Clay welcomes fellow Chautauquan Steve Duchrow of Illinois for a conversation about portraying historical characters. Clay does six or seven; Steve portrays the poets Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. They discuss how to choose a character. How do you prepare for your first performance and the five hundredth? Why is it important not to work from a script? How do you take unscripted questions from the audience in character? Clay and Steve discuss Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and John Steinbeck, among other subjects, about heroism, tragedy, and the intractable contradictions in the human character. What did Oppenheimer mean when he said, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds?”
