In-Process: An Interview with David Adjmi
Lizzie Stern, Literary Director at Playwrights Horizons, sat down with David Adjmi over the summer, shortly before Stereophonic rehearsals began, to talk about the creative process.
(Their conversation contains spoilers, so we suggest reading it after seeing the play.)
David Adjmi: Let me get my shield ready.
Lizzie Stern: Your shield?
David: My psychic shield. Okay. Go on.
Lizzie: Well, we don't have to dive in immediately. What’s been on your mind lately?
David: This play is just saturating my brain. I'm trying to do little tweaks and changes and things like that, and it's funny how I get so emotional about it. I don't want to make you feel weird if I burst into tears during our conversation.
Lizzie: That's okay. Feel any feeling.
David: It puts me at such an emotional peak when I'm in it.
Lizzie: Why do you think that is?
David: It’s very close to the bone for me. Because I did crystallize something about the experience of being an artist. And in a way, the wound that generated this play is being healed by the making of it, with Will [Butler], Daniel [Aukin], and Justin [Craig]. It’s so communally made. We have all gotten really close and they care about this play as much as I do, if not more. I mean, Justin is so worried about the music that he can't sleep. He is developing a migraine. And Daniel has healed me in a lot of ways because he is such a profoundly sensitive collaborator, so careful and caring. And he's taught me so much about how to be with somebody over time and how to trust someone and communicate in a creative relationship.
Lizzie: That’s wonderful, David. I also want to hear about the individual part of your writing process, wherever you want to start.
David: When I first came up with the idea for the play 10 years ago, I thought, well this is a great art installation. But is it a play? Because what will happen? Am I going to literally track them recording songs? Like, who the hell wants to watch that for hours? So then I thought, well, there are other modalities that this can play in.
And I have not been somebody traditionally who's worked in realism. I wanted to try it because I thought it would be a good experiment. Usually with my plays, I’m not trying to be relatable. I'm trying to write things that are not me, and tarry with things that are difficult. But then I was like, okay: if this were a dinner party and traditionally I have brought flame-baked cockroach, or like… if my play 3C were incinerated snake tails –
Lizzie: (laughing) I can’t deal with your examples –
David: I know - then Stereophonic is baked ziti. That was the experiment. Can I sit with these characters? Can I just be with them in their picayunish mundanity and ordinariness and boringness? You know, the kind of play that people like, where actors fry an egg, drink a beer, open a thing with the bottle cap, you know, that's when everyone says, “oh, so realistic, so real.”
And there are thousands of pages of dialogue and scenarios that are not here, of course. This is the curated version of it, so that audiences can understand what I know within a dramatic contraption. So that’s what I did: I gave it a dramatic contraption. And that took about five years to figure out how to do.
Lizzie: Wow.
David: I am a perfectionist. And writing is my conscience as a person: it shows me what I'm lying about. Because the characters are always shadows of me. They’re showing my unconscious to me, something about myself that I need to look at but won’t know until the end of the play.
Lizzie: I think that’s what theater does for people, to some extent. You can look at something uncannily close to your own reality, at just the right distance to see it clearly…
David: Right, it forces you to look at stuff that is true in you. And I'm not private in my writing. I am not withholding. Anything that's embarrassing or shameful or whatever, it goes right in. Theater is a sacred space for me to be completely rigorously honest, and I take it very seriously. I won't lie in my plays, the truth has to come out. And if it doesn't come out, then I'm not interested and I don't want to do it. I don't understand why anybody would write a play that isn’t honest. It’s a waste of time. If you're not going to put skin in the game, don't do it.
Lizzie: I also think that sometimes writers do put skin in the game, but fast-forward through or get lost in the curating part of it. Because it can take a long time to create a dramatic contraption that maintains the truth.
David: It’s like getting a clipping from a plant and letting it grow. Putting a little sunlight there, and shaping it so that the plant can do its thing.
Lizzie: I love that.
Let’s get into the characters now. It’s both controversial and impossible to choose a favorite in this play. I love them all in different ways, and feel I've known them my whole life. But let’s start with Reg because I think he’s the funniest. Also, I think he's living on the border of some kind of mythic access.
David: Reg is very special. He is very observant about people, and he can be shockingly polite about certain things. I see him as innocent. I think all of them are innocent actually. I knew when I wrote this, I didn't want to have this band where everyone's screaming at each other all the time. Of course they do scream at each other sometimes, but I knew that they would have to try to be gracious and generous when they could, and let things go for as long as they could when they knew there wasn't going to be an easy fix for something.
And Reg is reserved in how he engages with Peter's perfectionism and relentlessness. I'm impressed with him when Peter takes his bass from him and says, “let me show you.” It's really violent to do that to a musician. And Reg just lets him do it and tries to collaborate with him, to be a good band mate, and says, “Make me a tape, I'll listen to it.” He's a little bit of a fantasist and an idealist. He probably would've voted for Bernie.
Lizzie: He’s really a hippie. And he says he wants to live in art.
David: And not in a fantasy way. He's desperate for things to be beautiful. He's desperate for a beautiful life, and he's desperate to experience love in a beautiful way and to wear rose-colored glasses, to be cliché about it. And he wants things to be tinted a certain way because he is that way inside. He has a poetry to him. And he's reaching for other things, he’s interested in people and political movements, things that other people might think are weird.
Lizzie: He’s an independent thinker. But not, like, Qanon.
David: No. But depending on where his head lies on his shoulders a given day, it could go south. But, you know, at the end of the play, I think he went to some Carlos Castaneda conference, like someone on the street had flyers and said, “Hey, do you wanna learn about life?” And it’s very moving to me that he is trying to educate Grover about it, even though he just learned these things two days ago. I don't know if he's learned the lesson yet that he wants to teach, but he wants to have learned it and he already feels it inside him.
Lizzie: I love him so much. Let’s talk about the women, Diana and Holly.
David: I think about Diana and Holly especially when dealing with fame. There’s something redundant about that for them.
Lizzie: Go on?
David: Well it’s all these boys in this band and there’s only the two women. It’s much harder for them to navigate being around the guys than it is for the guys to be around them. They can’t “get emotional,” they can’t do anything that identifies them as a woman who’s gonna “interfere with the workings of the band” and all that shit.
Fame rhymes with the way women have to exist because of the way women are turned into images by men. With fame, you become mummified or encased in an image. I mean, you are voluntarily putting yourself out there for it, but the image of yourself can run away from you and exceed you and get blown up. And it doesn’t reflect or nourish anything about who you actually are. Suddenly it’s like, where am Iin this iconography that you’re making of me?
And I think Diana and Holly really experience this question, like, how should you be famous? Do you have to prepare for it? How do you prepare for it? Do you have to change? How do you equal the demand of the fame?
Lizzie: And still hold onto yourself.
David: Hold onto anything about yourself, yes, and stay a little girl writing lyrics in her diary. Because ultimately, that’s what art is: it’s banal and domestic.
That is another thing I really want to expose in this play: these people, in these rock bands, they’re just people doing their laundry. Art-making and big mythic beautiful music often come from people, like, taking a shower, eating eggs, driving around, going to the grocery store. It’s very quotidian. I mean, who would Lady Gaga be if she didn't have music and art and acting? Just a weird lady in the East Village.
Lizzie: Right, and so many brilliant artists are just a weird lady in the East Village for reasons that have nothing to do with talent or skill. I mean, I certainly do not believe that we live in a cultural meritocracy where the cream rises to the top.
David: It does not.
Lizzie: No there’s an alchemy of luck and random timing and bias and privilege and power at work, all of these vectors which are part of why and how an artist gets recognized. And I think all of that can induce an imposter syndrome for some artists, a sort of dissociative, almost depersonalized feeling: like, why is this happening to me? What did I even do?
David: Right, and how do I do it again? Am I supposed to keep doing it? What is making me famous? What is making me good?
Lizzie: Why do you think it is we mythologize artists in the ways that we do?
David: Hmm. I think we have a need for Gods and we have a need for things to exceed us and to live in some kind of mystique. It’s inaccessible. And we want to experience Dionysus in rock music. We want to have a holy religious experience and we want to lose ourselves.
Lizzie:Ekstasis in Greek mythology. Ecstasy.
David: Right. And in order to have that, you need to have a hierarchical relationship between you and the rock god. I’m interested in de-pathologizing that — I mean, Diana is so normal, you know? I’m interested in the mystery of that juxtaposition.
Lizzie: That juxtaposition reminds me of something I was actually just talking about with Will [Brill, the actor playing Reg], about how rock gods are similar to the Greek gods because the Greek gods are so flawed and human. I mean, Zeus is so powerful - and then also such a douche, such a joke.
David: Absolutely. It’s also like that first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. It works because he’s psychologized. And, I mean, I know some musicians and they don’t live these blown-out lives. That’s something that we see on red carpets and stuff. It’s an illusion.
Lizzie: And we create that illusion because we want gods, okay, and why else?
David: We want theater and glamor and we want what I want when I write my blown-out crazy-surrealist, melodramatic, psycho-whatever plays: I’m trying to push past reality because it’s not enough. Our lives are not enough. They feel impoverished. And rather than replicate the impoverishment, let’s blow it out and make it stylized and wittier and crazier than anything in life, and so much better in some ways. We all want that.
Lizzie: Absolutely. Okay, here's a question: Who in this play is a narcissist?
David: I don't think any of them are narcissists full-on, but I think they all have a little bit of narcissism. Peter might be the closest. He has a narcissistic wound.
Lizzie: What’s that?
David: When a child is not cared for by their parents, the child has to find ways to fill that in. But also Peter can’t be a total narcissist because he loves people. He loves Diana. Also, Diana is on the narcissism spectrum. I mean, they all are.
Lizzie: I think all artists have some aspect of it.
David: Some aspect, yes. But the characters can’t be too encased in themselves because I don't think the play could work otherwise, I wouldn't care. You have to believe that Peter loves Diana, that he sees her, is threatened by her, wants to nurture her, and probably wants to obliterate her in some way.
Lizzie: For sure. I’m thinking about that exchange where Diana says, “I don't want to be forced.” That's the part of the play that really destroys me whenever I read it.
David: It’s triggering, I know.
Lizzie: She's telling him he made her a puppet and doesn’t let her play an instrument. She's basically saying,“In this band, I'm your instrument. I'm not even a musician because I'm your instrument.”
David: And she also says, “I wanted to give myself some kind of literacy.” And her use of the word “literacy,” really for me, signals: “I am illiterate. I have no currency. Because you have cut things off from me.” It’s the worst thing Peter has ever done. But they are also able to have these sidebars in that argument where he agrees with her, and he goes with it. And that is why they were able to stay together for nine years.
You know how the inspiration for the play came from listening to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s Babe I’m Gonna Leave You - and it’s that bleed between, “I'm gonna leave you” and “don't ever leave me,” there’s no distinction. The categories just keep blurring in the song, and the violence of “I'm gonna leave you” blurs with the violence of “don’t ever leave me.”
Lizzie: I think often in life, the things or people we reject the most are also what we want the most. Because it's more vulnerable to admit how much you want someone than it is to push them away.
David: Yes. Especially if you know it's not right for you. I mean, Diana knows her relationship with Peter isn't working. It'd be so much easier if she stopped loving him. But you can't just fall out of love with certain people. It’s not rational.
Lizzie: And it’s so real. Because when you're with someone who has such a clear and domineering view of the world and of their position in it, it can be intense to get absorbed into that person’s version of reality. It can be almost impossible to get out of it at a certain point because it’s kind of like being in a cult.
David: There are lots of one-on-one cults. But I want to be careful about talking about Peter in that way. Diana did use Peter too. She needed him, he is brilliant and will devote time to her when she doesn’t know how to make a bridge or a chorus.
Lizzie: Yes, but that’s also where I get stuck. Because part of the reason she doesn’t know how to do that is him. He took her instruments away literally and figuratively.
David: That’s part of it, but not the only reason. Because she isn't totally rigorous. They’re both a little right and a little wrong, and he’s more wrong. And he is doing what his father did to him, which is, “teaching a really important lesson in discipline and rigor.” But the more Peter tries to help her and the band, the more they hate him. Because he’s driving them away with his perfectionism, being relentless and crazy. He just doesn’t know who else to be. I think he’s in the most pain of anyone in the play.
Because it can’t just be that he’s the abusive, asshole, narcissistic boyfriend and Diana is the innocent.
Lizzie: Of course not, then it’s boring. But it’s easy to see the ways he has power over her and how that’s an absorption of a patriarchal society.
David: Yes.
Lizzie: And it's so destructive.
David: So destructive.
Lizzie: And he privileges the wellbeing of the art over the wellbeing of everyone in the room, including himself.
David: A hundred percent. He doesn't like himself, he really has a lot of shame. It's all because of his father. I wish I could just have a conversation with the father.
Lizzie: I wish you could too. Have you ever talked to him?
David: No, I never met the dad.
Lizzie: Wow. Why do you think that is?
David: I don't want to meet him. I'm scared. I probably know him. And I don't want to know him.
Lizzie: Okay yeah. Just don’t go there.
David: But when I see Peter as a kid? Because I can see him as a little kid – sorry –
Lizzie: Don’t be sorry, there are tissues right there –
David: With this play and these people, I feel very sensitive, it feels very real to me, I don't know what to tell you. I feel like I work in an animal adoption center.
Lizzie: And how could you not? I mean, you have spent 10 years with them. And you have lived with them in their most intimate moments, you've seen parts of them that nobody else sees, you know them in ways no one else knows. I think that’s hard for you because sometimes they are misunderstood, or people cast judgment on them, which you feel is unwarranted because you understand where they're coming from. So I think you feel protective of them.
David: I do, I feel very protective.
Lizzie: Yes. And because of the genre you’re working in - hyperrealism, you know, and how immersive it is for you - you’re intentionally walking this tightrope between how much is aesthetic and how much is real, as you say. So, can we talk about Grover now? I can’t believe we haven’t talked about him yet.
David: I feel like Grover becomes a stealth protagonist of the play.
Lizzie: Yes. And we were just talking about how we mythologize certain artists as gods, but now I’m thinking about how we also have obsessions with tabloids, you know, “the stars are just like us” and whatever. Because of our desire to find a relatable humanity there. And I see Grover as an access point for that.
David: I’ve never thought about that before. But when I wrote Grover, I thought it was a great opportunity because he could be our man on the ground, a proxy for us, watching.
Lizzie: Right.
David: And Grover comes from nothing. He doesn't have a trust fund. He doesn't have any connections. He moved to Los Angeles and thought, “I'm going to do this because this is my dream and I'm going to make my dream a reality.” So he makes his dream a reality and then his dream corrodes in front of his eyes. It’s this really, really difficult, harsh reality that's in some ways worse than before he had the dream.
He was naïve about what it was going to take to work for a band like this. In the beginning, he was thinking about it totally in terms of the music, and how much he loves music. And he didn't understand the human element that goes into a process this involved and this difficult. And so he suddenly finds himself in quicksand. And what he comes to understand is that it’s not just about turning knobs and figuring out how to make it sound good – he has to manage personalities and listen in on conversations and know what's going on. Making art with people at this caliber and with this kind of intensity, I mean, the frequency of the vibe is intense and the demand for perfection is intense. It's that stupid saying, "what makes you, breaks you," and vice versa.
And Grover is in love with Peter and thought this was going to be the best thing that ever happened to him, working with his idol. But he realizes that his idol is kind of a horrible man. And his idol hates him, his idol wants to destroy him, his idol is relentless with him and is hurt and hurts him. Grover is like Peter’s spiritual twin. I think that's why Peter hired Grover. They’re both these boys who have been rejected or abandoned by their fathers. Grover's father walked out on him and Peter's father emotionally abused him. It’s a fatherless men thing, they’re both these broken straight boys.
You know, it’s weird that no one's gay in this play. It's all straight people. I don't even think anyone is bi.
Lizzie: Really? Truly straight? Or they’re repressing and not in touch with something?
David: No I think they're very, very straight.
Lizzie: Fully heterosexual. Wow.
David: I think so. Well, maybe Holly could be bi. Mildly.
Lizzie: Yeah she’s experimental at minimum. Like, she would have a good time and she would go with it.
David: Right she could make out with a woman and be into it. But I don't think she would be with a woman forever.
Lizzie: Mhm mhm. Anyway, back to Grover. We were saying how Grover wants to be loved by Peter, his idol, his god.
David: Yes and he wants to be seen by him. When his father left, his mother said, “this is a lesson and suffering and you need to suffer and learn.”And so he learned.
Lizzie: Is Grover Jewish?
David: No.
Lizzie: Is anyone in the play Jewish?
[Lizzie and David are both Jewish.]
David: No. This suffering is the Greek, pathe mathos, which means “suffer and learn.” I think Grover doesn't want to live that way, but he's so hurt that that way of thinking actually becomes an anchor for him. But deep down, he's also idealistic and optimistic, and there's a part of him that's a fabulist and a dreamer who wants life to be great.
So he’s piling on the pain of his life and swimming in it, saying, “you know what, it's fine, life is suffering, that's fine, good.” And when he's saying, in the play, “I hate Peter,” you know, “fuck Peter” – and then Peter comes to apologize to him, and afterwards Grover says, “Just give me my Grammy and get me out of here.” Like, “I don't need you to love me, I just want to acquire things and accumulate successes for myself and fuck all of you, I don't want to be in community with you, I want to be by myself.”
And so at the end of the play, when Grover tells Diana that he understands why she would want to do a solo album because, obviously, this whole process was a nightmare — she says it was the best it's ever going to get. She wants to be in community with others, and she's willing to go through all of this because she understands the rewards of that.
That’s one of the biggest questions in this play: Can I be in community? Can I create a community? Can I collaborate with other people? Can I be with other people in this world? How can I be in this world with other people?
They're all outsiders, the people in this play. And they're all eccentrics. They don't fit into the world. But through rock music, they can. And they can be together.
Lizzie: I’m also thinking about Grover and the end of the play, and about something you said once, that the ending is about death.
David: It does boil down to the ending, where Grover's playing with the console, doing his mixing.
Lizzie: In the script, you describe that sound as “angels and blue skies.”
David: Yes. You hear the harmonies that they're singing – but you also saw them screaming at each other and calling each other horrible things while they were singing those harmonies earlier. It’s the gears rubbing up against each other of this beautiful thing and this painful thing.
So the ending becomes an historical document of the entire play, and all the iterations of that song, and everything that goes into it. It’s like the play creates and documents its own history. And then it asks you to become a part of the making of that history by internalizing this music and the story of how it was made. It's almost Marxist. You know, this is the product – but in it are also all these parts that went into And it's asking you to take into account those different parts. And it's also asking you to look at life as a series of weird syncretic events, of opposite things that don't go together, but that also make a kind of harmony. The whole play is about doubling.
Lizzie: And to what you were saying before, part of why the play stirs up so much emotion in you is that doubling, or that duality. It holds contradictory things right up against each other, and I notice it everywhere – I mean, the language moves in and out of the sublime and the mundane all the time, things like that.
And that duality is artistry, it’s how artists live: accessing a realm of existential pain or confusion or transcendence, and also this other separate realm of total pragmatism. Moving between those two spaces can be a kind of torture.
And I wonder if you, in writing the play, went through some version of that. Because you are also sitting in that space between something infinite, I mean, you could live with these people forever.
David: With this play, I could.
Lizzie: Yes, but of course there also needs to be something curatorial and editorial to it. It’s like in the play, when Peter says, “You need to cut those verses.”
David: It was a very immersive project for me and I wanted to go very extreme with that. Because I wanted it to be behavioral and I wanted to really test how far I could go with the verisimilitude. You know, there’s that scene where Reg is talking about the houseboats?
Lizzie: Oh my God, it’s so funny. And beautiful.
David: That was once a 30-page scene. And Will [Brill] went crazy over it because they were just talking about this nonsense forever and ever and it was amazing. But then when you try to put that in a play, it's like, ughno. So I had to figure out how to give the impression of what that had been, and then make it work dramatically. Give it something architectonic. My plays don’t look like anything at first, it’s only later that I go, okay what if there was a dramatic thing here, what would it be? It’s based on what I made, instead of me deciding it in advance.
Lizzie: Right. You take in what you've made, and you find what's already true about it.
David: So with the structure, I start the scale very small, and then I bump it up in the fourth act deliberately. And, because of the suddenness of the scale bump, it makes everything much more painful.
And I knew I was going to do it that way from maybe the first month or two that I was working on it: hold back as much as I can, and then get all of the emotion out at the end. And I feel that I did that, while also fulfilling my mandate of just staying with the characters, not ending with some giant gesture. Because they have their breakdowns and they lose it, and then it's, “What are we gonna cut to get this album going? We have to make a practical decision.”
That's the end of the play. They just keep going. ■
