Jordan Roth spent years helping other people bring their creative visions to the stage. Eventually, he began to miss his own. His route back started with something he could practise every day: getting dressed.
Recorded in Paris during Art Basel week in October 2026, this episode brings together the artist, actor and seven-time Tony Award-winning theatre producer and designer Adam Charlap Hyman for a conversation with Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar about identity, performance and the emotional lives of objects.
Their starting point is Roth’s exhibition To Think of the Tranquil Life of Things, designed by Charlap Hyman & Herrero. Before leaving the New York apartment where he had lived for 15 years, Roth was photographed wearing clothes from different chapters of his life. Those photographs became collages printed onto silk crepe and draped over furniture, giving physical form to the memories held within a home. The exhibition takes its title from Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual.
Roth speaks candidly about being a child who struggled to make sense to others, finding belonging on stage, and the professional uniform that eventually began to feel restrictive. He explains why performance is a way of revealing himself, and why he now imagines identity as an expanding circle that continues to contain earlier versions of a life.
Charlap Hyman describes translating the apartment into a Parisian exhibition, where rooms and objects recur in altered forms. Together, they consider the home as a self-portrait, collecting as a means of changing ourselves, and the difficulty of distinguishing our own instincts from other people’s expectations.
There are also deeply personal memories: a chair where Roth fed his baby, a kitchen sink used for a first bath, and a child making music with his great-grandmother.