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A Healthy Serving of 'Down-to-Earth Candor' Along With Lunch By NICK WESTRATE
I had to be prepared before meeting with world-renowned playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. If there is something Juilliard has taught me, it is to "bring something to the table." In this instance, the "something" was an hour's worth of Google research on the playwriting alumnus, and the "table" was in Drama Division Director Michael Kahn's fourth-floor office, elaborately spread with a catered lunch of sandwiches, sodas, and cookies for the third-year drama students. The event, on April 1, was part of an ongoing series called Lunch With an Alum, sponsored by the Office of Alumni Relations and designed to give current students the chance to meet informally and chat with prominent alumni in their fields of study. (Alumni are invited at the request of interested students; earlier this academic year, drama students had the chance to meet with Tim Blake Nelson and Lisa Benavides.) Joe Kraemer, the Drama Division's literary manager and administrator of the Playwrights program, served as facilitator for the discussion. It looked to be a wonderful luncheon. It was.
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"If acting is honestly what's most important to you, then who cares where you do it? Shut up and go act."
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I loved David's plays Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo, and Wonder of the World when I saw them at the Manhattan Theater Club. My online research taught me that he grew up in South Boston in a gregarious working-class family and he attended Sarah Lawrence College, where he began to hone his writing skills. I learned of the many playwriting honors he received before and after coming to Juilliard. I also found his first interview in Time magazine, in which he mentioned his mother has the "mouth of a truck driver." David laughed when I brought this up over lunch. "She was really upset. She swore at me about it for weeks." This is one of David's most crucial writing inspirations: his family."I write about the kind of people I know and the things that interest me," he explained. One of my classmates asked him how he managed negotiating being a working artist, husband, son, and dad. David told us how marriage and parenthood have changed his artistic life: "I used to write every morning for a set number of hours. Now I sit down to write, and my son comes in and asks me to play 'trains' with him. Playing trains is always more important than writing." David's love of family and sly perspective on the world are what make his plays so true—zany comedies with real truth about family, love, and loss.He talked about his artistic process with "down-to-earth candor" (as third-year drama student Michael Markham put it afterward). "I don't know how, exactly, I would describe my process," David said. "It is so different for each project." He recalled the process of developing Fuddy Meers at Juilliard: "We had to bring in a certain number of pages each week for Chris [Durang] and Marsha [Norman]. I would write little cliffhanger endings for each week's section to keep my classmates interested. You can still hear them in the play."Of course, we vain actors all wanted to know about his casting process, writing for actors, and his relationship with them in the rehearsal room. David told us he loves actors who make bold choices, and that he deeply respects the actor's process in finding his or her own way to the part he has written. He also mentioned that a certain actor's voice will sometimes visit him as he is working on a new character—like actress Marylouise Burke's (Kimberly Akimbo, Sideways). In her case, it was always helpful, he said—but sometimes hearing a certain actor in the role too early can be distracting from the character.The best part of the lunch came when we third-years started commiserating about the state of the American theater: how you need to be a movie star to get on Broadway, and how terribly commercial it is all becoming. David helped to bring us back to reality a bit. "Of course that's unfortunate if the movie or TV stars aren't very good, but … Broadway producers need to make gobs and gobs of money to keep a show running … It's probably not something you can change. So why waste all that energy complaining about it? … If acting is honestly what's most important to you, then who cares where you do it? Shut up and go act … So if what you crave most is to act, then great—go to Cleveland and act. Who cares what they're doing on Broadway? But if you also happen to crave the mantle of 'Broadway actor,' because that somehow means 'I've made it,' then you should come clean and acknowledge that maybe you want to be a little famous and adored—like those very movie stars you're knocking (a few of whom can, in fact, actually act—and may have gone to Juilliard)."This is some of the best advice I have received this year. Just like he writes, David Lindsay-Abaire speaks truly. He survives in an industry clouded with commercialism, still makes great plays, and isn't stopping anytime soon. (His latest play, Rabbit Hole, will open Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club this fall. And he is currently working on musical versions of Betty Boop, Shrek, My Man Godfrey, and High Fidelity.)We all had a great time at lunch, and I thank the Office of Alumni Relations for it. And I hope everyone who attended takes his advice. Shut up and go act.Nick Westrate is a third-year drama student.
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