Notes on STEREOPHONIC
“You’re a broken person. So am I. Everyone’s a broken person.” …is what David Adjmi told me, as I remember it, on a street corner in Seattle about 22 years ago.
Amid the anxious excitement to open Playwrights Horizons’ new season with Stereophonic, I find myself recalling this same feeling from two decades ago, when David and I were gearing up to premiere his earlier play Strange Attractors at The Empty Space Theater, back at the start of our careers. From my earliest encounter with David’s writing I’ve found his plays exhilarating, terrifying, ecstatic – like (I imagine) the feeling of skydiving – and my heart leaps to think of unleashing that energy on our stage.
Strange Attractors is a loose riff on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and it centers on Betsy who (like Nora) is in a painful process of self-discovery and (ultimately) freedom from a domestic life that’s trapped her. But in Strange Attractors, Betsy’s escape from one dollhouse is only a passage into another more chaotic and labyrinthine one. Because it turns out her self, once she discovers it, is amorphous. Betsy’s self is a mosaic of fragmented ideas of a person – one moment she’s Barbara Stanwick, the next she’s Marilyn Manson, the next she’s Little Orphan Annie – and these pieces are held together by centripetal force as she spins, like a gyroscope, faster and faster, maintaining a kind of shape until she can’t spin anymore.
That fragility is at the core of every character in David’s writing, whether they’re the cast of Three’s Company (in his play 3C), in the court of Louis XVI (Marie Antoinette) or the Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn (Stunning). His characters are constructions made from shards of personal monsters, heroes and myths — and the thrill of David’s plays is that he places his characters in the precise circumstance that threatens to dismantle these constructions. As live theater, his work offers an intimacy that feels dangerous, scary even, but also exquisitely compelling. We become voyeurs to people stripped of their personae, a bundle of exposed nerves, fragile to the core.
Which in the hands of another writer might be cruel. But David’s not out to torture his characters, or ridicule them, and his plays aren’t satire. The identity chaos his characters struggle through is, in David’s anthology, a condition of living, written with deep compassion because we are all a work of fiction, perpetually constructing ourselves to feel secure.
In 2020, HarperCollins published David’s memoir Lot Six, which spirals around this constant in his own upbringing. A meticulous portrait of his childhood as an outcast among the Syrian-Jewish community of 1970s Brooklyn (in whose patois the book’s title refers to one who’s queer, an odd one out, of little value), the book traces his attempts to construct and revise his “self.” “In some way, exile was my native state,” David writes, and so he spends his childhood looking for “external cues for who to be,” an ever-shifting sense of identity that’s out of reach. “I’d begun to accept that living would be a kind of honed falseness — that, like a broken bone locked in a cast, one’s inner self only existed to be grafted and reshaped.”
To be so malleable, though, is to live in a state of extreme vulnerability. And to be so keenly aware of one’s own falseness might be great practice in locating the falseness in others: a power that can be acutely dangerous in the wrong hands.
In Stereophonic, a rock band and two sound engineers are stuck together in a recording studio, under enormous pressure to produce a groundbreaking new album. Through the lens of David’s writing, the scene becomes a psychological war zone: each artist fighting to protect their own sense of self, utterly exposed to one another’s chaos, while navigating their newly won fame, all in a room that’s way too small. It’s a neurotic thrill ride, a gorgeous freefall, and a love letter to our broken selves.
