From struggling artist to Tony triumph

The creator of Broadway's 'Best Play' first found his voice at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Long before his Broadway show Stereophonic became the most-nominated play in Tony Award history, ultimately winning 2024's Best Play and four other categories, David Adjmi arrived at the University of Iowa questioning his prospects as a writer and artist.

During a tumultuous time in 1998, Adjmi left New York for a small studio apartment on Linn Street in Iowa City. He'd broken up with his first boyfriend and was no longer on speaking terms with his father. Writing was a struggle.

David Adjmi

But over the next three years in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Adjmi found his voice. His rise since, while marked by profound setbacks, has been cinematic. So is his next project-turning Stereophonic, which chronicles a mid-1970s rock band on the brink of stardom as it records a new album, into a major Hollywood script.

"I would not be the writer I am without Iowa," says Adjmi. "That's where I started to embrace my own voice - I found it almost by accident. When you have to keep producing things and producing things, there's a point where the mask slips, and then you can't fake it anymore."

Besides earning recognition for his plays, Adjmi penned the acclaimed memoir Lot Six, which UI professor and award-winning author Melissa Feboscalled "one of the best books I've ever read."

Adjmi, who grew up in Brooklyn's Sephardic Syrian Jewish community, knew he wanted to be a playwright after seeing Six Degrees of Separation at Lincoln Center Theatre as a student at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Despite some initial fears about moving to the Midwest from a cultural hub, he found Iowa soothing - the perfect place to experiment and build confidence.

"It's a very artistically minded program; they're not thinking about the business side of writing," he says. "What does it mean to be an artist? How do you craft a play? And I didn't always think about those things before I came to Iowa. I didn't really understand craft at all. I learned a lot about it, but the way they taught it was quite sneaky. They gave us a lot of freedom."

Theatre Arts faculty, including Art Borreca and Dare Clubb and visiting instructor Naomi Iizuka, supported Adjmi's explorations, pretending not to notice when he came to class without pages. Instructors taught workshop students to risk being honest in their work and to challenge themselves and others. "What is Adjmi-esque?" Borreca asked his student one day, a question Adjmi, who was still working to find his own style, found terrifying.

Outside the classroom, Adjmi browsed Iowa City bookstores, saw movies, savored the Hamburg Inn's "goopy cheese sauces," and people-watched at the brand-new Coral Ridge Mall. He and fellow playwrights workshop students drove to the Sanctuary pub after classes, keeping the conversation going over artichoke dip.

"I loved Iowa City; I had so much fun there," says Adjmi. "Sometimes it drove me crazy, and I'd have to get out, but I miss it. I have a little place in my mind where I can visit it still and feel that emotion."

Inspiration came in bursts - including in a flash while walking through Chelsea while home over Thanksgiving break. Adjmi jotted down bits of dialogue he was hearing but couldn't yet see the shape of a play. It wasn't until the night before his class submission was due that he landed on a structure borrowed from Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a play he was teaching Iowa undergrads that year as a resident teaching assistant.

Ten minutes before class began, Adjmi rushed to the Theatre Building and printed copies of Strange Attractors. Despite missing a deadline, his loose adaptation was selected for production in the Iowa New Play Festival, the UI's renowned annual festival centered on producing, reading, and discussing new scripts from students in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

"New Play Festival is the pinnacle of our program for playwrights," says Mary Beth Easley, who chairs the Department of Theatre Arts. "At Iowa we emphasize the development and production of new work - so we suspend all of our classes that week to focus on putting our students' new plays on the stage. It's all hands on deck, including not only our students and faculty, but also numerous professional playwrights, directors, and producers that come from all over the country to view and discuss and support their work."

Strange Attractors later premiered in Seattle, leading to a commission from the Royal Court Theatre in London.

"That was the play where I exposed myself in a very raw way," Adjmi says. "I think at Iowa, because I was not being criticized all that much, I felt a kind of freedom. They understood that (playwrights) criticize ourselves enough."

Chris Stack and Will Brill star in Stereophonic, a play written by Iowa alumni David Adjmi. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

The success of Strange Attractors led to Adjmi's 2001 admission to Juilliard's American Playwrights Program, which accepts only four students each year.

But success was never linear or guaranteed. The Juilliard program was a disappointment that appeared for years to have been a setback, Adjmi says, after a combative professor who didn't like his work dismissed him after the first year.

Adjmi was working as a temp, living with his mother, and dealing with a bleeding ulcer. He had only a few thousand dollars left in his bank account when he learned in 2003 that he'd been selected for a prestigious award for emerging playwrights.

Adjmi traveled to Berlin, where he wrote three plays in quick succession: Caligula, 3C, and The Evildoers. His first big breakthrough came with Stunning, which was inspired by his roots in the Sephardic Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn.

Its sold-out New York premiere in 2009 was at the Lincoln Center Theatre, the same venue where he was inspired to become a playwright and where this past June he saw Stereophonicwin five Tony Awards.

In 2013, Adjmi was again thinking of leaving theater when he won a Mellon Foundation grant with a three-year residency and agreed to write a brief play. Inspiration hit on a flight to a Mellon Foundation conference in Boston when he heard and was struck by the powerful conflicting emotions embedded in Led Zeppelin's cover of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You."

He shared his idea with Will Butler, formerly of the band Arcade Fire, who agreed to write the original music for a play that took audiences behind the scenes of a recording studio.

After a year spent researching bands like Fleetwood Mac, Adjmi became enamored with playwrighting again as that brief play ultimately turned into a four-act production. It opened on Broadway at the Golden Theatre in April 2024 to rave reviews.

Juliana Canfield stars in Stereophonic, a play written by Iowa alumni David Adjmi. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

The New York Timescalled Stereophonic"a staggering achievement" that "already feels like a must-see American classic." Varietydubbed it a "work of theatrical virtuosity."The Tonight Show had the actors on to perform one of the cast recording's hit songs.

Then came June 16, when Stereophonictook home five Tony Awards - a capstone to the 11 years Adjmi devoted to the project. Early on, he asked director Daniel Aukin, sound designer Ryan Rumery, and set designer David Zinn to commit to the play, which he knew would take years to bring to the stage. Each of them won a Tony.

"The play is so much about collaboration and the ways in which it can falter," says Adjmi. "But this process was an example of what an elevated collaboration can be when people are firing on all cylinders and being their best selves and also their best artistic selves.

"That is the thing that I'm going to take with me from all of this. You can't control what awards you get; you can only do the work. But then the awards became a beautiful recognition of something from the larger theater community."

Borreca, co-head of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, was Adjmi's advisor at Iowa and taught him in the program's core creative course called Playwrights Workshop. He says Adjmi's recognition is momentous - and reflects the distinction of Iowa's program and its students.

"It's also a wonderful affirmation of the American theater's openness to supporting work of high quality that engages with contemporary characters and issues," he says. "As a student, David always brought in work that was exciting."

For Adjmi, Iowa provided the initial fuel and confidence that propelled him down the difficult, bumpy path to Broadway stardom.

"If this is your calling - and it has to be a calling - then you have to have faith in what you're doing. And that doesn't mean faith that it is going to work out the way you want it to work out," he says. "Faith is you are unconditionally committing to this life and the notion that somehow everything you are experiencing is going to enrich your art. My play is so much about that."