Michael Arden

I mean, I think when, you know, when Parade was written and Parade is about, it was already looking back to the past, but we were, you know, in a time politically in America where we were kind of like patting ourselves on the back and saying, wasn't it nice we kind of got over all that racism stuff?

This was like the Clinton administration.

We had, you know, if you look at media from that time, it was like it seemed like we had like gotten over some kind of hurdle, but not really.

Actually, it just kind of appeared that way.

And so to be able to re-examine it in the prelude and middle of like the Trump time was really an interesting experience.

thing.

The piece really came alive, I think, because of the audience's relationship to it.

Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about.

You were working with material built around the murder of Mary Fagan, the wrongful conviction and lynching of Leo Frank, and a musical that audiences held really deep attachment to.

Standing at the beginning of that process, what felt most important to get right?

I wanted to embrace the truth of it and to present to the audience a series of events for them to then decide.

I wasn't trying to like say like, and here's the answer.

Leo Frank is exonerated and this is what it should be like.

Actually, I just wanted to kind of like do it as starkly as possible, which is why we like had no set.

Everything was pretty minimal and,

And we performed all of the action basically on this like gallow courtroom square, 12 by 12 square, so that we could present this to the audience and they could make up their mind.

But it was important to me that...

We reminded the audience throughout that these events occurred, these people lived and breathed, and that we are doing a play.

It was a Brechtian exercise, this particular show.

I was very interested in a concept that he coined called the Fremdenseffekt, which means the alienation effect, where we acknowledge what we are watching is separate from reality.