Playwright's Perspective: Stereophonic

From the playwright: David Adjmi

Stereophonic came to me when I thought my life as a playwright was over. Early in my career I’d had a bad production experience; when it was done I was left with a bleeding ulcer and, in my bank account, a grand total of seven thousand bucks. I very dramatically announced to all my friends that I was “leaving the theater” — but once I’d made that decision, I was suddenly showered with grants and productions. Plays in my backlog were now seeing production, so I kept delaying my leave of the theater just this once, I’d tell myself, until the next production opportunity arrived, at which point I’d make another temporary volte face.

In 2013, I received a grant from the Mellon Foundation for a three-year residency at Soho Rep. As part of the residency, I was meant to write a new play. I thought this sounded terrible — as I’d “left the theater” — but I had to do it, so I agreed to write a brief 70-minute play to fulfill the assignment. But the brief 70-minute play grew to a two-act play, and then a three-act play, and then a four-act play, and before I knew it I found myself in love with plays and playwriting all over again — despite how I’d been bruised, and in spite of the dysfunction and craziness of what Zoe Caldwell used to sardonically refer to as “The Industry.”

Stereophonic is a play about this kind of love, a love so ardent and intractable it transcends logic; it transcends the humiliation and risk that inevitably come with it. This kind of love is not involuntary, it is something we choose. And it is choice that keeps the members of the band together — a choice they make again and again, day after day, in a process that gets more and more drawn out and feverish until it starts to resemble Hans Castorp’s visit to the sanitorium in The Magic Mountain.

Why are we drawn to the things that destroy us? And how is it that these destructive forces can also be life-giving fonts of beauty and profound meaning?

I can’t always point to the exact moment of inspiration for a play, but I can with this one. I was on a flight to Boston when Led Zeppelin’s haunting cover of “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” came on the radio. I knew the song, but I hadn’t ever really listened to it, and I was struck by the rawness and unmasked pain in the vocals. As Robert Plant taunts his lover with this threat of abandonment, his voice soars and shreds in a Dionysian frenzy of Eros and pain: the subtext being I can’t ever leave you. It’s the unresolvable tension between these two that makes the song great.

Stereophonic is a love letter to artists: to the intransigent, insane love that fuels our work and the heartbreak we endure to keep making it. Art is a prism that refracts our nightmares, transforming them into dreams. But dreams and nightmares are flipsides of one coin, just like love and hate. What I didn’t know on that flight to Boston but have since come to realize is that my “babe” is the American theater itself: my soulmate, my abuser, the best lover I ever had.