Ellen Kaplan is an actress, writer, and director, and professor emerita of acting and directing at Smith College. She performs and directs internationally, in places like Pakistan, China, Israel, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, and she recently edited the new book Theater Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons. Ellen joins me to talk about her work in and out of the classroom, dealing with “the shoulds,” how easy it is to get in our own way, why we are each a culture unto ourselves, what we’ve each learned from our students, and more.
00:00 Introduction
03:15 Self-discovery through teaching experiences
08:42 Importance of humility, listening, and respect
12:27 Cultural differences observed while teaching ESL
18:15 Embracing individuality in students
22:30 Influence of “should” on decision-making
28:05 Pressure of being an expert vs. staying open to learning
34:14 Value of revision in the creative process
38:50 Saying yes in improv and life
44:35 Creating healing spaces through storytelling
48:52 Career serendipity and intrinsic experiences
54:18 Commodification’s impact on creativity
58:23 Kitsugi and the beauty of imperfections
01:03:41 Ellen’s work in conflict zones and peace efforts
01:09:56 Improvisational recalculating of identity and work
Read this week’s article, on how Apple accidentally told the truth about technology and creativity, here.
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Show links
Ellen’s new book: Theater Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons
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Transcript
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. As you may know, I’ve been working on a new 1 on 1 course, and it’s here. Reignite Your Creative Spark is a private coaching program designed to help creative folks build momentum that lasts so they can turn their creative dreams into reality. In 6 private sessions, you will discover how to engage with your creative dreams with ease and joy, feeling both more confident in yourself and your work and more vibrant than you have in years.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:46]:
Wanna learn more? Use the link in the show notes to get in touch. Talk to you soon. Ellen Kaplan is an actress, writer, and director, and professor emerita of acting and directing at Smith College. She performs and directs internationally in places like Pakistan, China, Israel, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. And she recently edited the new book, Theater Responds to Social Trauma, Chasing the Demons. Ellen joins me to talk about her work in and out of the classroom, dealing with the shoulds, how easy it is to get in our own way, why we are each a culture unto ourselves, what we’ve each learned from our students, and more. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ellen Kaplan. Ellen, welcome to Follow Your Curiosity.
Ellen Kaplan [00:01:32]:
Thank you, Nancy.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:34]:
So I start everybody off with the same question. Were you a creative kid, or did you discover your creative side later on?
Ellen Kaplan [00:01:41]:
Okay. I come from a somewhat damaged home. I had nobody else in my life, no family besides my very not happy mother, abusive really. And creativity wasn’t a word. Nobody spoke about that. But but for me, it was escape. I was I don’t know if I was creative or not, but I needed other worlds to I was a voracious reader. I wrote tons, not for anybody else, but I wrote.
Ellen Kaplan [00:02:09]:
And I discovered vaguely that I liked being on stage or I thought I liked being on stage, but I discovered theater. And it was all a bit connected to that I tried to run away and did succeed more than once. I mean, it was just it was a place to get out of. And I realized that I realized many god knows how long later that one of the reasons that I was drawn to acting, part of it is because women I wouldn’t have begun to think that you could direct or anything else but acting, but was because I needed to feel seen, which also and heard, which also made me extremely vulnerable and and almost panicky. I mean, so it took me years to get past that. I’m no longer in any way, shape, or form. I haven’t been for years. I mean, everybody gets all stage fright, but that kind of serious, intense need which then led to a lot of panicking, long ago went away, but it was realizing that that was important.
Ellen Kaplan [00:03:08]:
So I don’t even know. I think every human being is creative. I’m not sure what it means. Question is how do you 2 things. 2 questions. How do you express that? What path do you need to take or paths? Why are you what are you trying to do psychologically, spiritually, intellectually? What is it you’re doing? And the other, sort of path of that, the other part of that is discipline. You can be as creative as you like, and we all are, But if you don’t have a crafted discipline procedures, then you just are emoting. You’re putting things out there, but you’re not crafting it.
Ellen Kaplan [00:03:47]:
And so its ability to communicate to anybody else is limited. So discipline and procedure on one hand and the need, the urge, why are you doing this? Not that you have to have any answers, but that’s what propels you. Do you know?
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:01]:
Isn’t it so interesting that you don’t have to have the answer?
Ellen Kaplan [00:04:06]:
You know, when I get an answer to anything is when it’s actually worked its way fully through me after decades. That’s when my answers come. Oh, that’s why I did that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:16]:
There’s a freedom in that. You know? I think especially when you’re when you’re young and you you kind of have this idea that I wanna do this thing, but I wanna do it right. You know? And I and I don’t I don’t wanna mess up. I I wanna be I wanna be very serious. I wanna be taken seriously. I wanna I wanna do it right. And we think that we need to know all of these things, but really, it’s much the doing is so much more important than the knowing.
Ellen Kaplan [00:04:43]:
When I came to Smith, I had already been tenured at Beaver College at the time, Arcadia, you know, in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. And I had taught for 8 years 10 years really before I came here. And yet when I started here, because I have little, little kids, I said I’d go back to 0 with tenure. I had to start again because I wanted to. But I my 1st semester here with my 4 month old and my 4 year old was a disaster for many reasons, but I think the I exaggerate, but still the main reason for me was unconsciously, I felt I suddenly needed to be an expert because now I was at Smith College. And that notion of expertise left me dry mouth and utterly like, oh, right. I need to know everything, which, of course, you don’t. But it took me quite a while to work.
Ellen Kaplan [00:05:31]:
Now you just do what you’ve been doing and do it more. And
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:34]:
Right. Right. Yeah. No. We get hung up on that stuff.
Ellen Kaplan [00:05:38]:
Yeah. We do.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:39]:
And it yeah. It gets in your way. It it makes your life more difficult when it doesn’t have to. But I think it can be hard to get around that when you think that it does have to be there.
Ellen Kaplan [00:05:52]:
That’s right. And that, I think, comes with the the notion of judgment. We’re being judged and of competition that we’re competing for something. And, you know, I’m I’m writing a play now. If you don’t mind, I’ll wander around it. No. No. Okay.
Ellen Kaplan [00:06:08]:
So I’ve written many plays. If I whatever. But the place I’m the thing I’m working on now is really about a woman at the last in the last chapter of her life. I’m 71. I’m thinking about it, and it’s great. But it’s very much a woman who’s trying to escape. She takes a little cabin off the coast of Maine while the world is dying around her, and she knows, and the water’s rising and the walls are kicking in. But this sense of of that first of all, when I start to write, I don’t know where I’m going.
Ellen Kaplan [00:06:38]:
But what what she is really working through and the other people in the play are that your whole life doesn’t have to be about producing and consuming and reproducing and pushing and pulling. And I’m just a pretty pressured person, which I’m really trying to let go of that. But and obsessiveness, which can help you in any artistic but for me, really beginning to disengage from what’s expected and from judgment and from all of that has been really because that becomes toxic. It really does. It is. I think it’s a toxic system that we live in that way. But trying to say, right. Pull back from that.
Ellen Kaplan [00:07:17]:
Pull back from that so that everything doesn’t I had a student many years ago who came into an acting one class. We go around. Why are you here? What are you interested? And she wanted to know, she’s an economics major. I wanna know the cost benefit ratio of this class. And I was finally said, nothing. Its value is nothing. You may be in the wrong place because it’s not. What can I tell you? It’s $3 and credit.
Ellen Kaplan [00:07:39]:
Oh, I don’t know. That’s I don’t want that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:43]:
Yeah. No. And and, I mean, I think that it does have value, but you can’t measure it that way.
Ellen Kaplan [00:07:50]:
And value what? What does that mean in terms of is it an intrinsic of course, it does. We could talk forever in terms of what it opens up and we but no. No. She it we can’t help but think of it as putting a dollar amount to it or putting a, you know, how will this further my life, my career, And that’s very hard to let go of for all of us. You know?
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:11]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, we we have a hard time dealing with things that we can’t quantify that easily.
Ellen Kaplan [00:08:19]:
We do. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:20]:
A really hard time.
Ellen Kaplan [00:08:23]:
I I’m clearly, I’m way older than you, and I will say so. It was I grew up, right, of childhood sixties or early seventies. Certainly involved in left wing politics, all good. But more important, more to the point at this rate, I think, is that there was this was a prosperous nation, far more than it is now. And I never thought for a minute, career? Don’t know. Don’t care. Really irrelevant. Marriage, kids, and I’m married.
Ellen Kaplan [00:08:51]:
I have 2 kids. I’m married almost 40 years. But, no, I wanted adventure. So I was already like that in the sense that but I think that it a lot of that is sort of, the time period because I see it with my kids. I counsel them. They’re in their thirties now. That follow your blues. You and they’re like, yeah.
Ellen Kaplan [00:09:11]:
That’s great for you, crunchy hippie. But and they got a point. But I feel like this was this pocket in time where it truly didn’t matter. I went to California, for example. I mean, I did this all the time. I went press country. I lost the $15 I took with me. Had nothing.
Ellen Kaplan [00:09:26]:
I went to California. I had $200, which I promptly gave away to a guy who thought he was the Duke of Edinburgh, but I didn’t care. I just moved there with a suitcase and said, now I live here. That can’t happen anymore. I don’t think. Not easily.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:39]:
It’s harder for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s down to what what’s the number that’s going to come out of, of anything that I, that I do. And, and, you know, I think that that is really hard for creative folks to let go of.
Ellen Kaplan [00:09:59]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:00]:
I think, you know, there was an article that I read a couple years ago, and I’ll have to see if I can dig it up. I don’t know if I remember enough to to be able to find it, but it was if I’m remembering right, it was about somebody who, you know, started doing something for the joy and the fun of it. And I think it was something like pottery. You know, like, she was making mugs or something. And someone persuaded her that she should sell them. Yeah. And it was all about, like, the difference between this was fun when I did it for me. And then when it turned into a business and I had to make mugs and I had to market them, and I had to ship them out and all that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:47]:
It’s taken over my life, and where’s the fun part now? Yeah. Right? And I think, you know, I heard a lot when I was a kid that was basically do the things you love as an avocation. Don’t do them as a career, and and some of that was because you’re not gonna make enough money to do it as a career, you know, that whole fear. And and I wonder now because that was the part that I heard as a kid, but, you know, there is truth to the idea that as soon as you start to turn it into a business
Ellen Kaplan [00:11:21]:
That’s right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:22]:
You can lose the part that drew you in in the first place because it becomes a have to rather than a get to. And so, yeah, it’s it’s an interesting thing to kind of walk that line, you know, if you still wanna sell stuff. Do you find a different way to do it? Do you make it more ad hoc? You know? I I don’t know.
Ellen Kaplan [00:11:46]:
I don’t know either, but I know that as soon as we commodify ourselves, think of ourselves in that way, and that’s I’m from New York, but I worked in as an actor and as a writer in the city for a number of years. And I honestly rolled the business. Here’s my headshot. Here’s my selling. I’m selling. I’m sell. I can’t do that comfortably. And, again, I attribute some of it to really the prosperity in this country until the mid seventies and the equality comparative made it just not essential to think like that.
Ellen Kaplan [00:12:19]:
And, again, and my parents really were not engaged at all except to be my father is a gondola, and my mother is very destructive. So it wasn’t like any push to, like, do things. So it was, in a way, freeing. In another way, it had flooded problems. But I think that that what you’re saying is true. And you bring to mind something that okay. So I in the last few years, even more than usual, but I write some scholarship besides what I do. I get a number now of book chapters and essays published, and I just had a book that’s, like, gonna come out April 23rd.
Ellen Kaplan [00:12:50]:
Yeah. But I, give me a minute to put my thoughts together. Kitsugi. One of the things I write about in one of them, because the book is theater and social trauma, but I deal with creativity and the arts and marginalized and traumatized people. And one of the things is there’s a Japanese concept which I hadn’t heard of before. Kitsugi, I think, but with pottery that you leave the cracks in. You don’t try to hide the cracks, and it’s beautiful. And to me, that, the cracks, the scars, the wounds, create and shape us as the individuals that we are.
Ellen Kaplan [00:13:25]:
And the notion that and I do write about value and commodification in that because the notion that if it’s something’s cracked or different or whatever, it’s not worth this much is quite the opposite. It’s worth more because you or whatever. But you can see the the cracks, and I love that. This is who we are. We’re all.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:46]:
Yeah.
Ellen Kaplan [00:13:46]:
Mhmm.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:47]:
Yeah. It’s when we try to pretend the cracks aren’t there that we get in trouble.
Ellen Kaplan [00:13:51]:
Exactly that. Exactly that. And if we could recognize and own our own wounds, the places where we’re damaged, which also strengthen us, we could recognize that not be afraid of others who have whatever their cracks are. We all have them. You know? Anyway, I’m pontificating, but that’s basically.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:11]:
I mean, it’s a reasonable enough thing to pontificate about. You know? Right. Because, yeah, the whole the whole perfection thing, you know, I mean, I think of it in the sense of all the people who are posting their perfect lives on Instagram and making everyone else
Ellen Kaplan [00:14:29]:
Feel terrible.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:29]:
Think that, first of all, that’s real, which how much of it is and how much of it isn’t. And then, you know, they’re not good enough because they don’t have, you know, the house by the beach or the perfect family or or whatever it is. Right. But, you know, there’s there’s also that that drive for perfection in doing whatever your creative thing is that can stop you before you even get started. I mean, one of the things that surprised me the most when I learned about perfectionism in Kaizen Muse training, because I was convinced that I was not a perfectionist. Right? I was like, I am not I am not a neatnik. I do not have my kitchen cupboards organized by, like, you know, color or can size or whatever. And and that’s that’s just not me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:19]:
I am not a perfectionist. Right? And then they said, you know, perfectionism can keep you from getting started because you figure you’ll never be able to do it well enough, so why bother trying? And I went, oh, crap.
Ellen Kaplan [00:15:34]:
Oh, wow. I guess I am!.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:37]:
Hi! Turns out I am a perfectionist after all. What do I know? Yeah. I know. Yeah. It’s like perfection isn’t interesting.
Ellen Kaplan [00:15:49]:
No. It’s really not. It shuts us down, but it also asks us to create these conforming things that and there’s another side to that, and I I I wanna talk about that for a moment. You make me think, first of all, where I come at. I was at an audition a 100000000 years ago, and I was talking to some guy and he says, well, I really wanna write mystery stories, novels. I think that’s great. And he said, well, I But I didn’t say but, right, if you know what’s gonna happen. But But I but, right, if you know what’s gonna happen.
Ellen Kaplan [00:16:21]:
But the the and that makes sense. But the other side is that I don’t think of it as perfectionism. For me, it’s more obsessive compulsive style that I need to keep keep keep, you know, whatever I’m doing, I need to keep doing it. I need I need to work. Otherwise, I get very, very anxious. That’s good in some many ways because it means you keep going back and you refine and, again, craft and you make better. The other side is that the satisfaction for me comes more from the obsessive compulsive side. I could get the same satisfaction, I think, by lining up all my pens or something.
Ellen Kaplan [00:17:00]:
I mean, it’s a good quality, but it also has its own destructive thing. And I think that being balanced in in our awareness, we write or whatever we do as an expression, a celebration, a questioning, the internal reasons we do this. And we get satisfaction that it speaks to others. But if you can’t balance that, I need to I need to. You need to find the balance, I think, between what I’m calling discipline or craft and the need to express. And both are real, and they’re intention, but they’re important. Mhmm. If I start thinking how bad my play is now, I’ll never go back to it.
Ellen Kaplan [00:17:34]:
But if I keep yeah. It might get better.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s so true. And I think, you know, when when I was teaching high school ESL kids, it the probably the single hardest thing to get through to them was that, okay, you’re gonna write this essay, and then you’re gonna look at it again, and you’re
Ellen Kaplan [00:18:02]:
gonna make
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:02]:
it better. And they would just look at me like I had 17 heads and be like, I’m sorry. What? I wrote it. I’m done.
Ellen Kaplan [00:18:11]:
Here it is. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:12]:
You know? It’s like it’s it’s done. It is it is perfect. It is as wonderful as it could ever be. And I know because I did it and it’s done.
Ellen Kaplan [00:18:19]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:19]:
You know? And they don’t know
Ellen Kaplan [00:18:20]:
how to revise, and they don’t see the purpose of revision.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:23]:
No. And yet, you know, nothing is perfect. First of all, very few things are perfect, full stop, but nothing is perfect the first time.
Ellen Kaplan [00:18:34]:
Oh my God, of course not.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:37]:
You know, even even if you, you know, don’t know where you’re going, and when I write, I don’t know where I’m going either. Right.
Ellen Kaplan [00:18:43]:
I don’t think because
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:44]:
if I did, like you said, why bother? Right. Why bother? But but then what the the biggest thing that that I discovered doing my MFA, because that was the first time I ever actually finished writing a novel, was going back through it. And it was great because since I was teaching at the time, I could use my classroom where I had a giant table, and I could just spread everything out and and kind of, like, pull up different pieces and hold them up side by side and whatever. But it it was like, oh. So here in chapter 3, I said this thing. Over here in, you know, chapter 32, I said something completely different.
Ellen Kaplan [00:19:31]:
Oh, go ahead now.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:32]:
So now, how do which which one’s right? Which one do I go with? How do I what do I all do I have to change, you know, to to make it work? And what questions are there? Because I you you know, maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Maybe it’s not that one’s right and one’s wrong. It’s that there’s something else going on in here. Maybe it has a different answer. And, you know, because I had really thought, okay, I’m gonna go through and revise the book. I’m just gonna go through and read it, and they’ll be, like, proofreading and, you know, like, little copy editing here and there and whatever. That’s just not how that works, but it was such a fascinating thing to me. And I realized, you know, that one of the things that I had learned without even realizing that I was being taught in that program was how to ask the right questions.
Ellen Kaplan [00:20:23]:
Yeah. You know?
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:23]:
So I was like, wow. I never would have thought to ask these things before, but here we are. And I don’t know what the answer is to that, but but let’s figure it out.
Ellen Kaplan [00:20:35]:
I love it. And and without a sense of revision that you have to go back and go back, Annie Dillard said something beautiful in one of her books about writing that you can build a whole house or a whole league and realize it all has to go, but except maybe one brick. And then you start again. I was like, oh my god. But yeah. Right now with the play that I’m working on, I’ve I’ve finished finished. I finished this draft of act 1. I’m trying to go on to act 2, but I realized in going back home, I have the same woman.
Ellen Kaplan [00:21:03]:
She goes out. Oops. She hasn’t come back. Wait. She comes back, but she hasn’t been out. And I gotta go through it. Wait. When did you leave and why and how? And it’s like, this is your working you don’t just what you’re saying.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:14]:
You you don’t remember all of it. And and up to a certain number of pages, you can reread everything before you start writing again. But eventually
Ellen Kaplan [00:21:22]:
You guys, what? You’re not
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:24]:
gonna read 200 pages every morning before you you you know, that it doesn’t work like that.
Ellen Kaplan [00:21:28]:
Yeah. But I think that internal judgment pressures that we put on ourselves, all those things mitigate against a freer spirit. Free play, which is the name of a book that I love by I forget who, who’s a brilliant violin violinist, but his book is I know it. I just can’t think of it now, but it’s free play, which is really about how in every creative process, what we need is to give ourselves the space to play. Yeah. And then, yes. Then there’s, you know, as primary process, then there’s secondary process, the fraud stuff. But, basically, yes, you go back.
Ellen Kaplan [00:22:04]:
But if you can’t make that space to play in the sandbox, then you’re not gonna have much to go back to.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:09]:
Right.
Ellen Kaplan [00:22:10]:
It is whatever it is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:11]:
Right. Yeah. You can’t you can’t play when you’re worried about how well everything’s gonna come out at any given second.
Ellen Kaplan [00:22:18]:
That’s hard to get out of our heads. We all do that. We do all the time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:21]:
Yeah. And I think, you know, that that’s part of why I love improv because it’s all first draft.
Ellen Kaplan [00:22:29]:
That’s right. That’s true.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:30]:
And I think it puts you back in that frame of mind that you are when you’re a little kid. You know? My one one of my nephews came up to me when we all got together right around his, like, 5th birthday, and he had this LEGO creation that was really more or less like a big cube. You know? A little bit more rectangular than a cube, but, you know, different colors and whatever. And he came up and he handed to me and and said, this is a cake.
Ellen Kaplan [00:23:00]:
I love it. Okay. And I looked
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:02]:
at it, and I thought, okay. You know? Why not? Yes, and. You know? It’s like Yes, ma’am. Exactly. See what comes out of of your cake. You know? I mean, and he had no no doubt that it was a cake.
Ellen Kaplan [00:23:17]:
Because it
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:17]:
was 5. You know?
Ellen Kaplan [00:23:19]:
I love it. The you just said I think what’s the crucial certainly been crucial to my whole life, which is the word yes. Mhmm. I’m not very good at thinking through and bouncing. I’m like, go this through the store? Yes. Because underneath all that, you know, if I could say what the biggest driving impulse, I mean, not the negative, but the positive is a sense of adventure. I want my life to be an adventure. I really do before anything.
Ellen Kaplan [00:23:44]:
And yes, it’s a great way to do that. Yes. And of course, it’s exactly the improv way to do it, and you wanna put that in your life because yeah. Okay. Yes. That’s the good part. And of course, as we the culture gets more, just corporate and capitalistic and all that, it’s harder and harder to find time and place for that kind of yes. Just yes.
Ellen Kaplan [00:24:09]:
Yeah. I will fill out this 20 page document of nonsense. Oh, yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:16]:
Yes. Okay. I had 2, but okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it I I’ve I’ve really come to think that that yes, and is just a philosophy of life. Yes.
Ellen Kaplan [00:24:29]:
Exactly, ma’am.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:30]:
Exactly. You know, the more you can do that and how how much time do most of us spend saying no?
Ellen Kaplan [00:24:37]:
Oh gosh. Exactly.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:38]:
And no is important. Don’t get me wrong. There were definite times and places for no, but, you know, it’s like you really you really kinda gotta look at where and how often you say no and say, what would happen if I said yes to some of these things?
Ellen Kaplan [00:24:53]:
Right. Sort of the other side of that. I say yes to almost everything and my endless my husband, for example, but everybody who knows me, learn to say no. And, yes, he’s they’re alright. But this again, I had to develop my own psychic responses to what I was coming out of, and those were things I decided that I mean, I somebody I remember asking when I was, like, 4 what I want you to be when I grew up, and I know it was, like, that old because my brother wasn’t born yet. I said, everything. He said, not a policeman. Because I was the only guy I didn’t wanna be.
Ellen Kaplan [00:25:28]:
But I really that’s the part of me that I value. And there’s a whole other dark clouds of me that I also value because they’re me. But it’s like this is the funniest part of me. It’s like Justin Briggs. Okay. And I like I like that. Yeah. I don’t I don’t know.
Ellen Kaplan [00:25:45]:
I think that hopefully because I’ve spent a lot of my life now, sort of do conventional theater and and I direct and act and do that stuff or I do that less, but I still do it. But a big portion of what I’ve done, maybe a third of it, has been worked with has been work with groups that have no connection to theater, whether it’s outside, in conflict zones or post conflict zones, whether in prisons, death row, with teen adjudicated teens. I mean, this has been a theme for my elders, and I it’s and I just came back from Pakistan, I I suppose, whereas again, doing really offering this sort of kindergarten is my idea for adults. But, like, here, we’re gonna make this play. The kids we worked with just now were graduate students in art and architecture, brilliantly talented, some with theater background, others not. But giving both mission on the one hand, because these kids work from 9 in the morning till 5:30 at night. I mean, they their classes were intense. But permission was one thing and structure was the other.
Ellen Kaplan [00:26:51]:
So now I can do it. How? And how is very light? I mean, you’re, you know, you’re a you’re a wonderful, creative human being with all these accomplishments. The how is is I can offer, but I’m not trying to impose it. This is how you do. Let’s explore. But that permission, I think, especially where it hasn’t been offered is really important part of me to be able to offer.
Nancy Norbeck [00:27:14]:
Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And and I’m I’m very curious about, you know, exactly what all you do when you go into places like that and how it how it goes.
Ellen Kaplan [00:27:26]:
So I’ll talk about Pakistan just because I just did it, but I’ve done this in various ways for, for most of my life. So what every time is different. Couple of years before that, I worked in Iraq with internally displaced Yazidis who had been subject to a genocide by ISIS, women and girls and young men who’ve been living in the camps for already 9 years. I mean, these are seriously disadvantaged people. So all I can say is that so I’m talking about 2 separate things. In Pakistan, I did structured work. We had a performance at the end. In Iraq, I didn’t.
Ellen Kaplan [00:28:03]:
I responded to the communities that I was with and tried to create healing spaces, playful spaces, places to explore some of the the things that were coming up for people and very gently because some are, like, seriously, significantly traumatized. And so you wanna be very careful. But basically to create spaces where people could explore stories. We did fairy tales. We did, intergenerational. What would you imagine that’s your great great grandmother? What would you say to her? What would you ask? All kind things like that. That’s applied theater. In Pakistan and again, these are 2 different models of kinda the same thing, and I’ve done them in many places.
Ellen Kaplan [00:28:40]:
But in Pakistan, we had a text or a series of texts by, incredible Urdu feminist writer from the 20th century. Just died in 19 I don’t know. 92, I think. But, anyhow and we took her work, and we chose 5 stories, and then I started with adaptations for each group. And then they reworked or worked it as I had it or reworked it, and we improv, we explored, then they’d write they were responsible for writing the final scripts, which were in Urdu and English, which was great. And then together so we adapted. We staged that and then performed it for a large audience, which was really and it was beautifully done. So these are 2 different ways of working, but both of them are saying, well, you know, with where people are, whoever you are, what are you in that you meet people where they are.
Ellen Kaplan [00:29:30]:
I had done work if forgive me if you’re going wrong about this, but No. It’s fine. I had done work in Bosnia. I was invited by my director friend who was herself invited by a group of women survivors, and want to tell their stories. So I did that together. She and I created a play that we then did, based on the words of these women. But year a few years later, I was working I did a series of workshops for pre GED students, most of them are high school, not everybody, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which itself is a hugely beleaguered city. So what I did was I used parts of the play to look at these kids and not only never heard of Bosnia, they didn’t know where Yugoslavia had been.
Ellen Kaplan [00:30:13]:
They didn’t know they’d never heard I mean, this is like, you know, I mean, they live in we make comparisons between what they endured in many ways in Holyoke and what they saw and how they wanna change and what happened in Bosnia and where is Bosnia. And we created Impreps, but it was a way of exploring a world that’s very different there, but also it has parallels. And so that so I’m saying each group is different. Each place you work is different. You know? I we created a devised piece. I lived in Israel during the second intifada. I’ve been there. I’ve been there just twice before that, and then several times since.
Ellen Kaplan [00:30:56]:
But one of the things because it was so I was there to observe and to work on primarily peace and reconciliation efforts, but they completely collapsed. It it would be like doing that now. Let’s have peace efforts. Maybe not. I surely learned a lot, but I worked with 4 women, other artists, dancer, actor. They all had different backgrounds. And we created a piece together called manicure. Basically, as our responses to knowing that our kids could die, because we hear it.
Ellen Kaplan [00:31:24]:
I mean, I watched tanks go by. I heard a bus blow up. So that was a way of responding to that situation. We did it in one of the women’s basement. They have a basement, but like a basement again, I guess. But it’s so it’s I guess what I’m saying is that this theater has been for me my way of healing for myself, my way of exploring. And it’s I try to offer what I know as a toolkit to the situation that I’m in. So I don’t have an answer to how I work.
Ellen Kaplan [00:31:55]:
It’s always different.
Nancy Norbeck [00:31:56]:
It’s always different. Yeah. It makes sense.
Ellen Kaplan [00:31:59]:
Mhmm.
Nancy Norbeck [00:31:59]:
It makes sense. But still, it it must be fascinating and and I hope really gratifying.
Ellen Kaplan [00:32:07]:
Yes. Yes. And I am not likely to do another long trip or a long I I just it’s too hard on my body at this point, which is fine because there’s plenty to do here. And I don’t mean plenty to do as community service work. I mean, I follow my instincts. One is right now, I’m volunteering as much as I can for Democrats in North Carolina because god knows we need it. Secondly, I mean, seriously, so that has no theater, and I don’t care. It’s just where I feel I need it.
Ellen Kaplan [00:32:38]:
On the other hand, there is a theater group here. I have connections to North Carolina, and I come down here at that time. My son is living here now, and that’s why we moved here. But he was here, and I came to see him, but I also was doing my death row work at that point. And I met a company, the the artistic director of a company here, Hidden Voices, who does this all the time, works with life without parole and and, people on death row. I met I came to talk to this guy who was on death row who was amazing. He’s used his time productively to become extremely a wonderful artist and and deeply insightful. So he was amazing.
Ellen Kaplan [00:33:17]:
But my point is is that once I finish up other projects, I will contact them again because I’d like to do work with them if possible. I just met them. I was just here visiting at the time. But I just, like I said, follow my nose. I’m like, oh, that’s something I would like to do, and so is, you know, the democrat stuff. So I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do. I know I won’t be taking endless trips to Pakistan.
Ellen Kaplan [00:33:39]:
It’s too far.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:44]:
So when you say you follow your nose, is that how you started out acting? Is that how you ended up trying directing even though you’d at first thought that that was not gonna be available to you?
Ellen Kaplan [00:33:56]:
Oh, well, it was more pragmatic than that. It never occurred to me to direct. It never occurred to me to do much of anything. Acting, I followed. I understood in my serendipity, things keep coming as I do that. But when I got my first, teaching job, which was right out of graduate school, I was teaching to act and direct. I was teaching acting and directing. I did one show a semester all for years.
Ellen Kaplan [00:34:20]:
And the first thing I did was I directed both Elektra and Bye Bye Birdie, a week apart. Wow. I don’t know what I’m doing. I had to learn. I really had one class. I didn’t know anything about directing. I mean, I did, but I didn’t know that I knew it, And I dove in. So I didn’t plan on directing, I just had to.
Ellen Kaplan [00:34:43]:
And then I found, well, I enjoyed it because honestly, for a lot of reasons, but for one thing, I was less less I felt less physically on the line than I did as an actor. So it was, like, great. Then I have shows and they come up, and I was just as nervous and just so then I started writing. And I just I just I mean, I’ve always written. I started writing plays. So I don’t know. I didn’t say, I’m gonna be a director. Now in retrospect, I kind of I don’t know if I wish I did.
Ellen Kaplan [00:35:11]:
That’s silly. I like what I do, and I like what I’ve done. But I didn’t again, I wasn’t thinking ever until I got to Smith College after I got careers or what all that meant. And I will tell you something. When I first came here to Smith, here, there, I retired, but I was teaching, acting as I do. And I also as I said, I had a 4 month old. I mean, he by the time this happened, he was probably 6 months old or 8 months old and a 4 year old and a husband that I totally uprooted and and was not sure he wants to be here at all. And got world depressed.
Ellen Kaplan [00:35:45]:
And I remember bathing Daniel, the baby, and getting a call from one of my students. It was 11 o’clock at night. And my phone is like this. Right? We didn’t have cell phones in. My phone is on my my shoulder. And as I’m trying to bathe him, she’s telling me that she’s a dance major, but maybe she should also be a theater major, but she also wants to be a senator. So I was like, I if I I and then I I’m like, you know, I can’t sew a button at this point in my life. I’m like, I wow.
Ellen Kaplan [00:36:13]:
I’m like, yes. That’s great. But I I mean, I understand the spirit, but she was saying, well, so what courses should I take? And what do I do to accomplish all this? And I was like, jump in the nearest lake. No. That’s me, mom. It it was not part of the way I looked at things until Mhmm. You know, and this is it’s Smith is an excellent, wonderful school, and it was right. But a lot and this was also this was the nineties by then, and things were changing in the sense that and also, Beaver, I had most of my students were first time college students in their in their family, and many of them had babies.
Ellen Kaplan [00:36:50]:
We I they come to my class, of course, I bring mine. But they were single mothers. But, it it really changed at Smith. The what the atmosphere and and, you know, for the worst, for the better, I don’t know. It’s just really different, and I had to re recalculate who I was and what I was doing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:08]:
I bet.
Ellen Kaplan [00:37:09]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:11]:
I mean, how what’s the right question for that? Like, I’m wondering, you know, like, how how long did it take to recalculate? What it it it had to have been rather improvised.
Ellen Kaplan [00:37:25]:
I was there for 30 years. I taught at Beaver 8 years before that because I was tenured, and before that, I had a full teaching scholarship to get my MFA in North Carolina. So I’ve taught essentially I’ve now taught for 40 years. And all I can say is that periodically, I have a dark night of the soul and go, what the hell am I doing this? What am I doing? What is it? And come up every few years. And the last one that I remember concretely was, well, I know what I’m doing. It’s called the production of joy. I wanna make joyful spaces. Mhmm.
Ellen Kaplan [00:37:56]:
And that was enough of an answer for me. Before that, it was to learn to be a better artist. That was why I taught. Before that, I had some other reason. I have no idea. But they they you know, in terms of I’ve just never been very clear about what I should be doing, career wise and what did I I just I don’t understand it. I sort of shrink from it, and I’m like but I like what I do, so I just do what I do. Now I was I I went to a writing retreat, and so a couple of people there clearly did not like the peace I brought, and they didn’t seem as and I remembered my awful mood saying to him, I made $10,000 as a writer so far.
Ellen Kaplan [00:38:39]:
And he was like, who gives a damn? What are you telling me? But that was how I could prove to him and myself, really, I could write. I was like, it was really stupid. I don’t care if you, you know, you won the publisher’s weekly clearing house thing. Right. That was about what I was saying. I do get this has been my profession, but it’s been a profession because it has happened. I can’t say beyond that. I mean, okay, I’m gonna have to because I need to think about it.
Ellen Kaplan [00:39:06]:
So when I started, I went after college, having no plan. I went by $200 in my suitcase to San Francisco, and I had a great old time for a couple of years. And just auditioning and doing and whatever else I did there. I don’t know, but I had a lot of fun. But finally it occurred to me that San Francisco, at least in the seventies, was not a place to actually do much as an actor. I mean, you could, but it wasn’t there was a professional work. I couldn’t get training, so I went back to New York. And I just and I got a job as a writer, a full time freelance professional writer, which I loved.
Ellen Kaplan [00:39:42]:
So why I’m saying that that things like that happened. I didn’t really plan much. I got back to New York. I got my job as a writer. I got a fabulous teacher. And then I auditioned and I get things. So I get things and I do them. And I the job allowed me to be away for a year, allowed me to be away for 10 weeks.
Ellen Kaplan [00:40:00]:
I mean, it was really 11 years of, like, just do what you’re doing and then come back, go back to the project. So these things happen. Then I another inflection point, I was not wanting to be in New York anymore. The job where I worked, they wanted to me to become production manager. The guy that I’ve been studying with wanted me to come to North Carolina to get my MFA, and I wanted to move to Seattle, because I I said, right. And I didn’t know what to do. So all of these things, I finally I mean, I was like, okay. North Carolina.
Ellen Kaplan [00:40:31]:
I I did not I got an MFA because I was invited, and they could pay me. I had no money. So it’s like, all of that like that. I got a job teaching because my boyfriend at the time had a a resume service. And so he said, well, here’s a resume, and I was I I had great credentials, but and I’ll send them back for you. I was like, fine. So I got, like, 5 interviews and then at this job. I mean, that’s what I’m saying.
Ellen Kaplan [00:40:54]:
I don’t have a plan. I never have.
Nancy Norbeck [00:40:57]:
Yeah.
Ellen Kaplan [00:40:57]:
But I’ve been a lucky person with some abilities. That’s hot. I don’t know. That’s useless, I realized. Listen. You follow your voice. I don’t know, but I know that I care. I’m very curious, and I need to work.
Ellen Kaplan [00:41:16]:
Those two things together and work for me is about self expression on some people. That’s all.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:22]:
Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder if someone had sat you down and said, you must come up with a career plan. I can’t imagine how well that would have gone.
Ellen Kaplan [00:41:34]:
Oh, for god’s sake. My career plan was to not go to college. It was to join the Weathermen who were the very radical group that I knew. I I mean, honestly, the thing that turned me off from that first of all was the oh, I shouldn’t say that. Okay. I’m gonna say this, but this is what you should put. The people I knew had a commune in Queens. They said, well, yes.
Ellen Kaplan [00:41:57]:
If you wanna join I mean, a bunch of people living in an apartment. If you wanna join, you have to have a bisexual experience. I was like, that’s how I was 19. I said, that’s not gonna happen to myself. I said that. So I went to college. I had nothing else to do. They had already gotten weirder and weirder until the days of rage and they’ve been in the several of them got life sentences.
Ellen Kaplan [00:42:16]:
I’m really glad I didn’t do that. But a career? That’s what I thought my career would be was being a disruptive leftist because I had no brains. I don’t know what I was talking about. But, I mean, seriously, I have been very lucky. But, no, career? Acting was, I never had oh god. I had an agent ask me once. You go and, you know, and they invite you in and you do your little I did a couple of my notes where he said, well, tell me. Are you gonna be a star? And I was taken aback and went, no.
Ellen Kaplan [00:42:45]:
Which is not what you say to your the guy who wants to be your agent. I was like, of course not. And it’s true. I would but that was the end of that interview. I remember. So I don’t know. But remember, I had to reconstruct myself from a home that was toxic, from a a a time that was very permissive, and, from really an attitude that didn’t take formal education seriously at all. As I said, really always, I’ve read tons.
Ellen Kaplan [00:43:20]:
I still do. But, no, my life led me to a place that that was lucky because I sure as hell did not do it except I had to inner I had to do things. Mhmm. That makes any sense.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:35]:
Yeah. I I think life led you to where you needed to be.
Ellen Kaplan [00:43:39]:
Oh, yeah. No. I can eat that. Each at each step. It’s just if it was a plan, it wasn’t a conscious plan because I don’t know. It was a debt.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:47]:
Right. I’m just thinking, you know, that people think now that you have to have a plan for everything, and I wonder how much serendipity we miss because we think we have to be directing everything ourselves.
Ellen Kaplan [00:44:01]:
Again, balance because I think that my counsel to my kids, just do what you want. Just follow your beliefs. That’s Joseph Campbell. Was like my son, maybe not, mom. I don’t think that. But so I I do believe that, But I I also really trust that we go where we need to be, that if we allow ourselves, that that’s what you know, the other thing and, again, you can put this in. I don’t care, but I’ll say it anyway. I have always oh, and I visualize pretty strongly.
Ellen Kaplan [00:44:32]:
And one of the things that I visualized was I would see myself in, I don’t know, 5 years hence, I would see myself and those things would happen. I saw myself in San Francisco before I ever dreamt I was going there. I did. I saw the apartment. I saw the person. I saw myself on a college campus before I had any clue that I was gonna do that. And I believe we all have those. I think they’re just extensions of our intuition.
Ellen Kaplan [00:44:59]:
Many of the things I saw were not so blissful. They expressed some horrors and hatreds, but they also expressed some dreams and some hopes. And I think it’s really just cluing into what’s already in there in all of us. Some visuals, some I don’t know how people see it. But that’s what I think is guiding me, an inner compass that has needed to say in the world who I am inside. Do you know? Yeah. I had to give a talk at Smith once. It’s a small thing, but they were asking, what is what what is education for? And I had to say, I didn’t have a clue.
Ellen Kaplan [00:45:38]:
Until I was in graduate school that there was any purpose to it, to formal to school. And and then I explained why I think it’s really a good thing now, and I really, really do. I wish I knew that stuff earlier, but you’re right. You get where you need to be. You do.
Nancy Norbeck [00:45:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. And I I just I it it’s so interesting to me because the the planning advice is that, you know, I mean, you’ve got your parents, you know, like you said, you were what, 4 when they said, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Right? And and you come up with an answer, and if everybody likes it, you run with it, right, at least for a while when you’re 4 or 5 or whatever. And then eventually, you know, you end up with a guidance counselor in middle school or in high school, and your guidance counselor wants you to, you know, not only to know what you wanna do, but how you’re gonna get there. And and your parents wanna know that too. And, you know, everybody starts asking you that question. Right? And then, you know, you go and you do the thing and and, you know, be like, what? I’m not anti planning at all, but, you know, I also know that you can have the greatest plan in the world and be halfway through it and find out, you know what? This is not actually for me. You know, I mean, I went, I started undergrad in a 5 year arts and engineering program.
Ellen Kaplan [00:47:11]:
Oh my gosh.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:12]:
Because I thought I wanted to be an engineer, even though I hated math. So, yeah. That’s work. Right. What could possibly go wrong?
Ellen Kaplan [00:47:22]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:23]:
And and it was actually calculus that did me in. But, you know, I I did it for a semester. And at the end of the semester, it was pretty clear that if I was gonna pass calculus, it would literally be by the skin of my teeth.
Ellen Kaplan [00:47:38]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:39]:
And and I did not. And so that was sort of the end of the idea that Nancy was ever gonna be an engineer. I loved the idea of it. Right. You know, you get to create all these cool things, you know, and design stuff and whatever. But, but yeah. And, and yet if, if I had actually like spent my whole childhood thinking that I was gonna be an engineer, which I had not, it was a fairly recent idea of should probably have been the first clue.
Ellen Kaplan [00:48:14]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:15]:
You know, thinking that that was what I was gonna do, and then, you know, had that same experience. You know, I was in the arts and engineering thing, so it was easy. I just dropped the engineering part and kept the English side. Right? But if that hadn’t been it, if I was there just to be an engineer and it became very clear over the course of that 1st semester that engineering was not actually the right place for me. I mean, that’s a huge internal crisis.
Ellen Kaplan [00:48:46]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:46]:
You know? It’s like, who the heck am I? I thought I was this one thing, and now it turns out I’m not. So what am I instead? I mean, that it it seems to me like, yes, we should have we should, you know, be asking these questions and and teaching kids to plan and all that kind of stuff, but we leave out the, what if it doesn’t work part.
Ellen Kaplan [00:49:08]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:49:08]:
And we leave out the more intuitive side and, you know, because if I had listened to an intuitive side, I might have realized a little sooner that that was not what was gonna happen. Right. You know? But but, yeah, I mean, my god, when you when you’re at school and you’re, what, 18 in your 1st year, and the whole plan has just fallen to pieces. Yeah. And then on top of that, you know, you could have the parents who are saying, I told you to study harder. This is because you didn’t study hard enough.
Ellen Kaplan [00:49:39]:
Oh, come on.
Nancy Norbeck [00:49:39]:
You know? And then, I mean, it’s it it can be disastrous if you don’t know how to how to like you say, how to balance all of that and how to say, okay. This is what I thought, but that’s not it. So now what? You know? And how to pick up from that?
Ellen Kaplan [00:49:59]:
Well, you make me think about the shoulds, and let me explain. And I’ve never realized this before as a blessing because my parents didn’t ask me where I wanted to be. They didn’t care at all. My mother, for me, was she hated me forever since I’m little. My father was never home. So between the 2, fine. I remember this, but it was a stranger or a my relative. We don’t really have him, but somebody asked me.
Ellen Kaplan [00:50:21]:
But I say that, and also in terms of the only career advice they ever gave me was to send me to Titan School. Remember, I grew up in the 5th I was born in 52. My brother who needed it, and I’m delighted, I’m glad, but there was a great deal of of I mean, he went to private schools. He went to this, that. All the things they paid or paid substantially towards his advanced education. I not for any re he really needed it. I don’t begrudge it at all. But for me, I I’ve always seen that with a degree of of resentment, but in fact, there’s a whole other side.
Ellen Kaplan [00:50:57]:
I had enormous amount of freedom and no shoulds. There were no shoulds. My guidance counselor sent me to a shrink because I was tripping. I mean and I had to tell her, and she said, what? I said, acid. What? LSD. Oh my god. You need a psychiatrist. Nobody talked.
Ellen Kaplan [00:51:12]:
And then I got kicked out of that high school not too long afterwards. I mean, I was suspended and then they saw whatever, and then I got kicked out. But my point is, in a way, I mean, nobody should ask for this kind of ruse. Mhmm. I don’t think that. But I in no way felt that it mattered to anybody but me, and there was no reason I would feel that. And to the extent that it did, a girl should get should learn to type, and that’s it. I mean, really, that was it.
Ellen Kaplan [00:51:39]:
It wasn’t married. No. I mean, that was it. So I can and and they my father had a store, which ultimately went bankrupt, but their plan for my future was that Howard and I, my brother, would take over the store, something I couldn’t be less interested in than Howard. So in a sense but I think why this is applicable in in larger ways is the should. I think I haven’t had any shoulds. I had a lot of nots, noes, but no shoulds. And knowing that a should is not a bad thing to a certain limited extent, but that it can be really paralyzing.
Ellen Kaplan [00:52:13]:
Mhmm. And and so, you know, if I can offer my path at all because it’s really not a path anybody’s gonna follow deliberately. Believe me. But, you know, trust a chance. Have parents who couldn’t care less. I mean, this is not gonna work. But for me, if I could balance and I had to get have successfully, in many ways, balanced the lack of should with should. There are things you should do.
Ellen Kaplan [00:52:38]:
You have a deadline? You should do that. You have whatever it is you should contribute. You should be a moral person. Those are inner shoulds. I I mean, my father was a great guy. I I don’t wanna just an ordinary guy. He just had work all the time, and and it was impossible to be around my mother. So it’s not that.
Ellen Kaplan [00:52:55]:
It’s just I think that you’re really making me feel kind of happy about the path I’ve taken, which I’ve never really thought about before. But yeah. No. Should can be utterly strangulating.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:07]:
Yeah.
Ellen Kaplan [00:53:10]:
Yeah. So for you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:13]:
Yeah. And you know what’s interesting about should is how often we don’t notice them.
Ellen Kaplan [00:53:18]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:20]:
Yeah. You know, you don’t you don’t realize if you’ve grown up in a family where the expectation is that you’re gonna take over the business, it it probably was never even said you should do this. It was just, this is what’s
Ellen Kaplan [00:53:32]:
gonna happen.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:32]:
It’s just in the air you’re breathing, you know? Right. And we don’t, I think even with ourselves, we don’t always notice. Absolutely. I really don’t wanna do that thing, but I should.
Ellen Kaplan [00:53:44]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:45]:
You know? And it it does. It makes a huge difference if you’re if you’re saying, especially if you’re saying it that way, if you’re saying, but I should, it’s probably trying to tell you something.
Ellen Kaplan [00:53:55]:
That’s right. And, you know, I think I’m thinking about something very specific. So I got back from Pakistan, and I’ve been retired well over a year, but I haven’t stopped working. But when I came back, I was very sick for a couple of weeks. And so that’s like the middle of March where I was pretty I mean, I had parasites. Awful. That said, that now, it’s April 2nd, and I the last week or so, I’m like, alright. So you’re better.
Ellen Kaplan [00:54:19]:
You’ve done your work. So get out of bed. You should get up and do things. And I’m like, oh, I don’t wanna and should is a good thing, but if you can bounce, you go, yeah. But you don’t have to. So take a look. Take a thing. Should is good.
Ellen Kaplan [00:54:30]:
It makes me do get up and do things. On the other hand, too much should makes me completely out of touch with myself. So, again, I well, listen, I’m the least balanced person you’ll ever meet. But oh, good. That’s not true. But all of a sudden, I’m seeing that a little bit of salt and pepper, a little should, a little you don’t have to. Mhmm. It’s really good.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:51]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s all about balance. Really.
Ellen Kaplan [00:54:54]:
Yeah. It is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:55]:
You know, I mean, almost anything is all about balance. You don’t want too much of any one thing. It’s It’s where where you tend to get in trouble.
Ellen Kaplan [00:55:05]:
Yeah. And that’s our locomotion through life. We have to be balanced in order to move. So, yeah, this is a whole new concept to me. I’ve never thought I was balanced, but I’m like, wait. That looks true. No. It’s it’s I think this is a finding is a really lovely talk.
Ellen Kaplan [00:55:22]:
I really am Nancy Nancy because I it’s making me reflect in a way that I haven’t before. And I hope it’s of some interest or value, but it’s really very useful to me. And I thank you for that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:34]:
Good. And I think it will be. I think it will be to a lot of people, especially the people who are drowning in shoulds or
Ellen Kaplan [00:55:41]:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:42]:
Think that everything has to be planned out and all of that.
Ellen Kaplan [00:55:46]:
I when I mentioned coming to Smith with the babies and so my first thing, I may have said this, I hope I’m not repeating myself, was, well, now that I’m at Smith, I better be an expert. And that was the worst thing I instructor I ever gave to myself. So after teaching for 10 years, I came in going, okay. No. I’m an expert because I’m at this fancy place. And it was warm. Like, finally, I went, no. I’m no expert.
Ellen Kaplan [00:56:09]:
Nobody is. We’re all you know? But that on my shoulder, that’s the when should really kick in. I was like, wow. That’s awful. So yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:19]:
Yeah. And that’s interesting too because you need experts. You need people who, you know, know a lot about things. But at the
Ellen Kaplan [00:56:27]:
same time But that as a pressure on yourself, it was not necessary.
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:33]:
There is one other thing I was I was thinking. Just because I know when I was teaching, I always said I learned more from my students than I had a feeling they learned from me. And Yes. Since you have taught for such a a long time, I’m wondering, you know, what what did you learn from your students, especially that you didn’t expect?
Ellen Kaplan [00:56:54]:
That is a great question, and, like, I have this Rolodex of faces going through my head. Well, this one’s on this one. This is wonderful. I think that a lot of it was how fresh, refreshing, how alive they became. Many, many, not everybody. But with when they approach they approach so much with an earnest openness, a curiosity. And I feel like that in the best circumstances, they appeal to a child in me. They’re not children.
Ellen Kaplan [00:57:36]:
I mean, these are adults. I don’t mean that, but here is a kinda childish space in some ways. So I I learned that. I learned tons over the years. I mean, the recently in the last few years, I learned about pronouns. That sounds stupid, but I it’s not. I learned how important they. I learned it very specifically from students who worked with me with that, how important it was to be able to identify stickler for grammar of all the idiotic things.
Ellen Kaplan [00:58:10]:
I mean, seriously, what beyond that, I learned so much. I can’t even I I learned I I directed, Curious Incident in the of the dog in the nighttime. Mhmm. And it’s about autism and my lead and most of the people in it were on the spectrum. And I learned so much about other ways of approaching the world. Trusting that. Trusting. Trusting that that there’s not a one way to skin a cat with an awful expression.
Nancy Norbeck [00:58:44]:
I do.
Ellen Kaplan [00:58:44]:
That so I think I guess what I’ll say. I think without oh, yeah. I learned many pathways, the kinds of frames of knowledge that Howard Gardner talks about, how different kinds of learning, And I learned it imperfectly because there are students many, many students with so many stronger ways of learn the the kinesthetic and musical and and all things. I am pretty proficient verbally, but there are so many other paths in trying to learn and open myself to not knowing and to say, well, how do you do that? It’s been very hard, but that’s the kind of thing. I mean, I can give you lots of specific instances, but those larger sense. Learning other ways of being freshly and curiously. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:59:32]:
Yeah. Which teaching is one of the rare fields where you really get exposed to those things.
Ellen Kaplan [00:59:38]:
It’s true. It’s true. Do you find that I wanna ask you the same question. What have you found in teaching?
Nancy Norbeck [00:59:45]:
Well, when I was teaching, you know, I was teaching ESL kids, they were mostly from Korea and Taiwan. Uh-huh. Occasionally, we’d have one from Japan, Thailand, Germany, Russia, Poland. So a lot of it was cultural.
Ellen Kaplan [01:00:02]:
Uh-huh. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [01:00:03]:
Like, I had no idea that there is a huge culture around convenience stores in Taiwan. Really? What there is, you know, are you the 711 fan? And and and they have 711 there, I’m pretty sure. Or because I don’t know what else they have, like, are you a dedicated Wawa kinda guy?
Ellen Kaplan [01:00:22]:
You know?
Nancy Norbeck [01:00:23]:
Like like and and it’s like there’s one on every corner, so it’s it’s a thing. You know? And and I didn’t know about, like, the plastic surgery culture in Korea, you know, all of all of these things. And and not even, you know, those are kind of, you know, bigger, random, almost factoid kind of things by comparison, but just, you know, one one of the one of the biggest things that I learned, and I I talked about this with Alex Poppy the other week, was like, yes. As a teacher, I can make a phone call or since, you know, this was overseas, send an email home to mom and dad because their kid is slacking off or a behavior problem or whatever, and that will fix the problem. But if it you know, like, it has to be the last ditch nuclear option.
Ellen Kaplan [01:01:25]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:26]:
Yeah. Because I would see kids come back in the day after I sent something, and they were so different. And it was like, okay. I was not needing to, like, make you terrified and kill your spirit.
Ellen Kaplan [01:01:41]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:41]:
And I don’t know what happened in the conversation that came after that email, but holy cow. You know, I don’t, I I want you to be you. I just need you to, you know, do your thing. And and that was I mean, I I was there from 2,001 to 2,009, so there wasn’t so much conversation about things like neurodivergence and autism and ADHD and whatever that may have factored into all of that. So so that was not something that we were even taking into consideration. But but, you know, it was just like, yeah, the the conversation with mom and dad is the last conversation you wanna have. It’s, you know, try absolutely everything before that.
Ellen Kaplan [01:02:31]:
There’s a key in the center of what you’re saying aside where absolutely I agree. But in a way, when you’re talking about different cultures, what you made me realize and I think over 40 years of doing this, I’ve gotten better at, is really embracing each student as if they are their own culture. You know, they’re not that they’re of course, you’re Korean, you’re Vietnamese, you’re Jewish, whatever you are. But what I meant, each individual human, I realized that I’ve spent a lot of my life believing that, well, my way is right and everyone’s like me. Yeah. Either is true.
Nancy Norbeck [01:03:02]:
Yeah.
Ellen Kaplan [01:03:03]:
More than I care to admit, I didn’t realize how much I carried that. Well, of course, this, this, that. And each and every student really person is a culture unto themselves embedded in a larger and a larger we’re women and then there’s rape and race and ethnicity and religion and culture and geography. All of those are real. But there’s also within that, like, a nest of Russian dolls and affected by the larger really saying, yes. I accept you as I wanna know about you as your own culture, as really who you are an individual. And I don’t think in retrospect that I’ve been nearly as good at that as I would have liked to be because I really have this unconscious belief. Well, of course, I know the witch.
Ellen Kaplan [01:03:49]:
Right. Right. Of course, we all think like me. We don’t.
Nancy Norbeck [01:03:52]:
Yeah. I think I would be much better at that now than I was then, especially because, you know, when you take on the mantle of teacher Yeah. You know, there there’s a whole lot of authority and supposed assumed expertise that comes with that. And you think because you are the teacher, you are the adult in the room, that therefore, you know better than everybody else in the room, and you don’t necessarily. You know, you are just as imperfect as everybody else in that room, and you’re all trying to do the best you can. And so, you know, so much better to sit down with with that kid who is an issue for whatever reason and say, hey, you know, tell me what’s going on. How can I help? What, you know, what what do you need rather than you’re a problem. I’m calling mom and dad.
Ellen Kaplan [01:04:46]:
Right. And I realized as you’re saying it how much I’ve not so much called mom and dad as as not really there were students that I didn’t know how to meet where they were because I assume where they were didn’t make any sense. Right. And and I was like, that’s ridiculous. But I wanna tell you something specific about this. One of the last things I did before I retired was during the pandemic, of course, and I directed an a a fire what’s it called? The online, whatever, version of Julius Caesar. I had 72 different students all over creation part of it. Wow.
Ellen Kaplan [01:05:21]:
And it was both a class and a production, an online production. It was I was very, very thrilled with it, very happy with it. But the classes, because the production did so much work, I was not with most of the students regularly because we’ve worked in rehearsals, but I was occasionally. And I tried very hard to work on, to offer Shakespeare. We looked at very many multicultural, multiracial approaches to Shakespeare, and I, you know, just because I want to. But in the last class, I had ultimately, they were asking me questions, and I asked them questions and what I said, how it came about more like this. You know, it’s always drawn me to acting, and this is true, is getting rid of yourself, is transforming yourself, is yourself draining away. And I couldn’t understand this really isn’t what they think of as acting at all until one student who’s become good, close friend of that, very close.
Ellen Kaplan [01:06:17]:
She’s a a young black woman, gay woman. She a whole story. I mean, yes. She couldn’t come from a different world more of a different world than I do. Adopted, but it was really from Ethiopia, and the whole thing. And she said to me and she said, well, that’s not what we care about. I said, what? What? I don’t understand. How could you wanna be an actor, not wanna be someone else? She said, no.
Ellen Kaplan [01:06:37]:
We care about who you are, our identity. I wanna know more of who I am. And if it hadn’t been her who said it, I would’ve just said, yeah. Well, you’re old to be. I would’ve said it. I would’ve thought, yeah. Well, you missed the best thing about theater. But, of course, this was I wouldn’t have said that, but there’s that’s where I come from.
Ellen Kaplan [01:06:53]:
You do this so that you can not be yourself. What a really it’s a different time. 70 whatever. 50 years have moved since I’ve I’ve embraced this. And she taught me how little I understand of why other people do this. Now, I mean, obviously, I do up to spend 40 years getting to know my students pretty many, many of them. So it’s not like I was oblivious to this. It was such a stark difference.
Ellen Kaplan [01:07:21]:
My weight isn’t right. It’s what I did, and it is certainly a path through acting, but it’s not so relevant to most of my students, and that’s okay. Yeah. I I think I I it just was such a a a wow. There’s a whole other way to do this. I never even thought of it. Because we would so Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:07:42]:
That’s why I like to say there is no right way. There’s just your way. You know, the way that works for you is the right way for you.
Ellen Kaplan [01:07:49]:
I wish I’d known that more. I really do. Yeah. Well,
Nancy Norbeck [01:07:54]:
I you know, it’s interesting with that example. I can see, you know, that that in both cases, even though you’re coming at it from a different angle, it’s it’s kind of both apply
Ellen Kaplan [01:08:04]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:08:05]:
No matter how. You know, you you were trying to get rid of yourself, but in the process, undoubtedly learned more about who you are. Exactly. And in, you know, vice versa. It I I’m not sure you can have the one without the other there.
Ellen Kaplan [01:08:19]:
That’s right. I like that. I sell my stuff short because I actually had many, many close relationships with many students, but there are so many that I didn’t get. I just didn’t get them. And now looking back, I go, ah, because it’s a whole other values, not, like, inhumane, not bad values, just others other priorities. Yeah. And and regardless of where I knew and where I didn’t, the thing is is that learning that and saying, right, everybody is shaped by so many things and respecting that fully requires listening.
Nancy Norbeck [01:08:51]:
Yes.
Ellen Kaplan [01:08:53]:
Yes. And humility, which is Yes. That’s true.
Nancy Norbeck [01:08:58]:
Yes. Absolutely. And all of those things are why everyone is a culture unto themselves.
Ellen Kaplan [01:09:02]:
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, I could go back to teaching. No. Okay.
Ellen Kaplan [01:09:11]:
I really don’t. Do. Plenty a lot. Yeah. I like
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:14]:
this. But I think that’s a great note to end on. Yeah. So thank you so much for coming and talking with me today. It’s been a lot of fun.
Ellen Kaplan [01:09:23]:
Nancy, you’re great.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:25]:
That’s our show. Thanks so much to Ellen Kaplan for joining me and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this episode. You’ll find a link right in your podcast app. And in it, tell us about a time when you got in your own way. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thanks so much. If this episode resonated with you or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at the spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:56]:
It’s free, and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.