What Does It Cost to Lead a Creative Life?

David ADJMI: It wasn’t necessarily a fait accompli that I would have this kind of hit or anything like that. I was taken to task by the critics, and I was considered really polarizing and difficult.

Stephen DUBNER: Um, let’s back up for a second — please say your name and what you do.

ADJMI: David Adjmi is my name, and playwright is my game.

Adjmi has been a playwright for a few decades now. His work was typically staged in regional or repertory or experimental theaters — but never under the much brighter lights of Broadway, or the West End. That changed last year, with a play he wrote called Stereophonic.

ADJMI: Stereophonic is a play about a dysfunctional family. And art-making. And about the struggle to become an artist.

That’s another way of saying that Stereophonic is a play about the mind of David Adjmi.

ADJMI: I always work off of tropes in the culture, but then it’s always really a way for me to talk about me. 

The plot of Stereophonic is so slender that it barely sounds like a plot: a five-piece band is struggling to record their second album. The band very much resembles Fleetwood Mac, at least superficially. There are two sound engineers also, and the entire play takes place in California recording studios, in the late 1970s. That’s it. But that slender plot supports an entire universe of emotion; it’s some of the most psychologically astute writing you’ll ever hear on a stage. And then there’s the music. Stereophonic is not a musical, not even close, but the music says a lot of things the characters aren’t able to; and the music was written by Will Butler, a longtime member of the band Arcade Fire. Last year, as we were trying to make a series about the strange economics of the live-theater industry, Stereophonic had just moved to Broadway from a well-received off-Broadway run, at Playwrights Horizons. I saw the play a few times, I loved it; and we wound up making a pair of episodes about it; we interviewed producers, cast members, and David Adjmi. Stereophonic went on to be nominated for more Tonys than any play in history, and it won five, including Best Play. And so when I was recently in London for some other tapings, and I saw that Stereophonic was in rehearsals for its debut in the West End, I asked Adjmi if he would meet up in a recording studio and tell us everything he’s been up to. As you’ll hear, he is a fun person to have a conversation with: he is super-smart but also earnest; he’s remarkably candid; he’s rarely mean-spirited (except toward himself sometimes), and he’s consistently interesting — at least to me. I hope you’ll agree. Today on Freakonomics Radio: after a Stereophonic-size success, what can David Adjmi possibly do now? 

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David Adjmi grew up in Brooklyn, in a turbulent Syrian-Jewish family. He describes the turbulence well in a memoir called Lot Six. We also learn that Adjmi started reading The New York Times when he was two; he saw his first Broadway musical at five. He went to college — at Sarah Lawrence — and then grad school for playwriting, at both Julliard and the University of Iowa. And then came the hard work.

DUBNER: The last time we spoke, which was just as Stereophonic was starting to explode, you said there had been times where you thought about just quitting playwrighting. But you didn’t, and you’ve now been writing plays for roughly 30 years — and when you look around, you realize that almost nobody really does that anymore, yeah?

ADJMI: I think that’s true. I sort of made some decisions and choices that compromised me in terms of the kind of life I would have. I was willing to do that, because I knew that my purpose here is really to do a certain kind of writing and to be very, very truthful and exploratory in the kind work I do. And if I can’t have that freedom to explore and sort of mull over what I believe the truth is for me in this kind of dramatic dialectical context of a play, I don’t want to do it. And I don’t know if I want to do anything. You know what I mean? That kind of feels like that is my reason for being. So I made a lot of sacrifices to get to write these plays.

DUBNER: What do you mean by sacrifices?

ADJMI: I would live in people’s homes. I’d live in attics. I’d live in basements. I’d find patrons, essentially. I went into an enormous amount of debt. 

DUBNER: Credit-card debt.

ADJMI: Credit cards. And, you know, I couldn’t pay my taxes. The problem is they tax grants, which prior to Reagan they didn’t do. So when artists got grants, if I got a Guggenheim, let’s say, which I was fortunate enough to get one, then I would use that money to try to pay some of my debt. The grants were a huge boon and then suddenly it became the bane of my existence because I was like, Oh my God, I’m running from the tax man. You also go into a little bit of denial, like, I’ve got all this money, hooray. And then you want to go out and celebrate and it’s like, Oh no I’ve got this albatross of these taxes.

DUBNER: That makes me sad because I feel like someone should have said to you, Hey, the first thing you need to do is take 30 percent of that and just set it aside. But nobody said that to you? 

ADJMI: Nobody said it. But I also think maybe I wouldn’t have listened because I wanted to experience the ecstasy of money.

DUBNER: Were you somewhat hedonistic?

ADJMI: Yes. 

DUBNER: On what?

ADJMI: I took myself out for nice dinners. Maybe I bought a little outfit here and there. 

DUBNER: That doesn’t sound hedonistic. 

ADJMI: For me, it was. It’s so funny because people thought I was so rich. I remember having dinner with a professor of mine from college, from my undergraduate, after my first play opened in New York. And she’s like, you must be doing so well now financially. And I said, “They paid me $7,000.”

DUBNER: What was she a professor of? 

ADJMI: She taught literary theory and literature.

DUBNER: I would have thought she would understand the economics of theater a little bit.

ADJMI: She had not the vaguest idea. I saw her recently, we had dinner again a couple of months ago, and she said, I remembered that day really vividly because it was such a shock to my system. People don’t understand that playwrights make literally nothing, and just how broken it is. And of course, now it’s just, we’re going down even a darker black hole, which I didn’t even think was possible, but of course it always is. 

DUBNER: During the 10- or 11-year gestation period of Stereophonic, which is the show that people now know you for, talk about how close you came, or how many times you came close, to quitting playwriting.

ADJMI: What I realized making Stereophonic was that I couldn’t give up. This is the kind of torture I think that gets crystallized in the play itself, because I think people realize I love this too much and the thing that I love is killing me, and I will never stop loving it. That’s why the play rings, I think with the intensity that it has, because I was really living it for real. I made the play over 10 years, I thought it was never going to get done at some point. I mean, it’s hilarious in a dark way, because it does mirror the trajectory of the play because the play is about this album that’s like never getting finished, and everyone’s going insane, and people are wondering like, am I going to make it alive out of this studio to see this record come out? And I was really feeling that.

DUBNER: And yet that was the thing that kept you in it, didn’t make you run from it.

ADJMI: It was a bit of a Beckett situation. You know, I think about the end of Strindberg’s play, I think it’s A Dream Play, where the character says, you want to stay and you want go, and wild horses are tearing you apart in both directions simultaneously. And I really felt those two opposite emotions with equal intensity. I learned how to be quite disciplined during that period and very, very rigorous, and just put my emotions to the side as much as possible. But there were times when I really thought I was losing my mind. I had holes in my clothes and I couldn’t afford anything. I mean, it got really, really bad for me. And my director, Daniel Aukin, was actually quite worried about me. Even to the point where, when we were in previews at Playwrights Horizons, I made sort of a dark joke. We were up on the roof, he was smoking a cigarette, and I sort of alluded to the fact that, well, if it doesn’t go so great, maybe I’ll just, you know — and I kind of nodded downward. And he just burst into tears because I think he was so worried about me.

DUBNER: The relationship you two have, along with Will Butler, is, I think, quite remarkable, because you were collaborators for years and years and years before there was a play, yeah? I mean, you were a team. You formed a band, essentially.

ADJMI: We just sort of decided that we would have unconditional faith in each other. It was some sort of spiritual contract that we made. I don’t know how we made it or why we did it, but we intuitively just knew that we could trust each other and that we were going to be really decent with each other. And that I was going to learn how to be civilized, which I maybe wasn’t prior to this process, because I am quite controlling and I am very demanding. Daniel sat me down prior to the process and said, Listen, you have a reputation of being very demanding, this is how I need to work. Can you work this way? And I said, Yeah.

DUBNER: Just to be clear, you drafted these guys into your band several years before anyone would have ever heard of Stereophonic, and they worked for essentially free for years?

ADJMI: For 10 years. 

DUBNER: So this is Will Butler, who was at the point still in Arcade Fire?

ADJMI: He was in Arcade Fire. This was 2013. He’s so smart. He’s so dramaturgical, Will. He has the mind for theater and that was something I did not know, it’s an accident. 

DUBNER: You went to him because you were able to find a connection, yes, or you reached out and he said yes? 

ADJMI: I reached out to Arcade Fire, period. I was like, I want Arcade Fire to do it. I don’t know what —

DUBNER: Just because you loved them.

ADJMI: I love Arcade Fire. And I just thought there was something about the anthemic quality of some of the songs, especially in their first album. I was like, There’s something about the intensity of this, and the sort of fever of some of these songs that I think will rhyme with what I want for this show. And I love them. And then they were all busy. “No, no, no. I can’t do it.” And Will was like, Well, I’ll meet with you. And I just thought, I like this guy. He’s a bit like Peter Pan or something. I mean, he’s kind of iconoclastic for a rock star. He is a sweet, sweet soul. He’s goofy, and he is silly, and he’s really fun, and he’s very, very brainy. When we were doing my show, he moved to Cambridge and got a degree in public policy from Harvard in the middle of recording for Arcade Fire. He’s a unicorn in the world of rock music.

DUBNER: And then Daniel Aukin is a working director in New York. His father, I think, was head of the National Theater here in London for a time, yeah?

ADJMI: He was, yeah.

DUBNER: So when you say, you know, we all made this contract where we agreed to be good to each other and to collaborate in a certain way, I could see why you would want to do that , right? You’re the writer, and you need them — a director and a musician to write what is a very essential piece of this play. But what was in it for them?

ADJMI: I have no idea. I think Daniel — you know, we went to Sundance together. They had this theater lab, and I developed my first real play there called The Evildoers. Daniel saw the reading, which was quite extraordinary. Michael Stuhlbarg was in it, and it was great. He got really jazzed about it and thought, I want to work with this guy. So we had been talking about doing something together. And I remember thinking, this is the play for Daniel. Like I saw it in my mind’s eye and then I just went, that’s for Daniel. 

DUBNER: What did your script look like over the years and how much archival stuff is there? Are there cartons full of paper versions? Was it all on a computer? 

ADJMI: I’m really bad at archiving my stuff because I’m so disorganized. What I was doing in the beginning was just taking notes of every single thing that I could learn about a recording process in the ’70s: jargon, equipment, what they would say to each other, what their problems would be. Then I would riff on it and make dialogue. It was a very scattershot process. My assistant now is saying, like, what’s your process? Explain it to me so I can help you. And I’m like, I can’t explain it because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just following my intuitions. 

DUBNER: Did all the characters already exist when all this was going on?

ADJMI: No, no, no. They didn’t exist. I didn’t have an engineer for the first part because I didn’t, I was just like, oh, it’s a band. They go into the studio. I didn’t know anything. And then I said, Okay, I’ll have an engineer. And then I showed it to John Kilgore, who is this very famous engineer-producer who worked with Philip Glass and Steve Reich and all these people, and John was amazing. And we said, could you be our advisor? He read through what I had and he said, why is there only one engineer? He needs an assistant. And so that opened up the dramaturgical thing of like, oh, there’s two guys. And now it becomes like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. So then that became the next draft. I developed it in workshops. So I’d do it like 10 or 15 pages at a time, 20 pages here and there.

DUBNER: I think for people who aren’t accustomed to making things, especially over a really long period of time — they show up, they buy a ticket, they see it, and in the case of your play — it’s a long play, so maybe you feel like you’re getting money’s worth, it’s three hours long — but I think it’s not natural to think about the ingredients or the process. You know, if you and I were to go to have a really nice dinner somewhere, we don’t stop to think about all the growing and planting, harvesting, preparing, education that goes into that one meal, but it’s years and years and year and years. And similarly, what you’re describing now is years and years of minute work that’s gone into this thing, that people will show up and buy a ticket and love it or not love it, whatever, and then it’s over. Does that get to you, that people don’t generally think about or understand what it takes to make something like this?

ADJMI: Well, that’s why I wrote the play. I heard an interview, I think it was about Barbra Streisand. Barbra Streisand was in the studio, and they were playing these violins. And she said, one of these, it’s flat. And they were like, what are you talking about? There were like 12 violins, and she goes, which one? Play it? You. That’s the kind of expertise that when you hear the anecdote, you’re like, oh my God. Barbra Streisand doesn’t brag about this. Hey, do you know what I do? I have to listen to all these flat instruments. She’s just focused on the work at hand. I find there’s such nobility in that for me, that artists often don’t have to display their expertise. They just do their work. I find that very beautiful. 

DUBNER: There are romantic relationships among the characters in your play that ebb and flow. But even among those for whom there’s no romantic relationship, being in a band is a little like being married to several people simultaneously, right?

ADJMI: I like the idea that you’re getting to. There is something in there, but I don’t understand it.

DUBNER: The reason I’m asking is that I was in a band, and I quit as we were kind of at the brink — we had gotten a record deal, and we were in pre-production on our first record when I decided that this was not the life that I wanted. We were on Arista Records. It was a whole thing. And I’d been working toward it for —

ADJMI: Clive Davis.

DUBNER: Yeah, Clive came to CBGBs to see us play. And then he led us out to his stretch limousine. It was very cold, he put his silk scarf around my neck.

ADJMI: Oh my God, oh my God.

DUBNER: And we went up to his office the next day and he had Aretha Franklin get on the phone with us to tell us how great Arista —

ADJMI: Oh my, what? Stephen.

DUBNER: But anyway, once we got into the making of the record and once I had exposure to people who were successful, I realized it was not the healthy lifestyle for me because it’s too much fun. But the band — I deeply loved every individual in that band. It’s just a very hard relationship, which is one of many reasons I loved your play. I think it’s a dynamic that your play helps people understand about themselves maybe. 

ADJMI: The thing that I started out with when I was writing the play was collaboration and working together and being together and functioning as a collective, and also as individuals inside of a collective — like, that tension, how do you do it? How do you partner? Where are the nightmares? Because I do have trouble with that. I’m much better one-on-one than I am working inside of a group. However, ironically, with this play, with this group, I can’t tell you how harmonious it is. It’s very beautiful and very magical and we do fight, and sometimes I want to fight more, probably should be fighting more, but I just love them so much, I don’t want to fight with them. I don’t like conflict. I want to be loved and just everything to be nice with everybody. But I sometimes push things into conflict because of that. I don’t think it’s ever gratuitous, because I love harmony and I don’t like to fight with people, but then I will sometimes push things. 

DUBNER: One particularly compelling element of this play to me, and I think to many people, is Peter. He ends up being the leader of the band by merit, but it wasn’t a vote, it just happened, because he was the most, let’s say, driven and talented. I’m just curious if that dynamic, that reality of, you know, a leader emerging and everyone is kind of bitchy about his being the leader in the way that he is a leader because he is very exacting. But they also benefit hugely by his being that kind of leader. And so he’s in this kind of difficult situation where he too wants to be loved, like you just said. He wanted to be invited over for that chicken dinner. Does that have a connection to you or anyone in your life? 

ADJMI: I think that’s like the obverse, that’s like the Dark Knight version of me. That’s where it could have gone. But I think Peter couldn’t have survived in doing theater because theater, you can’t control it every night, and you can’t record it and get all the levels exactly right, which is sort of what I want to do. 

DUBNER: Is that why you don’t go to the performances then?

ADJMI: That’s part of it, because I am compulsive. I literally sometimes spasm when the actors don’t do something the way I want them, like I’m —

DUBNER: So if you’re sitting in the audience, you might shout, “What are you doing?!”

ADJMI: It’s kind of what I’m doing the whole time in my head. And I think I would just, my energy. No, but it is dark comedy. I am compulsive, and Peter is compulsive. I am an obsessive person, and I hear things at a frequency. Daniel keeps saying, my director, he just goes, you hear things at a frequency that normal people can’t and I’m like going, well, that doesn’t help. Like he thinks that like, oh, it’s not a big deal that we don’t do that because you hear it and it’s so specific, but no one else will know. All I can do is tell you what I need to hear. But I have a really good bedside manner. I can be charming. I’ve cultivated this New York Jewish persona that I work the room with. It’s not just a persona. I actually do have this sort of sense of comedy about myself and my own obsessiveness and my neuroses. And I have a light touch and a kind of weird hovering overview of the absurdity of everything that we’re doing all the time so that I don’t get so, you know, annoying about things. I try, anyway. I mean, I did, like, say to Will, this song needs a bridge, and this song needs that, and I want it more intense, and blah blah blah, and he’d be trying it, and at some point, Will would just be like, God damn it, dah dah dah, and he just starts screaming at me, and I was like, Will, what can I do? Calm down, it’s going to be good, what can I do? 

Stereophonic was good: it won all those Tony Awards and it sold out night after night in New York. So why did it close after just nine months?

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Stereophonic opened on Broadway in April 2024 and it was a runaway hit. Some hits play on for years; but Stereophonic closed in January 2025, after just nine months. I asked David Adjmi why.

ADJMI: Well, we were kicked out of the house. It’s not up to me or the producers. We were trying to fight for more time, but the Shubert people wanted to put in another show. 

The Shubert Organization is the biggest landlord on Broadway; they own 17 of the 41 theaters.

ADJMI: They made a promise to another show, and we had maybe the opportunity to move to another theater, but then that’s a whole other expense. We just decided, let’s just, end on a high. The good thing about closing when we did was like, we had sold-out houses through the entire run.

DUBNER: But I can imagine that the producers must be saying, There’s so much money we’re leaving on the table. 

ADJMI: Yeah, I mean we had just recouped like a couple of weeks before we closed, and I think that it would have been nice for the investors and everyone to make a little bit of money from it.

DUBNER: Can you explain that to someone who doesn’t know the economics of Broadway? How can one of the biggest hits in a long time only recoup after eight or nine months and not make money? 

ADJMI: Well, because there are running costs every week. They’re paying the actors, they’re playing the stagehands.

DUBNER: Yeah, but it’s a relatively cheap cast, and you were able to charge quite a bit for tickets as it became a hit.

ADJMI: We were and yet, we had to pay back the investors. It was something like a $3 or $4 million production. So we had to pay all that back and also pay for the running costs every week. I don’t understand exactly like the compass of how that all works because I kept saying, when are we going to recoup, I can’t wait. And my agents were like, well, it’s happening soon, we don’t know. But also they put in money for advertising, and then they put money for this, and then these campaigns, and I don’t know, it just all costs money somehow.

DUBNER: Much more money in New York than here in London, though, right? — every producer talks about the huge spike in costs in New York, everything from building sets to advertising to union labor.

ADJMI: It’s the unions really in America. They’re very hardcore in America. And maybe not so much here. 

DUBNER: They’re definitely not. I’m guessing you’re the kind of person who politically aligns with union —

ADJMI: I do. I do, but I do think it might end up being the death of the American theater. It’s so intense, the demands of the unions, and it’s so expensive to put on shows. So then, you know, they put on these shows with movie stars and then they charge $500, $800 for a seat. That’s not going to help us build a theater culture in the United States. And it’s heartbreaking for me. 

DUBNER: Do you see a way around that, a way forward? 

ADJMI: Right now, I’m feeling very, very lost.

DUBNER: And you haven’t even spoken about the regional theaters, they’re in even worse shape, I think.

ADJMI: They’re in worse shape. I think Covid really struck a blow to so many regional theaters and so many nonprofit theaters in America. And then now what’s happening with the new priorities of this particular administration, new plays isn’t really something they care about.

DUBNER: Is that why you’re planning to move to London? I don’t know if that’s for public consumption yet.

ADJMI: I haven’t announced it, but I’ve told my friends. They have a special visa, it’s called a Global Talent visa out here, and if you are talented enough — I don’t know what to do.

DUBNER: I’m not blaming you.

ADJMI: But when I found out about it, I thought, well, I’m going to avail myself of this. If I’m globally talented enough to qualify, I am going to do it.

DUBNER: Did you decide this before you were over here for Stereophonic? 

ADJMI: We were out here for auditions, and I kept telling my music director, I really think you should move out here. You would love it here. Look how great it is here. And then I realized I was kind of doing some Freudian thing where really I was saying it to myself. And then I went to a party and this woman who’s American, she told me about this special visa that I could get. Because I was thinking, well, maybe I could live out here, but I don’t know if I could get a visa. And she said, no, no, I think you can get one. 

DUBNER: Why do you want to move here?

ADJMI: I’m a little bit disconcerted by some of the political goings-on in the United States right now. But also, I just like it here. I think New York has become crazily expensive and such a luxury playground for the rich and tech people. You know, I grew up there. I’ve seen the city change and change and change. I suddenly realized like, maybe I feel a little alien here. I was looking for a new apartment. I was looking in Gowanus, which is not necessarily the most, you know, glamor — I mean, they’re trying to build it up and turn it into Tribeca.

DUBNER: For those who don’t know, just describe Gowanus. Most famous for its toxic canal. 

ADJMI: Well, they have the toxic canal, and so you’ll probably get cancer and everything. But it can be nice. I remember growing up, there’s Park Slope, and then there’s Gowanus in between, and then there’s Carroll Gardens. If there was a party at Park Slope, but then we wanted to go to Carroll Gardens, we’d just run through Gowanus, because we were so petrified because there was just nothing there except for this toxic canal and maybe muggers. But then they said, Oh, let’s build this up and turn it into a playground for the rich.

DUBNER: So that’s where you’re looking.

ADJMI: I was looking and I thought, I’d like to have an office, so I’ll get a two-bedroom. And they were so expensive. I was like, do I really want to spend this kind of money and live here? I don’t know that I do. So when I came out to London, I just thought, actually, it’s a little bit less expensive here, and I kind of like it, and maybe I’m ready for something new, so.

DUBNER: So let’s talk, if you don’t mind, about the state of theater in general, let’s say New York versus London. Now you make a sad face. The FT ran a piece, I don’t know how much you might agree with it or disagree with it, but it said that the West End has maybe surprisingly become a better place to do good theatrical work. It’s definitely cheaper to produce here than it is on Broadway. And that Broadway has become, as we all know, the redoubt of celebrity casting and/or sitcom-ish shows, etc., etc. So in that way, Stereophonic stood out. Have you sensed any significant ways in which writing for the stage in England is significantly different than writing for the States, and is that part of why you want to be here? 

ADJMI: It’s not actually a factor in my coming here, no. I did a show at the RSC about 20 years ago. That was like one of my first-ever productions.

DUBNER: Royal Shakespeare Company. 

ADJMI: At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. It came to London as well. It was just like a one-person show that the Royal Court commissioned when I was like a graduate student and that was really fun. What I’ve noticed just in general is that it’s a very humane place in a lot of ways. The funding is not what it was. Let’s get that straight right now. In England, anywhere, the arts are underfunded. It’s bad everywhere.

DUBNER: Although here there’s much more from the state.

ADJMI: Much, much more. And I’m sure that’s going to be more pronounced once we lose, you know, our National Endowment of the Arts, which will probably happen very soon in America. So that’s absolutely true. I think there’s a theater culture here that does not exist in America. In general, there’s a certain kind of value placed on the arts in England and that is the thing about this tradition, right? We’re part of a history. This is part of how we do things. It’s very codified and there’s constricting elements to that and then there’s very wonderful elements to it. So you really do feel that, that theater-going is part of our culture and that’s why like, you know, in the Royal Court they have seats in the bleachers for like 10 pence, so everyone can come, because it’s part of the democracy. That is part of the democracy. That’s how the Greeks thought of it as well. 

DUBNER: I thought of you and this play the other day, we were up in Chester, England. It’s an old Roman city. They’ve still got intact Roman walls and there’s an thousand-year-old cathedral. And while we were there, we went to the races. The oldest horse racing track in the world is there. It’s almost 500 years old. It’s fun, and it’s also weirdly identical to what it must have been almost 500 years ago You’ve got animals, you’ve got people on them, and other than like the hats that the ladies wear, that they call fascinators, them being made of things that I’m sure materials that didn’t exist 500 years ago, otherwise, it’s pretty much the same. I was thinking that that’s a tradition that carries on. Maybe it’s because it’s a form of entertainment where you can also bet, but it’s social, right? People get together in the sunshine, you drink. And I was thinking about, well, theater, you know, the same time that Chester was happening, like Shakespeare probably went to the Chester racecourse at some point, right? And I’m just thinking about the trajectories of these two things. In some ways, they’re very similar. They’re analog — things that are events. But the theater, sadly, to me, and I gather to you, has what would seem to be a different trajectory going forward. What do you think is lost for humankind?

ADJMI: Oh my God. Listen, I’m a playwright, so clearly I like it. I think there are a lot of bad plays. I think it’s a very hard medium. I think some of the curators are a little bit boring. But I think in terms of people getting together in a shared space and having a collective experience, it can be breathtakingly beautiful and important. And you know again, I go back to the earliest democracies. I mean, it was a democratic requirement to go to the theater in ancient Greece. Not for women, because they weren’t considered people, or slaves. But still, okay, there was this idea that theater and democracy, they go together. 

DUBNER: And the theater was often about the ideas of the day, it wasn’t pure entertainment, we should say, yes?

ADJMI: Yeah, there were ideas of the day, but then it was also, who knows, people were stabbing each other and killing their sheep and going crazy. I guess those are the ideas of the day. We’re all going mad. But, you know, There was a kind of a psychic penetration, that those plays engaged. There was a shadow side of human behavior, and what it meant to be part of a social contract, and also to be a leader of some kind or to be disenfranchised. Those are the plays that really move and interest me. Sometimes we go into phases of history where boulevard plays, I guess they’re called, that are just lovely and entertaining and kind of throwaway, but fine in the moment, become more the order of the day. And then I think there are moments in history where the work can get more difficult.

DUBNER: Speaking of work that can be difficult — the street we’re on today — Old Compton, in Soho, central London — do you happen to know anything about who lived on this street in the past? 

ADJMI: Gay people? 

DUBNER: I’m guessing that —

ADJMI: That’s all I know, it’s like a gay area. 

DUBNER: Yeah, I’m guessing that’s true. 

ADJMI: Who lived here? 

DUBNER: Well, many people, but the most noteworthy one I looked up was Wagner. Richard Wagner lived here.

ADJMI: Oh my God. 

DUBNER: I asked my favorite A.I. search engine what Wagner and David Adjmi have in common.

ADJMI: Oh no. We’re both control freaks.

DUBNER: Didn’t give me that. It may not know you well enough yet. It says David Adjmi and Richard Wagner share several notable commonalities rooted in their contributions to the performing arts. You like it so far?

ADJMI: This is crazy.

DUBNER: Particularly in how they both innovated within their respective mediums. Okay, so this is legit. Ready? There are four. Pioneering theatrical storytelling. Richard Wagner as a composer and librettist who revolutionized opera with his concept of that word I can never say, Gesamtkunstwerk.

ADJMI: Yeah, yeah, I love that.

DUBNER: And David Adjmi as a contemporary playwright known for pushing the boundaries of dramatic form and content. I don’t know what you call the face you just made. It’s an “all right.” 

ADJMI: It’s like a Jewish face. It’s like my Larry David.

DUBNER: Okay, if you say so. Number two, focus on music as central to their work. Okay, not a bad point. I mean, he was a musician, but, um, okay. Number three, exploration of artistic process and creative tension. Wagner’s works often depict artists, gods, and mortals struggling with creation, ambition, and interpersonal conflict. While Adjmi’s Stereophonic similarly dramatizes the intense, often fraught, dynamics. And number four, influence and controversy. Both have attracted controversy. Wagner for his personal views and the revolutionary nature of his art. Adjmi for legal disputes over the sources and inspirations for plays, including Stereophonic and its alleged parallels to Fleetwood Mac’s history. So — That’s what the A.I. machine has to say about you and Wagner. What do you think?

ADJMI: No comment. 

DUBNER: Can you give me some kind of response to this, the lawsuit that the A.I. brings up? This was a Fleetwood Mac-adjacent lawsuit. There was a settlement, I understand. Say what you can or will.

ADJMI: I can’t say anything. You know, I’m not allowed. We settled it. I’m so glad we settled it.

DUBNER: The play did not have to change as a result of the lawsuit, I assume, or am I wrong?

ADJMI: No.

DUBNER: Was there serious concern at some point that you might have to either shut down the show or rewrite parts?

ADJMI: Well, we couldn’t do anything with the lawsuit hanging over us. We wouldn’t have been able to go to London or do a tour or anything like that. It was too fraught.

DUBNER: I know the settlement amount is not made public, as it never is in these cases. But I would assume that might have been a contribution to why it took a little while to recoup, yeah? A chunk must have gone there. 

ADJMI: I mean, I don’t think I’m allowed to say, but no.

 The case had been brought by Ken Caillat, a producer and engineer who worked on Fleetwood Mac’s record Rumors, and who wrote a memoir called Making Rumors. There are, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of Fleetwood Mac parallels in Stereophonic, from the makeup of the band itself to the way that the Peter character — like Lindsey Buckingham in real life — winds up taking over the project. There’s also the fact that both Peter and Lindsey have a brother who’s an Olympic swimmer. But now that the lawsuit has been cleared, Stereophonic is playing in London — with sold-out houses and rave reviews — and there will be a U.S. tour later this year.

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DUBNER: So, what’s different about the London production of Stereophonic from the New York production?

ADJMI: The cast is — three of them came from New York and they all had the option to come, but the rest of them said, no, we don’t want to come. Okay. So we recast it. 

DUBNER: Oh, they all did have the option.

ADJMI: They all had the option. Listen, it’s a very, very draining play to do. They were just like, we’ve done it. We came out in January and we recast the four other roles, and it was very, very hard because it’s not just about getting people who play instruments and who are good actors. They have to feel a certain way. I mean, I really cast for the quality first. And then it’s like, okay, how can you act? And can you play instruments? 

DUBNER: What do you mean cast for quality first?

ADJMI: I wanted people who felt like artists, and that they were a little bit weird. I didn’t want people that felt like actors. A lot of actors are really good actors but they feel like actors acting. I didn’t want that for the show and I really wanted to give the audience a very easy ramp into the kind of naturalism that we’re asking in the play. And we found these actors, but there were like one or two — like, okay, you could play that role. You’re the only one. You could do it. Kind of. But that’s what happened in America too.

Several cast members of Stereophonic in New York weren’t really musicians. Tom Pecinka , who played the Peter character, had told me that before he started training for rehearsals, he only played what he called “garbage guitar.” But some of the London cast members are experienced musicians.

ADJMI: At Playwrights Horizons it was like, you know, what’s that movie where they were getting the ship up the hill? That’s what that was. It was a little bit like, Oh my God, this is going to kill me. Whereas, you know, three days in, they were playing all the songs and it sounded great. They’re musicians, they can do this. 

DUBNER: With zero disparagement toward American cast, would it have been a different experience had you cast actors who were also musicians for the American version? 

ADJMI: I’m sure it would have been different. Would it have been better? Not necessarily, because so much of the charm and the deliciousness of that experience was the meta story of, can we make ourselves a band? Can we do this? Can we play instruments? It was wild seeing them step up to that plate, for Will Brill to learn how to play bass, and for Tom to learn the riff for “Masquerade.” They were so petrified, but inside of that fear was a kind of laser focus, like, I’m in it to win it. And it brought out something very primal and thrilling that made its way into the performance. So I actually think it helped us in a certain way. 

DUBNER: I understand there’s a new song for the London production, yeah? 

ADJMI: It’s not in the production. In the play, Diana speaks about this song, which is from the first album, and it’s the song that starts creeping back up the charts and that propels their album into success. So Will said, I’m going to write that song. And then he said I’m going to give the cast something to do that’s their own, to let the British cast shine for themselves. And they kill it.

DUBNER: I read that Brad Pitt’s film production company has acquired rights to Stereophonic, true? 

ADJMI: I don’t know if they acquired the rights, they’re just my producers for the film, which I’m writing right now.

DUBNER: Oh, so you’re writing the film.

ADJMI: I’m writing the film. I just decided not to sell it to a studio quite yet because I’d like to take my time and get it right and not have to take notes. Part of the problem is like, okay, you like the play, now what do you imagine the Hollywood version of it to be? I don’t even know what it is yet. I have to redo the whole thing in my mind. 

DUBNER: Is this going to take another 10 years roughly? 

ADJMI: I hope to God not. I mean, I’m working on it right now and I can’t rush it, but I don’t want to do a bad movie. I really want it to have the integrity that the play had, but it can’t be a play.

DUBNER: Can you give a couple ideas just of how the film would be different from the play?

ADJMI: I can’t talk too much about the film because I don’t want to jinx it. There are talky speeches that will never be in this film. I love them, and they’re central to the play, and they can’t have anything to do with it. There’s a character who was alluded to, this receptionist who is an aspiring singer-model person who sort of works her way through the band, who becomes a character in the film. I love writing her. It’s a big thing in the play, this demarcation between public and private, those spaces are quite collapsed in the play. Everything becomes public because they’re just in the studio and there’s no escape.

DUBNER: It’s inspiring to me that you are so confident about this because it’s a different kind of writing.

ADJMI: It’s totally different and you have to embrace it, but I don’t have an ego about it all. So I think that’s where playwrights get in trouble. Like, Oh, my wonderful play. It’s like, no, no. I’ve got to kill it, it’s like Oedipus, kill the play, marry the movie. You know what I mean? That’s how I’m approaching it. I can’t deify this play. This play is its own thing, and there’s things that I’m going to keep because they’re going to work in the movie. But I have to figure out the proportions and stuff, it’s just different. 

DUBNER: What about other plays? What are you working on? 

ADJMI: I’m doing a play for the Public Theater that I can’t really talk about. It’s a two-part play.

DUBNER: Is it contemporary? 

ADJMI: It is. But it also spans something like 50 years. It’s very different from Stereophonic. It couldn’t be more different, and I can’t talk about it. I can’t. I’m going to get in trouble. 

DUBNER: Does it engage more with the outside world than Stereophonic does, whether that’s political engagement or whatnot?

ADJMI: Yeah, it does, but not because I felt an obligation to. I think that’s where artists get into trouble, when they’re being pointed. “Oh, let me write about the issue of the day, because it’s very important and I need to speak to it.” I never do that. I don’t like those kind of plays. And yet, I’ve written one despite the fact that I dislike it. It came from a place of obsession, and not understanding what I was examining. That’s when I trust myself. When I’m coming from a place of rational inquiry, that’s when I know I’m on the wrong track. 

DUBNER: I’ve heard you talk about this notion of an event, a thing that happens in a given place and time, and that there’s less and less appreciation of that. And I will say as a human, that worries me a little bit because we’ve lived the entirety of our civilization with that notion. So, I don’t know, open thread on digital versus analog.

ADJMI: I just think it’s very troubling that it was so controversial that I had a play that was three hours. It was such an object of controversy, that people couldn’t bear to have the attention span to sit with a play like that. It was so daunting for them.

DUBNER: You sure your play was really singled out? Or it’s just that you paid more attention because it was your play?

ADJMI: Maybe I was paying more attention. I think that feels to me more like a symptom of a kind of TikTok-ification of people’s attention span, and that worries me, that people don’t know what it is to really pay attention and to devote sustained attention to a work of art.

DUBNER: On the other hand, the way you just described it there, no offense, makes it sound a little bit like homework, whereas the point of a piece of theater is that you become so immersed that you kind of are holding your breath. 

ADJMI: Edward Albee once said to me —

DUBNER: That’s a good sentence, however it ends.

ADJMI: I know, right? He once said, entertainment isn’t just about you being entertained. It’s about what you are willing to entertain. I think there is a fine line between edification — you might call it homework — and a certain kind of devotion and attention that really does pay dividends and pay rewards. But that it’s not always instant gratification. And there’s something about that ethos, I guess that’s sort of how I was raised a little bit. When I read Hegel and Kant in college, I wasn’t going, Oh my God, this is so riveting, except ultimately, it was riveting to me.

DUBNER: I assume that this play has brought you already and will bring more financial security that is a little bit surprising and unusual to you, yes? 

ADJMI: Yes, up to a point. It’s not like I’m set for life. The money has been unbelievably helpful for me and has kind of healed me. Poverty is just no fun. Feeling like you’re constantly trying to figure out, how am I going to pay my rent next month, how am I going to pay my rent? I have three months of rent I can pay. Okay. Now, what about this? That’s a drag, and that has been alleviated and I’m very grateful for that. 

DUBNER: Talking today, you seem pretty normal. You seem like you’ve — 

ADJMI: I’m not. 

DUBNER: Adjusted.

ADJMI: No.

DUBNER: No, you’re just —

ADJMI: I’m faking it, it’s an act. 

DUBNER: Because I know you’re very shy. 

ADJMI: I am shy. 

DUBNER: Is that where the sunglasses came from? 

ADJMI: The sunglasses came from when I was at Playwrights Horizons and I was starting to get extremely anxious about having to do press. Not even press. It started on the first rehearsal, something happened to me. Maybe I’m getting more neurotic as I get older, but I feel really naked. And I feel very nervous, and shy, and embarrassed. I feel so flayed. 

DUBNER: More than other plays?

ADJMI: Yeah.

DUBNER: Why do you think it was for this show? 

ADJMI: I think this is the most nakedly honest thing that I’ve ever written. 

DUBNER: Even though, from the outside, there’s nothing or anyone in the play that remotely resembles David Adjmi.

ADJMI: Right, but there were times in auditions, when actors were reading scenes over and over that I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown because I couldn’t keep hearing the lines anymore. I was like, I can’t handle this play.

DUBNER: Okay, so you write this play, it does as well as one could possibly wish. You win the awards, you’re selling out, all kinds of real rock stars are coming to see the play. People like Jeff Bezos are coming to see it. How did this whole experience change your self-image, your self-identity? 

ADJMI: I don’t really think it has. I just think I have so much to prove. That’s how I look at it. It’s like I have so much to prove and I have so much—

DUBNER: To whom? 

ADJMI: To myself and to the world.

DUBNER: Do you wish you were able to kind of, I don’t want to say normalize more, but respond in the way that most people might think you would respond, or are you very satisfied having the same gestalt you’ve got? 

ADJMI: I feel like Dolly Parton is like a good north star. She’s totally who she is. She’s self-possessed. She respects herself. She’s an artist. And that’s the end of it. That’s the end of the conversation. And now it’s like, let’s get to work and be humane and be a good citizen. That’s my goal. 

DUBNER: I will say this: I hope theater continues to exist and thrive, if only so that future people who are as obsessive and compulsive will have a productive thing to do with their lives. 

ADJMI: Those people are going to find their way into this no matter what, because when you are really driven to do this, and this is your life, you are going to do it no matter what. You will lay down whatever you need to lay down to make sure that it happens. I feel like that’s what I learned about myself. Like, this is what I have to do. I know it, there’s no other life for me. I’m going to do this. The end.

That, again, was David Adjmi, in a London recording studio on the street where Wagner used to live. I’d like to thank Adjmi for the conversation, and I’d like to thank you, as always, for listening. Please let us know what you think. Our email is radio@freakonomics.com. Until then, take care of yourself — and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Alina Kulman, with help from Zack Lapinski; it was mixed by Eleanor Osborne, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Jasmin Klinger, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Morgan Levey, Sarah Lilley, and Theo Jacobs. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.