Liz Duffy Adams

Liz Duffy Adams’ play, Or, premiered Off Broadway at the Julia Miles Theater in November–December 2009. Adams is a New Dramatists alumna (2001–2008) and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award, a Will Glickman Award, a Frederick Loewe Award in Music Theatre, a Weston Playhouse Music Theater Award, and a commission from Children’s Theater Company, Minneapolis. Other plays include Dog Act; Wet, or Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitude; The Listener; and One Big Lie. Her work has been written, produced, or developed at the Humana Festival, Portland Center Stage, Portland Stage Company, Syracuse Stage, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, New Georges, Shotgun Players, MOXIE Theater, Clubbed Thumb, and Crowded Fire Theater among other organizations. Publications include Poodle With Guitar And Dark Glasses in Applause’s “Best American Short Plays 2000-2001,” numerous short plays and monologues in anthologies from Heinemann and Smith & Kraus, and several plays published by Playscripts, Inc. BFA: NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing; MFA: Yale School of Drama. Adams has dual American and Irish citizenship and lives in New York City and Greenfield, MA.

Whose work would you recommend for emerging writers to study?

Unfashionable but yeah, Shakespeare. I'd even say study it as an actor. Get it into your bones. And Mac Wellman (essays as well as plays), Richard Foreman (ditto), Carol Churchill, the Greeks, Beckett, Chekhov, Aphra Behn... Not just reading of course, seeing the work live. Apart from theater they should read poetry, history, and the news. Poetry to sharpen language, history for context and stories, and the news because even if a playwright isn't writing about politics or global events, it's our responsibility to have an awareness of the big picture, and set our stories within it.

If you could remove a single personality from theater history, who would you choose and why?

Shakespeare! No, there's room for everyone, I have no dogma. Although, someone else answered Lee Strasberg and I have to admit I'm in some sympathy with that. Method acting is not the playwright's friend.

What writers do you know that should be produced more and why?

There are many but Anne Washburn, Carson Krietzer, and Gordon Dahlquist are three that come to mind. Because they write brilliant unexpected plays that don't conform to expectations, plays that are smart and world-conscious and keen-eyed and sly-humored and angry.

What piece of conventional wisdom about playwriting have you found to be the least helpful?

There's this weird idea floating around about a single protagonist. People will say, "Whose play is it?" It doesn't come up with really experienced theater people, but it won't go entirely away. It's odd. I mean, apart from all the great ensemble plays (whose play is The Three Sisters?) what about all the two-protagonist ones? Waiting for Godot, Romeo and Juliet, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, etc etc.

Also, "drama is conflict." Reductive much? It's the sort of advice that leads to plays where people stand on stage shouting at each other, which is boring, and unpleasantly reminiscent of one's childhood.

If for some reason you were suddenly forbidden to write plays (or films or tv shows), what would you end up doing?

I feel very lucky to have found my way to playwriting. I find it difficult to imagine doing anything else that would suit me so well. Rationally, I would probably support myself copywriting or copyediting, but it would not make me happy. I would prefer to have what they used to call a private income, and live for pleasure, by which I mean spend most of my time lying around reading and meeting people for drinks. Sadly, not an option. Or oh, I'd write novels, if there's a loophole for that. They wouldn't be very good, probably, but I'd have fun.

What is most helpful to you as you sit down to write a first draft?

Giving myself permission to write badly. But not just mediocrely - outrageously risibly insanely badly. It's sometimes the only way I can get started. I have huge ambitions for the play and am temporarily paralyzed by them; then the bad-writing permission liberates me. This was a gift from Mac Wellman, with whom I studied briefly but indelibly.

Do you write every day? Or almost?

No. I write every day for intense bursts of several weeks, then stop to pick up the pieces.

"I am a closet _____________"

Doctor Who freak, at the moment. Not really in the closet though - I'm an open book.

What is your least favorite question about your work?

"What kind of plays do you write?" It's peculiarly hard to answer. I'm not even sure what information is being solicited - genre? It's asked all the time, almost any time you reveal what you do. So I sometimes think I should craft a standard answer. But the fact is the most real answer would probably sound flip. Or pretentious, or reductive... a field of pitfalls.

I once heard a conversation - on stage, at a CUNY event - between Wallace Shawn and Richard Foreman. Someone asked Shawn how he writes, and he said, "Well, I generally start with some sentences.... and eventually I end with some sentences." And in his inimitable voice, this sounded like lucid zen-like wisdom.