"The Life of a Book"

by Jessica Luck and Laura Lemon 

From the initial concept to the bound volume, a book’s journey is shaped by many hands.

[This article was published in W&L: The Washington and Lee Magazine v. 101, no. 1 (Spring 2025) and posted on the magazine’s website on 22 July 2025.  (W&L is the alumni magazine of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia—my undergraduate alma mater.  The university is 276 years old—older than the United States itself [249 years]—and it happens that my first semester there began 60 years ago this month.)

[Readers will note that this is not a process description of the publication of one specific book, but a collection of the profiles of six of the professionals who guide a typical book through that process from conception to delivery to bookstores. 

[Since this is the publication for W&L grads, it may not surprise ROTters to find that each of the specialists in the process is an alumna/us of the university (all of them from long after I left Lexington!).  Obviously, every book goes through different versions of the steps limned here, but they all navigate a path like this prototype.

[I’m not intending to spotlight my own college’s accomplishments—though that may be the effect.  I just thought that the system outlined below would be interesting to readers of Rick On Theater.]

Every book begins the same way: from a flash of inspiration. As it moves through the world of imagination, a team of creatives brings the final idea into existence. Once it takes shape, readers are allowed windows into other worlds that offer new perspectives – and leave an indelible mark on their lives.

THE WRITER – REBECCA MAKKAI ’99

Author of five novels [The Borrower (Penguin Books, 2011); The Hundred-Year House (Penguin Books, 2014); The Great Believers (Penguin Books, 2018); I Have Some Questions for You (Viking, 2023)] and numerous short stories [Music for Wartime: Stories (Penguin Books, 2015)]; teacher of graduate fiction at Middlebury College, Northwestern University and the Bennington College Writing Seminars; artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago.

[nb: Makkai’s published only four novels (not five), plus one collection of short stories. There are also additional stories in anthologies of the work of several artists, and Makkai stories published in magazines and other outlets.]

One of the things Rebecca Makkai ’99 enjoys most about being a fiction writer is the freedom of invention. She gets the opportunity to travel to any time and place and to experience them through her characters. And the required research is part of the fun. She recently ordered a slew of Vogue magazines from 1938 on eBay to ensure the outfits she chose for a character in her current novel are historically accurate.

“I get to live in whatever world I choose,” Makkai says. “When you write a short story, it’s a place you’re visiting for a little while. But when you write a novel, you’re going to live in this world for years.”

Five years, in Makkai’s case. The first year is spent marinating on the concept and turning over ideas in her head. That way, she’s mentally worked through things before she commits anything to paper. After she’s about one-third of the way done with the book, she’ll write an outline to make sure she has a roadmap as she finishes writing, which takes about three years total. Surprisingly, she says her favorite part of the process is editing. She spends around a year copyediting what she’s written and focusing on structure.

“As a writer, you get to ask yourself: ‘What do I want to have happen? Do I want it to be funny? Do I want it to be sad? What do I feel today?’” she says. “It’s a lot of pure freedom and invention.”

Makkai says many of her works are preoccupied with the passage — and layering — of time. Her 2018 novel, “The Great Believers,” which was named one of The New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century and was a finalist for both the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and the 2018 National Book Award, jumps back and forth between contemporary Paris and 1980s and ’90s Chicago, portraying love and loss during the AIDS epidemic.

“I think that if I ever wrote a book that could not get you in a fight in your book club, I would have failed in some way,” she says.

One of the great things about writing is its interiority, Makkai says — the ability to understand what another person is thinking.

“We see again and again the failure of empathy in our society, in politics, in policy and in the world,” she says. “Fiction is one of the only things that can really take you at great length into the thought process of someone else.”

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THE EDITOR – PRANAB MAN SINGH ’05 

Co-founder of Quixote’s Cove bookshop and Satori Centre for the Arts [Patan, Nepal]; assistant editor and translator with La.Lit literary magazine; visiting professor at Kathmandu University Department of Art + Design [Patan].

An accounting and philosophy double major from Kathmandu, Nepal, Pranab Man Singh ’05 says his view of the United States had largely been shaped by Hollywood before he came to Washington and Lee University. He started college the same year as 9/11, and conversations in and out of the classroom after the event helped him appreciate the rich and complex history of the U.S.

“It really made me realize how much our present lives are tied to the histories and past lives of other people and generations and how important it is for these stories to be shared,” he says.

After graduating, Singh knew he wanted to return to Kathmandu to start his own business, just as the country was coming out of a decade-long civil insurgency and was in the process of writing a new constitution. He opened an independent bookstore, Quixote’s Cove, and through the store he founded a literary magazine, La.Lit, which started publishing books from the community of writers with whom the store worked.

[Known as the Maoist insurgency, the conflict between the Communist Party of Nepal and the monarchy lasted from 1996 to 2006.  It ended with the abolition of the Nepalese monarchy and the establishment of a democratic republic.] 

“We had a young population and educational levels were increasing, and there was a lot of curiosity among people to learn about the world and our role in it,” Singh says. “The bookshop was an opportunity to engage in those conversations.”

Quixote’s Cove worked with the U.S. State Department during the Barack Obama administration to bring American artists, writers and poets to Nepal to share ideas and facilitate engagement through the arts. This resulted in the establishment of the nonprofit Satori Centre for the Arts, which managed the U.S. Embassy’s Book Bus program until 2023, and ran mobile libraries across Nepal.

Safu, which means “books” in Nepal Bhasa, is the publishing imprint for Quixote’s Cove. As a small independent publisher, it works with writers, poets, illustrators, artists, editors and translators to produce books in multiple languages that capture diverse voices and experiences.

Singh works as both an editor and translator and sees them as relationship-building opportunities. He’s edited everything from reports to fiction novels to memoirs.

“Normally, as an editor, you get to know the writer through the editorial process and can build trust and familiarity with them,” he says.

“It is necessary for you to put on their shoes and see the world as they do and understand what they are trying to say. A good editor can help a writer come to clarity of thought. On the other hand, the act of translating something is to dwell in the mind of the writer — it requires empathy and an attempt to embody the writer. Since Nepal is a multilingual country — we have over 128 different languages — we have always been keen on bringing out the richness of ideas that this offers and placing them in conversation with the world.”

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THE AGENT – CHANDLER WICKERS ’18

Associate agent at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency Inc. [New York City]; works with more than 100 authors in all stages of the publishing journey; freelance copywriter and marketing content writer; former freelance film and TV critic.

By happenstance, Chandler Wickers ’18 assumed the role of literary agent during her final group simulation project for the Columbia Publishing Course [Columbia School of Journalism program to prepare students for entry-level jobs in publishing]. As a newly minted W&L grad hoping to pursue a writing career in New York City, she had enrolled in the six-week intensive course covering all aspects of book, magazine and digital media publishing. Through a random assignment in her group of 10, where each person played a different part in the industry, she found the job that captured the relationship to writing she wanted.

“In editorial, you’re reading and copyediting; you’re really deep in the material all day. I wanted to be a little bit more zoomed out,” she says.

“That’s why an agency appealed to me; it’s really the business side of publishing. You’re not only working editorially with authors and helping them get their proposals ready for submission, but you’re also handling their contracts. You’re working on their film deals and publishing deals. I wanted something that’s a little bit more business-oriented and less just editorial-minded.”

She achieved her hope of working with words in 2021 when she landed a gig at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency Inc., after first getting a job in marketing at an advertising agency and then a financial planning startup. She immediately felt a connection to the Krichevsky agency because it represented one of her heroes, New York Times bestselling author Sebastian Junger and filmmaker, who also directed her favorite documentaries, “Restrepo” [National Geographic Entertainment, 2010] and “Korengal” [Gold Crest Films and Outpost Films, 2014].

Based in San Fransisco, Wickers works with more than 100 authors, such as Ashlee Vance — who wrote “When the Heavens Went on Sale” [Ecco, 2023] and is currently writing a book on OpenAI [no title yet; expected in 2026; UK publisher is Headline Publishing Group, but U.S. publisher has not been announced] — and Leander Schaerlaeckens, a sports reporter who’s writing a book about the history of U.S. men’s soccer [The Long Game; Viking, due on 12 May 2026]. All the authors on her long list dwell in various stages of the literary journey — from manuscripts and proposals, to drafts in editors’ hands, to published works, to screen adaptations, to new ideas haphazardly jotted down on paper. And as the life cycle of the book continues to evolve, Wickers’ role as the agent remains steadfast.

“You’re advocating for the author at every stage,” she explains, “and making sure that their work is valued. . . . I really like that — I like being the first touch point.

“Books and reading offer a powerful way to exercise our imagination and critical thinking, which I believe are precious resources for understanding and connecting with each other. These skills feel more essential than ever in an age where technology risks eroding them. I was fortunate to study under incredible professors at W&L who instilled in me a deep love for storytelling, and I’m truly grateful to work in an industry that preserves and celebrates the written word.”

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THE PUBLICIST – CRAIG BURKE ’93

Vice president and associate publisher at Berkley/Penguin Random House; oversees publicity campaigns for the entire Berkley list, including bestselling author Emily Henry [writer of books containing elements of the rom-com and chick lit genres; all Henry's adult romance books—she also writes young adult novels—have been optioned for screen adaptations], among others.

Craig Burke ’93 had a clear idea of his career path until he fell in love — with book publishing. As a journalism and French double major, he thought his next step would likely be in broadcast journalism once he moved to New York City. But after someone at W&L’s Career and Professional Development Office suggested Burke submit his resume to a job fair in New York that included book publishers, Burke realized what a perfect fit that field was. At W&L, he served as the publicity chair of the Generals Activities Board and helped bring bands like Blues Traveler to campus while also promoting events among the W&L community.

Six weeks before graduation, a recruiter from the job fair told Burke he was perfect for a publicity assistant role at Random House and that there were two openings at different imprints: one at Ballantine and the other at Knopf. He ultimately chose Knopf, which had published one of his favorite books — Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” [Alfred A. Knopf, 1992].

Burke worked his way up the publicity ladder and joined Berkley as an associate publicist after a few years at Knopf. Now serving as vice president and associate publisher at Berkley/Penguin Random House, Burke oversees publicity campaigns for the company’s entire roster, including bestselling authors Emily Henry, William Gibson, Grady Hendrix and Carley Fortune. Berkley’s expertise centers on women’s fiction, romance, science fiction/fantasy and mystery/suspense.

“What’s not to love about a job that lets me read books and then spend most of my time trying to convince other people why they should read the books that I love or discover the authors that I really admire?” Burke says.

“What makes my job so fabulous is the people I interact with, from the authors, to their agents, to the media folks that I’m pitching, to my colleagues. I work with intelligent, witty, sharp, fascinating people who are up for talking about books and pop culture and what’s going on in the world.”

Depending on the book, Burke will get involved as early as the editing stage to start planning the publicity campaign. Sometimes he can tell from the title alone what the promotional hook will be, as with Henry’s “Beach Read” [Berkley, 2020]. Beyond pitches and press releases, Burke has accompanied authors on press tours, including traveling with musician Ricky Martin for his appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

When not reading for work, Burke is often drawn to commercial fiction, whether that means romance, thrillers or fantasy.

“It’s the best escape money can buy,” he says. “I firmly believe that reading any kind of fiction, whether it’s commercial or literary, improves your ability to be empathetic and understand where people are coming from.”

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THE LAWYER – GRAY COLEMAN ’79

Partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP [headquartered in Seattle, Washington]; named one of The Hollywood Reporter’s 25 Most Powerful Entertainment Lawyers in New York; represents estates and heirs of Harper Lee, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lindsay and Crouse, Thomas Meehan and Agatha Christie, among others.

Traditional artistic channels never unveiled hidden talent within Gray Coleman ’79, so, he jokes, he set his sights on law school. After double majoring in history and English at Washington and Lee University, he arrived at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1980, hoping to benefit from the field’s reputation of versatility. To his delight, he did.

“Lawyers are the ultimate chameleons,” says Coleman. “They take their color from the rocks you put them on, and I was looking for this real colorful rock to sit on.”

As a lifelong theater-lover, he moved to the artistic hotbed of New York City, and after working for Wall Street firm White & Case LLP for a couple years, Coleman found his colorful geode in entertainment law. As a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, he represents producers for theatrical productions such as “Tootsie” [2018; Broadway: 2019] “Mean Girls” [2017; Broadway: 2018] and “The Color Purple” [2004; Broadway: 2005]; he serves as outside general counsel for institutional theaters such as the Public Theater (New York), the Goodman Theatre (Chicago) and the National Theatre of Great Britain; and he works with authors and owners of literary and intellectual properties.

“We lawyers are the historical memory,” Coleman says. “We keep the agreements; we keep the history.”

For close to 10 years, he’s represented the estate of Harper Lee, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of “To Kill a Mockingbird” [Lippincott, 1960]. He has served as outside general counsel for the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate for over two decades and has worked on behalf of Agatha Christie’s heirs. He also acts as trustee for the estates of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, one of American theater’s most durable partnerships (the pair wrote the libretto for “Anything Goes” in 1934 and then “The Sound of Music” 25 years later [1959]), and Thomas Meehan, book writer for “Annie” [1976; Broadway: 1977] and co-book writer of “The Producers” [2001] and “Hairspray” [2002; Broadway: 2003]

“The star of the show in my world is the property itself,” Coleman says. “I’m acting for clients, or, if I’m the trustee, my job is to look after the property and try to maximize income and avoid tarnishment for the benefit of the beneficiaries. But, in a way, I think of ‘The Sound of Music’ as my client. I think of ‘Annie’ as my client. When I make decisions, I make them for the welfare of those children.”

From working on the legalities of turning literary works into stage productions to handling the licensing of famed properties to representing theater houses, Coleman has relished a life in the arts.

“If I had had some creative talent, maybe I would have taken a different path,” Coleman says. “But I wanted proximity to the creative arts, and I found a way into it.”

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THE TEACHER – MARSHALL BOSWELL ’88

Professor of English at Rhodes College [Memphis, Tennessee] teaching 20th- and 21st-century American literature and fiction writing; author of literary studies [Understanding David Foster Wallace (University of South Carolina Press, 2009); John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy (University of Missouri Press, 2001)], articles and two works of fiction [Trouble with Girls: Stories (Delta, 2004); Alternative Atlanta (Delacorte Press, 2005)]; 2002 winner of the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching [for full-time Rhodes faculty members who have taught at least three years at the college].

When Marshall Boswell ’88 was considering colleges, his father, James M. Boswell Sr. ’57, tried to nudge him toward W&L. But the university’s all-male student body made it a no-go. Once his dad showed him a Ring-Tum Phi article that reported the W&L Board of Trustees had voted to admit women, Boswell did an about-face.

“I went to W&L and had a life-changing experience,” he says. “They are still the four years of my life I would relive if I had a time machine.”

Boswell found a litany of mentors in the English Department, but it was professor of English Jim Boatwright who made one of the earliest impacts. In Boatwright’s Introduction to Fiction Writing class, they read “A&P,” a short story by John Updike [1961, New Yorker; Pigeon Feathers, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961] about a young man working at a grocery store. Boswell’s father worked his entire career for Kroger [national supermarket and department store chain], and Boswell spent the summers delivering Pepsi to grocery stores and other shops.

[When I was in Lexington in the second half of the 1960s, Kroger was the one and only supermarket in town; I don’t know if that was still true twenty years later. ~Rick]

“The fact that a famous writer from New York would write so eloquently about the grocery store, which was a place of such significance to me, was a revelation,” Boswell says. “It felt like my brain had been hacked in a really wonderful way.”

After getting his bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in creative writing, he went on to get his master’s in English from Washington University [St. Louis, Missouri] and his Ph.D. in 20th-century American literature from Emory University [Atlanta, Georgia]. A professor of English at Rhodes since 1996, he teaches courses in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and fiction writing. He encourages his students to “get under the hood” of a story, to really understand what the writer is trying to do.

“There’s a kind of playful creativity to the way I approach teaching literature and a scholarly expertise that I bring to creative writing,” he says. Although his path ultimately led to teaching, Boswell is an author in his own right; he’s published full-length studies of Updike and David Foster Wallace, as well as short stories and a novel. And he still remembers the moment he realized he was a first-time published author — in a short story collection. He was so proud he didn’t want to put the book down and laid it on the passenger seat of his 1988 green Saab 900 and drove to the grocery store. After shopping, there was his book, waiting for him.

“Writing is the best way that we can take the mess in our brains and give it shape and form,” Boswell says. “It’s not a reflection of what we think, it’s the product of thinking. When you’re writing something down, you’re discovering what it is that was there. Writing brings it into existence.”

[Below is a list of some of the prominent and successful writers who studied at Washington and Lee University.  I’ve only included the prose writers of fiction and non-fiction, not the several poets and numerous journalists who came out of the school, and I’ve also restricted myself to students (W&L was a men’s college until 1985), not listing the faculty who had writing careers.

 •   William Alexander Caruthers (Washington College, 1817-20; did not graduate): A 19th-century novelist known for works like The Kentuckian in New York (Harper and Brothers, 1834). 

•   Harvey Fergusson (1911): An early 20th-century author, he is noted for his autobiography, Home in the West (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945). 

•   Tom Robbins (1950-52): A novelist known for works like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 1976; adapted as a film in 1993), Robbins attended Washington and Lee for two years before moving to New York to pursue writing.

•   Tom Wolfe (’51): An author and journalist, Wolfe was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement.  His famous works include The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) and The Bonfire of the Vanities (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987).

•   Philippe Labro (1954-55): A French writer, journalist, and film director who spent his freshman year at Washington and Lee.  He wrote about his year there in his novel The Foreign Student (Random House, 1988; L’Étudiant étranger [Gallimard, 1986]).  He received the Prix Interallié, an annual French literary award for a novel written by a journalist, for the autobiographical novel.  (The Foreign Student was filmed in 1994.)

•   Jerry Hopkins (’57): A journalist and author, Hopkins worked for Rolling Stone magazine and wrote biographies of figures such as Jim Morrison (No One Here Gets Out Alive [with Danny Sugerman; Warner Books, 1980]) and Elvis Presley (Elvis: A Biography [Simon and Schuster, 1971]).

•   Terry Brooks (’69 Law): A best-selling fantasy author, Brooks is known for his Shannara series (Original Shannara Trilogy: The Sword of Shannara [Random House, 1977], The Elfstones of Shannara [Ballantine Books, 1982], The Wishsong of Shannara [Ballantine Books, 1985]; there are 33 follow-up novels and 8 related books).  He attended the university's law school.

•   Mark Richard (’86): An author who won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award.

•   Rebecca Makkai (’99): The author of novels and short stories (see partial list above), Makkai's work The Great Believers was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. 

[Readers will notice that the first name on the list graduated from Washington College rather than W&LU.  The school was established in 1749 as Augusta Academy and then in 1776, changed its name to Liberty Hall Academy.  In 1796, in gratitude for the $20,000 endowment, at the time one of the largest gifts ever given to an educational institution in the United States, made by George Washington, the trustees changed the school’s name to Washington Academy, and in 1813 it was chartered as Washington College.

[After the Civil War, in the fall of 1865, Robert E. Lee accepted an offer to become president of Washington College.  Lee died in 1870 and the college’s name was again changed, to Washington and Lee University in his honor.]

'Rebel With a Clause'

 

[As readers can see from the headline below, this post is about—wait for it—grammar.  (Actually, it’s about a grammarian and a documentary film about her.) 

[ROTters will know that I have been a writing teacher and that in this blog, I have posted many articles about writing and writing mavens.  I haven’t posted much about grammar per se, but that’s part and parcel of writing—knowing and properly using grammar.

[I first taught writing in the mid-1980s.  I was a doctoral student hired to teach a required undergraduate writing course.  When I grew up, in the Eisenhower ’50s, we still learned grammar, syntax, the parts of speech, and spelling and how to parse a sentence and diagram it.

[I was chagrined to find that none of my students knew English grammar.  Clearly, learning grammar had been deemed old-fashioned in the decades between my high school graduation in 1965 and the years my undergrads finished their secondary education. 

[I wasn’t so much disturbed because my writing students didn’t know the grammatical conventions I’d had to learn.  I discovered, though, that I couldn’t discuss with the tyro writers what the problems they were having communicating in writing were without using the grammatical terms that were the jargon of writers and writing.  I had to start teaching grammar (sort of surreptitiously) so my students and I would have a common language when we talked about their writing.] 

“GRAMMARIANS GATHER TO CELEBRATE AN AMBASSADOR”
by Katherine Rosman 

[This report ran in the New York Times on 9 March 2025, in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted on the Times website as “Grammar Fans Flock to a Film About Participles and Gerunds” on 6 March and updated on 8 March.]

At the New York premiere of “Rebel With a Clause,” there was a shared love of language.

Jennifer Griffin stood outside a movie theater on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, waving to a friend.

“I’m here with all the other dorks!” she called out, using a prepositional phrase to get the attention of Lisa Kuklinski. Soon, they were joined by Miranda Schwartz, a copy editor [a person who revises or corrects a manuscript, text, etc., for publication, especially to find and correct errors in style, punctuation, and grammar] who was wearing a shirt that read “I’m Silently Correcting Your Grammar.” Notably, the message lacked a punctuation mark at the end.

The women are members of a group chat in which they text each other about the words they find in the New York Times Spelling Bee game. This was their girls’ night out. “When you find someone as nerdy as you are about the Oxford comma,” said Ms. Kuklinski, an actuary, “you find you have plenty of other things in common.”

They were attending the first New York screening of “Rebel With a Clause,” a new documentary about a woman who set up a “grammar table” in all 50 states for passers-by to stop and ask her about punctuation and past participles.

The film’s star, Ellen Jovin, schleps her table from Maine to Hawaii and each state in between, dispensing lessons that are precise but not pedantic, engaging in the sort of face-to-face conversations with strangers that are so absent from quotidian contemporary life.

At the screening this week, more than 450 grammar aficionados (the median age hovered in the early-AARP-membership range) came to celebrate “Rebel With a Clause,” which was directed by Ms. Jovin’s husband, Brandt Johnson.

[AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is a U.S. interest group that focuses on issues affecting Americans 50 years old and older.

[Rebel With a Clause was produced by Syntaxis Productions (a communication skills training firm, cofounded in 2007 by Johnson and Jovin) and released in the United States on 8 February 2025. It runs 1:26 (86 minutes).]

Before and after the screening, filmgoers bantered about whether to place a comma after the penultimate item in a list [i.e., the Oxford comma], discussed the appropriate usage of “lie” and “lay” and united in a shared reverence for language, ideas and the grammatical rules designed to give clarity to free expression.

[The decision whether to use the Oxford comma (also called the ‘serial comma’ or the ‘Harvard comma’) and the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay’ aren't matters of grammar, strictly speaking.

[Using or omitting the Oxford comma and resolving the ambiguities both choices can engender is a question of rhetorical style, which is concerned with the clarity, logic, and precision of effective communication.

[The ‘lie’/’lay’ confusion is a matter of diction, the selection of precise, appropriate, and effective words to convey a message, influence tone, and suit a specific audience.

[Style, diction, grammar, and other elements of good writing (and speaking) are coequal, but separate.  Though Jovin and the others in this article, as well as the one posted below, have been labeled ‘grammarians,’ but they clearly arbitrate questions in all areas of good writing and speaking.]

Ms. Jovin greeted the audience members and directed them to stacks of worksheets with the “Nonmandatory Grammar Quiz” she had created. (Sample question: “What is the square root of the number of letters in the part of speech that ‘punctiliousness’ is?”)

[‘Punctiliousness’ is a noun, which has four letters. The square root of 4 is 2.  (That is, 4 is the product of 2 multiplied by itself, i.e., 2 x 2 = 4.)

[Curiously, if you answered that ‘punctiliousness’ is a substantive (11 letters) or a nominal (7 letters), you’d be correct.  The math, however, would be complicated, since neither 11 nor 7 has a whole-number square root. In fact, neither is even a rational number, since the decimal fraction that results never ends!]

She was wearing a shirt with rhinestones that spelled out “Grammar Is Groovy,” which she had ordered online at the last minute. “All of my other grammar clothes are not dressy enough,” she said.

A writer and writing instructor who has studied about 25 languages, Ms. Jovin first set out her grammar table on the streets of New York in 2018. Since then, she has written a book, also called “Rebel With a Clause,” which was published in 2022 [Mariner Books].

Mr. Johnson, a 6-foot-6 former pro basketball player and communication skills consultant, loomed amid the crowd. He said that as he witnessed the “humor and humanity” at the grammar table, he was moved to capture it on film. “I saw the fun and the connections,” he said. “It felt like just a beautiful thing that I wanted to share with the world.”

The theater filled up with strangers and friends. Lloyd Rotker and his wife, Judith, had once seen Ms. Jovin speak at a library. “I’m very concerned about grammar,” Mr. Rotker said. “As we lose interest and skills in grammar, we lose clarity in language and eventually in thought.”

Ms. Rotker said she was not as grammatically attuned as her husband, but that he did not often correct her. “That’s why we’re still married,” he said. She nodded. (Their 51st anniversary is later this month.)

Sitting near the front of the theater were Janice and Korey Klostermeier, former neighbors of Ms. Jovin and Mr. Johnson. They had flown in from Miami Beach.

“I love good ol’ grammar,” said Ms. Klostermeier, who quickly added, “That’s O-L-apostrophe.”

The joy among the grammar lovers was occasionally tempered by worry over word choice.

“Can I sneak by?” Taylor Mali, a poet, asked the people sitting on an aisle as he slid past them toward a seat in the center of their row.

“You may,” one of them answered.

[‘Can’/’may’ is a matter of diction again.]

Mr. Mali sighed as he recounted the exchange. “Of all the places,” he said, his head hung low.

The movie opens with an animated discussion in Decatur, Ala., between Ms. Jovin and two men who may or may not have spent a few hours in a bar before sidling up to her grammar table. They wanted her to weigh in on the proper placement of the apostrophe in “y’all.”

The film then takes viewers on Ms. Jovin’s road trip to Detroit; Salt Lake City; Little Rock, Ark.; and beyond. She and Mr. Johnson set up a table covered with dictionaries and usage manuals, and wait for questions.

The action is breezy and lighthearted. At several moments, the audience burst into laughter. When Ms. Jovin professed her love for diagraming sentences, the crowd erupted in applause.

The film also offers instances of surprise, even for some who consider themselves grammatically sharp. On several occasions, Ms. Jovin clarifies a misconception about ending a sentence with a preposition.

To do so is actually perfectly correct, Ms. Jovin explains. “It is a grammatical myth that made its way into English via Latin, but English is a Germanic language,” she tells one table visitor who responds with a delighted “Shut up!”

[I started studying Latin in 8th grade and then learned German some years later. I decided that English grammar had so many exceptions because the Latin grammar system that was being applied to English was being forced on a Germanic language just didn’t quite fit. There were bits left over—so . . . exceptions.]

Audience members filtered into the lobby afterward, checking for news on their phones. While they were watching a film centered on language and civil discussion, President Trump was delivering a sometimes inflaming speech to Congress, during which he faced politicians protesting silently with signs, others groaning and booing, and a heckler, Representative Al Green [D-Texas], who was tossed out.

[Representative Green was removed from the House of Representatives chamber for heckling Trump during his address to a joint session of Congress on 4 March 2025 (the day of the screening). He was later formally censured by the House on 6 March.]

The timeliness of the film’s message was not lost on Kathryn Szoka, who co-owns Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

“She is talking to people, including many who probably have very different views from her own,” Ms. Szoka said of Ms. Jovin. “These are respectful and engaging conversations around our shared values and serve as an illustration of how art and language bring us together.”

[Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players, and individuals making an imprint on New York City for the New York Times.  She joined the Times in 2014 and spent years writing for the Styles section, as well as for the Business pages and Culture desk.  She has also helped cover behind-the-scenes dynamics at the N.F.L.

[In the past year, Rosman has helped report on the tensions playing out in New York City, as they connect to the Israel-Hamas war.  She’s written about James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks and one of the most vilified people in New York, and has chronicled free-speech issues at universities.  Rosman has recounted a fight between billionaire Ray Dalio, a hedge fund founder, and millionaire Federico Pignatelli, an Italian prince and owner of Pier59 Studios, over a SoHo pergola and has detailed the end of Geraldo Rivera’s career at Fox News as she tagged along on a boat trip he and his brother took on the Erie Canal.

[Before moving to the Times, Rosman was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal for a decade.  She’s the author of a memoir about her mother, If You Knew Suzy (Harper, 2010).]

*  *  *  *
“FILMMAKER BRANDT JOHNSON AND
GRAMMAR GURU ELLEN JOVIN
CHAT ABOUT REBEL WITH A CLAUSE, A NEW DOCU-COMEDY
ABOUT ELLEN’S POP-UP GRAMMAR ADVICE STAND
ON A ROAD TRIP ACROSS AMERICA”
by Russell Harper

[The transcript of the conversation below was posted on CMOS Shop Talk (a website of The Chicago Manual of Style, one of the U.S.’s most widely used-style guides) on 25 February 2025.]

Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin are cofounders of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm based in New York City. Ellen, an internationally acclaimed grammar and language expert, is the itinerant grammarian behind the Grammar Table, an informal pop-up advice stand that she launched in 2018 in Manhattan and has since taken to every state in the US. Brandt is the director of the new documentary film Rebel with a Clause. Before this project, he wrote and produced several plays and was the writer, director, and star of Brad Advice, a comedy web series.

Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA [School of Visual Arts] Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022. The film is the subject of this exclusive interview with Shop Talk editor Russell Harper.

[The world premiere of the documentary Rebel With a Clause was on 10 January 2025 in Washington, D.C. at the Planet Word Museum, a language arts museum. Following that, the film had a New York City premiere on 4 March 2025, for National Grammar Day.]

Russell: Thank you, Ellen and Brandt, for making a pit stop to talk about this new documentary. Ellen, when CMOS interviewed you in 2022 about your book—which is also called Rebel with a Clause—the film was in postproduction. Or is it a movie?

Ellen: We are glad to be here, Russell—thank you. Either “film” or “movie” is fine. But the film is all Brandt’s doing; I stuck to conjugating things.

Brandt: It’s great to talk to you again, Russell! You can also call it a docu-comedy. It is, above all, meant to entertain.

Russell: Great to talk to both of you again—and to get an opportunity to learn more about your docu-comedy film/movie, which takes us on the road with the Grammar Table. You’ve now been to all fifty states with your grammar advice stand. Do you ever get tired, Ellen, of talking to strangers about grammar?

Ellen: Never. I’d already been talking about grammar for decades when the Grammar Table came into being. I will talk about grammar anytime, anywhere. I guess one thing I might get slightly tired of is people monologuing to me about how no one cares about grammar while I am literally sitting at a grammar advice stand that thousands of people have come up to of their own free will.

Russell: What about you, Brandt? Are you a grammar person also, or is that all Ellen?

Brandt: Ellen put me in the index [to her Grammar Table book] under apostrophes. That’s all I’m going to say.

Ellen: Yeah! The entry is “apostrophes, husband who knows how to use.” Brandt is totally grammarous. He even won the English award in his high school. He is also the one who more than thirty years ago taught me that not everyone pronounces “stalk” and “stock” the same way, which was total news to me. I didn’t believe him and had to go look it up.

Russell: I’ll remember that the next time I need celery stalks for my soup stock. So, which came first, the movie or the book? And did you have an idea of either one the first time you walked out the door and set up the Grammar Table?

Ellen: Absolutely not. I was in search of hedonistic grammar fun. I wanted to spend less time on the computer talking about grammar and more time in the open air talking about grammar. Even though I’d been trying to think of a good angle for a grammar book, for some reason the table didn’t occur to me as a book topic. It wasn’t until table visitors started saying “You should write a book about this!” that it bonked me in the head.

Brandt: When Ellen started out with the Grammar Table, I definitely wasn’t thinking of a movie. But after many hours observing what was happening at the table, just outside our building in New York, I really wanted to share it with a larger audience. I began filming less than three months after the start of the Grammar Table.

Ellen: And then I actually put Brandt’s plan to make a movie in my book proposal.

Russell: How did you pick the locations for the Grammar Table?

Ellen: In New York there are good locations everywhere. Above all, the Grammar Table needs foot traffic. The express subway stop at 72nd and Broadway was perfect, so that’s where I usually went at the beginning.

Brandt: Outside New York, we had to work harder to find pedestrians.

Ellen: The first task was to pick cities. Sometimes weather determined the city. For example, in Ohio we were planning to go to Cleveland, but it was raining, so we went to Toledo instead.

Brandt: In cities we didn’t know, we’d sometimes expect a spot was going to be just right for filming and then arrive and discover it wasn’t great after all. And we were also expelled from a few places. So then I’d maybe have to go off and look for another spot while Ellen stayed with the equipment, table, grammar books, and so on.

Ellen: Preferably in a nice café with excellent cappuccino.

Russell: Once you were set up and ready to film, did the presence of cameras—not to mention of Brandt himself (you played basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters, and you’re about six and a half feet tall, right?)—make it harder to get people to engage and be themselves?

Brandt: I think I look very friendly.

Ellen: Usually that’s true.

Brandt: And I don’t think people minded the camera, or me, very much. The volume of visitors didn’t change after I started filming. It stayed just as high. I had been worried about that—that having cameras would scare people off or alter the conversations—but mostly people seemed just as happy to talk about grammar with cameras as without.

Ellen: Yeah, and you might even have given me an air of professional legitimacy. I looked official with cameras around.

Russell: You’re certainly both Grammar Table pros by now. By the way, thank you for sharing a preview of your movie with me. The book may have the advantage when it comes to all the typographic details, but nothing beats watching it play out in real life. All those spontaneous conversations in the public square about apostrophes and spaces and past participles (not to mention Dutch and French and Tagalog [a language spoken in the Philippines; pronounced tuh-GAH-log]) are often funny and even moving. And the scenery—mountains, haystacks, beaches—also plays a big role. Did you intend from the beginning to make a portrait of America and not just a movie about grammar?

Brandt: It was important to me to let the story emerge as we experienced this road trip and as I edited the film. My intentions at the beginning of all of this were flexible. The US landscape made itself a central part of the story.

Ellen: Brandt is really observant about physical space. He spent hours getting B-roll of things I never noticed. I like seeing beautiful places too, but I’m not observant and can easily get lost just finding my way back from the bathroom.

[B-roll is supplemental or secondary video footage that’s used to enrich the main video (A-roll). It’s what viewers see when the narrator or character keeps speaking, but the visuals cut away to something else—like scenery, hands at work, product close-ups, or contextual action.]

Russell: I remember Brandt running out to get B-roll way back in Providence [in 2019, when I met Brandt and Ellen at the ACES [American Copy Editors Society] conference for copyeditors [sic], where CMOS also had a table]. Is this it for the Grammar Table, or will you be returning to the road at some point?

Ellen: I still go out with the Grammar Table! I love going out with the Grammar Table. My new dream is to get a grammarmobile, just to make roaming around the country a bit easier. We’re car-free Manhattanites.

Brandt: I plan to keep filming as we go around the country screening Rebel with a Clause. I already have my eye on a new camera.

Russell: How can others see Rebel with a Clause, and do you have any plans for a follow-up?

Brandt: We are screening the film in person and virtually for organizations around the country, we’re going to be showing it at festivals, and we are constantly adding new dates on our website.

Ellen: People can sign up for our mailing list if they want to be alerted about screenings. Also on our website is a form you can fill out to bring the film to your organization. We are even going to be showing the film at a boat club soon!

Russell: Will the movie be available for streaming?

Brandt: We don’t have any details about that yet, but we’ll announce them on our website as soon as we do.

Russell: In other words, be sure to check out rebelwithaclause.com for details and updates. In the meantime, thank you so much, Brandt and Ellen, for talking about your film.

Brandt: Thank you, Russell. Don’t forget that you are in the film, in footage from that ACES conference.

Russell: My first cameo! And here you are, almost six years later, with a book and a documentary that brings it all to life. I hope you and the Grammar Table will be around for a long time to come.

Ellen: There’s an awful lot of grammar left to discuss.

[Russell Harper is the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of The Chicago Manual of Style.  He also contributed to the 8th and 9th editions of Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

Here’s a list of the posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing in some aspect or another.  As I said above, most only touch briefly on grammar specifically, but it’s always there in the background. 

    •  “Writing,” 9 April 2010
•  “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer, 7 December 2011
•  “Why Write?” 4 March 2013
•  “Words on Words,” 1 February 2014
•  “Four Worthies” by Kirk Woodward, 5 January 2016
•  “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In,” 28 July 2015
•  “More Words on Words,” 8 June 2016
•  “Nominalization” by Henry Hitchings, 25 January 2017
•  “Verbification,” 12 August 2018
•  “How I Write,” 25 February 2022
•  “Peter Elbow and Freewriting,” 12 March 2025
•  “Bad Writing,” Parts 1-5, 19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025
•  “Punctuation” by Sarah Boxer, 29 June 2025
•  “New Word Coinages” by Madison Malone Kircher and Callie Holtermann, 29 July 2025 

[There are also several posts on tangential subjects, including writers, playwriting, reviewing and topics less obviously connected to writing—but ROTters will have to seek those out for themselves.]

More About Healing Theater

 

Both Bryan Doerries and KJ Sanchez use theatre to confront the toughest human challenges, from battlefield trauma to prison

[This post is a follow-up on “Theater: A Healing Art” (3 September 2023).  Theater as a healing art is an idea that was put into my head by Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), an experimental theater director I knew in the 1980s and ’90s, and about whom I’ve blogged often on Rick On Theater.]

“NOT ALONE”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt

[The article below, the transcript of a conversation between KJ Sanchez and Bryan Doerries moderated by Rob Weinert-Kendt, was published in American Theatre’s October 2015 issue (volume 32, number 8) under the heading “Conversations.”  It was posted as “Bryan Doerries and KJ Sanchez, Mediators and Resensitizers” and slugged “Interviews” on the AT website on 23 September 2015. 

[(The text below is taken from the online version of the article which has more of the conversation than the printed text.  The final passages of the digital edition were badly edited; I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning them up for reposting on Rick On Theater.)

[Bryan Doerries and his Theater of War, which is all about healing through theater, are the subject of “Theater of War” (22, 25, and 28 June, and 1 July 2024).]

The creators of ‘Theater of War’ and ‘ReEntry’ compare notes on adapting and creating cathartic experiences for servicemembers and other hard-hit communities.

Neither has served in the military, but both Bryan Doerries [b. ca. 1977; pronounced DOOR-eez] and KJ Sanchez [b. ca. 1967] have felt called to serve in other ways: Doerries with his company Outside the Wire, which since 2008 has toured his stripped-down translations of Greek tragedies to military bases around the world, including at Guantanamo Bay (AT, July/August ’11), and Sanchez with ReEntry, a docutheatre piece she created with Emily Ackerman [playwright and actress based in New York City] based on interviews with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the same AT issue) [premiered at Two River Theater Company, Red Bank, New Jersey, 24 January-15 February 2009]. Both have since branched out to do similar work in other contexts: Doerries with healthcare workers and prison guards, and Sanchez with pieces about equity in the arts and most recently the legacy of brain injuries in professional football (X’s and O’s: A Football Love Story at Berkeley Rep [premiere: 16 January-1 March 2015], coming soon to Baltimore’s Center Stage [13 November-18 December 2015]; AT, March ’15).

[Outside the Wire is “a social-impact company,” say the official statements of its mission, “that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and social issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end-of-life care, prison reform, domestic violence, political violence, recovery from natural and man-made disasters, substance abuse, and addiction.”  It was started in 2009 by Doerries, its co-founder (with Phyllis Kaufman, a lawyer and the company’s producer).

[Outside the Wire is the umbrella organization for several related projects, including the Theater of War, whose origins reach back to 2005, though it, too, was formed in 2009. ToW is “a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, and their families to help them initiate conversations about the visible and invisible wounds of war.” (The dates of formation for both Outside the Wire and Theater of War are given variously in different sources.)]

Doerries’s new book about his work, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, will be published on Sept. 22 by Knopf [2015; for a review by James Shapiro, see Theater of War, Part 1], along with a volume of his translations of Ajax, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Prometheus Bound, titled All That You’ve Seen Here Is God [Vintage, 2015]. A star-studded 10-city fall tour to mark the book launch begins Sept. 27 [2015] at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Some months ago, Sanchez and Doerries, who are friends and colleagues, met for drinks at Soho’s [New York City] Ear Inn to talk shop about military culture, the machinery of tragedy, and why talkbacks are an obscenity.

[For some thoughts on “talkbacks” from a playwright’s and a dramaturg/writing teacher’s perspective, see “Thoughts on Playwriting” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2021).]

KJ Sanchez: What I love about your book is that it covers all your work, not just your work with the military, but how all of these plays can serve as palliative, as healing, as a reflecting pool and a conduit to important, life-changing conversations we don’t seem to be able to have until we have that play that can ignite them. What the book can do is become a lighthouse for a lot of people who want to do this kind of work.

Bryan Doerries: I hope so. I certainly hope so.

Sanchez: I have to make a confession. When I first saw your presentation on an Army base, I got really emotional—and that was before the actors even started. I got emotional with your introduction. You get up there and say that in your marrow you are committed to this conversation that is about to happen. It’s clear how personally dangerous it is, how professionally dangerous it is, and you lay it all out on the line. The way that you introduced Ajax [442 or 441 BCE; by Sophocles (497/496-406/405 BCE)]—the way you set the stage for who Ajax was and what his friend Achilles meant to him, and the loss of dignity and humanity that Ajax suffered when Achilles’s shield is given to Odysseus instead—this was all in your introduction, and I was already just completely engaged.

And I was so happy to see that you put all that personal investment in the book, too. You had talked to me a little bit about losing your girlfriend Laura. Obviously, losing someone you love is a key moment in anyone’s life, but I didn’t realize how that really triggered what you would do for the rest of your life.

[Laura Rothenberg and Doerries met at the University of Virginia in 2002. She had cystic fibrosis from birth and died on 20 March 2003 at age 22 when her body rejected her transplanted lungs. In his grief, Doerries said, he turned to the Greek tragedies he’d read in college because he could relate to the great suffering the characters underwent. That experience, he professed, led him to the Theater of War.]

Doerries: You know, you make one decision in your life: I’m going to care for a person; I’m going to put it all on the line and see where this leads. I’m going to face death, I’m going to face suffering. And it just continues to open world upon world upon world. I owe all my work to that experience, and it keeps unfolding in all these ways that I could never expect. Laura died on March 20, 2003, in the East Village in our apartment, and a year ago, on March 20 [2014], I found myself sitting in an office at [Memorial] Sloan Kettering [Cancer Center; cancer treatment and research institution in Manhattan] being asked whether we’d bring Philoctetes [409 BCE by Sophocles] to this cancer hospital. We did five or six free performances, engaging these oncologists in open discussions about death and dying and being in the presence of suffering, using this ancient play as a catalyst. At the end of that, the head of surgery’s wife comes up to me and says, “We’d like to ask you to be our commencement speaker this year for the surgical oncologists.” I always thought I would get a high school graduation, or you know, the Rotary Club, but to be given the opportunity to speak to 75 of the top surgeons at the top training institution in the world for oncology was a huge opportunity.

So standing in front of these doctors, I hit them really hard—I talked a lot about Philoctetes and about Hippocratic medicine, the limits of medicine in the ancient world and how there was wisdom in conceiving of a medicine with limits. I had no idea if it would land. And then, at this black-tie event at Cipriani, one by one these doctors, these chairs and chiefs of the program, came up and said, “That really touched me.”

[Doerries was probably speaking of Cipriani 42nd Street, an elegant event space known for its high-end Italian cuisine. It is directly across East 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal. (There are—or were in 2015—a number of Cipriani eateries of different types in Manhattan.)]

What I’ve learned over the last six years or seven years is that sometimes it really takes an outsider to change the culture of an institution, whether that institution is the theatre or a hospital or the military. The only way to stand in front of an audience of a thousand Marines who are thinking about the ways they could disembowel you, who are resentful at the fact that you’re there telling them about Greek tragedy and they’ve been “volun-told” to see it—the only way to stand there with any confidence in my opinion is to revel in being the outsider. You don’t have to be hyper-masculine; you don’t have to be accepted or even be liked by them. You just have to deliver this thing to them.

Sanchez: And you have to be willing to listen. That is very, very clear with what you do. Even if what you ask them is, “So tell me how we got it wrong,” then that opens the door.

Doerries: That’s the best!

Sanchez: That’s the best question, right?

Doerries: I know it’s working when two things happen. One is when the lowest-ranking member of the community for which we’re performing, the food service worker in the prison, the private in the military, the palliative care hospice nurse in the hospital setting, stands up and speaks the truth of his or her experience in front of the highest-ranking members. The second way I know it’s working is when people talk about how much they hate the experience, and they can openly do it in their own words. It becomes all the more validating, after the person who said, “This is the fucking most pretentious thing I’ve ever experienced,” for someone to say, “This is the most life-changing thing I’ve ever experienced.” I find myself grinning from ear to ear when people stand up and say, “This is bullshit.” Because we’ve created a place where that can be said. I mean, where else can that be said in these regimented hierarchical environments, you know? I mean, it’s okay for us to get up and say it at the Public Theater, but to say it where your job is on the line?

Sanchez: Wouldn’t that be fantastic if we could have more of that immediate feedback loop in the American theatre at large? Because the only way we have feedback is audiences can give thumbs up, thumbs down, reviewers can talk about what they liked or whether the writing was successful. This isn’t about, “Do you think we’re good playwrights?” It’s: I’m going to do my very best to share, to tell you this story in an artistic, human way. Then I want to hear whatever you have to offer, all of you.

Doerries: When we move the needle and audiences are buzzing because they’ve been touched in some meaningful way—not necessarily explicitly about a social issue, but touched as human beings—we have an opportunity to do something with that energy. Yet 99 percent of the time, with great speed and efficiency, we suck the life out of the possibility in that audience. We do that by having a dramaturg come out and give a lecture; we do that by having people who share our political beliefs come out and congratulate us for having those beliefs; we do that by, worst of all—with all due respect—having the artists come out and talk about process. That’s the most soul-deadening thing you can do after an uplifting experience in the theatre. Instead, this model, which I know you subscribe to—

Sanchez: Well, we outright stole it from your design when we did ReEntry at Center Stage, then at Actors Theatre of Louisville [Humana Festival of New American Plays; 15 November-17 December 2011]. We did exactly what you do: Immediately after the performance, panelists came up. With ReEntry it was a veteran, a spouse, and either a chaplain or a mental health worker. And their job was to give their first-blush personal response to the play. It can be, “This play made me angry,” “This play was exactly my story,” “This play made me question how I’m going to talk to my husband,” or, “What you didn’t get in the play was this.” And then a town hall discussion. It’s completely different than having the actors come out, and then the audience has to be nice and say, “What was it like to be that character?”

Doerries: It’s to the point where the word “talkback” has become an obscenity to me. Not because the word isn’t descriptive of what we should be doing—we should be talking back. It’s an obscenity because we have turned it into a manifestation of our most banal, most unimaginative impulses in the theatre. Theatre is a psychotropic experience; it changes us biochemically. It puts us in a different state of consciousness. And once we enter that state of consciousness, something can happen.

Sanchez: We need to coin a new phrase—“talk-across.”

Doerries: Yeah!

Sanchez: Instead of a talkback, you know?

Doerries: I mean, right now it’s really a “talk down.” It’s about, how many different ways can we condescend to the intelligence of this audience? Until we’ve deadened the possibility we’ve created. The model that we use and that you have innovated on in your own way—I do think it speaks to the ancient model from which these ancient texts derived and evolved, which is that a city would empty all of its courts, its places of work, its places of worship, and send one third of its population to a theatre, and 17,000 people would sit according to tribe and rank and watch plays that were explicitly speaking in some way to fundamental human experiences. Not as sheer entertainment and not as therapy per se, but as a religious experience—a rite, something that is sacred.

Sanchez: I get a little squirrely when I hear the word religious, but my version of that is about bearing witness.

Doerries: If I had one word to define this work, it’s permission. How many different ways can we give you permission—you, the audience—to speak the unspeakable? To acknowledge the thing that you buried deep and denied? To face death? To collectively acknowledge our shared humanity, and also, most importantly with the tragedies we perform, to acknowledge the limitations of human compassion? The note I give actors before they go onstage is: “Make them wish they’d never come.” The reason I say that is because if we push an audience to a point where they wish they weren’t there, and in some way they’ve been trapped—whether they’re “volun-told” or it’s socially unacceptable to walk out, or it’s a place without an aisle—that then we can create this moment where we can actually interrogate why it was so difficult to be in the room. I used to think it was all about empathy, but for me it’s much more about shared discomfort.  

[For an example of a situation like the one Doerries describes above, see my discussion of Richard Schechner’s The Prometheus Project in December 1985 in “Appropriation in the Theater” (8 May 2015).].

Sanchez: Right. You know, we use the phrase “compassion fatigue” a lot, when we’re not really all that tired of being compassionate. But you are actually dealing with communities, with doctors and hospice workers who are facing death every day, dealing with a military on their 8th, 9th, 10th deployment—you are dealing with people hitting the wall.

Doerries: Absolutely.

Sanchez: And you’re saying to the actors: Throw the wall back at them and then somehow you bust through together.

Doerries: Yeah. Push it past them, past what people in the room can handle. I mean, most of our audiences are red state audiences; they don’t share a lot necessarily in common with the actors or with me in terms of our values, our political perspectives. But if we share nothing, at least we share that we were uncomfortable.

Sanchez: That is such a great place to start. That’s the base of human experience.

Doerries: So if you want to have a conversation about abortion, if you want to have a conversation about war, if you want to have a conversation about traumatic brain injury, start with a portrayal of human suffering first, push the audience past its ability to hear it, witness it—and then have the conversation. I guarantee you it won’t be a shouting match of people trying to savage each other with ideology, because we have moved the audience from one cognitive space to another, and it creates the opening. I see it every place we go, from San Francisco and Cambridge and D.C. to the most rigidly conservative audiences in the middle of the country.

Sanchez: Ajax was your first project; you used that play as a way of talking about battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress—depending on who you talk to, because some folks don’t like the term “disorder”—the spousal experience, and obviously suicide. Talk us through a couple of the other pieces that you cover.

Doerries: Concurrent with the development of Theater of War, I also developed this project, presenting readings of Prometheus in supermax prisons. At first I thought we were going to perform it for the inmates.

Sanchez: But then something even more interesting happened.

Doerries: After trying to get into Rikers Island and getting very close but not making it, I met a social worker there who said, “Listen, I have a cousin who is the director for corrections in the state of Missouri, and he might just be crazy enough to allow you to come in with Prometheus Bound [ca. 430 BCE; by Aeschylus (525/524-456 BCE)].”

Sanchez: It’s always about meeting the one that’s crazy enough. Or desperate enough. I once had a Marine Corps retired general say to me, “We’re desperate now—we’ll try anything.” That’s why he was all for bringing theatre into the military.

Doerries: Yeah, God bless the military. They’re not like foundations that need metrics before they try something. They have a problem the scale of which is so large, and for better or worse, they have such a large portion of our gross domestic product and our tax dollars, and you and I came in at this moment where they were trying everything: They were trying sand rock gardens, they were trying equestrian therapy, they were trying dolphins. Greek tragedy or documentary-style theatre [what Sanchez does; see “Feud for Thought” and “Real Talk About Real Talk”] actually seems relatively middle of the road when you think about all the things they were trying. They were throwing them up against a wall and seeing what stuck.

Sanchez: So back to: You met this woman who had a cousin who might have been crazy enough to try this.

Doerries: Yeah, so I call the cousin and he immediately returns my call. His name is George Lombardi, he’s the director of corrections in the state of Missouri. And he says, “Listen, I really like your idea. We have some programs already for prisoners, but what I think maybe would be more valuable is if you came in and did the performance for corrections officers and other people working in the prisons. No one ever does anything for them, we have very little psychological services for them, and they do time eight hours a day and live in these hellish environments, and, you know, maybe something could happen.” The more I thought about it, I thought, well, there’s not closer analogue to the military, where I knew the project was really working, than the sort of paramilitary apparatus of those who work in prisons. They have rank, they have file, they report their surveillance, there’s punishment. To a certain extent, there’s no difference between a barracks and a hospital and a prison. They’re all systems of rigid hierarchy, of discipline and punishment. And Prometheus is about discipline and punishment! It’s about living within this hierarchical structure.

Sanchez: I was very struck with how many guards identified with Prometheus, and see themselves as part of the prison industrial complex in a way that really surprised me.

Doerries: Theatre gives us the opportunity to step back from the roles we’re all playing, to acknowledge the archetypes and look at them more objectively. Everyone who works inside a prison is aware that a very thin barrier separates them from the people they have power over—that only grace separates them in many ways. Many who work in prisons come from the same socioeconomic background, the same neighborhoods, the same classrooms, the same gangs, as the people who are in the prison themselves. So that came out immediately in the discussion of Prometheus Bound after the first performance we did at a supermax prison for the guards: “I’m Prometheus; I’m the one who can be punished for showing compassion to the people that I’m guarding,” or, “I’m the one that if I get a DUI will get a mandatory sentence of five years or more, while you, because you can afford a much better lawyer, Bryan, will get off.”

You know, all of these communities that we go into are communities that practice a kind of emotional detachment at the center of their work, whether it’s surgeons or soldiers or guards or corrections officers. And theatre has the capacity to create a safe space for them to let down the barriers—to allow the Trojan horse of Greek tragedy in and to feel something, and to do it in a public, and even in a performative way.

One of the things I’ve also learned from this work—and this is the center of your work in every way—is that we need mediation. Theatre is mediation. Like, if I allowed myself to feel the things it would be appropriate to feel from the walk from here to the subway in relation to people that I saw on the street, I would be destroyed. So I practice this clinical detachment as well. I need to be wrested from it, for it be wrenched away from me, and the shock of being in the presence of a believable portrayal of human suffering, with an amazing actor delivering it, can do that.

Sanchez: I understand why some doctors and others become desensitized; it’s a survival mechanism.

Doerries: Certainly. It’s not adaptive to be crying when bullets are flying at you, or when you’re in an ER and you’re having to cut open someone’s chest. But there has to be a sanctioned place to feel those things, and the theatre was that sanctioned place. This is not some fanciful fabrication. It was the place where everyone stopped working, they came together, and they purposely put themselves in front of an experience that would elicit these feelings. In a century in which 80 years of that century was spent fighting war—in the latter half of a century in which a third of the Athenian population had died, if we believe Thucydides—there is no one in the Athenian audience who wouldn’t have known the screams of these characters. There was no one in the audience who wouldn’t have understood that first- or secondhand. So for the last six years, the experiment for me has been: What do we do when we take these ancient stories, which I think are a technology designed for very specific audiences that had lived these experiences—

Sanchez: The original apps, is that what you’re saying?

Doerries: Yeah, I think of them more like external hard drives. When you plug them into an audience for which they were designed, the plays know what to do and the audience knows what to do in return. Like when you transplant a kidney, and before you finish suturing it into the new body, the urethra is pumping urine. There’s something about these plays that are living, breathing, organic technology for delivering a very specific experience.

But this is where your work comes in; there are so many people who are suffering and need an intervention of this nature for which there is no classic text and something needs to be devised.

Sanchez: Right, American Records’ mission is to make work that chronicles our time, and work that serves as a bridge between people. So my job is to listen to a particular community, to a particular story, and then what I do is I frame it in a palatable way. I’m a huge fan of documentary films, but documentary theatre does something very different, similar to what you do, which is that it allows us to bear witness together. So I start with a subject, something that I find burning and interesting. This is going to not make any sense, perhaps, but I pick subjects I don’t understand yet what I feel about. That’s been my guiding principle for the last 10 years: that what I think and feel about a situation has nothing to do with what I’m trying to do. In fact, I’ve turned down stories and projects—

Doerries: Where you have a lot of skin in the game?

[My recent post “Documentary and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025) is an excerpt from KJ Sanchez’s book The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre (Routledge, 2024). (The selection was published as “Feud for Thought: How I Made a Play Out of a Family Drama” on the American Theatre webpage on 20 March 2025.) The book explores the field of documentary and investigative theater and offers a guide for making interview-based plays.]

Sanchez: Yeah. I’ve been asked to do something about immigration, and it’s like, no, I know how I feel about that. Then it becomes agitprop theatre.

Doerries: That’s a really important distinction. Because I think theatre that wears its politics on its sleeve alienates the very audience one would hope to engage. It’s not about the opening of meaning, or discovery, it’s about the closing of meaning and discovery.

Sanchez: I took some heat from my colleagues with ReEntry. I had a handful of people angry at me because I didn’t make an antiwar play. They thought that Emily and I made a pro-military play because I didn’t end the play with “war is bad.” I ended it with, “You know what? They’re still going back, and they couldn’t give a shit what the war is about.”

But all of these stories are incredibly emotional; the stakes are unbelievably high. For the last 9 years I’ve been promising myself a nervous breakdown. I keep saying that when I’m interviewing somebody, my job is not to let them know how I feel about anything. I’m on board for wherever they’re going to take me. So I don’t cry; I set aside all of that. Someday I’m going to go away, find a shaman, get into a sweat lodge, and let it all out. And I’m sure this happens everywhere you present: There’s a line of people who want to tell you their story, right? I find people who don’t feel comfortable talking in front of the group, they pull you aside.

Doerries: Yeah, definitely. It goes on for hours.

Sanchez: Where do you put that?

Doerries: It just gives me energy. It doesn’t take away. What I see night after night in the audiences when we perform is a palpable sense of relief.

The first question I ask all audiences is: Why do you think Sophocles wrote these plays and staged them for his community? What was he trying to say—what was his objective? Of course, the subtext of that is, How did this make you feel? And “how does this make you feel” is a question I wouldn’t want to be asked myself. So I say, “Why did Sophocles write this play?” I’m making it sound like a quasi-academic question. At one of our first performances, at an artillery base in Germany, this junior-enlisted soldier immediately raises his hand and says, “I think Sophocles wrote Ajax to boost morale.” And I say, “What’s morale-boosting about watching a great warrior lose his best friend, come unglued, attempt to kill his commanding officers, and ultimately, against the pleading of his wife and family, take his own life?” Before I could finish the question, the soldier shoots back, “Because it’s the truth.”

Sanchez: One of the best compliments I ever got was a lance corporal who walked up to me and said, “First of all, ma’am, I would like to say, I’m very glad this did not suck. And secondly, it’s good to know I’m not alone.”

Doerries: That’s terrific. I was at Camp Pendleton, and a Marine came up to me and said afterward, “Hey, sir, I liked your little skit.” I was like: You’re right, it is a skit.

Sanchez: We’ve talked about this before, but you and I have both noted the difference in communicating with military leadership versus leadership in the American theatre.

Doerries: Oh yeah.

Sanchez: I can get a general to return my emails and my phone calls, but there are a good number of artistic directors who don’t have the time and ability to communicate well.

Doerries: Well, for what it’s worth, maybe the general has more resources.

Sanchez: Yes, that’s a good point. One of my favorite things that Anne Bogart [b. 1951; theatre and opera director; one of the artistic directors of SITI Company] ever said to me was a little advice she gave when I was becoming a director. She said, “You need to figure out if you’re a person who’s round on the outside and square on the inside, or square on the outside and round on the inside.” The military and medical and service communities that we work with are very square on the outside. You get a response—either, “No, thank you,” or, “We’d like your play at our base, please advise.” Done. But in the world we traffic in, because of all of our creativity, we’re round on the outside, so it’s more difficult to communicate, to be hard when we need to be hard. Do you know what I mean?

Doerries: It’s actually been a big revelation for me. Would I rather deal with academics, people in the theatre, foundation people—or with people in the military to try to get something done? No question who I’d want to work with. There’s something so remarkable about the efficiency. There are a lot of inefficiencies, obviously, in the military, but if you give people in the military two pieces of paper with a quick proposal, and maybe one phone call later, it’s executed, usually flawlessly—maybe a little too literally. If you work in the theatre or with academics, you have 20 phone calls. Maybe it’s part of the culture from the get-go, or maybe it’s just when you’re facing life-and-death issues, you don’t have time for all the bullshit. You attack problems more efficiently. There’s something deeply refreshing about it.

Sanchez: Does it make you crazy when well-intentioned people say, “You know, you should hook up with the USO”? That makes me crazy!

Doerries: No. We did partner with the USO on a quarter of a million dollar grant, and they were great partners, and they have an enormous reach.

Sanchez: But it’s about, “Let’s entertain the troops.”

Doerries: It’s different. So the other person person that should be sitting at this table is Adam Driver [b. 1983; actor], whose organization Arts in the Armed Forces, of which I’m on the board, espouses that specific approach. He was in the military, the Marine Corps, he went to Juilliard, he’s had a successful career, and he feels that people in the military deserve not to be condescended to with what passes for entertainment. They deserve to be uplifted and challenged, and so he doesn’t do plays that are explicitly about the military—he does John Patrick Shanley [b. 1950; playwright, theater director, and filmmaker], and he allows the audience to have its own human response. They’re not about discussion, but they’re about raising the bar and saying, you know, it is a form of service to go into these communities and bring something that actually is challenging or uplifting, rather than to you know, simply entertain.

[Arts in the Armed Forces (AITAF) was a non-profit organization that brought arts programming to active-duty service members, veterans, military support staff of the United States, and their families around the world free of charge. It was founded by actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker in 2006 and was dissolved in 2023.]

Sanchez: Yeah. Isn’t it cool now that we have a tribe?

Doerries: Yeah, there’s a tribe.

Sanchez: You mentioned Adam, and there’s also Paula Vogel [b. 1951; Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright].

Doerries: Paula Vogel, and there’s a whole bunch of others.

Sanchez: What’s so fascinating about her is that early in her life, her day job was as a secretary for the Navy.

Sanchez: And now she’s offering herself to do workshops whenever possible for veterans, to teach, to give them tools to write their own plays.

Doerries: And she’s cultivating the talent of this next generation of veteran writers—Maurice Decaul [b. 1980; former Marine; poet, essayist, and playwright], all these other writers she has taken a personal interest in. She’s created space within TCG [Theatre Communications Group; non-profit service organization that promotes professional non-profit theater in the United States; publisher of American Theatre] for veterans, for theatres to come to a different orientation, to what it would mean to actually do something that might move people socially with regard to veterans. There are a lot of people in the space now, and as far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.

Sanchez: I agree.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is an arts journalist and the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at the University of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[In addition to “Feud for Thought,” in “Documentary and Investigative Theater,” playwright Sanchez figures in “Real Talk About Real Talk,” part 3 of “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (21 September 2017).]