(upbeat music) - Our good friend, John Schreiber, is back in the house, not our house, but his house, but you know, the virtual house.

President and CEO of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center otherwise known as NJPAC.

Good to see you, John.

- Same to you, sir.

Lovely to see you too, even virtually.

- Yeah.

And all kinds of great things happening in NJPAC.

Go on their website to find out more.

The information will come up.

But today, John, we're not plugging NJPAC.

Philip Roth- - Ah.

- It's one of my many Roth books.

- Okay.

- This is actually a book written by Claudia Roth Pierpont.

- Right.

- You have, you and your team at NJPAC, have Philip Roth Unbound coming up March 17th to March 19th.

This will be seen before and after, doing in collaboration with the great folks at the Newark Public Library, where, in fact, Philip Roth donated all of his work to that library.

Hey John, what's this Roth Unbound thing all about?

- It's a chance for us to examine, and celebrate, and illuminate, you know, the work of this remarkable novelist who, as you know, I think was probably the most important voice in fiction in the last 75 years.

We think about the great novelist, American novelist, who came to our attention at, you know, in the last century, beginning of this century.

You think of Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, John O'Hara, John Updike, et cetera, et cetera.

Roth is still read as much today as he was when he was in his writing prime.

He wrote 27 novels in his lifetime, and he was a Newark boy.

He was born in the Weequahic section.

He went to Weequahic High School.

He used Newark as a canvas for a lot of what he wrote.

So there's a lot of Newark in Roth and we thought it would be really fun to, on the occasion of his, what would've been his 90th birthday, celebrate that work and examine that work with more than a dozen events over the course of a weekend from the 17th to 19th of March.

- All kinds of events.

And John will talk more in detail about those events.

There gonna be writers, actors, artists, journalists, public intellectuals, all kinds of folks, historians.

But help folks understand this, John.

We actually did, if you look on our website, steveadubato.org, you'll see a past segment we did with a representative from the Newark Public Library, on Roth.

And so I wanna make sure people understand this, John, it wasn't just the Weequahic section of Newark it was also the strong Jewish community in Newark at that time that Roth grew up in.

How important were those Jewish roots to Roth as a person and as a writer?

- I mean, Roth wasn't a religious person he wasn't an observant Jew, but he was a cultural Jew.

You know.

- Define that for folks.

- Well, it's- - I'm a cultural Catholic, so go ahead.

- It's the food, it's the food it's the comedy, it's the family.

It's, I mean, it's all those things, you know, it's things that, it's things that those of us who define, you know, who identify as Catholic, any number of, you know.

Religion is so much more than observance, you know, it's- - It is culture.

- Yeah, yeah.

So Roth, I think, was a cultural Jew, you know, Jewish culture sort of informed a lot of his writing, you know, whether it's "Portnoy's Complaint" or, you know, or "Patrimony," or "American Pastoral," you know, he looked at the world through eyes that he knew and that was the Jewish experience, to a reasonable extent.

- "Goodbye Columbus" in there?

- Oh, sure.

- Yeah.

- Absolutely.

- Yeah, I mean- - First one I read.

- Well, and one of the first ones he wrote, you know, that goes back to 1958, you know?

In fact, if you think about Roth in the movies, of all the movies that were made of Roth books that was the one he liked the best.

- Really?

- Yeah.

- Interesting, it was Rich.

You remember, it was Richard Benjamin.

- Richard Benjamin?

Oh my God, what a great character.

Who else played with him?

- Ali MacGraw was the other- - Oh.

- She played the female lead.

- That's pre "Love Story."

- Oh yeah, totally.

Pre "Love Story."

Yeah, absolutely.

- Will the movies, the books that were turned into movies, part of the Roth Unbound experience at NJPAC?

- No, we're not screening any movies.

What we are doing is we're gonna do a full reading of a bridge for the stage of the "Plot Against America" which will have nine actors, including Tony Shalhoub and- - Is John Turturro in that?

- Turturro was on Sunday.

We're doing, we commissioned Turturro and Ariel Levy of The New Yorker to do a stage adaptation of "Sabbath's Theater," which was Ross's favorite book.

Are you, is that one that you are familiar with?

- Have it right In my Roth Library.

- Yeah.

So that was Roth's favorite book.

It is hilarious, it's disgusting.

I mean, it's everything you love best about Roth, and John turned it into a play, and he's gonna do a scene from it on the Sunday night of the festival, which would've been Ross's 90th- - 90th.

- I'm curious, Roth, controversial, no doubt, controversial, no doubt wrote and said things, sometimes about women, that would not play today on any level.

To what degree does the Roth Unbound exhibit, series, weekend Festival at NJPAC, deal with how incredibly controversial Roth was?

- It actually does.

- It does?

- Yeah.

We wanted to make sure that the harsher sides of Roth also got a chance to be exposed and illuminated.

So, you know, we have a panel that is called, What Gives You the Right?

And it's a conversation about the ethics of representation identity, the limits of artistic freedom in fiction.

We have another one where we talk about Roth in relation to American history.

Roth was a great historian.

If you read the books, as you do, you know that American history sort of informed a lot of what he did, so we're talking about that.

We're gonna do a Philip Roth bus tour of Newark that Liz del Tufo- - The Great Liz del Tufo.

- Exactly.

The- - Knows Newark better than anyone.

- And lemme tell you, the Philip Roth bus tour is, we have two of them, they sold out immediately.

They're the first things to sell out, you know.

- Is it going through Roth's old neighborhood?

- Yeah, the whole, every place that was important to Roth and every stop along the way, there'll be a reading from some Roth novel that is cited in the, you know, in the Newark thing.

So we're doing a night at Hobby's.

- Roth was a big comedy fan, he loved standup comics, he loved the Borscht Belt.

So this is a sort of tip of our hat to that, and we'll have all the noshes and we'll have three stand ups working- - Did you say noshes?

Did you just say noshes?

- I did say the word noshess, it's correct.

(both laugh) - I'm verklempt.

(both laugh) - You know, I don't get a lot of chances to say the word noshes, so thank you, you know?

- But is it appropriate if I say I'm verklempt?

Is that the right word right now?

- Sure, sure.

You can get away with that.

Yeah, sure.

(Steve laughs) - Listen, that is John Schreiber, the great, the CEO, President at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

Philip Roth Unbound, March 17th to March 19th, and done in collaboration with the Newark Public Library where Roth's work lives.

Check out all John's work at the NJPAC.

Not just the Roth stuff, but the other stuff.

Good to see you, my friend.

- Likewise, stay well, please.

Thank you.

- You got it.

That guy's good and NJPAC's the best.

See you next time, everyone.

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