Alec Baldwin: I’m Alec Baldwin, and you’re listening to Here’s the Thing from WNYC Radio.

[Video playing]

Female: Whatever it is, whatever you do, you’re our daughter, and I will love you.

Alec Baldwin: Jon Robin Baitz has a new play on Broadway, recently nominated for a Tony. Other Desert Cities is about family, dysfunction, and the choices we make.

[Video playing]

Female: There are consequences to our actions.

Female 2: What does that mean?

Female: How could I trust you? How could I ever be in your presence, my dear ...

Alec Baldwin: Robbie, as he’s known to many, pursued similar themes in the drama he created and executive produced for ABC, Brothers and Sisters. Robbie’s strengths as a playwright are magnified by the talent he surrounds himself with. Dan Sullivan directed Substance of Fire in 1992; Joe Mantello directed Other Desert Cities. Robbie Baitz often writes for specific actors he admires, like Stacy Keach and Ron Rifkin, who have worked on several of Robbie’s stage and screen projects.

In the theater world, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t want to work with Robbie. He comes across as kind, human, and humble. During our conversation, he confessed there’s been a dark side to his success on Broadway: he’s been spoiled. Jon Robin Baitz can barely think about going back to the smaller theaters.

Jon Robin Baitz: I’m ruined. I’m ruined for off-Broadway now. I may – I sort of say things like, “Well, that play’s an off-Broadway play; it’s not a Broadway play,” making fun of myself. The difference is, you know, you’re in this great, great, grand old house, you know, that’s built for a kind of big experience, and the drama is somehow expanded. I mean I – listen, I never knew the difference, so I was always –

Alec Baldwin: And when you’re there, you feel – there’s just a different tapestry there, when you’re at a Broadway house, that lends itself to the kind of the import of the project, or –

Jon Robin Baitz: There is a lot of different things going on, you know. The audience has bought into an experience for which they’ve usually, sadly, paid more money.

Alec Baldwin: Mm-hmm.

Jon Robin Baitz: And so it changes the dynamic; it changes. There’s more ornamentation around it, in some way. The laughs change, which is odd; the laughs are sort of bigger and more expensive in some way.

Alec Baldwin: So what was the arc of Other Desert Cities before you went to Broadway – it began where?

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, in, in the Mitzi Newhouse, which is the beautiful jewel theater in the basement of Lincoln Center.

Alec Baldwin: How many seats?

Jon Robin Baitz: 299, I think.

Alec Baldwin: Small.

Jon Robin Baitz: Small, intimate, and in fact, even claustrophobic. What happened was Joe Mantello, who directed it, immediately had a sense of, of having to build space around things and that, once it moved in the transfer. I actually believe the play got better in its move. It just all came together in some way. I did a little work on the play, and –

Alec Baldwin: For example, what work did you do?

Jon Robin Baitz: I worked a little bit on the ending of the play, the last few minutes of the play.

Alec Baldwin: It went so well off-Broadway in Lincoln Center. When you do that kind of thing, what is it that propels you to do that?

Jon Robin Baitz: It’s just the knowledge that there’s more to mine from it. And mostly it was, you know, Joe’s great sort of probing sense of, “I think there’s a deeper truth there. I think we’ve glossed over something or skipped over something.”

Alec Baldwin: You have a success now on Broadway that if I’m – I could be mistaken, but it’s been a while since you had it to this level. This is like Substance of Fire again, you know, where you had great, great notices and people said wonderful things about your career and your future. That was 20 years ago.

Jon Robin Baitz: I know.

Alec Baldwin: When you look back on some of your plays, would you change them?

Jon Robin Baitz: I can’t. I just have to keep moving forward. I, I can’t do it. I know that people do, but you know, I can’t fight old wars. I would find it disablingly backwards-looking for myself to go back. I think some of my plays have been, uh, less successful to me than others, and to me it’s all been about the process of getting to the next play or getting to the next day. This play, though, at the core of it, it comes out of trying to understand the ways in which people collapse, even though the subject is not necessarily depression.

Alec Baldwin: Uhuh. I want to take two plays – Substance of Fire, Sullivan directed, and now you’re on Broadway and had been at the Mitzi with Other Desert Cities, and Joe directed. Compare and contrast Sullivan with Joe in terms of their directing types.

Jon Robin Baitz: They’re, they’re very similar.

Alec Baldwin: They are?

Jon Robin Baitz: They are meticulous. Meticulous miniaturists with big, expansive visions of what logic and a world are comprised of. They’re both indefatigable. They never give up. They live and breathe it. Their approaches are very different. Dan has a kind of almost holistic view of, of the logic of a play, and Joe, because – I don’t know, maybe because he was an actor for a long time, even though Dan had been an actor – Joe looks for a different kind of character logic.

He’s always asking, “And what happens next dramaturgically?” He’s very much about the engine and the motor. And Dan is – well, he’s also actually – he’s actually all – they’re so similar that it’s only a matter of their temperaments that are different.

Alec Baldwin: How are they different?

Jon Robin Baitz: Dan is –

Alec Baldwin: A priest.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah – he’s more Jesuitical.

Alec Baldwin: Yeah, and Mantello was what –

Jon Robin Baitz: Uh-

Alec Baldwin: To the extent that you want to say?

Jon Robin Baitz: He’s passionately, passionately dedicated to leaving no stone unturned. And I think one of the reasons he went back to acting this last year, did The Normal Heart on Broadway, and I think it’s because he had to re-experience the, the sort of dynamic of what it means to be an actor. To get under the skin of the experience and find out what kind of communicator he is with actors by acting again. Dan has a, a kind of remove about him, and Joe tends to delve, oh sort of with sword kind of play –

Alec Baldwin: More visceral.

Jon Robin Baitz: Deep into the play – yeah. What they both have in common is real rigor about their work ethic and their intellectual understanding of a subject, of a world.

Alec Baldwin: Sometimes, although it’s not always useful, I divide directors between directors that you want to please ’cause you want them to like you, and directors that you want to please ’cause you don’t want them to hate you. And I don’t think I need to tell you which one would be which in this case, you know, ’cause Joe seems so intense; just seems so smoldering all the time.

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, he –

Alec Baldwin: Is he?

Jon Robin Baitz: No. He wants you to show him. He doesn’t want to have to tell you what to do. He wants you to bring something amazing to the table every day. It’s why one loves, for instance, our mutual friend, Nathan –

Alec Baldwin: Right.

Jon Robin Baitz: Nathan Lane – because every day he brings something new – what they call a “money player.”

Alec Baldwin: Many people, I think, don’t understand this is not always the case. That the theatrical experience – movies are very, very different – when you work with a director in the theater, a lot of them don’t tell you this or that. They edit. You know, the most famous example, who I love, is Joey Tillinger, who Tillinger basically says nothing for the, for the three weeks, and then in the last week, he selects.

Jon Robin Baitz: Mm-hmm.

Alec Baldwin: My recollection of Joey was it was three weeks of me doing something. I’d say, “What do you think,” he would say, “What do you think, baby – do you think it works?”

Jon Robin Baitz: I just – I can’t do it that way. I see it as all about stripping away and finding the kind of improvisatory freedom that’s locked in the text, and that involves a combination of savviness and analysis and getting off book really fast, and being able to move around really fast. And then setting up –

Alec Baldwin: Joe, I’m told, is a stickler for that: “Get off book” -

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, you can’t –

Alec Baldwin: Because nothing really happens until you do.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s difficult.

Alec Baldwin: Well, especially in a world now where, as I recall, you used to have five weeks of rehearsal for a straight play. We’ve gone to a four-week rehearsal. Four weeks – that goes by like, like you sneeze.

Jon Robin Baitz: I like shorter rehearsals. With Bob Falls, another great director, I did Three Hotels this last summer at Williamstown, with Maura Tierney and Steven Weber, and they had two and a half weeks. Everything is dangerous at two and a half weeks.

Alec Baldwin: Tell me about when a play like Substance of Fire – how did that come to you?

Jon Robin Baitz: You know, it’s interesting, because that play and this play share something in common: they came out of despair. They both came out of trying to write myself out of a kind of real sense of despondency and loss.

Alec Baldwin: And to the extent you want to talk about it, what was the despondency back in ’91?

Jon Robin Baitz: I had been working on a play for a long time that was, eventually became, a, a play called A Fair Country, but at the time it was called Dutch Landscape. And I worked on it – impossible play to do when you’re young, about growing up. Did it at the Taper in Los Angeles, and I lost the play. I actually lost it, you know, in rehearsal, in development. Through nobody’s fault, you know; certainly not Gordon Davidson’s, who directed it. If anybody was at fault, if you can even use that word – ’cause it’s, it’s theater – it was me.

I was just in despair over how did I let this happen to me? I used to work at Book Soup in Hollywood, and I borrowed the office above Book Soup to try and figure out – you know, I was no longer working there. So I was sitting up in this office above the store, and I was surrounded by books, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, I’ve read all of you. I’ve read you, you, you, you, you, you. And none of you did me any good whatsoever. I don’t know how to fight.” First line of Substance of Fire is “Look at all these books.”

The play is about learning how to fight, and articulating the things you need; articulating the ways in which you have to express yourself in order to somehow achieve a kind of victory that goes beyond words.

Alec Baldwin: What’s Isaac’s victory?

Jon Robin Baitz: Isaac doesn’t really have a victory, in an odd kind of way. He goes down with his own ship, but he’s unyielding, and I think I tried to learn how to be unyielding in writing that play. It didn’t do me much good.

Alec Baldwin: Why?

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, because life is life and plays are plays, and you can’t actually learn that much by writing them. You have to live.

Alec Baldwin: Do you find that in the ensuing years, you wind up going up against things that just crush you so –

Jon Robin Baitz: Totally.

Alec Baldwin: Right – they crush you –

Jon Robin Baitz: Crush you.

Alec Baldwin: And you realize that – I’m not going to compare battles with television networks with going through the Holocaust. But on the other hand, the Isaac character – there are some people who they are just incapable of the happiness that leads to real intimacy ’cause there’s something they just cannot get over.

Jon Robin Baitz: I think it’s very true – totally true, that character. And in his case, he has very little choice. He’s locked in battle with this melancholia –

Jon Robin Baitz: That won’t lift.

Alec Baldwin: Right – which I think people don’t have a real honest understanding about. They don’t know what it’s like to be betrayed on like the ninth level – you know, something really hideous.

Jon Robin Baitz: I think despair is – the dimensions of one’s despair are so difficult to quantify, so difficult to paint, so difficult to expose, and it’s such a huge subject. Certainly, Other Desert Cities is steeped in despair. You know, you say, talk about network battles, but I had – I sort of, you know, was ejected from my one adventure in television, up to that point. I was creating Brothers and Sisters, and it was a very unhappy, very difficult experience for me. And again, at the end of that thing, I sort of – I came back East, you know, after having been West for a little bit.

Alec Baldwin: And what was the first thing you wrote after that?

Jon Robin Baitz: There are three plays in my drawer because I, I, I had forgotten how to write. This is the thing I think about with Other Desert Cities is it’s the play where I learned, I taught myself how to write again, because I was so used to writing to please people.

Alec Baldwin: What happened with ABC?

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, first of all, networks being what they are, the people who commissioned the piece and who are invested in putting it on the air end up leaving.

Alec Baldwin: Sure.

Jon Robin Baitz: And so you’re left with a kind of, in a kind of –

Alec Baldwin: Stepparents.

Jon Robin Baitz: And not necessarily particularly –

Alec Baldwin: Caring, supportive stepparents.

Jon Robin Baitz: Slightly bewildered. I mean the, the, the guy who really ran the entertainment division kept saying, “I don’t understand why anybody watches this show.” And I would say the same thing, except for different reasons. I mean it was really – it was bizarre.

Alec Baldwin: But how soon into –

Jon Robin Baitz: He would call me and scream at me. I actually said to him, “I don’t know who you think you’re talking to” –

Alec Baldwin: Yeah.

Jon Robin Baitz: And I would, you know, politely hang up and say, “I’m leaving the conversation now.” At one point I said to them, “Don’t you feel like there’s something wrong? I mean, look at this amazing cast: Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths, Ron Rifkin, Patty Wettig, on and on and on. Don’t you think there should be some higher intention, some integrity, maybe some – I don’t know – do you want, do you want to try and get an Emmy or something?”

I didn’t even know how to speak their language, but I thought Emmy would be something that they would recognize. And the literal quote from the head of the studio was: “No, I don’t need awards. The ratings are good enough for me.”

Alec Baldwin: This happens in the first season.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah.

Alec Baldwin: The first season.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah.

Alec Baldwin: And you are gone after how many seasons – after the first season?

Jon Robin Baitz: Oh, yeah.

Alec Baldwin: So all this takes place in one television season.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yes.

Alec Baldwin: One nine-month period.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yes.

Alec Baldwin: Hard to believe.

Jon Robin Baitz: You know, someone comes in to sort of manage the show, and they’re beholden to the network and the studio, as they should be. And I’m beholden to an esthetic, and I’m an idiot for being beholden to an esthetic. But you know, people love the show; it went on for another four seasons after that.

Alec Baldwin: And you maintained some participation in the show, yes?

Jon Robin Baitz: No, no, no.

Alec Baldwin: How was that possible? You created the show. You were the creator of the show, correct?

Jon Robin Baitz: There was a writers’ strike, and there was a force majeure clause – force majeure being act of God. The studio network could use that clause to nullify any contract they had with anybody they like. I had been very vocal during that strike about what I considered at the time the very unhealthy dynamic between the producers and the Writers’ Guild, and I wrote about this way too much.

Alec Baldwin: What was the name of those blogs you wrote on Huffington Post?

Jon Robin Baitz: Leaving L.A?

Alec Baldwin: Leaving, yeah.

Jon Robin Baitz: A lot of them were very insanely painful, and actually lead to, again, Other Desert Cities. The girl in the play can’t stop writing about things that affected other people.

Alec Baldwin: Right.

Jon Robin Baitz: And –

Alec Baldwin: She wants some truth.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah, and then she’s left with the debris. So it all came out of, you know, I pick up the phone one day, and I see that, you know, people’s deals were being canceled, but they’re people who haven’t made anything, and I, I, suddenly I’m, I was gone. And I even before that wasn’t sure to what extent I was ever going to go back. I knew I would have some involvement, but then I had none whatsoever.

Alec Baldwin: But for me, what’s curious – and again, you don’t have to answer this question. I’m just curious – which is as the creator of a television show, there is typically a windfall for that person as the creator of that show. If that was taken away from you through some contractual sleight-of-hand, where did all that go? All went to the network – they took it all for themselves?

Jon Robin Baitz: I can’t speak to that. I’m just not going to talk about that.

Alec Baldwin: Okay. Okay.

Jon Robin Baitz: But I am going to say that I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it would’ve been dirty money.

Alec Baldwin: Right.

Jon Robin Baitz: I think it would’ve destroyed me, in some way. To have no pride in the thing that made me wealthy would’ve made me terribly uncomfortable, and I would’ve felt that I’d betrayed whatever promise or potential I’d set up for myself as a writer. That if I was going to survive at it, it couldn’t be compromised.

[Music playing]

Alec Baldwin: This is Alec Baldwin, and I’m talking with playwright Jon Robin Baitz – more in a minute.

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[Music playing]

Alec Baldwin: This is Alec Baldwin, and you’re listening to Here’s the Thing. The idea for Jon Robin Baitz’s new play, Other Desert Cities, came to him when he was back on the East Coast.

Jon Robin Baitz: I was sitting at a beach with my notebook, and I’m thinking about how to get back into it and what matters to me, and I just sort of self-destructed at Brothers and Sisters. I had written about personal events that implicated other people in some way, that I hadn’t taken into account the consequences, and I found myself very much like the character in my play, played by Beth Marvel and Rachel Griffiths at various points: a writer who is a dangerous creature.

And I had a note to myself, “play about daughter of a famous family who writes a book about her growing up in this family,” something like that; “the danger of telling the truth that turns out to be a lie.” And at that moment, this lady of a certain age walked by me, and she looked to me like, um, Pat Buckley, the old doyenne of New York conservative politics, the wife of, uh –

Alec Baldwin: Bill Buckley.

Jon Robin Baitz: Bill Buckley. And I’d had lunch with her once, and found her to be charming and engaged, and this woman walked by me on this beach with her hat, and in a one-piece bathing suit. I immediately felt the mother in that play, and I suddenly remembered old California, the way it was when I was a kid. And we were just in the throes of an election at the time, too, or about to be.

And the Republicans of – certainly of that period, and even more so today, were very confusing to me, because they didn’t seem recognizable to me as having a coherent, cohesive, cogent argument for their principled positions, which had to be principled in some way. The play just came together in one fell swoop. Old California conservatives –

Alec Baldwin: Yeah – Reaganites.

Jon Robin Baitz: The old Hollywood system, Reaganites. I even remembered I’d gone to high school with I think the daughter of John Gavin, and I thought, you know, ’cause I love Touch of Evil, and I think – isn’t John Gavin – no, he’s not in Touch of Evil. He’s in –

Alec Baldwin: Psycho.

Jon Robin Baitz: He’s in all these movies, and I thought about –

Alec Baldwin: He was the Ambassador to Mexico.

Jon Robin Baitz: That’s right, as is the Stacy Keach character in my play. And I thought about –

Alec Baldwin: [Laughter] Your character’s based on John Gavin.

Jon Robin Baitz: To some extent – there are all these archetypes in there.

Alec Baldwin: No, I love it.

Jon Robin Baitz: At the back of all this, of course, there’s also Joe Mantello, who, you know, we’re no longer a couple, but he’s my family, my best friend, and all that.

Alec Baldwin: And you ceased being a couple what year?

Jon Robin Baitz: 2002?

Alec Baldwin: So it was a while.

Jon Robin Baitz: And he kept saying to me, “With all possible respect, nobody’s waiting for the next Robbie Baitz play.” And you know these are chilling words, because I have so much to say and it’s not coming out.

Alec Baldwin: My equivalent of that is my agent said to me – he goes, 'It’s not that these people don’t want to hire you ’cause they don’t like you.' He says, 'They don’t want to hire you because they don’t think of you at all.'

Jon Robin Baitz: Jesus.

Alec Baldwin: And I thought, 'Wow.'

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, it’s terrible, because the worst thing that can happen to an artist: 'I’m invisible.'

Alec Baldwin: Sure.

Jon Robin Baitz: 'I no longer matter.'

Alec Baldwin: Yeah.

Jon Robin Baitz: For me, writing plays has always been very tricky. I don’t know a lot – I don’t have a lot to say. I reach things very slowly, and I – I sometimes it seems facile, and easy, and to me, sometimes my thoughts and my sort of expressed opinions in plays seem hollow or naïve, even.

Alec Baldwin: Why?

Jon Robin Baitz: Because I know there are deeper truths always to be found, and that I’m –

Alec Baldwin: But don’t you think that seeking them and being aware of that makes you more likely to find it than anybody else? You didn’t go to college, did you?

Jon Robin Baitz: No, I didn’t.

Alec Baldwin: Why? You wound up educating yourself.

Jon Robin Baitz: I wish I’d gone to college. I was –

Alec Baldwin: Why didn’t you?

Jon Robin Baitz: I was a depressed and unsettled kid, and –

Alec Baldwin: Why?

Jon Robin Baitz: I don’t – I think I wasn’t at peace with probably any element of who I was, whether it was a sort of nascent intellectual, or sort of pre-expressive homosexual kid, or –

Alec Baldwin: You grew up where?

Jon Robin Baitz: Variously, L.A.

Alec Baldwin: You were born where?

Jon Robin Baitz: In L.A.

Alec Baldwin: And you lived there till you were how old?

Jon Robin Baitz: Seven, then Brazil for three years, in Rio, and then South Africa for six and a half years, till I was 18.

Alec Baldwin: And your father was in the condensed milk business.

Jon Robin Baitz: My father worked for a giant multinational, Carnation Milk, yeah. He was in the condensed milk business.

Alec Baldwin: Well, so L.A., Brazil, South Africa –

Jon Robin Baitz: And then back to L.A.

Alec Baldwin: Back to L.A. And when you finally get back to L.A., how old are you?

Jon Robin Baitz: 18.

Alec Baldwin: So high school’s over.

Jon Robin Baitz: I just finished high school. I sort of lost time through all the travel.

Alec Baldwin: What was high school in South Africa like?

Jon Robin Baitz: I couldn’t get used to things like cricket and corporal punishment. You know, you get caned for like not doing well on a spelling test – literally caned. And I think I was so busy trying to be sly and charming, that I forgot how to be me; that I think led me to rebel against learning itself. So I was sort of interested in the few things I was interested in – literature, history – but I wouldn’t apply myself to anything except escape. And part of escape meant not going to college. I was really lonely, and I kind of became a depressed kid, and –

Alec Baldwin: How’d that manifest itself, if you can say?

Jon Robin Baitz: I think I –

Alec Baldwin: Did you know you were gay then?

Jon Robin Baitz: Yes, I definitely knew that. I knew –

Alec Baldwin: Did that add to your depression? Did it make you feel more isolated?

Jon Robin Baitz: Totally.

Alec Baldwin: In the environment you were living in. So it wasn’t so proactive, the gay community there.

Jon Robin Baitz: In 1973?

Alec Baldwin: Talk about getting caned.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah, well. I think my parents, who loved me very much, were distracted by their own terrors. There are certain families that are born in terror, and live in terror. Um.

Alec Baldwin: Conceived in terror. I need you to write a play for me. I want it to be called Conceived in Terror. Go ahead.

Jon Robin Baitz: Well, no – I mean Death of a Salesman is a family that lives in terror.

Alec Baldwin: Right. You were how old when you arrived in Durban?

Jon Robin Baitz: Ten.

Alec Baldwin: So you were there eight years.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah, I was there almost eight years.

Alec Baldwin: A critical time – ten years old – so all of your real back half of your childhood, your teenage years especially, you are in Durban.

Jon Robin Baitz: I guess I was 17 or something when we left.

Alec Baldwin: But you had finished the high school program.

Jon Robin Baitz: No, no, I finished it in L.A.

Alec Baldwin: You did.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah.

Alec Baldwin: Where?

Jon Robin Baitz: Beverly Hills High School.

Alec Baldwin: What was that like?

Jon Robin Baitz: I, you know, was the only kid I knew who rode their bike to school, because everybody else’s parents had given them a Fiat.

Alec Baldwin: Literally.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah, or something.

Alec Baldwin: Who were your friends, then – who – did you become friends with anyone?

Jon Robin Baitz: Oh, yeah. In fact, Jenny Livingston went on to make Paris is Burning, a great documentary; Tina Landau, a great theater director; Gina Gershon, my oldest friend from high school – we were in plays together in the drama department. So I became friends with – and I say this with real respect and love – with fellow freaks.

Alec Baldwin: How were you feeling about yourself and about life that last year in Beverly Hills?

Jon Robin Baitz: I think I was scared to death, still. I mean it was just a new form of foreignness, but it had the patent of something very familiar to me. But, you know, I remember being taken to a party really early on, and I had developed a kind of weird eye beforehand for art – I thought maybe I was going to be a painter or an artist or - And I walk into this house, and there is a giant David Hockney, and next to it is a giant Motherwell.

I’m standing in front of this giant painting that’s famous that I’ve looked at in books – Thames and Hudson art books – while I was in Durban at the art library of the university. I don’t know – the world was just very real and different. And it was easier to like have sex, and it was easier to, to function.

Alec Baldwin: Were you writing?

Jon Robin Baitz: I guess I was sort of writing, yeah.

Alec Baldwin: What were you writing?

Jon Robin Baitz: I was writing really bad short stories about alienated Paul Bowles kids, adrift in foreign countries – just basically, to tell you the truth, still what I’m doing. It just looks slightly – the wallpaper’s prettier now.

Alec Baldwin: Where were you living at that age?

Jon Robin Baitz: I was living on friends’ sofas – like the parents of children I went to high school with took pity.

Alec Baldwin: You were the beloved house guest.

Jon Robin Baitz: I was. I was just this freak, you know, and I was at odds with my family at the time, you know, and I had escaped, and it was just a nightmare.

Alec Baldwin: How do we get from there to Fair Country, Gordon Davidson?

Jon Robin Baitz: You know in Pinocchio where he falls in with actors?

Alec Baldwin: Mm-hmm.

Jon Robin Baitz: I’m walking around. I ran into this girl I knew from high school. She said, 'What are you doing,' and 'I’m sort of looking for a job. I think I’m starving to death; I’m not sure.' She said to me – and I should’ve known – she said, 'Well, my father just fired me. He needs a new assistant. [Laughter] He needs a new assistant.' And I was like, 'Well, what does he do,' and she said, 'Oh, he’s a film producer.'

Alec Baldwin: Who was the film producer?

Jon Robin Baitz: This great guy, and he [laughter] –

Alec Baldwin: Was he a working producer? I’m only asking for a name to make it easy.

Jon Robin Baitz: So I thought.

Alec Baldwin: Right.

Jon Robin Baitz: My first day at the office, he says to me, 'Whatever you do, answer the phones, but never pick up the phone.' And I was like, 'I don’t even know what that means.' And he said, 'You’ll do fine.' And he had a gang of cronies, all of whom had contempt for the studio system and had worked around the edges of it or in it, had done well, fallen out of favor; usually had destroyed themselves through my favorite thing, their own ambivalence. I found myself at home for the first time in my life. [Laughter]

Alec Baldwin: Within a nest of scorpions.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yes, I did – I found myself – I said, 'This, I know;' yeah, because nobody is trying to pass.

Alec Baldwin: Yeah.

Jon Robin Baitz: It’s a den of thieves, quite literally.

Alec Baldwin: Where you hit the ball here.

Jon Robin Baitz: It was still the days of speakerphone, and they would have fights. They had a tower on Sunset Boulevard. They had a nest of rooms in a tower, and they would be fighting with each other, and then there would suddenly be a pause. Someone would say, 'Geez, if you could see what I see right now, that girl walking down Sunset. She is so beautiful.' The fight was over.

Alec Baldwin: Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Robin Baitz: Nothing meant anything.

Alec Baldwin: The narcotic of sex.

Jon Robin Baitz: That’s right. One of them asked for a glass of water – this is my first few weeks there – 1982, what do I know? I would go to the sink, bring a class of water, he’d spit it out, like practically on me, and say, 'This isn’t water.' And I would say, 'Yes, it’s water – what are you talking about? That’s water.' And he’d say, 'I want professional water.' And the whole time became about professional water.

Alec Baldwin: How long did that last?

Jon Robin Baitz: Three, four, five – like four-some years?

Alec Baldwin: No.

Jon Robin Baitz: No, but it got –

Alec Baldwin: You were in the scorpion’s nest looking down at the women’s asses for four years?

Jon Robin Baitz: And I would copy everything down.

Alec Baldwin: Right.

Jon Robin Baitz: And so at the same time I started hanging around with these actors, there was a sort of – an equally desperate contingent of avant- gardiste odd playwrights out there in L.A., living on the fringes of everything. And so I lived between these two worlds, one of which was sort of drunk and druggie, and the other was insane, megalomaniac- oh, I can’t say the word.

Alec Baldwin: Megalomaniacal.

Jon Robin Baitz: Thank you – megalomaniacal.

Alec Baldwin: That’s what I’m here for. You just think of the words, and I’ll say them. Go ahead.

Jon Robin Baitz: Thank you.

Alec Baldwin: You know, we’re going to beam each other – go ahead.

Jon Robin Baitz: I know it’s like Bluetooth without the technology.

Alec Baldwin: Bluetooth me – go ahead.

Jon Robin Baitz: I had to come up with a play for one of these sort of workshop things that we would put together, and one of these playwrights said to me, 'So what’s your play?' And me, bullshitting – which is something I just did – I said, 'Yeah, it’s called Mizlansky/Zilinsky' – on the spot. I just came up with the name.

Alec Baldwin: Based on those guys.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah. I said, 'Yeah, it’s called Mizlansky/Zilinsky. It’s just' –

Alec Baldwin: You based it on the guys in the tower.

Jon Robin Baitz: I said, 'It’s just them talking.' And I put all my notes together and we did it, and –

Alec Baldwin: That was the first one you wrote.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah.

Alec Baldwin: Now you’re on Broadway. The show’s a big success. People have said wonderful things about the show. I worship Stacy. I mean I worship Stacy.

Jon Robin Baitz: He’s a – he is –

Alec Baldwin: One of the great wild mustangs of all theater history. And in this piece, it is that Reagan crowd, it is that Bush crowd, it is that blue-blood Republican crowd, the conservative crowd.

Jon Robin Baitz: Stacy captures that – I wrote the part for him.

Alec Baldwin: He does. You wrote the part for him.

Jon Robin Baitz: Oh, yeah. I knew that there was nobody who could capture that better, ever. We’d worked together before. He’d done Ten Unknowns at the Taper, and it was a revelation to me.

Alec Baldwin: ’Cause the character has to have a dignity as well.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah.

Alec Baldwin: Stacy brings in a guy, we sit there and go, 'I get it. I would’ve followed him. I wanted him around.'

Jon Robin Baitz: He’s great, and I love him so much. You know, he and Joe didn’t know each other, and so they got on the phone before rehearsal. And Stacy says to Joe, 'You know, I’ve worked with Robbie before. We’ve worked together before, and I, I know him well, and do you, do you know him? Have you worked with him? And, how well do you know him?' And Joe says, 'I kind of know him. I mean we lived together for 12 years.' [Laughter] But that’s Stacy.

Alec Baldwin: Kind of know.

Jon Robin Baitz: He’s like, 'Oh, damn.' The great thing about Stacy is he brings centuries of actors’ honor onto that stage with him; the honor of honoring fellow actors, the honor of listening, the privilege of being an actor, the privilege of being in the theater. Not missing a single show; in his 70s; the rituals of it. The privilege of working in the theater is the thing that has been – of everything that’s happened to me – just the great honor of being in the American theater in some capacity is what I’m left with; that it’s a privilege to be in it. I’m lucky to have found my way back to it.

Alec Baldwin: What’s institutionalized in working in the theater is a hunt for truth.

Jon Robin Baitz: Totally.

Alec Baldwin: That doesn’t exist in the movie business and the television business.

Jon Robin Baitz: No.

Alec Baldwin: Do you know what you’re doing next? Are you onto something now that you’re writing?

Jon Robin Baitz: Who knows? I can’t tell yet.

Alec Baldwin: You can’t?

Jon Robin Baitz: I just can’t tell.

[Music playing]

Alec Baldwin: You’re scribbling.

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah.

Alec Baldwin: You’re scribbling.

Jon Robin Baitz: I’m supposed to be doing things. I’m a mess at all times.

Alec Baldwin: Jon Robin Baitz says he feels like more of a grown-up as of late. When he started out in L.A., he was couch-surfing at the homes of his friends’ parents. Things are different now.

Jon Robin Baitz: I have a home. I grow stuff. I’m responsible to people.

Alec Baldwin: To the dog.

Jon Robin Baitz: I have a dog. He has three legs.

Alec Baldwin: What’s the dog’s name?

Jon Robin Baitz: Trip.

Alec Baldwin: Trip?

Jon Robin Baitz: Yeah. He has three legs. He’s a great dog.

Alec Baldwin: This is Alec Baldwin. Here’s the Thing is produced by WNYC Radio.

[End of Audio]