the second revolution was the one of the bolsheviks. the bolsheviks didn't care that he had been a black man in the united states. the only thing that mattered to him is that he was a member of the wrong class and there was nothing he could do to mitigate the class. so his properties were seized and he himself was running a symbol type of luncheonette for the workers and when he found out in 1918 that the secret police had him on a arrest which meant he could be readily shot for being a member of the wrong class, he with great difficulty managed to escape from moscow to the south of russia which for various historical reasons was actually at that time in german hands so he was on russian soil but out of the bolshevik control. when the war ended in 1918, that territory in the south of russia taken over by the french, and russians like rhetoric and others, because he considered himself to be russian by that point were hoping this french enclave would be the place a crusade could be against the bolsheviks and overthrow them so he and other

for themselves or cooperatives when they wanted to provide electricity were attacked as communist bolshevik efforts by the private actors that wanted to stop them exactly the same thing is happening in america today where musicality that are trying to bring high speed internet access to their own citizens are being stopped by incumbent driven state laws making it either illegal or very difficult for municipalities to do this for themselves so we're just redoing the same history except we're doing it at a time when the rest of the world is far ahead of us and. getting farther right whereas before we were doing it we were leading the world record sadly that is a key difference here and that's that's pretty scary when you consider the consequences of this. be you mention libraries being overburdened and i mentioned franklin ben franklin he had started this kind of intellectual men's club the juno society in philadelphia and they had a huge library and his idea for public libraries was give those to the poor give access to the poor and those the public library came about in philadelphia remembe

war named alexander and popular in western europe and he described how in 1920 he escaped from the bolshevik and landed in constantinople then he wrote the following sentence which i will translate from the russians, i began to perform in the outdoor entertainment garden from the famous mosque cool negro -- moscow negro this so surprise me i close the book to put it down i studied this period i knew something about it i had never heard of many famous black person in russia at this time. in fact, to this day if you ask a reasonably educated russian person to name the most famous black person is almost certain they will say it was a brown hannibal who is famous because he is a great great grandfather of the russian writer but lived in the 18th century so there were no other famous black people whether from africa directly or the caribbean or the united states who lived in

>> well, it was partly just the era, born in 1917, the year of the bolshevik revolution, her parents were commitsed marxist and she lived through its depression. all of that was extremely formative. >> rose: are you full of things you want to say, and it's just taking time and choice and getting to them one by one? in other words, are you one, a young person with thousands of questions that you want answered? people have said to me, you know, the great novels begin with a question. maybe you can say that about plays too am maybe that's-- if you ask about belleville tlses's a question there. maybe the question is can this marriage hold? >> yeah, i-- i do think a lot of these plays have begun with a question. i don't think that i have a backlog of them. i think that i'm slower than that and i follow my nose more than that. so something will pique my interest and it may be years of sort of gathering more interest until i finally write the play. so i don't feel like i have 20 in people. i feel like i will be lucky to find my next one. >> rose: really? >> yeah. i think every time i find a