SIMON: Hi. This is Ari's nephew, Simon (ph). This week, how transphobia has shifted in the U.S. Plus, a Broadway director makes his way back to stage. All right. Let's start the show.
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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
You're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.
There's been a wave of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation sweeping through a number of states this year. I kind of feel like I've been saying that every year, and every year it gets bigger. But something's changed in the kinds of bills that are passing and the strategies behind them. Take Florida, for example. Over the past few years, anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills have shown up in Florida's legislature. There was a failed bathroom bill in 2015. A slate of four other anti-LGBTQ bills appeared in 2020. Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law banning trans youth from joining sports teams that align with their gender.
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RON DESANTIS: I can tell you this. In Florida, girls are going to play girls' sports, and boys are going to play boys' sports. That's what we're doing.
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DESANTIS: And we're going to make sure that...
SHAPIRO: And this year they just keep coming. The so-called Don't Say Gay bill bans kindergarten through third-grade public school teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in their classrooms.
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DESANTIS: This is trying to sow doubt about kids, about their gender identity. It's trying to say that, you know, they could be whatever they want to be. This is inappropriate.
SHAPIRO: And it goes beyond bills. Last week, Florida's Department of Health put out a memo guiding doctors not to administer gender-affirming care to trans youth, even advising against social transition - nonmedical changes, like using a new name or wearing different clothes. In a minute, we're going to get a national historical perspective on all this. But I wanted to start with what it feels like for people in the middle of it. So I talked to the mother of a trans teen in Florida.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: My teenager is a sophomore in high school. She transitioned between seventh and eighth grade.
SHAPIRO: Her daughter isn't out at school, so we're not using their names here.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: We moved to Florida prior to her starting high school in ninth grade. So she has always been stealth at her high school. She uses the girls' locker rooms and restrooms. She - her birth certificate, passport, every legal document was changed before we moved. So we don't think a lot of people or anybody knows that she's trans.
SHAPIRO: Can you talk about the reasons for that, what the concern is, what the fear is or was even before this latest round of legislation and policies in Florida?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah. It's a lot of things. A lot of it is fear-based, worries about violence and bullying at school and in the community. It would probably cause her to drop out of school if something like that were to happen. She hasn't gone out for any sports, primarily, again, because of the discrimination against trans girls in the state of Florida.
SHAPIRO: So she would like to play sports. She's athletic, but is just concerned that...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She played sports in middle school and grade school. Yeah. But since moving to Florida, even before that ban passed, just the climate to where we live in Florida did not make her feel safe to come out as trans. And then once that ban passed, she would be jeopardizing her...
SHAPIRO: Her safety, her education, her - yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah - that - if someone were going to want to check her genitals. The only way anyone could really know would be a physical examination. And that was actually brought up during the proceedings for the bill. So that I think she's just put out of her mind as even an option.
SHAPIRO: So those were all concerns even before this latest round of anti-trans legislation and policies. What kinds of workarounds or precautionary measures are you taking now that you might not have considered before?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She has been receiving gender-affirming health care since she was 13, and that's not something we would be willing to stop. So we would be traveling out of state to be able to continue on her medical journey that she is on and has worked together with us, as her parents, and her doctors and endocrinologists and psychologists, etc. She is thriving. And she wasn't before we learned her truth and found her help to start that journey. And we're not about to let that progress go backwards.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. You say she's thriving and she wasn't before she made this transition. Can you tell us a little bit more about what life was like for her before she came out and what life is like for her now and how that's changed?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: She started failing her classes. She stayed in her room all the time. She didn't hang out with her friends anymore. She was depressed. But we didn't know why. We found out she was being bullied. And then this was kind of the height of her male puberty that was really driving this depression and this dysphoria. And she finally figured it out on her own that she was trans. And she found the courage to share that information with me and her dad. And we immediately sought out help. It took a while. You know, we got her on puberty blockers and then hormone replacement. But now she's a sophomore in high school, taking college classes, getting straight A's, smiling. She has lots of friends. She's the kid that we always knew and loved. And it's like we got her back.
SHAPIRO: I'm just thinking how difficult this is for your family, where you support your daughter, and you're standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. And I'm imagining families with trans kids where the parents are not aware or are not supportive. And given how difficult it is for you with a united front as a family, I'm just imagining what it's like for those who don't have the good fortune to have supportive parents like you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: A hundred percent. I feel like there's a lot lacking in the state of Florida as far as education on all things LGBTQ for probably children and adults alike. I lead a support group for parents of trans children. And I try to be as out as I can as an ally, just so that if kids need to see someone that is safe, they do. So I wear a lot of ally, you know, type gear - buttons or bracelets. I always make sure to have something on that says I'm safe and I see you. But I know that there are a lot of kids that aren't as lucky as our daughter.
SHAPIRO: You said that she's doing well now. She's doing well in school. She seems happy, well-adjusted, has friends. But has it been difficult to see the political power of the state leveraged against her and people like her?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah, I think it - you know, it somehow sends the message that they are less-than, and they're being singled out. And they're really just kids, and they're trying to just get through their teen years and have fun and make friends and be social and be active. And then the media belittles them and humiliates them. I can't even really begin to imagine what that must feel like on her end. I am not part of a marginalized community, and I certainly am not being called out on the national news every single night or the local news for just who I am and how I was born. And that hurts me a lot as her mother that she has to go through that.
SHAPIRO: Thank you for sharing your story with us.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Thank you.
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SHAPIRO: Anti-trans policies and laws are not just spreading in Florida; lots of states are moving in the same direction. Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins and author of the book "Histories Of The Transgender Child." And she's here to explain how transphobia has shifted and to put these fights into context. Good to have you here.
JULES GILL-PETERSON: Thanks so much for having me back.
SHAPIRO: So it feels like something has shifted in how trans people are being targeted in the U.S. How would you characterize what this change is?
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah, definitely. There have been kind of two different ways to look at this shift - on the one hand, kind of just a sheer quantitative one. You know, last year when we spoke, we were looking at maybe a hundred and some odd bills in state legislatures targeting trans people. This year, we're on track to double that. And there are also nonlegislative things going on - administrative reforms, memos from governors and attorney general offices. So we're really seeing sort of, like, a huge uptick. And you can see that also in just the sheer amount of political rhetoric that's kind of circulating around.
But I'd also qualify it as a kind of shift in tone, a kind of extremism that has sort of taken hold. We're seeing really severe kind of state policies around education and health care and also an alarming shift in the language that some people are using that is really kind of going sort of full in on ideas that used to be relatively confined to conspiracy theorists or to sort of QAnon parts of the internet and, within that, also a return to some really extreme homophobia and attacks on gay and lesbian people, alongside trans people. So, you know, it's sort of a worst-case scenario, kind of a perfect storm of intensification.
SHAPIRO: So there's more happening. It is more intense. It is broader and more virulent. There are a lot of things to pick apart there, and so I kind of want to go one at a time.
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: Without losing sight of the real people who are affected by this, is it possible to assess how much of this is just about pure political calculus that if you gin up a moral panic, you can win elections, versus an authentic uprising of homophobia, whatever authentic might mean in that sense, or of transphobia?
GILL-PETERSON: A cynical part of me says, well, it doesn't really matter whether people really mean it or not because the outcome is sort of similar either way. But I actually do think moral panic is sometimes framed, you know, just as sort of people's hateful thoughts or their sort of moral error, when actually moral panic and the kind of policies were seen being pushed right now have actual policy goals, right? There actually is a policy strategy here, and it's one in which attacks on trans people and gay and lesbian people fit into larger right-wing politics. They're joined with attacks on, you know, abortion access, reproductive rights, voting rights.
You know, when we think about what it means to ban a small minority population from being able to access health care, life-saving health care, even regular health care - right? - part of that fits into a larger belief system about, you know, sort of a certain version of morality. But it's also just about damaging the public health care and the public good that health care is. Or when we think of, you know, for example, the Don't Say Gay Law in Florida, of course, it is a kind of moral censorship of gay, lesbian and trans people, but it also has this civil lawsuit component that is explicitly designed to damage public education in the state. So I don't know which one is the original motive, right?
SHAPIRO: Right.
GILL-PETERSON: Like, do people start passing these bills just because they're authentically homophobic and transphobic or because they just like public education? Or is it both? But, you know, I think it's important to see that link.
SHAPIRO: So I'd love for you as a historian to take a step back and give us some context for what we're seeing now because it's not clear to me whether the history of marginalized groups getting rights in the United States is one of a steady, slow march forward where maybe you take two steps forward and one step back or if it's a pendulum and, like, groups gain rights and then lose rights. And I guess what I'm trying to ask is, is this anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ wave that we're seeing now a historical anomaly? Or is it like, oh, no, this is how it goes, this is how it works in America, like, this is part of what we should expect every now and then?
GILL-PETERSON: Yeah, I think it's really hard to create kind of grand narratives about rights and progress in the United States because, of course, you know, we're talking about several centuries worth of history. But what is happening today and the targeting of LGBT people in general but especially of trans people and trans children - this is unprecedented. The state has never explicitly named and targeted trans people as an undesirable population who should be subject not just to the withdrawal of any state support or the withdrawal of their civil rights, but explicitly targeting them for suppression, for being kicked out of the public sphere, kicked out of education, banned from accessing health care, unable to change their ID documents and, therefore, pushed out of public life.
SHAPIRO: And, also, in some cases, punishing parents...
GILL-PETERSON: Yes.
SHAPIRO: ...Who support their children, which strikes me as shocking, coming from a party that is so often about letting the family make decisions.
GILL-PETERSON: Exactly. It's really not at all. It's about legislating a particular moral point of view and enforcing it as obligatory - right? - for everyone. A lot of the discrimination that trans people have faced historically was de facto, right? Of course, laws and, you know, policies were set up on the idea that there were only men and women and that people didn't necessarily cross those categories. And that caused a lot of problems for trans people. But it was never official state policy to name trans people as a minority that had to be punished for being who they were and then try to immiserate them as much as possible through every single law and policy you can think of. That had - that's never happened before, right?
And, you know, that has been, to some extent, the experience of gay and lesbian people when, you know, at various points in the 20th century, the federal, you know, level or certain states adopted explicit kind of heterosexuality as state policy, right? But that's something that was chipped away at in large part in the 2000s. And so we're seeing it sort of coming back. But it kind of boils down to this idea. Is - you know, do we think it's appropriate for state legislatures or for the federal government to legislate a state-mandated sex and gender that it can force on people against their will? I think it's really disturbing when we sort of slow down and ask, like, well, what does that mean for everyone? - because...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
GILL-PETERSON: ...You know, if a state can compel a trans child to take away their bodily autonomy, then it's going to reinforce their ability to take away the bodily autonomy of people who might need access to abortion - right? - or any medical procedure - birth control - right? - you know, other kinds of rights that we, you know, might take for granted.
SHAPIRO: I'd love for you to weigh in on the language in this debate because we hear supporters of these laws accusing their opponents of grooming young people. And in the 1970s, people like the anti-gay activist Anita Bryant were using that kind of language. She would argue that since gay people can't biologically reproduce, LGBTQ people would have to recruit children.
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ANITA BRYANT: I have been blacklisted for exercising the right of a mother to defend her children and all children against their being recruited by homosexuals.
SHAPIRO: And then some four decades later, we hear similar arguments from Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: The Democrats are the party of pedophiles. The Democrats are the party of teachers - elementary school teachers - trying to trying to transition their elementary school-age children and convince them they're a different gender.
SHAPIRO: What do you make of the fact that this language has just boomeranged back into public discourse?
GILL-PETERSON: It's incredibly chilling. I mean, this is extremist language. I think part of the boomerang really did come from QAnon and far-right groups, including white supremacist groups.
SHAPIRO: I wondered about that, whether it was, like, the conspiracy theory about child abuse that fed into the mainstream in this way.
GILL-PETERSON: Exactly. QAnon folks and far-right and white supremacist groups started allying openly with anti-trans groups. And this - you know, that I actually think is the explicit origin of why we're seeing this language folded back into the public sphere. But, you know, as you pointed out, it has a long history. I mean, they're actually so wildly, easily debunkable. They're such extreme, unverifiable kinds of claims that, you know, I think part of how we have to understand them is that they're not even attempts to make truth claims, right? I don't really care if any of these people believe this or not. Probably some of them don't.
I think what we really have to remember, though, is that when you dehumanize a small minority of people by calling their existence per se as a form of sexual predation, what you're doing is making them disposable, punishable - right? - and sometimes killable populations. That is the sort of tactic that it has been used for in the past. In some ways, Anita Bryant was the most respectable version of this because she didn't call for, you know, gay people to be necessarily all rounded up and killed. But it doesn't take, you know, too far of a kind of journey down this rhetorical extremist rabbit hole to get to that place.
And certainly, I think a lot of trans advocates and public figures, myself included, have seen an uptick in death threats arriving, you know, in our inboxes and in our replies online. So I think this escalation of language actually really does have a verifiable origin in the way that QAnon politics have gone mainstream on the right and in the Republican Party. But on the other hand - right? - it's sort of drawing on this really vicious history - right? - that clearly has still been sort of in people's repertoires, right? You know, Anita Bryant may no longer be a public figure, but clearly a lot of people still have access to those kinds of really violent, homophobic and transphobic tropes.
SHAPIRO: You know, we've been talking about the sort of outlook right now in which trans and LGBTQ people, more broadly, are playing defense, trying to block legislation. I'd like to end by asking you to imagine a different scenario where life is safe and supportive for trans young people. What would that look like? I mean, like, what would need to happen? What would that situation be? Paint a picture of that for us.
GILL-PETERSON: If you begin from the premise that there's nothing inferior or bad or wrong about being trans, then you don't really need to know anything else to know that, you know, trans people in your life are valuable. Trans people have plenty of gifts to bring the world. And by being locked into these cycles of reaction, we're being deprived of, you know, the chance to live meaningful lives. And I say this all the time, but for me, you know, having gone through the experience, like so many other trans people, of having to out, without any resources or language in life, who I was and figure out how to say yes to what I needed to live in the world as a happy, well-adjusted person has given me a kind of empathy that I bring to, you know, how I relate to all people that I meet, you know, in every walk of life.
And I think that, you know, when we think of sort of the positive terrain that trans politics can bring us to, it comes down to some really powerful insights, which are, what if we, you know, work to create a world in which everyone had the resources they need, not just to survive, but to live happy lives, to explore their potential, right? What if we said that everyone deserves to go to school, everyone deserves to have access to health care, everyone deserves to be able to imagine, you know, achieving things in their lives that surprise and reward them, you know, for following their hopes and dreams?
I think those are stories that trans people understand on a really deep, deep level in our bones because we've had to. But those are enduring messages that connect us to so many kinds of other people. And since there are trans people in every community, I think that, you know, we could be - instead of vilifying or just rushing to protect trans people alone, we could also be thinking about how lucky we are to share the world with trans people because, you know, we as a group kind of have this deep knowledge and deep sense of possibility that you can strive beyond the limitations of what you were handed or what you were told. And I really, truly do believe that there is a positive vision of community, of equitable resource sharing, of learning how to support the flourishing of the people in your life and kind of questioning the anxieties that they bring up for you that trans people, you know, could really play a central role in if we were to be given just that basic, basic window of opportunity to live and survive without being marked, you know, as undesirable or marked as a population unworthy of life. So we have lots to teach about what it means to live a rewarding and rich life in this world.
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SHAPIRO: Jules Gill-Peterson is a historian at Johns Hopkins University. Thank you so much for this perspective.
GILL-PETERSON: Thank you so much for having me.
SHAPIRO: Coming up, I chat with director Sam Gold about opening a Broadway show amid a COVID surge and how he ended up onstage.
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SHAPIRO: You're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. Sixteen shows opened on Broadway this April, and several more have come back from hiatus. It was the busiest April for Broadway in more than a decade. But it's also been a month of false starts. COVID keeps popping up, forcing shows to cancel performances, delay opening night and in one case, even send a director onstage to fill in for a sick cast member. The last show to officially open on Broadway this month is "Macbeth," starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. At the beginning of April, on just the third night of previews, one of the actors tested positive for COVID. This was 7:15 p.m., less than an hour before curtain.
SAM GOLD: We scrambled for about an hour, trying to figure out how we could put an understudy in and wound up, at 8:15 with 1,100 people sitting in the audience, realizing there was just no safe way to get through the show.
SHAPIRO: Sam Gold is the director of "Macbeth."
GOLD: And I had to do something that I never thought I would ever, ever do in my career, which is walk out onstage in front of 1,100 people and say, I don't have a show for you. You have to go home. It was just the most painful, painful thing.
SHAPIRO: To make it worse, this happened on April 1.
GOLD: And someone in the audience yelled out, April Fools. And then the whole audience erupted in applause, as if I was this genius who had staged an April Fool's prank.
SHAPIRO: And you had to tell them...
GOLD: And then I had to be like, that's an amazing April Fool's prank. And I wish I had come up with it.
SHAPIRO: Wow.
GOLD: But instead, I'm doing this much darker and sadder thing.
SHAPIRO: And that was only the beginning of the show's troubles.
GOLD: In the morning, we saw that that case had spread. And Daniel tested positive. And at that point, we took 11 days off to just see if we could get COVID to run through the cast, you know, get everybody safe and healthy and...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
GOLD: ...And start fresh.
SHAPIRO: In those 11 days, Sam hired more understudies. He made plans and backup plans. He thought "Macbeth" was prepared for anything.
You come back after this pause. You think, we've got belt and suspenders. We've got plan B, C, D, E and F. And then what happens?
GOLD: And then it rolled out like a nightmare, which is that each day, another person went down. And so when I found out that Michael tested positive, it was, like, at 1 p.m. And I...
SHAPIRO: I don't know who Michael is. Sorry. Forgive me.
GOLD: Michael Thornton plays Lennox. And this is the character I wound up subbing in for.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
GOLD: So at, like, 1 p.m., Michael tested positive. And I had a show at 8. And I had no understudies left. Everybody was already on. And I started calling some actors who I thought were crazy enough to maybe go on that night.
SHAPIRO: I'm offering you your big break...
GOLD: Yeah. Hey, could you come in...
SHAPIRO: ...To play opposite Daniel Craig in "Macbeth" on Broadway.
GOLD: Could you come in in half an hour? And I'll stage you into the show, and you can hold your script and go on. But, you know, at a certain point, I found a wonderful, you know, totally brave actor who I love, who I've worked with for a long time, named Tina Benko. But she was in Philly and she was like, I can get there for tomorrow. So Tina was going to come in tomorrow. And I was like, well, I have one night. I don't want to cancel this show and I know it, so I'll just, you know, keep the curtain up and I'll do it myself.
SHAPIRO: You say that calmly; I know it. I'll just do it myself. Were you feeling calm in that moment?
GOLD: I mean, honestly, the part of me going on was the easiest part. The bar is pretty low for me. You know, no one's expecting me to be good in it. So as long as I can say the words and not screw Daniel and Ruth up, then the audience gets what they came for. The show is the show, you know, me aside. And everyone will just think it's kind of funny that the director was up there keeping the curtain up. So I didn't feel worried about my acting, but I just felt for the whole company that had been through so much. And I was doing - I was just trying to figure out what's the thing that's going to make things the least confusing and crazy for everybody?
SHAPIRO: Do you remember the first line you spoke as Lennox?
GOLD: (Laughter) Lennox's first line is he seems to - here comes Ross. He seems to see things strange. You know, it's - he sort of does some plot introduction for some characters entering.
SHAPIRO: Were you holding the script?
GOLD: You know, I - because I'm not an actor, I tried holding the script in rehearsal and felt that the audience was going to be disappointed. And I have some experience - my early theater experience was working at The Wooster Group, an experimental theater company that does a lot with in-ear receivers. I have a lot of experience with that, so I asked my amazing assistant stage manager Jenae (ph) to sit in the booth with the script and a microphone and talk into my ear. And I had a little in-ear receiver, and she fed me the lines.
SHAPIRO: I think a lot of people have had a recurring nightmare about having to go on in a role that they don't know the lines for. Like, had that been a recurring nightmare for you before actually having to do exactly that?
GOLD: No (laughter). I think the nightmare was the nightmare that came true, which is that I get to do this beautiful play on Broadway with all these amazing people. And then right as we were about to start doing the play, like, we would have all these reasons we couldn't do it.
SHAPIRO: So you play the role, you get through it. And then do you go off stage and collapse or exalt or just think, like, punch in, punch out, hope I don't ever have to do that again? Like, what was the feeling?
GOLD: I think it gave us a shot of energy. And I think for - the cast had been through so much. They had been working so hard and been thrown so many curveballs that I think the fact that I got in there with them was a really good bonding experience for all of us. Like, I'm not putting them out there and then sitting in the audience and, like, stay - you know, I got my hands dirty, you know, too, for all the same reasons they were. And it's just a really tender time. It's a hard time for everyone. And so I think the fact that I was up there with them, it felt really nice at the end of the show to look everybody in the eye and be like, yeah, we all - we're all going through this together.
SHAPIRO: Before we talk more broadly about the season on Broadway, I do have to ask - I don't know if you're a superstitious person, but I'm sure you are aware that "Macbeth" has a reputation as a play. Like, it is rumored to be cursed. There are actors who won't even name it in a theater. They'll call it the Scottish play because they don't want to bring bad luck. Is that what's going on here?
GOLD: Yeah. I mean, clearly, I said "Macbeth" a lot of times, and then bad things happened (laughter). So clearly, I wasn't superstitious enough. You know, I think that's funny, and I think it's great that it's a great story that, you know, you can attach the name "Macbeth" to all of this drama. But on the other hand, really hard things happen all the time. And the fact that this play is called "Macbeth" just makes it easy to make that connection. And that's been true forever, you know? You know, there's all these stories about fire - you know, when you do "Macbeth," some light falling from the grid or a fire or an actor dying. And these stories over the course of 400 years, but also Macbeth is one of the most performed plays in, you know, English history. So there's going to be stories. They just get attached to the curse, you know. Like, this happened to "Plaza Suite." Nobody's talking about "Plaza Suite" being a cursed title, you know.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) The Neil Simon play. We can name it.
GOLD: Yeah, we can name "Plaza Suite." Yeah. So in the end, we're not the only show that's going through this.
SHAPIRO: Let's talk about that because you've done a lot of work on Broadway. You won a Tony for directing the musical "Fun Home" in 2015, another for directing "A Doll's House, Part 2" in 2017. You've spent so much time on Broadway. Does this season feel different from any other?
GOLD: Absolutely. It's a crazy, intense, amazing feeling. You know, you feel the sense of community. You know, we all got into theater - everyone who does this does it because they like the feeling of being a part of a community. And to be a part of Broadway this spring is to really feel it's a community that cares about each other and cares about the audience. And you feel that love in this major way. It's not - doesn't feel like a business where we're trying to sell tickets. It feels like we all have these stories. We all feel these stories could be meaningful to the larger culture right now. And the larger culture has been kind of robbed of their opportunity to do that, to be in a room breathing with other people and experiencing stories with other people. It's a very important part of human culture. And it sounds Pollyanna or something, but it really - you feel it when you're - you know, you feel it this season. You feel the undeniable truth that being in a theater with other people is good for humans.
SHAPIRO: So how do you balance that kind of hopeful sense of return and coming together again with the recognition that at theaters all over Midtown, performances are being canceled, understudies are going in, the director is having to play a role because, literally, every show is going through - maybe not literally every show, but so many shows are going through what "Macbeth" has gone through?
GOLD: Yeah, I mean, I think that is the optimistic thing is, look - we're doing it, you know? Like, it works. It happens. We all do it, you know? I'm so glad we're all out there figuring it out and making stuff right now. It feels very vital. And we always come back to art during times when we need it, you know? And we need it right now.
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SHAPIRO: Sam Gold is director of the Broadway production of "Macbeth," starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. It officially opened this week. Sam Gold, congratulations. And thanks for talking with us.
GOLD: Thank you. Hopefully saying that title won't curse you for your next episode.
SHAPIRO: He's the director of the Scottish play. Let's just go with that.
GOLD: (Laughter) Thanks, Ari.
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SIMON: Now it's time to end the show the way we always do. Every week, we hear the best things that happened to our listeners. But this week, we have a very special version of the Best Things segment. Let's listen.
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Hey, everyone. Producer Liam here. It's the last show of our beloved senior producer, Anjuli Sastry Krbechek. So here are all the best things about Anjuli My vote for the best thing about Anjuli is her endless optimism and determination. She goes into problems knowing that she'll find a solution.
AJA DRAIN, BYLINE: This is Aja, IBAM's news assistant. Anjuli welcomes everybody she meets with open arms and really makes sure that everyone feels like they belong.
NATHAN PUGH, BYLINE: Hi, my name is Nathan Pugh, and I'm a former intern for IT'S BEEN A MINUTE. I met Anjuli working on the team, and it was such a wonderful experience getting to know her. She's so organized and prepared and helped make the show just a joy to work on.
JINAE WEST, BYLINE: Hey. This is Jinae. One of the best things about Anjuli is that even when you're working together and you're thousands of miles away from each other, she will still send you cookies late at night via delivery service because you mentioned on Slack that you were having a hard time cutting this one interview for the next day's show - just because that's the kind of person, colleague and friend that she is.
JANET WOOJEONG LEE, BYLINE: Hey, Anjuli. This is Janet. Your work has not only shaped what the show sounds like literally from the beginning, but it has had such a big impact on every producer you work with. I personally am so grateful for your mentorship and also your emphasis on opening opportunities for younger producers. Wish you luck. Bye.
ANDREA GUTIERREZ, BYLINE: Hey, Anj (ph). It's Andrea. There are not enough words to say how much you've done for me. Your star is shining so bright. I can't wait to see what you do and to someday work for you. Thank you so much. I love you. And I will miss you.
DRAIN: Congratulations, Anjuli.
PUGH: I'm so excited for you.
WEST: Happy last show, Anjuli.
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SHAPIRO: This week's episode was produced by Anjuli Sastry Krbechek, Andrea Gutierrez, Liam McBain, Chloee Weiner, Janet Woojeong Lee and Aja Drain. We had engineering help from Patrick Murray. Our editor is Kitty Eisele. Our director of programming is Yolanda Sangweni. And our big boss is NPR's senior VP of programming Anya Grundmann. So till next time, be good to yourselves. I'm Ari Shapiro. We'll talk soon.
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