ADS:  Yeah, but Harvard's very, very far away, and my work isn't really made. . .I didn't create and bring this piece to Harvard; the heart of the piece is made for the community that it's designed for. You know what I'm saying?  It's very nice when other people say, "Boy, I'm interested in that"—that's great. Then the play has more life. But the heart of my work is that I'm trying to mirror the community. Now, I think that does imply a more interesting question—which is not to say your question isn't interesting—but in the bounds of what I'm actually trying to do, there is an interesting question: Should I perform it as a mainstream institution, or should I take it into the community, if it's really meant to mirror the community. Then in L.A. you have the problem of . . . there is no community, and this is the tragedy of Los Angeles—there is no meeting ground that everybody goes to. New York, at least Central Park, was built to create that—you know, rich and poor, north and south, black, white, Latino, everyone can merge. There is no place in all of Los Angeles which invites that, none. So it would be hard to find a meeting ground which could accurately mirror the Los Angeles community. 

Then the question is:  Well then, should I give up on that and just make little mirrors—in fact, little fractured mirrors—and play for ethnocentric groups; should I go out into the community and do that?  And I think that's a really legitimate question, and maybe that's inevitably what I have to do. But the other side of that is that I believe that these institutions, which get all kinds of funding—these are not, you know, the people; these institutions are not just kept alive by their subscribers. They get all kinds of grants, and we now have what's going to be a very explosive question to answer in theater about cultural equity. Because  a lot of the smaller theater groups and arts institutions are dying, and the larger institutions are still able to have enough manpower to get grants and so forth, to survive. Part of what I believe is that these institutions must be accountable to the communities, and they must make themselves available, they must become Central Park—they must!  So then the question is how do we actively go to the communities and let them make it available and try to get them interested in this?  
 
KLF:  And how do they even find out about it?  Because we [Appendx] deal with the same dilemma, the fact that the words that are being spoken here tonight are going to be published in the next issue. . . 

ADS:  Thank you! 

KLF:  I mean, how accessible is this? 

ADS:  You know, it's not going be in the Los Angeles Sentinel, it's not going to be in whatever newsletter the L.A. Four has, which will probably be disbanded by the time that this is published. We won't be on the L.A. Four hotline with this talk. 

KLF:  Now if this did somehow hit the "mainstream," however that might work, how do you maintain at arm's length the notions of multiculturalism and political correctness as "mean-spirited" labels that attempts to drain the significance of your work? 

ADS:  When somebody uses that word, I mistrust the interviewer right away. For example, the question everybody asks me over and over again is, "How do you get people to say these things to you?" First of all, I don't believe I really do anything; I think everybody comes forward, everybody wants to claim their own authorship. Most interviewers are very sensitive to the fact that to get the best from people, I have to make the conditions where it is organic for them to give me their best. And so the interviewer who uses that type of language with me simply doesn't get the best, that's what's really hard. Because I get very much on the defensive because of that; I feel bad for people who buy this type of thinking. I teach at Stanford, and I taught this class called "Beyond Stereotypes of Race and Gender," and it's one of my favorites of the things I have ever taught. There was a very, very smart black woman in the class who is probably going to be a very, very important journalist—she's going to be important in whatever she does. And she quit the class. And I think—I don't know the full ins and outs and why she quit—but she got in a lot of hot water one day in class when she accused me of having a P.C. class. She said,  "I think this is just a P.C. class, even this idea of beyond stereotypes. You know, who are we to think we can move beyond these, as though we have something better." And I remember feeling bad—I felt very bad for her, because she's very smart, she is extremely well educated, and yet she's buying this way of labeling and scoffing these alternative ways of thought, and the pursuit of this alternative way of thinking, which is. . . you know, for the moments that it was won was very hard work, and then the minute that we kind of get close to getting people to think in alternative ways, on different levels, it's given this pooh-pooh, and people should be very very suspicious of where that came from. Very suspicious. To make it a fashion, when blood was shed for these ways of thinking! It's awful when. . . I feel just awful anyway when fashion, in terms of both metaphor and reality, begins to shape the discourse of how we deal with difference. 

KLF:  Especially when it  emerges as a brooch on the lapel of someone like Pat Buchanan, espousing who knows what. How do you maintain a level of sanity with this going on? 

AA:  And for most people—probably for many people, I won't say most—interested in what you are doing and what we are doing in the journal, it is fashionable in some way to sort of explore other identities, but when it comes down to it, like disseminating or distributing some of that money, some of that theater money, so that other identities can be explored in other places besides that "central theater," that's when the doors close. 

ADS:  That's really the bottom line. And that's when we separate the grown-ups from the children. And how that's going to be worked out is very hard, because who can you trust? Who can you really trust to make these decisions? I think only groups can make them;  no individuals can really make these decisions. I was thinking about this today—and it's hard to talk about it, I've never talked about it, I hope I can sort of say it the right way—the kind of mirror fisticuffs that I came to with one of the Japanese American women who worked on "Twilight " with me. She's a very, very smart person, and she was on my case all the time,  de-ethnocentrasizing me, and speaking for better representation of Asian Americans in the piece. When I think of—on an emotional level, a gut level—what it felt like to have her on my case, even though I invited her in because I wanted to have this disruptive . . . but the bottom line was, it felt awful to be having a disruptive. On some level, I didn't like it. 

AA:  Well, what did you have to do in order to disrupt it?  

ADS:  I had to surround myself with a lot of people, which is also what most playwrights wouldn't adhere to—you know, the writing process is a very private process, and I had a lot of people who gave their opinions constantly.  And so, partly it's just very difficult to tolerate that as a playwright. But also there was so much that I didn't know, and I do have a lot of faith in this particular woman [the disruptive] do you know what I mean? I had to just have faith in her. And also, here is where. . . I'm suddenly on the conceit—kind of what white people were dealing with me in most of my life, in that things would happen which were on my subconscious plane. 

I remember one rehearsal where I presented a lot of material, and at the end of it this woman said, "You know, I'm furious because I have to sit for one half hour and there's not one Asian voice." And I had a lot of excuses, but I can remember when I was in college and I would challenge white people for that kind of thing, and they would have a lot of excuses, and my response to that is, it's their subconcious, they don't even know how ingrained their racism is.  So this is me, and we become aware of how ingrained our ethnocentricity is, and as you say, there would be a lot of black people that would be very suspicious of me to even question that, which also threatens me to be on the outside of black people.