouldn't be.

Wally: I mean, uh, and my dreams are sort of different and...and I feel a little
bit different when I get up in the morning.

Andre: I wouldn't put an electric blanket on for anything. First, I'd be worried I
might get electrocuted. No, I don't trust technology. But I mean, the main
thing, Wally, is that, I think that that kind of comfort just separates you from
reality in a very direct way.

Wally: You mean...

Andre: I mean, if you don't have that electric blanket, and your apartment is
cold, and you need to put on another blanket, or go into the closet and pile
up coats on top of the blankets you have, well, then you know it's cold. And
that sets up a link of things. You have compassion for the per...well, is the
person next to you cold? Are there other people in the world who are cold?
What a cold night. I like the cold, my God, I never realized. I don't want a
blanket, it's fun being cold, I can snuggle up against you even more because
it's cold. All sorts of things occur to you. Turn on that electric blanket, and it's
like taking a tranquilizer or it's like being lobotomized by watching television.
I think you enter the dream world again.

Andre: I mean, what does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where

something as massive as the seasons, or winter, or cold don't in any way
affect us? I mean, we're animals, after all. I mean, what does that mean? I
think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the
sky and the stars, we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

Wally: Yeah, but I mean...I would never give up my electric blanket, Andre, I
mean, because, uh, New York is cold in the winter, I mean, our apartment is
cold. It's a difficult environment, I mean, our lives are tough enough as it is,
I'm not looking for ways to get rid of the few things that provide relief and
comfort, I mean, on the contrary, I'm looking for more comfort because, uh,
the world is very abrasive, I mean, uh...I'm trying to protect myself because,
really, there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look.

Andre: Yeah, but, Wally, don't...don't you see that comfort can be dangerous?
I mean, you like to be comfortable, and I like to be comfortable, too, but
comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquillity. I mean, my mother knew a
woman, Lady Hatfield, who was one of the richest women in the world, and
she died of starvation because all she would eat was chicken. I mean, she
just liked chicken, Wally, and that was all she would eat, and actually, her
body was starving, but she didn't know it cause she was quite happy eating
her chicken, and so, she finally died.

Andre: See, I honestly believe that we're all like Lady Hatfield now, we're
having a lovely, comfortable time with our electric blankets and our chicken,
and meanwhile we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with
reality that we're not getting any real sustenance...cause we don't see the
world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other
people.

Andre: Have you read Martin Buber's book on Hasidism?

Wally: No.

Andre: Oh, well, here's a view of life. He talks about the belief of the Hasidic
Jews, that there are spirits chained in everything, there are spirits chained in
you, there are spirits chained in me. Well, there are spirits chained in this
table. And that prayer is the action of liberating these enchained embryo-like
spirits, and that every action of ours in life, whether it's, uh, doing business,
or making love, or having dinner together, or whatever, that every action of
ours should be a prayer, a sacrament in the world. Now, do you think we're
living like that? Why do you think we're not living like that?

Andre: I think it's because if we allowed ourselves to see what we do every

day, we might just find it too nauseating. I mean, the way we treat other
people. I mean, you know, every day, several times a day, I walk into my
apartment building, the doorman calls me "Mr. Gregory", and I call him
"Jimmy". Alright, what's the difference between that and the Southern
plantation owner who's got slaves? You see, I think that an act of murder is
committed in that moment when I walk into that building. You know, because
here's a dignified, intelligent man, a man of my own age, and when I call him
"Jimmy", then he becomes a child, and I'm an adult because I can buy my
way into the building.

Wally: Right. That's right. I mean, my God...when...huh, when I was a Latin

teacher, I mean, people used to treat me...I mean, uh, you know, if I would
go to a party of, uh, professional or literary people, I mean, I was just
treated, uh...in the nicest sense of the word, uh, like a dog. I mean, in other
words, there was no question of my being able to participate on an equal
basis in a conversation with people. I mean, you know, I'd occasionally have
conversations with people but then, uh, when they asked what I did which
would always happen after about five minutes, uh, you know, uh, their faces,
I mean, even if they were enjoying the conversation, or they...they were
flirting with me, or whatever it was, you know, their faces would just have
that expression just like the portcullis crashing down, you know, those
medieval gates. They would just walk away. I mean, I literally lived like a dog.
And, I mean, uh, when Debbie was working as a secretary, you know, if she
would tell people what she did, they would just go insane, I mean, it would
be just as if she'd said, uh, "Oh, well, uh...I've been serving a life sentence
recently, uh, for child murdering."

Wally: I mean, my God, you know, when you talk about our attitudes toward
other people...I mean, I think of myself as just a very decent, good person,
you know, just because I think I'm reasonably friendly, to most of the people
I happen to meet every day. I mean, I really think of myself quite smugly, I
just think I'm a perfectly nice guy, uh, you know, so long as I think of the
world as consisting of, uh, you know, just the small circle of the people that I
know as friends or...or the few people that we know in this little world of our
little hobbies, the theater or whatever it is, and...and I'm really quite self-
satisfied, I'm just quite happy with myself, I just have no complaint about
myself.

Wally: Huh, I mean, you know, let's face it, I mean, there's a whole enormous
world out there that I just don't ever think about. I...I certainly don't take
responsibility for how I've lived in that world. I mean, you know, if I were
actually to sort of, uh, confront the fact that I'm sort of sharing this stage
with...with...with this starving person in Africa somewhere, well, I wouldn't
feel so great about myself. So, naturally, I just...I just blot all those people
right out of my perception. So, of course...of course...I'm ignoring, uh, a
whole section of the real world. But, frankly, you know, when I write a play, in
a way, one of the things I guess I think I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring
myself up against some little bits of reality and I'm trying to share that, uh,
with an audience.

Wally: I mean...I mean, of course we all know, uh, the theater is, uh, in
terrible shape today, I mean, uh, I mean, at least a few years ago people who
really cared about the theater used to say, "The theater is dead." And now
everybody's redefined the theater in such a trivial way that, I mean...I mean,
God, I know people who are involved with the theater who go to see things
now that...I mean, a few years ago these same people would have just been
embarrassed to have even seen some of these plays, I mean, they would
have just shrunk, you know, just in horror at...at the superficiality of these
things. But now they say, "Oh, that was pretty good." It's just incredible. And
I really just find that attitude unbearable because I really do think the theater
can do something very important, I mean, I do think the theater can help
bring people in contact with reality. Now...now, you may not feel that at all, I
mean, you may just find that totally absurd.
Andre: Yeah, but, Wally, don't you see the dilemma? You're not taking into
account the period we're living in. I mean, of course that's what the theater
should do. I mean, I've always felt that. You know, when I was a young
director, and I directed the Bacchae at Yale, my impulse, when Pentheus has
been killed by his mother and the Furies, and they pull the tree back, and
they tie him to the tree, and fling him into the air, and he flies through space
and he's killed, and they rip him to shreds and, I guess, cut off his head, my
impulse was that the thing to do was to get a head from the New Haven
morgue and pass it around the audience. Now, I wanted Agave to bring on a
real head and that this head should be passed around the audience so that
somehow people realized that this stuff was real, see, that it was real stuff.
Now, the actress playing Agave absolutely refused to do it.

Andre: You know, Gordon Craig used to talk about why is there gold or silver
in the churches, or something, the great cathedrals, when actors could be
wearing gold and silver? And I mean, people who saw Eleonora Duse in the
last couple of years of her life, Wally, people said that is was like seeing light
on stage, or mist, or the essence of something, I mean...then when you think
about Bertolt Brecht, he somehow created a theater in which people could
observe, that was vastly entertaining and exciting, but in which the
excitement didn't overwhelm you. He somehow allowed you the distance
between the play and yourself that, in fact, two human beings need in order
to live together.

Andre: You know, the question is whether the theater now can do for an
audience what Brecht tried to do, or what Craig or Duse tried to do. Can it do
it now? Cause, you see, I think that people today are so deeply asleep that
unless, you know, you're putting on those sort of superficial plays that just
help your audience to sleep more comfortably, it's very hard to know what to
do in the theater. Because, you see, I think that if you put on serious,
contemporary plays, by writers like yourself, you may only be helping to
deaden the audience in a different way.

Wally: What do you mean?

Andre: Well, I mean, Wally...how does it affect an audience to put on one of

these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they
can't reach each other, and their lives are desperate? Or how does it affect
them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking
sexual events, and terror, and violence? Does that help to wake up a
sleeping audience? See, I don't think so, cause I think it's very likely that the
picture of the world that you're showing them in a play like that is exactly the
picture of the world they have already.

Andre: I mean, you know, they know their own lives and relationships are
difficult and painful. And if they watch the evening news on television, well,
there what they see is a terrifying, chaotic universe, full of rapes, and
murders, and hands cut off by subway cars, and children pushing their
parents out of windows. So the play tells them that their impression of the
world is correct and that there's absolutely no way out. There's nothing they
can do. And they end up feeling passive and impotent.

Andre: I mean, look...look at something like that christening that my group

arranged for me in the forest in Poland. Well, there was an example of
something that really had all the elements of theater, it was worked on
carefully, it was thought about carefully. It was done with exquisite taste and
magic. And they, in fact, created something, which, in this case, was, in a
way, just for an audience of one, just for me. But they created something
that had ritual, love, surprise, denouement, beginning, a middle, and end,
and was an incredibly beautiful piece of theater. And the impact that it had
on its audience, on me, was somehow a totally positive one. It didn't deaden
me, it brought me to life.

Wally: Yeah, but I mean, are you saying that it's impossible, I mean, uh, I
mean...I mean, uh, isn't it a little upsetting to come to the conclusion that
there's, uh, no way to wake people up anymore except to involve them in
some kind of a strange, uh, christening in...in Poland, or some kind of a
strange experience on top of Mount Everest, I mean, uh, because, uh, you
know that the awful thing is, uh, if you really say that it's...it's necessary to,
uh, take everybody to, uh, Everest, it's...it's really tough, because everybody
can't be taken to Everest. I mean, there must have been periods in history
when it would have been possible to, uh...save the patient through less
drastic measures, I mean, there must have been periods when in order to
give people a strong or meaningful experience you wouldn't actually have to
take them to Everest.

Andre: But you do now. In some way or other, you do now.

Wally: I mean, you know, there was a time when you could have just, for
instance, written, I don't know, uh, "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen,
and I'm sure the people who read it had a pretty strong experience. I'm sure
they did, I mean, all right, now you're saying that people today wouldn't get
it. Maybe that's true, but, I mean, isn't there any kind of writing or any kind
of a play, that, I mean, isn't it still legitimate for writers to try to portray
reality so that people can see it?

Wally: I mean, really, tell me, why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in
order to be able to perceive one moment of reality, I mean...I mean, is Mount
Everest more real than New York, I mean, isn't New York real? I mean, you
see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store
next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out, I
mean...I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in a cigar
store as there is on Mount Everest, I mean, what do you think, you see, I
think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think
there's nothing that different, in a certain way, I mean, because reality is...is
uniform, in a way, so that if your...if your perceptions are, I mean, if your own
mechanism is...is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to
Mount Everest, and sort of absurd because, I mean, it just, I mean, of course,
on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on 7th
Avenue, but I mean...

Andre: Well, I agree with you, Wally. But the problem is that people can't see
the cigar store now. I mean, things don't affect people the way they used to. I
mean, it may very well be that ten years from now, people will pay ten
thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by
something.

Wally: Well, why...why do you think that is? I mean, why is that, I mean, is it
just because people are...are lazy today, or they're bored? I mean, are we
just like bored, spoiled children who've just been lying in the bathtub all day
just playing with their plastic duck, and now they're just thinking, "Well, what
can I do?"

Andre: Okay. Yes. We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it every occurred
to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the
world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of
brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money?
And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks. And it's not just
a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is
asleep? And somebody who's asleep will not say "no"?

Andre: See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I
met this man whom I greatly admire, he's a Swedish physicist, Gustav
Björnstrand, and he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't
read newspapers, and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them
out of his life because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of
Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes
to turning you into a robot.

Andre: And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree
expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from
Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods, he's 84 years old, and he always
travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he's gonna be
tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, "Where are you
from?" and I said, "New York." He said, "Ah, New York. Yes, that's a very
interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about
the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes." And he
said, "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal
theories. He said, "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all."

Andre: He said, "I think that New York is the new model for the new
concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates
themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this
thing they've built. They've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state
of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result,
they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the
prison they've made or to even see it as a prison." And then he went into his
pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, "This is a pine tree."
He put it in my hand and he said, "Escape before it's too late."

Andre: See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this
very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should
feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the
problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is
going in the same direction. See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s
represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished
and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from
now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing,
thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that
there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts,
and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody
will really remember that life existed on the planet.

Andre: Now, of course, Björnstrand feels that there's really almost no hope,
and that we're probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying
period. Findhorn people see it a little differently. They're feeling that there'll
be these pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world, and that
these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet, and that as we, or the
world, grow colder, we can take invisible space journeys to these different
planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come
back. And it's their feeling that there have to be centers now where people
can come and reconstruct a new future for the world.

Andre: And when I was talking to, uh, Gustav Björnstrand, he was saying
that, actually, these centers are growing up everywhere now. And that what
they're trying to do, which is what Findhorn was trying to do, and, in a way,
what I was trying to do. I mean, these things can't be given names, but in a
way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school or a new kind of
monastery. And Björnstrand talks about the concept of "reserves", islands of
safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue
to function in order to maintain the species through a dark age. In other
words, we're talking about an underground, which did exist in a different way
during the Dark Ages among the mystical orders of the church. And the
purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the
culture, how to keep things living.

Andre: You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language, a...a
language of the heart. A language, as in the Polish forest, where language
wasn't needed. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of
poetry, that's the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is.
And I think that, in order to create that language, you're going to have to
learn how you can go through a looking glass, into another kind of
perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things, and
suddenly you understand everything.

Waiter: Are you ready for some dessert?

Andre: Uh, I think I'll just have an espresso. Thank you.

Waiter: Very good.

Wally: I'll...I'll also have one. Thank you. And...and, uh, could I also have, uh,
an amaretto?

Waiter: Certainly, sir.

Wally: Thank you.

Andre: You see, Wally, there's this incredible building that they built at
Findhorn, and the man who designed it had never designed anything in his
life. He wrote children's books. And some people wanted it to be a sort of hall
of meditation and others wanted it to be a kind of lecture hall. But the
psychic part of the community wanted it to serve another function as well,
because they wanted it to be a kind of spaceship which at night could rise up
and let the UFOs know that this was a safe place to land and that they would
find friends there.

Andre: So, the problem was, cause it needed a massive kind of roof, was how
to have a roof that would stay on the building, but at the same time, be able
to fly up at night and meet the flying saucers. So, the architect meditated
and meditated, and he finally came up with the very simple solution of not
actually joining the roof to the building, which means that it should fall off,
because they have great gales up in northern Scotland.

Andre: So, to keep it from falling off, he got beach stones from the beach, or
we did, cause I...I worked on this building, all up and down the roof, just like
that, and the idea was that the energy that would flow from stone to stone
would be so strong, you see, that it would keep the roof down under any
conditions, but, at the same time, if the roof needed to go up, it would be
light enough to go up. Well, it works, you see. Now, architects don't know
why it works, and it shouldn't work, cause it should fall off. But it works. It
does work. The gales blow, and the roof should fall off, but it doesn't fall off.

Wally: Yep. Well, uh...do...do you want to know my actual response to all this,
I mean, do you want to hear my actual response?

Andre: Yes.

Wally: See, my actual response, I mean...I mean...I mean, I'm just trying
to...to survive, you know, I mean, I'm just trying to, uh, earn a living. I'm just
trying to pay my rent and my bills, I mean, uh...uh, I live my life. I enjoy
staying home with Debbie. I'm reading Charlton Heston's autobiography. And
that's that.

Wally: I mean, you know, I mean, occasionally, maybe, Debbie and I will step
outside, we'll go to a party or something. uh...and if I can occasionally get
my little talent together and write a little play, well, then that's just...that's
just wonderful. And, I mean, I enjoy reading about other little plays people
have written, and reading the reviews of those plays and what people said
about them, and what people said about what people said, and...and I mean,
I have...I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook.
I enjoy going through the notebook, carrying out the responsibilities, doing
the errands, and crossing them off the list.

Wally: And, I mean, I just...I just don't know how anybody could enjoy
anything more than I enjoy, uh, reading Charlton Heston's autobiography or,
uh, you know, uh, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold
coffee that's been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the
morning, and no cockroach or fly has...has died in it overnight, I mean, I'm
just so thrilled when I get up and I see that coffee there, just the way I
wanted it, I mean, I just can't imagine how anybody could enjoy something
else any more than that, I mean...I mean, obviously, if the cockroach...if
there is a dead cockroach in it, well, then I just have a feeling of
disappointment, and I'm sad. But I mean, I...I just...I just don't think I feel the
need for anything more than all this. Whereas...you know, you seem to be
saying that, uh...it's...it's inconceivable that anybody could be having a
meaningful life today, and, you know, everyone is totally destroyed,
and...and we all need to live in these outposts, but I mean, you know, I just
can't believe, even for you, I mean, don't you find...isn't it pleasant just to
get up in the morning, and there's Chiquita, there are the children, uh, and
The Times is delivered, you can read it, I mean, maybe you'll direct a play,
maybe you won't direct a play, but forget about the play that you may or
may not direct. Why is it necessary to...why not lean back and just enjoy
these details, I mean, and there'd be a delicious cup of coffee and a piece of
coffeecake. I mean, why is it necessary to have more than this or to even
think about having more than this, I mean, I don't really know what you're
talking about. I mean...I mean, I know what you're talking about, but I don't
really know what you're talking about.

Wally: And I mean, you know, even if I were to totally agree with you, you
know and...and even if I were to accept the idea that there's just no way for
anybody to have personal happiness now, well, you know, I still couldn't
accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to just totally,
you know, reject Western civilization and fall back into some kind of belief in
some kind of weird "something", I mean, I don't even know how to begin
talking about this, but, you know...in the Middle Ages, before the arrival
of...of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe
anything. Anything could be true, the statue of the Virgin Mary could speak
or bleed or whatever it was. But the wonderful thing that happened was that,
then, in the development of science in the Western world, certain things did
come slowly to be known and understood. I mean, you know, uh...obviously,
all ideas in science are constantly being revised, I mean, that's the whole
point, but we do at least know that the universe has some shape and order,
and that, uh, you know, trees do not turn into people or goddesses, and
there are very good reasons why they don't, and you can't just believe
absolutely anything.

Wally: Whereas, the things that you're talking about, I mean...I mean, you
found the handprint in...in the book, and there were...there were three
Andres and one Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and to me, that is a coincidence.
But, and...and then, you know, the people who put that book together...well,
they had their own reasons for putting it together. But to you it was
significant, as if that book had been written forty years ago, so that you
would see it, as if it was planned for you, in a way.

Wally: I mean, really, I mean...I mean, all right, let's say, if I get a fortune
cookie in a Chinese restaurant, I mean, of course, even I have a tendency, I
mean, you know, I mean, of course, I would hardly throw it out, I mean, I...I
read it...I read it, and...and, uh, I just instinctively sort of, you know, if it says
something like, uh, "A conversation with a dark-haired man will be very
important for you", well, I just instinctively think, you know, "Who do I know
who has dark hair? Did we have a conversation? What did we talk about?" In
other words, uh, there's something in me that makes me read it, and...and I
instinctively interpret it as if it were an omen of the future, but...in my
conscious opinion, which is so fundamental to my whole view of life, I mean, I
would just have to change totally to not have this opinion...in my conscious
opinion, this is simply something that was written in the cookie factory
several years ago, and in no way refers to me, I mean, you know,
the...the...the fact that I got it...I mean, the man who wrote it did not know
anything about me, I mean, he could not have known anything about me,
there's no way that this cookie could actually have to do with me, and the
fact that I've gotten it is just basically a joke.

Wally: And, I mean, if I were gonna go on a trip on an airplane, and I got a

fortune cookie that said "Don't go", I mean, of course, I admit I might feel a
bit nervous for about one second. But, in fact, I would go because, I mean,
that trip is gonna be successful, or unsuccessful, based on the state of the
airplane, and the state of the pilot, and...and the cookie is in no position to
know about that. And, I mean, you know, it's the same with any kind of, uh,
prophecy, or a sign, or an omen, because, if you believe in omens, then that
means that...that the universe, I mean, I don't even know how to begin to
describe this, that means that the future is somehow sending messages
backwards to the present. Which...which means that the future must exist in
some sense already, in order to be able to send these messages. And it also
means that things in the universe are...are there for a purpose, to give us
messages, whereas I think that things in the universe are...are just there, I
mean, they don't mean anything, I mean, you know, if the turtle's egg falls
out of the tree and splashes on the paving stones, it's just because that
turtle was clumsy, by accident. And...and...and...and to decide whether to
send my ships off to war on the basis of that seems a big mistake to me.

Andre: Well, what information would you send your ships to war on? Because,
if it's all meaningless, what's the difference whether you accept the fortune
cookie or the statistics of the Ford Foundation? It doesn't seem to matter.

Wally: Well, the meaningless fact of the fortune cookie or the turtle's egg
can't possibly have any relevance to the subject you're analyzing. Whereas a
group of meaningless facts that are collected and interpreted in a scientific
way may quite possibly be relevant. Because the wonderful thing about
scientific theories about things is that they're based on experiments that can
be repeated.

Andre: Hmm. Well, it's true, Wally. I mean, you know, following omens and so
on is probably just a way of letting ourselves off the hook so that we don't
have to take individual responsibility for our own actions. But I mean, giving
yourself over to the unconscious can leave you vulnerable to all sorts of very
frightening manipulation. And in all the work that I was involved in, there was
always that danger. And there was always that question of tampering with
people's lives. Because, if I lead one of these workshops, then I do become
partly a doctor, and partly a therapist, and partly a priest, and...and I'm not a
doctor, or a therapist, or a priest. And already some of these new
monasteries or communities or whatever we've been talking about, are
becoming institutionalized. And I guess, even in a way, at times, sort of
fascistic. You know, there's a sort of self-satisfied, elitist paranoia that grows
up, a feeling of "them" and "us", that is very unsettling.

Andre: But I mean, uh, the thing is, Wally, I think it's the exaggerated
worship of science that has led us into this situation. I mean, science has
been held up to us as a magical force that would somehow solve everything.
Well, quite the contrary, it's done quite the contrary, it's destroyed
everything. So, that is what has really led, I think, to this very strong, deep
reaction against science that we're seeing now. Just as the Nazi demons that
were released in the thirties in Germany were probably a reaction against a
certain oppressive kind of knowledge and culture and rational thinking. So, I
agree that we're talking about something potentially very dangerous, but
modern science has not been particularly less dangerous.

Wally: Right. Well, I agree with you. I completely agree. No, you know, the
truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about the work you've
described and...and I don't even know if I can express it. But somehow it
seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops,
when you get right down to it, and you ask, "What was it really about?" The
whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops,
including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of
purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so
that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In
other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for
certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed
to be doing.

Wally: And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don't think I
accept the idea that there should be moments in which you're not trying to
do anything. I think, uh, it's our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do
things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic
human structure, and...and to say that we ought to be able to live without it
is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or
roots, but...but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn't be a tree, I
mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I'm saying?

Andre: Uh huh. Uh huh.

Wally: I mean, in other words, if I'm sitting at home and I have nothing to do,
well, I naturally reach for a book. I mean, what would be so great about just
sitting there and, uh, doing nothing? It just seems absurd.

Andre: And if Debbie is there?

Wally: Well, that's just the same thing I mean...I mean, is there really such a
thing as, uh, two people doing nothing but just being together, I mean, would
they simply then be, uh, "relating", to use the word we're always using, I
mean, what would that mean, I mean...I mean, either we're gonna have a
conversation or we're going to, uh, carry out the garbage, or we're going to
do something, separately or together, I mean, do you...do you see what I'm
saying, I mean, what does it mean to just, uh, simply, uh, sit there?

Andre: That makes you nervous.

Wally: Well...well, why shouldn't it make me nervous? It just seems ridiculous

to me.

Andre: That's interesting, Wally. You know...you know, when I went to Ladakh
in western Tibet and stayed on a farm for a month, well, there, you know,
when people come over in the evening for tea, nobody says anything, unless
there's something to say, but there almost never is, so they just sit there and
drink their tea, and it doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, you see, the
trouble, Wally, with always being active and doing things is that I think it's
quite possible to do all sorts of things and at the same time be completely
dead inside. I mean, you're doing all these things, but are you doing them
because you really feel an impulse to do them, or are you doing them
mechanically, as we were saying before? Because I really do believe that if
you're just living mechanically, then you have to change your life.

Andre: I mean, you know, when you're young, you...you go out on dates all
the time, you go dancing or something, you're floating free, and then one
day, suddenly, you find yourself in a relationship. And suddenly everything
freezes. And this can be true in your work as well. And I mean, of course, if
you're really alive inside, then, of course, there's no problem. I mean, if
you're living with somebody in one little room and there's a life going on
between you and the person you're living with, well, then, a whole adventure
can be going on right in that room.

Andre: But there's always the danger that things can go dead. Then I really
do think you have to kind of become a hobo or something, you know, like
Kerouac, and go out on the road. I really believe that. You know, it's not that
wonderful to spend your life on the road. My own overwhelming preference is
to stay in that room if you can. But you know, if you live with somebody for a
long time, people are constantly saying, "Well, of course it's not as great as it
used to be, but that's only natural, the first blush of a romance goes, and
that's the way it has to be." Now, I totally disagree with that. But I do think
that you have to constantly ask yourself the question, with total frankness. Is
your marriage still a marriage? Is the sacramental element there? Just as you
have to ask about the sacramental element in your work, is it still there?

Andre: I mean, it's a very frightening thing, Wally, to have to suddenly

realize, that, my God, I thought I was living my life, but in fact I haven't been
a human being. I've been a performer. I haven't been living, I've been acting.
I've...I've acted the role of the father, I've acted the role of the husband, I've
acted the role of the friend, I've acted the role of the writer, or director, or
what have you. I've lived in the same room with this person, but I haven't
really seen them. I haven't really heard them. I haven't really been with
them.

Wally: Yeah, I know some people are just sometimes, uh, existing just side by
side, I mean, uh, the other person's, uh, face could just turn into a great
wolf's face and, uh, it just wouldn't be noticed.

Andre: And it wouldn't be noticed, no, it wouldn't be noticed. I mean, when I

was in Israel a little while ago, I mean, I have this picture of Chiquita that was
taken when she...I always carry it with me, it was taken when she was about
26 or something, and it's in summer, and she's stretched out on a terrace in
this sort of old-fashioned long skirt that's kind of pulled up, and she's slim
and sensual and beautiful, and I've always looked at that picture and just
thought about just how sexy she looks. And then, last year in Israel, I looked
at the picture, and I realized that that face in the picture was the saddest
face in the world. That girl at that time was just lost. So sad and so alone.
You know, I've been carrying this picture for years and not ever really seeing
what it is, you know, I just never really looked at the picture. And then, at a
certain point , I realized I'd just gone for a good eighteen years unable to feel
except in the most extreme situations.

Andre: I mean, to some extent, I still had the ability to live in my work, that
was why I was such a work junkie, that was why I felt that every play that I
did was a matter of my life or my death. But in my real life, I was dead. I was
a robot. I mean, I didn't even allow myself to get angry or annoyed. I mean,
you know, today, Chiquita, Nicolas, Marina, all day long, as people do, they
do things that annoy me and they say things that annoy me, and today, I get
annoyed and they say, "Why are you annoyed?" and I say, "Because you're
annoying." you know.

Andre: And when I allowed myself to consider the possibility of not spending
the rest of my life with Chiquita, I realized that what I wanted most in life was
to always be with her. But at that time, I hadn't learned what it would be like
to let yourself react to another human being. And if you can't react to
another person, then there's no possibility of action or interaction. And if
there isn't, I don't really know what the word "love" means...except duty,
obligation, sentimentality, fear.

Andre: I mean...I don't know about you, Wally, but I...I just had to put myself
into a kind of training program to learn how to be a human being. I mean,
how did I feel about anything? I didn't know. What kind of things did I like?
What kind of people did I really want to be with, you know? And the only way
that I could think of to find out was to just cut out all the noise and stop
performing all the time and just listen to what was inside me. See, I think a
time comes when you need to do that. Now, maybe in order to do it, you
have to go to the Sahara, and maybe you can do it at home. But you need to
cut out the noise.

Wally: Yeah, of course, personally, I...I just, uh, I usually don't, uh...like those
quiet moments, you know, I really don't, I mean, uh...I don't know if it's that,
uh, Freudian thing or what, but, uh, you know, the fear of unconscious
impulses or my own aggression or whatever, but, uh...if things get too quiet,
and I find myself just, uh...sitting there, you know, as we were saying before,
I mean, whether I'm by myself, or...or I'm...I'm...I'm with someone else. I just,
uh, I just have this...this feeling of, uh...my God...I'm going to be revealed.

Wally: In other words, I'm adequate to do any sort of a task, um, but I'm not
adequate, uh, just to...to...to be a human being, I mean, in other words, I'm
not, uh, if I'm...I'm just, uh, trapped there and I'm not allowed to do things
but all I can do is just, um, uh, be there, uh, well, I'll just fail.

Wally: I mean, in other words, uh, I can, uh, pass any other sort of a test, and
I, you know, I can even get an "A" if I put in, uh, the required effort but I just
don't, uh, I just don't have...have a clue how to pass this test, I mean...I
mean, of course, I realize this isn't a test, but, um, I see it as a test, and I...I
feel I'm going to fail it, I mean, it's...it's very scary, I just feel, uh...just totally
at sea, I mean...

Andre: Well, you know, I could imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would
become an incredible, monumental, creative task, and we're not necessarily
up to it. I mean, if you felt like walking out on the person you live with, you'd
walk out. Then if you felt like it, you'd come back, but meanwhile, the other
person would have reacted to your walking out. It would be a life of such
feeling.

Andre: I mean, what was amazing in the workshops I led was how quickly
people seemed to fall into enthusiasm, celebration, joy, wonder, abandon,
wildness, tenderness. Could we stand to live like that?

Wally: Yeah, I think it's that moment of, uh, contact with another person, I
mean, that's what scares us, I mean, that moment of being face-to-face with
another person. I mean, now...you wouldn't think it would be so frightening.
It's strange that we find it so frightening.

Andre: Well, it isn't that strange. I mean, first of all, there are some pretty
good reasons for being frightened. I mean, you know, the human being is a
complex and dangerous creature. I mean, really, if you start living each
moment, Christ, that's quite a challenge, I mean, if you really reach out, and
you're really in touch with the other person, well, that really is something to
strive for, I think, I really do.

Wally: Yeah, it's just so pathetic if one doesn't do that.

Andre: Of course there's a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to
another human being, the more completely mysterious, and unreachable,
that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach out, you have to
go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating
to a ghost or something. I don't know, because we're ghosts. We're
phantoms. Who are we? And that's to face...to confront the fact that you're
completely alone, and to accept that you're alone is to accept death.

Wally: You mean, because somehow when you are alone, you're alone with
death, I mean, nothing's obstructing your view of it, or something like that.

Andre: Right.

Wally: You know, if I understood it correctly, I think, uh, Heidegger said that,
uh, if you were to experience your own being to the full, you'd be
experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of your
experience.

Andre: You know, in the sexual act there's that moment of complete
forgetting which is so incredible. Then, in the next moment, you start to think
about things, work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow. I don't know
if this is true of you, but I think it must be quite common. The world comes in
quite fast. Now, that again may be because we're afraid to stay in that place
of forgetting, because that, again, is close to death. Like people who are
afraid to go to sleep. In other words, you interrelate, and you don't know
what the next moment will bring, and to not know what the next moment will
bring brings you closer to a perception of death.

Andre: You see, that's why I think that people have affairs. I mean, you know,
in the theater, if you get good reviews, uh, you feel for a moment that you've
got your hands on something, you know what I mean, I mean, it's a good
feeling. But then that feeling goes quite quickly. And once again you don't
know quite what you should do next. What'll happen? Well, have an affair,
and up to a certain point you can really feel that you're on firm ground, you
know, there's a sexual conquest to be made, there are different questions.
Does she enjoy the ears being nibbled? How intensely can you talk about
Schopenhauer at some elegant French restaurant? Whatever nonsense it is.
It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that there's firm earth.

Andre: Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years.
That's completely unpredictable. Then, you've cut off all your ties to the land
and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas. I mean, you know,
people hold on to these images of father, mother, husband, wife, again, for
the same reason. Cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there's
no wife there. What does that mean? A wife. A husband. A son. A baby holds
your hands, and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the
ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?

Wally (narration): All the other customers seemed to have left hours ago. We
got the bill, and Andre paid for our dinner.

Wally (narration): I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city
streets. There wasn't a street, there wasn't a building, that wasn't connected
to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father.
There, I was having an ice cream soda after school. When I finally came in,
Debbie was home from work, and I told her everything about my dinner with
Andre.