Directing Romeo and Juliet, with Sam Gold

BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music fades]

Well, you might not have noticed it, but it has been a really Romeo and Juliet year. Shakespeare’s Globe kicked 2024 off with a modern-dress production. Then Tom Holland played Romeo in London’s West End. Then there was Diane Paulus’s production at A.R.T. And Folger Theatre launched its current season with the star-crossed lovers as well.

And, of course, the jukebox musical & Juliet is still rolling along on Broadway. That show picks up where Shakespeare’s play left off and sets its action to the music of pop super-producer Max Martin.

[CLIP from & Juliet, “Baby One More Time”.]

SINGER:
When I’m not with you, I lose my mind
Give me a sign
Hit me, baby, one more time

Now, along comes another production of Romeo and Juliet, also on Broadway. This one stars Kit Connor as Romeo and Rachel Zegler as Juliet, with music by another pop super-producer, Jack Antonoff.

Here’s Zegler as Juliet singing Antonoff’s song, “Man of the House.”

[CLIP from Romeo and Juliet, “Man of the House”, sung by Rachel Zegler.]

RACHEL ZEGLER:
Do you have doubts?
I curse your name
It brought me pain
And now
Without you I don’t know how to be
Hurts so bad it brings me to my knees

As you’ve probably already caught on, this Romeo and Juliet has a very contemporary vibe—much more Bushwick than Verona.

The director is Sam Gold. Gold is probably best known for his work with contemporary playwrights like Annie Baker and Lisa Kron. But over the last 8 years, Gold has taken on five of Shakespeare’s tragedies: Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and now Romeo and Juliet.

———————

BARBARA BOGAEV: Hey, Sam Gold.

SAM GOLD: Hello, hi.

BOGAEV: It’s great to have you on the podcast.

GOLD: Thanks for having me.

BOGAEV: So, I’m looking back over your past eight years, and you have just immersed yourself in Shakespeare’s tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear. So, as you were working your way through them, was Romeo and Juliet always in your sights?

GOLD: Yeah, I definitely wanted to do the five major tragedies. The order of them was based on actors and opportunities and things but I knew I wanted to go through them all.

I had been the assistant on a Shakespeare in the Park Romeo and Juliet and just fell in love with the poetry. It’s a young Shakespeare and he has a sort of more excited, youthful relationship to the poetry—more rhymes, more wit, more fun than some of the later tragedies—so, it was, it was a fun one.

BOGAEV: Do you remember who your Romeo and Juliet were?

GOLD: Oh, yeah, very much so. It was Lauren Ambrose and Oscar Isaac.

BOGAEV: Right! Oh, fantastic. What a fantastic pair. I wish I had seen that. So, in this 20 years, if it was maybe in the back of your head, were you kind of casting it?

GOLD: No, I don’t think so. Romeo and Juliet isn’t a play that—I think because they’re so young it’s not like you’re sitting there thinking a ton about, you know, “Oh my god, I want to see Mark Rylance’s Romeo,” you know?

In a way, it’s more of a director’s piece, you know? What is the world? Who are the two households? It’s so physical. It’s got so much momentum. It moves so fast there’s a lot of world building. There’s a lot of moving from comedy to tragedy and back, you know? Crazy tonal shifts. It’s got a lot that’s just fun for a director. So, I think that’s a bit more where I was at. I was like, “This would be really fun for me to stage.”

BOGAEV: Okay, that’s cool. I want to talk about world building in a second, but you said somewhere that the first line of Romeo and Juliet—“Two households both alike in dignity”—had been going through your head for years. Obviously, it speaks to political polarization, I guess, but what did the phrase conjure for you that it was so sticky in your brain?

GOLD: Yeah, I think what it meant to me was we’re more alike than we are different. Even when Shakespeare wrote it—it’s a famous story, you know, he based the play on a known story—the idea that there are these two warring factions and that kids from both sides fall in love with each other, it’s a beautiful old idea. That the first line is, “These two households are both alike”—starting there felt very powerful to me. Living in a world where we keep, you know, kids keep inheriting the violence of their parents’ generation.

BOGAEV: That’s interesting to me because other directors play up different kinds of ideas like income disparity between the Capulets and the Montagues and they stage it as a feud between the haves and have-nots. I’ve seen a lot of those. More than one of our guests here has taken issue with that spin on an adaptation because Shakespeare does make such a point of saying that they’re equals and that there’s no reason for this ancient feud that’s “bred of an airy word,” which just perpetuates a cycle of senseless violence. Was that a sticking point for you too? Like, it has to—they have to be equal.

GOLD: No, I mean I’m very much of the opinion with these plays that they’re very malleable and that there’s a lot of right answers. I mean, I think West Side Story is an amazing, amazing production of Romeo and Juliet. So, the idea of using the text to explore two different communities and how those communities interact, I think, is very valid.

It just wasn’t what I was emotionally lit up by in the moments where I was launching the production. What I was lit up by was the feeling that we’ve become so polarized that we have to pledge allegiance to our side and there’s a lot less room for nuance and understanding people who feel differently than you. That, to me, feels like a recipe for disaster.

When I would think about the play, it really lit up those ideas that just because your parents have told you this person is an enemy, or your friends on Instagram have told you to feel this way, not that way, that maybe cosmic forces bring us together more. You know, we could all use a dose of that hope.

BOGAEV: Yeah, don’t close your heart. I think you feel that in this production.

Alright, so world building. Where did you start with this play? Maybe you started there, but in terms of, you know, a director’s world building, how do you see it with fresh eyes? Because this is the one Shakespeare play, we all probably know best.

GOLD: Well, I wanted a really young cast. I had the feeling that, you know, I’d like to know what people who are the age of the characters in the play, what are they making of the world and what do they make of the generation that, sort of, has created the rules they have to live by?

So, the way I really started was thinking about double casting. Thinking about how could I get a group of very young actors and do the whole play with them. That was a lot of work, and it took me a long time to figure out. It actually, the play doesn’t—didn’t divide up as easily as I wanted it to, like, it wasn’t as symmetrical in the double casting as I kind of wanted it to be. So, it took a while to kind of wrestle with how best to tell the story with this young company of actors and how should they double.

I kind of came to a philosophical idea that I’m sure doesn’t come through in the production, doesn’t need to, but the idea was that each actor would get two opposites to play, because the play is so filled with opposites, that we’d have the doubling of the Nurse in Tybalt, so, the person who nurtures and the person that resorts to violence, so, these two opposites.

BOGAEV: And Lady and Lord Capulet.

GOLD: Lady and Lord Capulet, so, like, sort of, mom and dad, masculinity and femininity, sort of, splitting things that way. And then Paris and Peter, so, sort of the rich and powerful and the kind of servant class.

So, I sort of started thinking of things that way and giving the actors this opportunity to kind of put on two different sides of the play, which was part of this idea of like, “We’re more alike than we are different.” What if you played both? Like, what if you could feel what it’s like to be this side of things and the other side of things and you got to embody both of them?

So, over the course of the evening it’s sort of a ritual in, kind of, exploring how we want to feel all these differences and that we’ve been taught to feel all these differences but by the end we can hopefully come together more than we were before the show.

BOGAEV: Oh wow, so everything kind of flowed from this initial idea, this impetus that you had, that we can come together. That’s so interesting. I was thinking that you came up as an actor actually, and through The Wooster Group, which is an ensemble that is experimental, and also very much about authenticity and just being real on stage, working together and organically growing something. So, is that how you work with your cast as well? It sounds that way from what you’re saying.

GOLD: Yeah, I really like ensembles. I like the feeling of an ensemble where the whole group has energy that they share with each other. And that, I feel like I like a show to come from that ensemble’s connection to each other. That was really important on this production.

Part of the reason for all the doubling was to sort of give the ensemble a kind of shared mission and then they’d kind of go from that shared mission to playing a few different roles within the evening.

BOGAEV: Okay, let’s give people something to visualize because they haven’t seen the play and we’re very abstract here. So, let’s talk about staging because the beginning of a play is so critical.

You create this soft start for this production. You have much of the cast hanging out on stage as the audience enters the theater and gets seated, and the cast, they’re drinking and they’re vaping, I guess, and they’re wearing Hello Kitty backpacks and there’s a shopping cart full of stuffed animals.

So, you’re sitting down in the audience and you’re thinking, “Okay, the setting for this Romeo and Juliet is kind of a warehouse rave or a club scene.” There’s thumping bass, club music and then Gabby Beans—your actor who plays three parts, the Friar and Mercutio, she plays them, and she’s also the prince, as kind of the narrator of your Romeo and Juliet—she arrives with a handheld mic and calls out the cast and the roles the way a lead singer introduces band members at a concert, I guess.

So, what was this conversation around this beginning? How did it come about and what were you going for?

GOLD: Yeah, well, I wanted the audience to receive the evening more like they would receive a concert. I was really intending for young people to connect to the show and the generation that I was really aiming the show to has a lot of experience going to a live event as a concert, but less so to a play, and I was borrowing from that a bit.

I wanted also to focus on the ensemble and how they were connecting with each other. So, I wanted them to be in a space that felt like it would galvanize them. It would bring them towards each other, and it would make them want to tell this story eight times a week. It’s a story about two young people who commit suicide, and we watch that with the hope that the parents will learn something from the kid’s death about how to make a more just world.

I believe in live music for Shakespeare. His company used live music. I really like putting live music under Shakespeare because I think it helps audience members with what’s so abstract about a play in verse and about the heights of the emotions, which we’re not as used to in contemporary culture. So, I wanted there to be live music.

I wanted there to be a sense of a kind of collaborative energy, both between the cast members and each other, and between the cast members and the audience. I wanted the audience to feel welcomed.

A lot of people, especially the age group I was going for, I think they’re intimidated by Shakespeare. I wanted to start the show in a way that would say, “Hey, this is, this is for you. This is the way you experience live performance. We’re not going to try to tell you you’re not smart enough to understand Shakespeare. We’re here with you and for you, and we want you to be moved by this ritual.” So, that was kind of where the opening came from.

BOGAEV: And our audience, the one I was sitting in, was really young and it seemed to really work because it immediately communicated this isn’t school, this isn’t school, and this isn’t necessarily every other Broadway play. It seemed a lot of them hadn’t been to a Broadway play.

GOLD: Yeah, it was a lot of first-time theater goers, a lot of people who hadn’t encountered Shakespeare before or read it in their high school English class and had a very different opinion about it.

A lot of what I like to do with Shakespeare and with some other old texts is I like to kind of shake people’s expectations off at the beginning. Because when you have an old play, it comes with a lot of baggage that isn’t useful for the evening. You know, when you close your eyes and picture a Shakespeare production, you might be picturing something that isn’t actually going to connect you to this text in 2024.

As soon as you come in, there’s a DJ and there’s music blaring and the actors are hanging out eating gummy bears. I think you’re able to sort of immediately discard those expectations. And therefore I think you’re more open to actually hearing the story, actually really being in the present tense and not just hearing the story as an affirmation of the expectation you had going in, but as something you’ve never encountered before and you’re going to receive for the very first time and be taken to a place that you didn’t know you were going to be taken.

So, I’m hoping to really move people too, in an unexpected way, and so, I have a lot of, sort of, strategies to get people ready for that kind of, hopefully, transcendent experience.

BOGAEV: I was going to say in your Othello production with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig, you started the show just in total darkness and the actors are lying on mattresses with the audience surrounding them on three sides. And these very—you had laboriously made this special seating for the audience. And it really made you key into just the words, just the Shakespeare.

GOLD: Yeah, I had an idea. Othello was the first one that I did, and when I did it, I had this idea that all my Shakespeare productions would start in complete darkness so that the first thing the audience encountered was just the words. Because everyone, when they come see a Shakespeare production, there’s an amount of time before your brain starts translating for you.

BOGAEV: Oh yeah, it takes at least 10 minutes—for me, too.

GOLD: Yeah, there’s an amount of time where you’re still actively translating and then at a certain point your brain catches up and does that work subconsciously. So, I wanted to speed that up, and I really liked the idea of starting the play in darkness.

I did it again in my next Shakespeare, in Hamlet, but it turns out that those two plays are sort of uniquely suited to starting in the dark. You know Hamlet, the first line is, “Who’s there?” So, it makes sense that it’s dark.

And with Othello, I had the whole production was kind of centered around the idea that these were sort of soldiers having a PTSD kind of nightmare. So, the way the show started was you were sort of inside the barracks with these soldiers, as you mentioned, and at the beginning of the show, the actors got into bed, turned off the lights and went to sleep. And then in the darkness, the play started.

So yeah, I really liked starting the plays in the dark. But the next one I did was King Lear and Glenda Jackson just wouldn’t let me do it. I kind of gave up after that.

BOGAEV: Okay, I’m going to jump ahead to my Glenda Jackson question, because—which I was saving for the end—because I did interview Glenda Jackson. She was a wonderful guest on the program, but she’s a very intuitive actress and it’s hard for her to articulate what she does on stage, it just comes out of her. So, my question for you is, did you actually give her notes? I mean, it sounds like she just would not put up with—

GOLD: I mean, honestly, we fought and fought. She loved causing trouble, and it was great for her. You know, she was playing a really difficult character, right? And I mean that, like, I don’t mean just the Everest of playing Lear, I mean, she was playing a person who was very difficult, like it’s a character who’s got a lot of venom inside them, a difficult man. So, Glenda, there was a lot that fed that for Glenda, she could really let loose and that worked very well for the character.

But as I said, I like to make these ensemble shows, and that was antithetical to what Glenda was up to. She wanted to do her Lear. She wasn’t really particularly interested in what everybody else was doing. Honestly, Glenda would’ve been very happy if all of them kind of just stood in the wings and threw their lines in for her. So, that was a bit of a battle.

BOGAEV: Wow. I feel like I’ve just triggered your PTSD. So, I’m going to go back to Romeo and Juliet.

GOLD: I’ve never gone on the record with this, and this can be the time. She’s dead now, and I can tell you it was horrible.

BOGAEV: Just between you and me. Okay, so, music is, as you said, a big part of this production. You know, of course, your Juliet, Rachel Zegler, is known for her performance as Maria in the recent Spielberg remake of West Side Story.

You brought on musician and music producer Jack Antonoff to create the score—this was his first time on Broadway. He’s collaborated with so many musicians, you know, Taylor Swift and Lorde and St. Vincent and Harry Styles. I just imagine both of you immediately agreeing, like, you know, “No lutes. Nothing even vaguely like a spinet. Not a single reference to Elizabethan music, not even an ironic nod.” So, is that how it went down or did you, you know, not even, did it not even need to be said?

GOLD: We had a really fun initial conversations about what the vibe of the music would be and we settled quite early on these synthesizers that Jack loves using and making some electronic music. You know, we wanted the show to feel like these Gen Z kids had kind of stayed in the club after hours, you know, and put on Romeo and Juliet there after everybody else went home to sleep.

Jack and I have been talking for years about doing, you know… he’d been sort of flirting with doing Broadway for a long time, maybe doing a musical. We’d been talking and it was just obvious, it was like, “Romeo and Juliet, yes.”

As soon as I sort of pitched him the vibe of it, we made some musical references to each other and then he just started like playing stuff. He’s just like a kind of musical savant, right? Like, he can kind of just do anything. So, we would meet in his studio. He has a bunch of instruments there and as we were chatting he would just go over to this like Mellotron and start playing stuff and be like, “Kind of like this?” And I would say, “Yes, 100%.”

Then he just made music. He would be in rehearsal with us, and he would just make music while we were rehearsing. He would just like add music to the rehearsal room and so you could kind of just feel it, feel whether it’s right. You didn’t have to talk a lot because he just sort of knew from it being in the room.

BOGAEV: Okay, I want to talk about editing. That is such a brutal job when you adapt Shakespeare. A lot of directors come on the podcast and say it is brutal. Was it brutal for you? And what was your guiding principle or your through line?

GOLD: Oh, it was so fun to edit the play, and actually the easiest of the five that I’ve done. I did it early in the process, because I had the double casting, I felt like I needed to cut the play first to see what I really had.

It was a pretty easy play for me to cut because I just, I feel like at this point now, I can kind of read the play and be like, “Oh, this is the stuff that we won’t be sad to lose.”

You know, like Hamlet is much harder for me to cut and it shows. My production was four hours long. Romeo and Juliet‘s kind of easy to cut. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not that great in it. There’s a lot of plot explication and, you know, characters telling you what you’ve already seen and stuff that was important in Shakespeare’s time, but we make theater very differently now.

Shakespeare does a lot of theater setting the scene so that his plays could just be at the Globe Theatre and you can sort of know where you are. It’s all in the poetry. And, you know, contemporary theatre just works differently. There’s stuff that kind of you don’t need anymore because of that. So, I made the choice to streamline some things, especially in the second half of the play.

BOGAEV: You know what I really appreciated? Juliet’s lines often get decimated in Romeo and Juliet, particularly in movie adaptations. The ones that we, or at least I, grew up with.

GOLD: I barely touched Juliet because that’s the reason you’re there. You’re there for her mind. You’re there for the way she invents thought and language and to watch her kind of grow up over the course of the evening and start putting these things together. And I didn’t—that’s sort of the whole point of the night for me so I barely touched her. I didn’t touch Romeo very much either, you know. Like the major poetry, the major stuff between the two of them I kept.

BOGAEV: And that’s—and you really feel that, because she is the heart and the intellect, as you say, at the core of this play. She really understands what the stakes are, too.

You know, Romeo’s kind of, he’s just driven by passion, and your Romeo, Kit Conner, has such a beautiful fluency with Shakespearean language. I mean, the words and the rhythm just sound so natural and fresh coming out of his mouth, full of passion and youth. So, what was the process working with your two, with your Romeo and Juliet, in terms of the language?

GOLD: I was prepared for, like, the geekiest rehearsal process ever where we sat with 50 books and went through and talked about iambs and, you know, did all of the homework. But Kit and Rachel were, like, born to play these parts, dying to play them, worked so hard before they got there that they got into rehearsal, and they were just like launching. It was already happening. On the first day of rehearsal when we read it, the balcony scene was so good that I was like, “Oh, oh no, I can’t sit here and screw them up.”

BOGAEV: You just got out of their way, it sounds like.

GOLD: I did, yeah. I can’t take a ton of credit for either of them and their relationship to the poetry. They both have real facility with the language. They both have that innately. They both understood the characters, understood the way their characters used poetry. They both had really smart things to say about that and very specific, you know, like Kit’s Romeo is a very specific take on the character that just fits him very well and his use of language really fit his Romeo: the energy, the passion, the unbridled energy.

BOGAEV: The impulsiveness.

GOLD: The impulsiveness, the awkwardness. He found all of that in the language and knew how to use the language to play the character in the way he saw the guy. He really saw who Romeo is, like, “Oh I know this guy, I know how he thinks. I know what he would want in this moment. I know how he would go about it in this moment.” He really just identified with the character.

Rachel too. I mean, they both really just do have things about themselves in real life that remind me of their characters. It’s one of those great things where most of your job is just casting at that point.

BOGAEV: I love that you said that they just really nailed the balcony scene right away, because that was one of the few things actually that I could decipher from my notes from the night. He was especially good in the balcony scenes.

In your production, Juliet’s bed lowers down from the fly tower, the heavens, or the ceiling, and it remains suspended over the stage. Romeo gazes up at her from below until he does this wildly crowd-pleasing, athletic pull-up to the bed to kiss Juliet. So, how did that scene evolve in rehearsals?

GOLD: It’s a good story because that’s the thing that’s become a meme on the internet and is like the great directorial moment of the show—that was actually Rachel Zegler’s idea, not mine. As soon as Kit and Rachel got off stage at our final dress rehearsal, Rachel texted me, like, from walking off stage, “Tomorrow we have to kiss in the balcony,” which meant Kit had to kind of pull up his face to hers in that moment.

What I will say is before I even cast Kit, the idea of the production, you know, when we built—when we designed the set was that the bed was going to hover and that Romeo was going to be able to jump and catch the railing of the bed and suspend himself. That was sort of in the design. The bed was built to take that actor’s weight. Like, that was all done months and months in advance. So, we had sort of worked all that out.

The part that we hadn’t worked out was, I thought he would just be hanging there, and then Rachel was like, “You can’t have him just hang there. He needs to pull his body up to mine and kiss me.” So, that then happened starting preview one. The second it happened, like, the audience just freaked out. Like, people like, screamed for it. And I was like, “Uh oh.” So that was, yeah, that brilliant directorial choice was not mine.

BOGAEV: I’ve got to ask you, what was your first Shakespeare experience?

GOLD: I think it was—I’m trying to think what speech it was—I think it was from the Scottish play in maybe like third or fourth grade. You know, some class in elementary school where you had to memorize a poem and recite it for the class. I think it was, MacB talking about killing Duncan and—

BOGAEV: Wait a second. Are you seriously avoiding saying Macbeth?

GOLD: Yeah, I do avoid it, I do avoid it, given that I had a lot of our theater was definitely haunted while we did it, and everyone got COVID, and I had to go on in one of the parts, and it was…

BOGAEV: So, you feel the curse?

GOLD: I feel it a little, yeah.

BOGAEV: Okay. Okay.

GOLD: You know, I’m not going to mess with it when I don’t have to, I guess is what I’m saying.

BOGAEV: Gotcha. Okay. So, it was one of those speeches?

GOLD: Yeah, yeah, “He’s here in double trust,” that speech. I think I did that speech in like an elementary school class.

You know, I took acting classes as a kid. I was always interested in theater. In high school, I did a Romeo. I did Romeo’s banishment speech. I think I did Hal from Henry IV and went to like a summer Shakespeare intensive in high school.

BOGAEV: Oh, so you were really into it.

GOLD: I was interested in Shakespeare. I did some in college too. Then I started really directing them in grad school. That was really my focus.

When I got out of grad school, the economy of New York theater is very much built on new plays, so when I got out of school and I needed a job, all of my early jobs were working on developing new writing. So, I didn’t get back to Shakespeare until I had sort of established myself as a director and could kind of make a job for myself doing Shakespeare. So, it took a while for me to get back to it, but actually, I’d say doing all the new plays really formed the way I work on Shakespeare because I really work on it like this guy is in the room, he’s in his 30s, and he’s, you know, he’s written some great stuff, but some of it’s not totally perfect yet and we’ve got to do some editing. You know, I treat him like a collaborator and not like someone that I have to sort of bow down to and that’s really helped free me to tell a story that I think can impact people today with his work.

BOGAEV: That makes sense. You did skip over your acting.

GOLD: I wasn’t, there isn’t really much to say there. I was a terrible actor. I was never good at it because I was always a director. Whenever I was an actor, I was always thinking about everything else. I was always thinking about the other actor, the staging, the whole picture and that’s the worst thing you can do as an actor. You know, you’re supposed to be in the moment. I was like never in the moment. I was always sort of judging myself from the outside. It was easy to make the transition to directing. It’s just much more suited to my temperament.

BOGAEV: I guess I was asking because being in the moment is so much a part of intimacy, and you came out of this whole Wooster Group, as we were talking about earlier, this dance theater, media ensemble whose ethos is really immersive and authentic and it stresses performance, I think, as an extension of your life. And your work also seems very invested in intimacy between the audience and the actors and the theater. That you’re all kind of working this thing out together. So, how do you think about bringing that to your Shakespeare productions?

GOLD: I mean, I’d say Shakespeare is one of my favorite writers to enact that philosophy, because it was written before, you know, film and TV and all this stuff. It’s always breaking the fourth wall. It’s always connecting directly to the audience. It’s always sharing space with the audience, acknowledging them. I love making this kind of intimate ensemble work with Shakespeare. Those stories and the way he tells them and the poetry of them just lend themselves really well to it. I think there’s something very similar about a Shakespeare play and a downtown experimental theater company today.

BOGAEV: Okay, so this eight-year immersion in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Do you have any interest in directing comedies or problem plays next? What can we look forward to?

GOLD: Yeah, I mean, everybody’s making their pitches to me, you know? The great Shakespeare scholar, Ayanna Thompson, who I work with, is really, really invested in doing Titus next. Oscar Isaac, who is my Hamlet, and I have always wanted to do Winter’s Tale together. That’s a part I really want him to play.

I also really could just go back and do the five I’ve already done again. Instead of trying a new one that I don’t know anything about. Like, why don’t I just keep digging deeper into these sort of infinite texts that I already have started on?

BOGAEV: Well, I’m looking forward to any and all of that. Thank you so much. It was great to talk with you.

GOLD: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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BOGAEV: Director Sam Gold. His Romeo and Juliet is playing a limited engagement at Circle in the Square Theatre through February 16. You can find tickets and more info at romeoandjulietnyc.com.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Digital Island Studios in New York and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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