Truthful, Honest -- But Funny
By Evan Hughes '94

David Lindsay-Abaire’s first New York production, Devil Inside, appeared at the Soho Repertory Company in 1997. While a playwriting fellow at Juilliard, he wrote Fuddy Meers, which was selected for the Eugene O’Neill National Competition and produced by the Manhattan Theater Club (MTC) in 1999, to rave reviews. The following year, Sarah Jessica Parker played the lead role in David’s Wonder of the World, also produced by MTC. His next show, Kimberly Akimbo, opened in February. The New York Times is calling it “haunting and hilarious...at once a shrewd satire, a black comedy and a heartbreaking study of how time wounds everyone.” In addition to finishing his screen adaptation of Fuddy Meers, David recently signed a two-picture deal with Miramax films, and is currently developing a sitcom for ABC starring Kristen Johnson and produced by David Letterman.

Rest assured, Class of 1988, David Abaire’s glasses are much, much better than the ones he wore in high school. Fame has brought him at least that far. The frames no longer obscure the better part of his face, as they did in his Milton yearbook pictures. He is also trimmer, though still pleasantly rounded off at the edges, a characteristic befitting a born comic. Actually, he is now David Lindsay-Abaire, for reasons that will soon become clear.
Once David leads me into the spacious living room of his Brooklyn duplex apartment, his young son, Nicholas, runs over my foot with his Fisher-Price lawn mower by way of a greeting. Trailing after Nicholas is his mother, Chris. She is beautiful. In fact, don’t get me wrong David, but she’s a knockout. I am instantly sure he once cast her in a New York play and the sparks flew. It turns out that although she is an actor and did appear in his “early works,” says David, laughing off the phrase as hopelessly pretentious, they actually met as housemates in a domicile straight out of MTV’s “The Real World” – three men, three women – at Bronxville’s Sarah Lawrence College. Now that they are both established, however, “She does her thing and I do mine. It’s not like David Mamet, casting all his wives. We didn’t want to get anywhere near that.” It sounds like a remarkably sane policy. Also sane (sort of) is their agreement regarding surnames: they took each other’s and became the Lindsay-Abaires.

As he runs through a recap of his rapid rise in the world of New York theater, the big moment is clear only in retrospect. It occurs when his comedy about a middle-aged woman with amnesia, Fuddy Meers, is produced by the Manhattan Theater Club in 1999. “So then Fuddy Meers went up, and that was really, you know…” he says, his voice trailing off for the sake of humility. Before all this happens, I check to make sure my tape recorder is working. He says the reporter from The New York Times did the same thing. Flattery will get you everywhere. The interview begins in earnest when I ask him the first on our list of prearranged questions.

EH: Why write plays?
DL-A: Oh my god…

EH: You were prepared…
DL-A: It’s the hardest one on the list! It’s a good question, though. The easy answer is this: It’s what I do best. What is different about playwriting is that you communicate through the spoken word, and it’s a very alive, living medium. Every night in the theater is different from the night before. There’s a real exchange between the audience and what’s going on onstage. I love showing up and knowing what people think of my work. When you publish a novel, you don’t get to sit behind the reader’s shoulder and see what they like and don’t like. In the theater, you know immediately if your line bombs, and then maybe you rework it. I love it.

EH: How did you know this was your strength?
DL-A: A lot of trial and error. I did a number of different kinds of writing, starting at Milton. In creative writing classes, in English class. After we did a Fourth Class play, a classmate said, “You know, we should do a Third Class play,” and the reaction from the faculty was like, “Are you mad?” That was unheard of. My classmate, Amy Stevens said, “You’re the funny one; you write it.” Not knowing any better, I did. And that’s how I became a playwright. Amy Stevens said, “Go be one.” Once I did it, I knew that it’s a hard enough role, and I don’t want to be one who writes the play, directs it, and stars in it. It would just be distracting. That said, I went to college primarily as an actor. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. And I took English and psychology and acting, and essentially took playwriting just to fulfill my theater program requirement. “Oh, I’ll do playwriting; I did that in high school.”

EH: What happened to make you settle on writing?
DL-A: I wrote a play called Devil Inside, and no, I had never heard of the INXS song, and with that I applied to Juilliard. It was a fellowship, not a degree program, with Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman teaching. So it was free and I could do it while working full time at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. And while doing all that, I wrote Fuddy Meers. Just when I was finishing at Juilliard, 20th Century Fox got wind of my work and actually offered me this job as a contract writer, and they don’t usually do that now; it’s a setup from the 1930s. We’ll pay you a weekly salary, and you’ll try to write some screenplays and possibly some TV stuff. I didn’t want to write screenplays, though, and I didn’t want to go to Hollywood, and I said, “Are you going to make me go to Hollywood?” No. “Are you going to put me on staff at a TV show? Bouncing jokes off one another?” And they said no. So I said, “Okay.”

EH: What sort of movie did they see you writing?
DL-A: They knew what my style was. My voice is kind of off. It’s not mainstream. They said, “We feel like your writing is a lot like Flirting with Disaster, so your first movie will be like that, just till you figure out where the margins are. So I wrote this movie and they loved it and Hugh Grant was suddenly attached to star. They put the producer of Forrest Gump on it, and privately I’m thinking, “People complain about making it in Hollywood; it’s so easy!” And then the project…

EH: Went into development hell.
DL-A: Exactly, development hell.

EH: Meanwhile, though, Fuddy Meers comes out of previews, and kind of explodes. The New York Times dubs me. They say, “You’re a successful playwright.” It’s ridiculous, it’s totally luck. But for whatever reason, the Times says, “It’s good.” Then the new president of Fox comes in and asks, “Why are we paying this guy a weekly salary?” She calls me and says, “We think your script is great, but it’s a little too… Flirting with Disaster” [widespread laughs]. They wanted me to do another Runaway Bride and I said, “You know what? That’s a fine movie, but I’m not the one to write that movie,” so I got out of the Fox contract.

EH: : So you’re not fundamentally anti-Hollywood. You don’t think it’s trying to ruin you or something.
DL-A: No, not at all. I love movies. I just think there’s a lot of nonsense that goes with them. If the terms are right, I will sell out. All that I want – and this will make me sell out, if that’s what you want to call it – is control over my product, that’s the big difference, then yeah, I’ll do it.

EH: You don’t want to direct?
DL-A: Not yet, I don’t know enough about movies. Not theater either, no. I love being in the room, and I’m really great talking with actors and talking through scenes. It’s the other stuff I have no interest in doing. Design meetings, tech stuff, costumes. I don’t care what color the floor is. I don’t want to go to those production meetings. I just want to write.

EH: What about your second play, Wonder of the World? How did that go?
DL-A: It didn’t go as well as Fuddy Meers. Second productions usually don’t. There were mixed reviews. A couple really viciously scathing, awful reviews, crazy bad [laughs], and a couple really great, wonderful reviews. They were all over the map. And the dirty secret about that play is that it was written before Fuddy Meers. I knew it wasn’t as good, but I liked it – I really wanted it to have a life. I knew it wouldtake a bit of a beating. It was hard because we had this huge celebrity in it, Sarah Jessica Parker. The hype was like, “Holy cow, what have I done? I don’t think this play’s very good.” I mean, I do think it’s good. I stand by it. It’s just a different play. It was fine. It wasn’t embarrassingly bad. To complain about critics in theater is like saying, “I want to play football, but I don’t want to be tackled.” It’s part of the game, you know? A lot of them are going to say nasty things about you.

EH: What do you think of John Simon [veteran drama critic, now writing for New York Magazine]?
DL-A: I used to think he was a really nasty person, and he has a thing about picking on fat people, fat actresses in particular, that I think is really mean. But then he went over the moon about Fuddy Meers, and even made a pun on my name: “Call the play errant, aberrant, or Abairant, Lindsay-Abaire proves a bare minimum less funny than Ionesco, whose true heir he is.” Ionesco is my idol. So now I like Simon. Basically I’m a whore is what I’m saying.

EH: What is the environment for playwrights like now?
DL-A: It’s very, very difficult. I’ve been incredibly lucky. I speak to young writers sometimes, at NYU or elsewhere. The story of how Fuddy Meers succeeded, the enormous role that luck played, it just drives them crazy. The fact that Manhattan Theater Club produced it was a miracle. The fact that the director and the actors were great was a miracle. I wouldn’t have a career if all those stars didn’t line up.
EH: You seem to write about women a lot. Where do you think that comes from?
DL-A: I don’t know. It just so happens that I wrote three plays in a row with women in the lead roles.

EH: It just so happens?
DL-A: Well, okay, this is not conscious, but my mother is a very strong presence in my life. She’s the performer of the family. She’s hilarious. Of course my plays would have those sorts of women. On the other side, and this is conscious, there are far more male roles than parts for women, so when I start a play, I think “Does it matter if this character is a man or a woman?” If not, I make it a woman by default, to right the balance a bit.

EH: Is that part of your artistic mission?
DL-A: No. I don’t know that I have an artistic mission.

EH: Good answer.
DL-A: I just want to write true stories. True in the deeper sense. Truthful, honest – but funny!

EH: Do you have any temptation to write something really dark?
DL-A: Um, no. I really don’t. I come from a very specific place. For me, it’s not: What’s funny here? Where can I make jokes? I’m not a joke writer per se. I view the world in a very off, skewed way. People have called it absurdist. I don’t think it’s so ridiculous. In my plays, there are real people, real dilemmas. Yeah, they’re over the top sometimes, because the characters’ needs are so desperate, or their situation is so odd. That’s real life to me. Life just seems ridiculous to me sometimes. I don’t want to write a realistic play set on a back porch, with all due respect to Proof [a Broadway drama by David Auburn about a famous mathematician and his daughter]. I mean, that’s a great play, but again, not my thing. I think theater has an obligation to be theatrical. It’s not real. Don’t pretend it’s real. I’m not a realist. For some, the game is how real can you make it? That’s silly to me. It’s a play.

EH: What are your fond memories of Milton?
DL-A: I was miserable there. I have no fond memories.

EH: Seriously?
DL-A: No, I loved it.

EH: You bastard. Okay, who are the key players? Amy Stevens must be one.
DL-A: Amy, of course. I owe her my career, apparently. I always say John Zilliax, too. Just a great teacher. I took Modern World Drama, where we read two plays a week, starting at Aeschylus, going through August Wilson, then Mamet. It was hardcore. I got exposed to this breadth of theater, this whole range. You had to pick a playwright to emulate in exercises, and I chose Ionesco. Now John Simon says I’m his “true heir.” John Zilliax, thanks for that. Also Kay Herzog, Rey Buono. Speech Team was the focus of my life in theater. Dale DeLetis, Debbie Simon, and Randy McCutcheon led the way there. I loved it: the camaraderie, the whole scene.

EH: What were your categories?
DL-A: I did Humorous Interp, mostly. I started doing “Kiddie Lit,” Children’s Literature.

EH: I’m guessing the team was good.
DL-A:We rocked. We were legends. We went to Nationals, all that stuff.

EH: : What about bitter memories of Milton? Did you ever feel alienated?
DL-A: You would think so from my work, which often centers on an outsider. But actually, I think most people found me likable. I was the valedictorian. I was the funny guy.

EH: The class clown.
DL-A: Well, no, more like the class comedian. I forget who made the distinction. The class clown is the guy who runs across the football field naked, and the class comedian is the guy who talked him into doing it. I was that guy. Still am.