Yerma

She started planning her own summer trip.

She had been collaborating with Paul Bowles on an English language musical adaptation of Yerma by Federico García Lorca.

When Topper headed west with his friend Steve Wasserman, Libby and her then-lover, a 30-something graduate student named Luke who Louisa introduced her to, flew to Paris and drove down to Spain to meet Paul so they could experience firsthand the Spanish gypsy culture that they wanted to dramatize.

[piano music] On a Saturday in August, Topper and his friend Steve Wasserman set out to climb Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevadas.

I'm sure not making a ton of money, but enough to pay the bills and live a decent life in New York City there in the 60s.

He got his first big break in his first Broadway production, Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma in 1966.

And I did not list all of the Broadway productions he did in his career in the show notes because that would eat up a lot of our time.

But just know that was the start of a lot of the work in the Broadway space.

Yeah, it's certainly exciting.

I first came across you in Yerma at Guildhall.

Oh,

no way!

Yeah, I feel like that play also feels very Greek in many ways.

Did you come away from that experience wanting to play very specific characters and tell particular stories too?

Yeah, Yerma was really special because obviously it was my first third year show.

But it was also really scary because I was playing a lead in a way that I hadn't before.