The great ones don’t teach you a damn thing. Not directly. They just sit there in the tenth row and call out the truth until you stop flinching.
Carl Weber sat in that tenth row for Brecht. He sat in it for Kushner. He sat in it for me. The man watched the most radical reinvention of performance in the twentieth century from arm’s length, absorbed it into his bones, then spent the next sixty years transmitting that frequency to anyone wired to receive it. Not as doctrine. Never as doctrine. As voltage.
We recorded those interviews, a whole group of us at Stanford, pulling stories out of Carl like archaeologists brushing dust off something irreplaceable. The article lives in TDR now, all properly formatted and academically housed. But a lot of great stuff got left out. That’s the price you pay when you’re serving another master, when the work has to fit the container the institution gives you. The best stories, the ones that made the room go quiet, the ones where Carl’s voice dropped low when he talked about Brecht’s obsession with props looking used, looking real, those don’t always survive the editorial process. The way silence worked differently around him, like he’d learned it from someone who understood that what you withhold is the art. That’s not the kind of thing you can footnote.
He told me once I’d have a life in this. I told him he was crazy. He was right.
What Carl understood, what Brecht understood before him and what the best of us are still trying to articulate, is that the machinery of storytelling isn’t separate from the human thing. The gears and pulleys, the alienation effects and the fourth wall demolitions, all of it exists in service of one brutal, beautiful objective: making people see. Not watch. See.
That voice from the tenth row never stops carrying. Even now. Especially now.