AI transcript
0:00:08 it wasn’t necessarily a fait accompli that i would have this kind of hit or anything like that
0:00:13 i was taken to task by the critics and i was considered really polarizing and difficult
0:00:16 um let’s back up for a second please say your name and what you do
0:00:20 david ajmi is my name and playwright is my game
0:00:26 ajmi has been a playwright for a few decades now his work was typically staged
0:00:33 in regional or repertory or experimental theaters but never under the much brighter lights of
0:00:39 broadway or the west end that changed last year with a play he wrote called stereophonic
0:00:44 stereophonic is a play about a dysfunctional family and art making and about the struggle
0:00:51 to become an artist that’s another way of saying that stereophonic is a play about the mind of david
0:00:56 ajmi i always work off of tropes in the culture but then it’s always really a way for me to talk
0:01:04 about me the plot of stereophonic is so slender that it barely sounds like a plot a five-piece band
0:01:10 is struggling to record their second album the band very much resembles fleetwood mac at least
0:01:16 superficially there are two sound engineers also and the entire play takes place in california
0:01:23 recording studios in the late 1970s that’s it but that slender plot supports an entire universe of
0:01:29 emotion some of the most psychologically astute writing you’ll ever hear on a stage and then
0:01:34 there’s the music stereophonic is not a musical not even close but the music says a lot of things
0:01:41 the characters aren’t able to and the music was written by will butler a longtime member of the band
0:01:47 arcade fire last year as we were trying to make a series about the strange economics of the live
0:01:53 theater industry stereophonic had just moved to broadway from a well-received off-broadway run
0:02:01 at playwrights horizons i saw the play a few times i loved it we wound up making a pair of episodes
0:02:08 about it we interviewed producers cast members and david ajmi stereophonic went on to be nominated for
0:02:15 more tonys than any play in history and at one five including best play and so when i was recently
0:02:20 in london for some other tapings and i saw that stereophonic was in rehearsals for its debut in the
0:02:26 west end i asked ajmi if he would meet up in a recording studio and tell us everything he’s been up
0:02:33 to as you’ll hear he is a fun person to have a conversation with he is super smart but also earnest
0:02:41 he’s remarkably candid he’s rarely mean-spirited except toward himself sometimes and he’s consistently
0:02:48 interesting at least to me i hope you will agree today on freakonomics radio after a stereophonic
0:02:52 size success what can david ajmi possibly do now
0:03:12 this is freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host
0:03:31 david ajmi grew up in brooklyn in a turbulent syrian jewish family he describes the turbulence well in a
0:03:37 memoir called lot six we also learned that ajmi started reading the new york times when he was two
0:03:43 he saw his first broadway musical at five he went to college at sarah lawrence and the grad school for
0:03:49 playwriting at both juilliard and the university of iowa and then came the hard work
0:03:58 the last time we spoke which was just as stereophonic was starting to explode you said there have been times
0:04:04 when you thought about just quitting playwriting but you didn’t and now you’ve been writing plays for
0:04:12 roughly 30 years and when you look around you realize that almost nobody really does that anymore yeah
0:04:18 i think it’s true i sort of made some decisions and choices that compromised me in terms of the kind of
0:04:24 life i would have i was willing to do that because i knew that my purpose here is really to do a certain
0:04:31 kind of writing and to be very very truthful and exploratory in the kind of work i do and if i can’t
0:04:37 have that freedom to explore and sort of mull over what i believe the truth is for me in this kind of
0:04:43 dramatic dialectical context of a play i don’t want to do it and i don’t know if i want to do anything
0:04:49 you know what i mean that kind of feels like that is my reason for being so i made a lot of sacrifices
0:04:55 to get to write these plays what do you mean by sacrifices i would live in people’s homes i’d live in
0:05:02 attics i’d live in basements i’d find patrons essentially i went into an enormous amount of debt
0:05:08 credit card debt credit cards and you know i couldn’t pay my taxes the problem is they tax grants
0:05:12 which prior to reagan they didn’t do so when artists got grants if i got guggenheim let’s say
0:05:17 which i was fortunate enough to get one then i would use that money to try to pay some of my debt
0:05:21 the grants were a huge boon and then suddenly it became the bane of my existence because i was like
0:05:26 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
0:05:31 money hooray and then you want to go out and celebrate and it’s like oh no i’ve got this albatross
0:05:36 of these taxes that makes me sad because i feel like someone should have said to you hey the first thing
0:05:41 you need to do is take 30 of that and just set it aside but nobody said that to you nobody said it
0:05:46 but i also think maybe i wouldn’t have listened because i wanted to experience the ecstasy of money
0:05:54 were you somewhat hedonistic yes on what well i took myself out for nice dinners maybe i bought a little
0:05:59 outfit here and there that doesn’t sound hedonistic for me it was it’s so funny because people thought
0:06:05 i was so rich i remember having dinner with a professor of mine from college for my undergraduate
0:06:10 after my first play opened in new york and she’s like you must be doing so well now financially and
0:06:15 i said they paid me seven thousand dollars what was she a professor of she taught literary theory
0:06:19 and literature i would have thought she would understand the economics of theater a little bit
0:06:25 she had not the vaguest idea i saw her recently we had dinner again a couple months ago and she said i
0:06:29 remembered that day really vividly because it was such a shock to my system people don’t understand
0:06:35 that playwrights make literally nothing and just how broken it is and of course now it’s just we’re
0:06:39 going down even a darker black hole which i didn’t even think was possible but of course it always is
0:06:47 during the 10 or 11 year gestation period of stereophonic which is the show that people now
0:06:53 know you for talk about how close you came or how many times you came close to quitting playwriting
0:06:59 what i realized making stereophonic was that i couldn’t give up this is the kind of torture i think
0:07:05 that gets crystallized in the play itself because i think people realize i love this too much and the
0:07:11 thing that i love is killing me and i will never stop loving it that’s why the play rings i think with
0:07:18 the intensity that it has because i was really living it for real i made the play over 10 years i thought it
0:07:26 was never going to get done at some point i mean it’s hilarious in a dark way because it does mirror the
0:07:30 trajectory of the play because the play is about this album that’s like never getting finished and everyone’s going
0:07:37 insane and people are wondering like am i going to make it alive out of this studio to see this record
0:07:42 come out and i was really feeling that and yet that was the thing that kept you in it didn’t make you run
0:07:48 from it it was a bit of a beckett situation you know i think about the end of strindberg’s play i think it’s
0:07:54 a dream play where the character says you want to stay and you want to go and wild horses are tearing you
0:08:00 apart in both directions simultaneously and i really felt those two opposite emotions with equal intensity
0:08:04 i learned how to be quite disciplined during that period
0:08:06 and very very rigorous
0:08:08 and
0:08:13 just put my emotions to the side as much as possible but there were times when i really thought
0:08:17 i was losing my mind i had holes in my clothes and i couldn’t afford anything i mean
0:08:19 it got really really bad for me
0:08:22 and my director daniel walken was actually quite worried about me
0:08:24 even to the point where
0:08:28 when we were in previews at playwrights horizons i made sort of a dark joke
0:08:34 we were up in the roof he was smoking a cigarette and i sort of alluded to the fact that
0:08:37 well if it doesn’t go so great maybe i’ll just you know and i kind of
0:08:41 nodded downward and he just burst into tears because i think he was so worried about me
0:08:46 the relationship you two have along with will butler is i think quite remarkable because you
0:08:50 were collaborators for years and years and years before there was a play yeah
0:08:53 yeah i mean you were a team you formed a band essentially
0:08:58 we just sort of decided that we would have unconditional faith in each other it was some
0:09:03 sort of spiritual contract that we made i don’t know how we made it or why we did it
0:09:08 but we intuitively just knew that we could trust each other and that we were going to be
0:09:14 really decent with each other and that i was going to learn how to be civilized which i
0:09:20 maybe wasn’t prior to this process because i am quite controlling and i am very demanding
0:09:26 daniel sat me down prior to the process and said listen you have a reputation of being very demanding
0:09:30 this is how i need to work can you work this way and i said yeah
0:09:33 just to be clear you drafted these guys into your band
0:09:37 several years before anyone would have ever heard of stereophonic
0:09:43 and they worked for essentially free for years for 10 years so this is will butler who was at the
0:09:50 point still in arcade fire he was in arcade fire this was 2013 he’s so smart he’s so dramaturgical will
0:09:56 he has the mind for theater and that was something i did not know it’s an accident you went to him
0:10:01 because you were able to find a connection yes or you reached out and he said yes i reached out to
0:10:06 arcade fire period i was like i want arcade fire to do it just because you love them i love arcade
0:10:09 fire and i just thought there was something about the anthemic quality of some of the songs
0:10:14 especially in their first album i was like there’s something about the intensity of this and the sort
0:10:20 of fever of some of these songs that i think will rhyme with what i want for this show and i love them
0:10:25 and then they were all busy no no no i can’t do it and will was like well i’ll meet with you
0:10:30 and i just thought i like this guy he’s a bit like peter pan or something i mean he’s kind of
0:10:37 iconoclastic for a rock star he’s a sweet sweet soul he’s goofy and he’s silly and he’s really fun
0:10:43 and he’s very very brainy when we were doing my show he moved to cambridge and got a degree in
0:10:50 public policy from harvard in the middle of recording for arcade fire he’s a unicorn in the world of rock
0:10:56 music and then daniel auken is a working director in new york his father i think was head of the
0:11:02 national theater here in london for a time yeah he was yeah so when you say you know we all made this
0:11:07 contract where we agreed to be good to each other and to collaborate in a certain way i could see why
0:11:14 you would want to do that right you’re the writer and you need them a director and a musician to write
0:11:20 what is a very essential piece of this play but what was in it for them i have no idea i think
0:11:25 daniel you know we went to sundance together they have this theater lab and i developed my first
0:11:30 real play there called the evildoers daniel saw the reading which was quite extraordinary michael
0:11:34 stubert was in it and it was great he got really jazzed about it and thought i want to work with
0:11:40 this guy so we had been talking about doing something together and i remember thinking this is the play for
0:11:43 daniel like i saw it in my mind’s eye and then i just went that’s for daniel
0:11:50 what did your script look like over the years and how much archival stuff is there are there
0:11:55 cartons full of paper versions was it all on a computer i’m really bad at archiving my stuff
0:12:00 because i’m so disorganized what i was doing in the beginning was just taking notes of every single
0:12:07 thing that i could learn about a recording process in the 70s jargon equipment what they would say to
0:12:12 each other what their problems would be then i would riff on it and make dialogue it was a very
0:12:17 batter shot process my assistant now is saying like what’s your process explain to me so i can
0:12:20 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
0:12:25 intuitions did all the characters already exist when all this is going on no no no they didn’t exist i
0:12:30 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
0:12:35 the studio i didn’t know anything and then i said okay i’ll have an engineer and then i showed it to
0:12:40 john kilgore who is this very famous engineer producer who worked for philip glass and steve reich and all these
0:12:45 people and john was amazing and we said could you be our advisor he read through what i had and he said
0:12:50 why is there only one engineer he needs an assistant and so that opened up the dramaturgical thing of
0:12:55 like oh there’s two guys and now it becomes like rosencrantz and guildenstern so then that became the next
0:13:01 draft i developed it in workshop so i do it like 10 or 15 pages at a time 20 pages here and there
0:13:07 i think for people who aren’t accustomed to making things especially over a really long period of time
0:13:12 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
0:13:17 feel like you’re getting money’s worth it’s three hours long but i think it’s not natural to think
0:13:22 about the ingredients or the process you know if you and i were to go to have a really nice dinner
0:13:30 somewhere we don’t stop to think about all the growing and planting harvesting preparing education
0:13:35 that goes into that one meal but it’s years and years and years and years and similarly what you’re
0:13:40 describing now is years and years of minute work that’s gone into this thing that people will show
0:13:46 up and buy a ticket and love it or not love it whatever and then it’s over does that get to you
0:13:51 that people don’t generally think about or understand what it takes to make something like this
0:13:55 well that’s where i wrote the play i heard an interview i think it was about barbara streisand
0:14:01 barbara streisand was in the studio and they were playing these violins and she said one of these it’s
0:14:06 flat and they were like what are you talking about there were like 12 violins and she goes which one play
0:14:13 it you that’s the kind of expertise that when you hear the anecdote you’re like oh my god barbara
0:14:17 streisand doesn’t brag about this hey do you know what i do i have to listen to all these flat
0:14:24 instruments she’s just focused on the work at hand i find there’s such nobility in that for me
0:14:31 that artists often don’t have to display their expertise they just do their work i find that very
0:14:38 beautiful there are romantic relationships among the characters in your play that ebb and flow but
0:14:42 even among those for whom there’s no romantic relationship being in a band is a little bit
0:14:47 like being married to several people simultaneously right i like the idea that you’re getting to
0:14:52 there’s something in there but i don’t understand it the reason i’m asking is that i was in a band and
0:14:59 i quit as we were kind of at the brink we’d gotten a record deal we were in pre-production on our first
0:15:06 record and i decided this was not the life that i wanted we were on arista records it was oh my god
0:15:13 i’d been working toward it for clive davis yeah clive came to cbgb’s to see us play and then he led us out to
0:15:19 his stretch limousine it was very cold he put his silk scarf around my neck oh my god oh my god and
0:15:24 we went up to his office the next day and he had aretha franklin get on the phone with us to tell us
0:15:32 how great oh my what it was but anyway once we got into the making of the record and once i had
0:15:38 exposure to people who were successful i realized it was not the healthy lifestyle for me because it’s
0:15:44 too much fun but the band i deeply loved every individual in that band it’s just a very hard
0:15:50 relationship which is one of many reasons i loved your play i think it’s a dynamic that your play helps
0:15:54 people understand about themselves maybe the thing that i started out with when i was writing the play
0:16:01 was collaboration and working together and being together and functioning as a collective and also
0:16:07 as individuals inside of a collective like that tension how do you do it how do you partner where
0:16:13 are the nightmares because i do have trouble with that i’m much better one-on-one than i am working
0:16:21 inside of a group however ironically with this play with this group i can’t tell you how harmonious it is
0:16:28 it’s very beautiful and very magical and we do fight and sometimes i want to fight more probably
0:16:32 should be fighting more but i just love them so much i don’t want to fight with them i don’t like
0:16:37 conflict i want to be loved and just everything to be nice with everybody but i sometimes push things
0:16:43 into conflict because of that but not gratuitously i don’t think it’s ever gratuitous because i love
0:16:48 harmony and i don’t like to fight with people but then i will sometimes push things one particularly
0:16:54 compelling element of this play to me and i think to many people is peter he ends up being the leader
0:17:02 of the band by merit but it wasn’t a vote it just happened because he was the most let’s say driven and
0:17:10 talented i’m just curious if that dynamic that reality of you know a leader emerging and everyone
0:17:15 is kind of bitchy about his being the leader in the way that he is the leader because he is very
0:17:22 exacting but they also benefit hugely by his being that kind of leader and so he’s in this kind of
0:17:27 difficult situation where he too wants to be loved like you just said he wanted to be invited over for
0:17:34 that chicken dinner does that have a connection to you or anyone in your life i think that’s like
0:17:40 the obverse that’s like the dark night version of me that’s where it could have gone but i think peter
0:17:45 couldn’t have survived and doing theater because theater you can’t control it every night and you
0:17:49 can’t record it and get all the levels exactly right which is sort of what i want to do is that
0:17:54 why you don’t go to the performances then that’s part of it because i am compulsive i literally sometimes
0:17:59 spasm when the actors don’t do something the way i want them so if you’re sitting in the audience you
0:18:05 might shout what are you doing it’s kind of what i’m doing the whole time in my head and and i think i would
0:18:12 just my energy no but it is dark comedy i am compulsive and peter is compulsive i am an
0:18:18 obsessive person and i hear things at a frequency daniel keeps saying my director he just goes you hear
0:18:23 things at a frequency that normal people can’t and i’m like going well that doesn’t help like he thinks
0:18:28 that like oh it’s not a big deal that we don’t do that because you hear it and so specific but no one
0:18:34 else will know all i can do is tell you what i need to hear but i have a really good bedside manner
0:18:41 i can be charming i’ve cultivated this new york jewish persona that i work the room with it’s not just a
0:18:46 persona i actually do have this sort of sense of comedy about myself and my own obsessiveness and my
0:18:52 neuroses and i have a light touch and a kind of weird hovering overview of the absurdity of everything
0:18:59 that we’re doing all the time so that i don’t get so you know annoying about things i try anyway i mean
0:19:03 i did like say to will this song needs a bridge and this song needs that and i want it more intense and
0:19:07 blah blah blah and he’d be trying and at some point will would just be like god damn it and he just
0:19:13 started screaming at me and i was like will what can i do calm down it’s gonna be good what can i do
0:19:21 stereophonic was good it won all those tony awards and sold out night after night in new york
0:19:27 so why did it close after just nine months that’s coming up after the break i’m stephen dubner
0:19:30 and this is freakonomics radio
0:19:45 stereo phonic opened on broadway in april 2024 and it was a runaway hit some hits play on for years
0:19:54 but stereophonic closed in january 2025 after just nine months i asked david adjmi why well we were
0:19:59 kicked out of the house it’s not up to me or the producers we were trying to fight for more time
0:20:04 but the schubert people wanted to put in another show the schubert organization is the biggest
0:20:10 landlord on broadway they own 17 of the 41 theaters they made a promise to another show and
0:20:15 we had maybe the opportunity to move to another theater but then that’s a whole other expense
0:20:20 we just decided let’s just end on a high the good thing about closing when we did was like
0:20:25 we had sold out houses through the entire run but i can imagine that the producers must be saying
0:20:29 there’s so much money we’re leaving on the table yeah i mean we had just
0:20:33 recouped like a couple of weeks before we close and i think that it would have been nice for the
0:20:37 investors and everyone to make a little bit of money from it can you explain that to someone who
0:20:43 doesn’t know the economics of broadway how can one of the biggest hits in a long time only recoup
0:20:48 after eight or nine months and not make money well because there are running costs every week they’re
0:20:52 paying the actors they’re paying the stage fans but it’s a relatively cheap cast and you were able to
0:20:58 charge quite a bit for tickets as it became a hit we were and yet we had to pay back the investors
0:21:02 it was something like a three or four million dollar production so we had to pay all that back
0:21:08 and also pay for the running costs every week i don’t understand exactly like the compass of how
0:21:13 that all works because i kept saying when are we going to recoup i can’t wait and my agents were like
0:21:18 well it’s happening soon we don’t know but also they put in money for advertising and then they put in
0:21:22 money for this and then these campaigns and i don’t know it just all costs money somehow
0:21:27 much more money in new york than here in london though right every producer talks about
0:21:33 the huge spike in costs in new york everything from building sets to advertising to union labor
0:21:38 it’s a unions really in america they’re very hardcore in america and maybe not so much here
0:21:42 they’re definitely not i’m guessing you’re the kind of person who politically aligns with
0:21:48 union i do i do but i do think it might end up being the death of the american theater
0:21:53 it’s so intense the demands of the unions and it’s so expensive to put on shows so then you know
0:21:57 they put on these shows with movie stars and then they charge five hundred dollars eight hundred dollars
0:22:05 for a seat that’s not going to help us build a theater culture in the united states and it’s
0:22:12 heartbreaking for me do you see a way around that a way forward right now i’m feeling very very lost
0:22:17 and you haven’t even spoken about the regional theaters they’re in even worse shape i think
0:22:21 they’re in worse shape i think covid really struck a blow to so many regional theaters and so many
0:22:27 non-profit theaters in america and then now what’s happening with the new priorities of this particular
0:22:32 administration new plays isn’t really something they care about is that why you’re planning to move to
0:22:37 london i don’t know if that’s for public consumption yet i haven’t announced it but i’ve told my friends
0:22:43 they have a special visa it’s called a global talent visa out here and if you are talented enough
0:22:48 that’s a humble title i don’t know what to do i’m not blaming you i know but when i found out about it
0:22:53 i thought well i’m going to avail myself of this if i’m globally talented enough to qualify i’m going to do
0:23:00 it did you decide this before you were over here for stereophonic we were out here for auditions
0:23:04 and i kept telling my music director i really think you should move out here you would love it here
0:23:09 look how great it is here and then i realized i was kind of doing some freudian thing where really i was
0:23:15 saying it to myself and then i went to a party and this woman who’s american she told me about this special
0:23:19 visa that i could get because i was thinking well maybe i could live out here but i don’t know if i could
0:23:24 get a visa she said no no i think you can get one why do you want to move here i’m a little bit
0:23:30 disconcerted by some of the political goings-on in the united states right now but also i just like it
0:23:37 here i think new york has become crazily expensive and such a luxury playground for the rich and tech
0:23:43 people you know i grew up there i’ve seen the city change and change and change i suddenly realized like
0:23:49 maybe i feel a little alien here i was looking for a new apartment i was looking in guanis which is not
0:23:53 necessarily the most you know glam i mean they’re trying to build it up and turn it into tribeca
0:23:58 for those who don’t know just describe guanis most famous for its toxic canal well they have the toxic
0:24:04 canal and so you probably get cancer and everything but it can be nice i remember growing up there’s
0:24:09 park slope and then there’s guanis in between and then there’s carol gardens if there was a party at
0:24:13 park slope but then we wanted to go to carol gardens we just run through guanis because we were so
0:24:18 petrified because there was just nothing there except for this toxic canal and maybe muggers but
0:24:22 then they said oh let’s build this up and turn it into a playground for the rich so that’s where
0:24:26 you’re looking i was looking and i thought i’d like to have an office i’ll get a two-bedroom
0:24:32 and they were so expensive i was like do i really want to spend this kind of money and live here
0:24:37 i don’t know that i do so when i came out to london i just thought actually it’s a little bit less
0:24:43 expensive here and i kind of like it and maybe i’m ready for something new so so let’s talk if you
0:24:49 don’t mind about the state of theater in general let’s say new york versus london no you make a sad
0:24:54 face the ft ran a piece i don’t know how much you might agree with it or disagree with it but it said
0:25:02 that the west end has maybe surprisingly become a better place to do good theatrical work it’s
0:25:08 definitely cheaper to produce here than it is on broadway and that broadway has become as we all
0:25:16 know the redoubt of celebrity casting and or sitcom ish shows etc etc so in that way stereophonic stood
0:25:23 out have you sensed any significant ways in which writing for the stage in england is significantly
0:25:28 different than writing for the states and is that part of why you want to be here it’s not actually a
0:25:34 factor in my coming here no i did a show at the rsc about 20 years ago that was like one of my first
0:25:38 ever production royal shakespeare at the royal shakespeare company in stratford it came to london
0:25:43 as well as let’s just like a one person show that the royal court commission when i was like a graduate
0:25:49 student and that was really fun what i’ve noticed just in general is that it’s a very humane place in
0:25:55 a lot of ways the funding is not what it was let’s get that straight right now in england anywhere the
0:26:01 arts are underfunded it’s bad everywhere although here there’s much more from the state much much more
0:26:05 and i’m sure that’s going to be more pronounced once we lose you know our national endowment of the
0:26:11 arts which will probably happen very soon in america so that’s absolutely true i think there’s a theater
0:26:17 culture here that does not exist in america in general there’s a certain kind of value placed on
0:26:24 the arts in england and that is the thing about this tradition right we’re part of a history this is part
0:26:28 of how we do things it’s very codified and there’s constricting elements of that and then there’s very
0:26:34 wonderful elements to it so you really do feel that the theater going is part of our culture and
0:26:39 that’s why like you know in the royal court they have seats in the bleachers for like 10 pence so
0:26:44 everyone can come because it’s part of the democracy that is part of the democracy that’s how the greeks
0:26:51 thought of it as well i thought of you and this play the other day we were up in chester england it’s an old
0:26:58 roman city they’ve still got intact roman walls and there’s a thousand year old cathedral and while we were
0:27:03 there we went to the races the oldest horse racing track in the world is there it’s almost 500 years old
0:27:11 it’s fun and it’s also weirdly identical to what it must have been almost 500 years ago you’ve got animals
0:27:17 you’ve got people on them and other than like the hats that the ladies wear they call fascinators them
0:27:22 being made of things that i’m sure materials that didn’t exist 500 years ago otherwise it’s pretty
0:27:28 much the same i was thinking that that’s a tradition that carries on maybe it’s because it’s a form of
0:27:33 entertainment where you can also bet but it’s social right people get together in the sunshine you drink
0:27:37 and i was thinking about well theater you know the same time that chester was happening like
0:27:42 shakespeare probably went to the chester race course at some point right and i’m just thinking
0:27:46 about the trajectories of these two things in some ways are very similar they’re analog things that are
0:27:53 events but the theater sadly to me and i gather to you as what would seem to be a different trajectory
0:28:01 going forward what do you think is lost for humankind oh my god listen i’m a playwright so clearly i like
0:28:06 it i think there are a lot of bad plays i think it’s a very hard medium i think some of the curators
0:28:11 are a little bit boring but i think in terms of people getting together in a shared space and having
0:28:18 a collective experience it can be breathtakingly beautiful and important and you know again i go
0:28:24 back to the earliest democracies i mean it was a democratic requirement to go to the theater
0:28:31 in ancient greece not for women because they weren’t considered people or slaves but still okay there was
0:28:37 this idea that theater and democracy they go together and the theater was often about the
0:28:41 ideas of the day it wasn’t pure entertainment we should say yes yeah there were ideas of the day but
0:28:46 then it was also who knows people were stabbing each other and killing the sheep and going crazy i guess
0:28:52 those are the ideas of the day we’re all going mad but you know there was a kind of psychic penetration
0:29:01 that those plays engaged there was a shadow side of human behavior and what it meant to be part of
0:29:08 a social contract and also to be a leader of some kind or to be disenfranchised those are the plays
0:29:15 that really move and interest me sometimes we go into phases of history where boulevard plays i guess
0:29:20 they’re called that are just lovely and entertaining and kind of throw away but fine in the moment
0:29:26 become more the order of the day and then i think there are moments in history where
0:29:34 the work can get more difficult speaking of work that can be difficult the street that we’re on
0:29:39 today old compton in soho central london do you happen to know anything about who lived on the street
0:29:44 in the past gay people i’m guessing that’s all i know it’s like a gay area yeah i’m guessing that’s
0:29:51 true who lived here well many people but the most noteworthy when i looked up was wagner richard
0:29:57 wagner lived here oh my god i asked my favorite ai search engine what wagner and david ajmi have in
0:30:02 common oh no we’re both control freaks didn’t give me that it may not know you well enough yet
0:30:09 says david ajmi and richard wagner share several notable commonalities rooted in their contributions to the
0:30:14 performing arts you like it so far this is crazy particularly in how they both innovated within
0:30:21 their respective mediums okay so this is legit ready therefore pioneering theatrical storytelling
0:30:26 ricard wagner as a composer and libretticist to revolutionize opera with his concept of
0:30:32 that word i can never say the sum constant yeah i love that and david ajmi as a contemporary playwright
0:30:36 known for pushing the boundaries of dramatic form and content i don’t know what you call the face
0:30:40 you just made it’s all right it’s like a jewish it’s like my larry david okay if you say so
0:30:48 number two focus on music as central to their work okay not a bad point i mean he was a musician but um
0:30:54 okay number three exploration of artistic process and creative tension wagner’s works often depict
0:31:01 artists gods and mortals struggling with creation ambition and interpersonal conflict while ajmi’s
0:31:08 stereophonic similarly dramatizes the intense often fraught dynamics and number four influence and
0:31:14 controversy both have attracted controversy wagner for his personal views and the revolutionary nature
0:31:21 of his art ajmi for legal disputes over the sources and inspirations for plays including stereophonic
0:31:26 and its alleged parallels to fleetwood mac’s history so all right that’s what the ai machine has to say
0:31:31 about you and wagner what do you think no comment can you give me some kind of response to this
0:31:38 the lawsuit that the ai brings up this was a fleetwood mac adjacent lawsuit there was a settlement i
0:31:44 understand say what you can or will i can’t say anything you know i’m not allowed we settled it i’m so
0:31:50 glad we settled it the play did not have to change as a result of the lawsuit i assume or am i wrong no
0:31:55 was there serious concern at some point that you might have to either shut down the show or rewrite parts
0:32:02 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
0:32:08 it was too fraught i know the settlement amount is not made public as it never is in these cases
0:32:15 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
0:32:17 i mean i don’t think i’m allowed to say but no
0:32:24 the case had been brought by ken calais a producer and engineer who worked on fleetwood mac’s record
0:32:31 rumors and who wrote a memoir called making rumors there are as i mentioned earlier a lot of fleetwood
0:32:37 mac parallels in stereophonic from the makeup of the band itself to the way that the peter character
0:32:42 like lindsey buckingham in real life winds up taking over the project there’s also the fact that both
0:32:48 peter and lindsey have a brother who’s an olympic swimmer but now that the lawsuit has been cleared
0:32:55 stereophonic is playing in london with sold out houses and rave reviews and there will be a u.s tour
0:33:00 later this year i’m stephen dubner this is freakonomics radio we’ll be right back
0:33:13 so what’s different about the london production of stereophonic from the new york production
0:33:19 the cast is three of them came from new york and they all had the option to come but the rest of
0:33:23 them said no we don’t want to come okay so we recast it all did have the option they all had the option
0:33:31 listen it’s a very very draining play to do they were just like we’ve done it we came out in january
0:33:37 and we recast the four other roles and it was very very hard because it’s not just about getting
0:33:42 people playing instruments and who are good actors they have to feel a certain way i mean i really cast
0:33:48 for the quality first and then it’s like okay how can you act and can you play instruments what do you
0:33:53 mean cats for quality first i wanted people who felt like artists and that they were a little bit weird
0:34:00 i didn’t want people that felt like actors a lot of actors are really good actors but they feel like actors
0:34:07 acting i didn’t want that for this show and i really wanted to give the audience a very easy ramp into
0:34:13 the kind of naturalism that we’re asking in the play and we found these actors but there were like one or two
0:34:20 like okay you could play that role you’re the only one you could do it all of england kind of but that’s
0:34:21 what happened in america too
0:34:31 several cast members of stereophonic in new york weren’t really musicians tom pasinka who played the
0:34:35 peter character it told me that before he started training for rehearsals he only played what he called
0:34:42 garbage guitar but some of the london cast members are experienced musicians at playwrights horizons it was
0:34:45 like you know what’s that movie where they were getting the ship up the hill
0:34:51 fitz carraldo that’s what that was it was a little bit like oh my god this is going to kill me whereas
0:34:55 you know three days in they were playing all the songs and it sounded great they’re musicians they can
0:35:02 do this with zero disparagement toward american cast would it have been a different experience had you cast
0:35:08 actors who were also musicians for the american version i’m sure it would have been different would it have
0:35:13 been better not necessarily because so much of the charm and the deliciousness of that experience
0:35:20 was the meta story of can we make ourselves a band can we do this can we play instruments
0:35:28 it was wild seeing them step up to that plate for will brill to learn how to play bass and for tom to
0:35:40 learn the riff for masquerade they were so petrified but inside of that fear was a kind of laser focus like
0:35:47 i’m in it to win it and it brought out something very primal and thrilling that made its way into the
0:35:51 performance so i actually think it helped us in a certain way i understand there’s a new song
0:35:58 for the london production yeah it’s not in the production in the play diana speaks about this song
0:36:04 which is from the first album and it’s the song that starts creeping back up the charts and then
0:36:10 propels their album into success so will said i’m gonna write that song and then he said i’m gonna give
0:36:16 the cast something to do that’s their own to let the british cast shine for themselves and they kill it
0:36:31 i read that brad pitt’s film production company has acquired rights to stereophonic true i don’t know
0:36:37 if they acquired the rights they’re just my producers for the film which i’m writing right now oh so you’re
0:36:42 writing the film i’m writing the film i just decided not to sell it to a studio quite yet because i’d like
0:36:48 to take my time and get it right and not have to take notes part of the problem is like okay you like
0:36:54 the play now what do you imagine the hollywood version of it to be i don’t even know what it is
0:36:59 yet i have to redo the whole thing in my mind is this going to take another 10 years roughly i hope to
0:37:06 god not i mean i am working on it right now and i can’t rush it but i don’t want to do a bad movie
0:37:12 i really want it to have the integrity that the play had but it can’t be a play can you give a couple
0:37:17 ideas just of how the film would be different from the play i can’t talk too much about the film
0:37:22 because i don’t want to jinx it there are talky speeches that will never be in this film i love
0:37:27 them and they’re central to the play and they can’t have anything to do with it there’s a character who
0:37:33 is alluded to this receptionist who is an aspiring singer model person who sort of works her way through
0:37:39 the band who becomes a character in the film i love writing her it’s a big thing in the play this
0:37:44 demarcation between public and private those spaces are quite collapsed in the play everything becomes
0:37:49 public because they’re just in the studio and there’s no escape it’s inspiring to me that you’re
0:37:54 so confident about this because it’s a different kind of writing it’s totally different and you have
0:37:59 to embrace it but i don’t have an ego about it all so i think that’s where playwrights get in trouble
0:38:05 like oh my wonderful play it’s like no no i’ve got to kill it’s like oedipus kill the play marry the movie
0:38:10 you know what i mean that’s how i’m approaching it i can’t deify this play this play is its own
0:38:15 thing and there’s things that i’m going to keep because they’re going to work in the movie but i
0:38:19 have to figure out the proportions and stuff it’s just different what about other plays what are you
0:38:26 working on i’m doing a play for the public theater that i can’t really talk about it’s a two-part play
0:38:32 is it contemporary it is but it also spans something like 50 years it’s very different
0:38:39 from stereophonic it couldn’t be more different and i can’t talk about it i can’t i’m gonna get in
0:38:46 trouble does it engage more with the outside world than stereophonic does whether that’s political
0:38:53 engagement or whatnot yeah it does but not because i felt an obligation to i think that’s where artists
0:38:58 get into trouble when they’re being pointed oh let me write about the issue of the day because it’s
0:39:03 very important and i need to speak to it i never do that i don’t like those kind of plays and yet
0:39:10 i’ve written one despite the fact that i dislike it it came from a place of obsession and not
0:39:16 understanding what i was examining that’s when i trust myself when i’m coming from a place of rational
0:39:22 inquiry that’s when i know i’m on the wrong track i’ve heard you talk about this notion of an event
0:39:29 a thing that happens in a given place in time and that there’s less and less appreciation of that and
0:39:34 i will say as a human that worries me a little bit because we’ve lived the entirety of our civilization
0:39:43 with that notion so i don’t know open thread on digital versus analog i just think it’s very
0:39:49 troubling that it was so controversial that i had a play that was three hours it was such an object of
0:39:57 controversy that people couldn’t bear to have the attention span to sit with a play like that it was
0:40:01 so daunting for them you sure your play was really singled out it’s just that you paid more attention
0:40:06 because it was your play maybe i was paying more attention i think that feels to me more like a
0:40:13 symptom of a kind of tiktokification of people’s attention span and that worries me that people don’t
0:40:22 know what it is to really pay attention and to devote sustained attention to a work of art on the other hand
0:40:27 the way you just described it there no offense makes it sound a little bit like homework whereas the point
0:40:32 of a piece of theater is that you become so immersed that you kind of are holding your breath
0:40:38 everard alby once said to me that’s a good sentence however it ends i know right he once said entertainment
0:40:47 isn’t just about you being entertained it’s about what you are willing to entertain i think there is a
0:40:54 fine line between edification you might call it homework and a certain kind of devotion and attention
0:41:01 that really does pay dividends and pay rewards but that it’s not always instant gratification
0:41:08 and there’s something about that ethos i guess that’s sort of how i was raised a little bit when
0:41:14 i read hegel and kant in college i wasn’t going oh my god this is so riveting except ultimately it was
0:41:21 riveting to me i assume that this play has brought you already and will bring more financial security that
0:41:29 is a little bit surprising and unusual to you yes yes up to a point it’s not like i’m set for life
0:41:37 the money has been unbelievably helpful for me and has kind of healed me poverty is just no fun feeling
0:41:41 like you’re constantly trying to figure out how am i going to pay my rent next month how am i going
0:41:46 to pay my rent i have three months of rent i can pay okay now what about this that’s a drag and that
0:41:53 has been alleviated and i’m very grateful for that talking today you seem pretty normal you seem like
0:41:59 you’ve i’m not adjusted no no you’re just i’m faking it because i know you’re very shy i am shy is that
0:42:05 where the sunglasses came from the sunglasses came from when i was at playwrights horizons and i was
0:42:11 starting to get extremely anxious about having to do press not even press it started on the first
0:42:17 rehearsal something happened to me maybe i’m getting more neurotic as i get older but i feel really naked
0:42:26 and i feel very nervous and shy and embarrassed i feel so flayed more than other plays yeah why do you
0:42:33 think it was for this show i think this is the most nakedly honest thing that i’ve ever written even
0:42:40 though from the outside there’s nothing or anyone in the play that remotely resembles david adjmi
0:42:46 right but there were times in auditions actors were reading scenes over and over that i thought i was
0:42:50 going to have a nervous breakdown because i couldn’t keep hearing the lines anymore i was like i can’t
0:42:58 handle this play okay so you write this play it does as well as one could possibly wish you win the
0:43:03 awards you’re selling out all kinds of real rock stars are coming to see the play people like jeff
0:43:10 bezos are coming to see it how did this whole experience change your self-image your self-identity
0:43:16 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
0:43:24 have so much to prove and i have so much to myself and to the world do you wish you were able to kind
0:43:30 i don’t want to say normalize more but respond in the way that most people might think you would
0:43:36 respond or are you very satisfied having the same gestalt you’ve got i feel like dolly parton is like
0:43:43 a good north star she’s totally who she is she’s self-possessed she respects herself she’s an artist
0:43:48 and that’s the end of it that’s the end of the conversation and now it’s like let’s get to work
0:43:55 and be humane and be a good citizen that’s my goal i will say this i hope theater continues to exist and
0:44:02 thrive if only so that future people who are as obsessive and compulsive will have a productive
0:44:08 thing to do with their lives those people are going to find their way into this no matter what because
0:44:15 when you are really driven to do this and this is your life you are going to do it no matter what
0:44:19 you will lay down whatever you need to lay down to make sure that it happens i feel like that’s what
0:44:25 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
0:44:34 to do this the end that again was david ajmi in a london recording studio on the street where
0:44:40 wagner used to live i’d like to thank ajmi for the conversation and i’d like to thank you as always
0:44:46 for listening please let us know what you think our email is radio at freakonomics.com coming up next
0:44:53 time on the show we head back to the real world at one point early on after the russian invasion of
0:44:58 ukraine before i could actually get into ukraine i decided that i would meet my ukrainian counterpart
0:45:03 dmitry kuleba on the border between poland and ukraine and technically set foot into ukraine
0:45:10 i talked to former secretary of state tony blinken on the fragility of democracy the care
0:45:18 and feeding of autocrats and how diplomats like him do what they do that’s next week until then take
0:45:23 care of yourself and if you can someone else too freakonomics radio is produced by stitcher and
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0:45:35 where we publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by alina kullman with help
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0:46:13 the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything
0:46:18 stitcher
0:00:13 i was taken to task by the critics and i was considered really polarizing and difficult
0:00:16 um let’s back up for a second please say your name and what you do
0:00:20 david ajmi is my name and playwright is my game
0:00:26 ajmi has been a playwright for a few decades now his work was typically staged
0:00:33 in regional or repertory or experimental theaters but never under the much brighter lights of
0:00:39 broadway or the west end that changed last year with a play he wrote called stereophonic
0:00:44 stereophonic is a play about a dysfunctional family and art making and about the struggle
0:00:51 to become an artist that’s another way of saying that stereophonic is a play about the mind of david
0:00:56 ajmi i always work off of tropes in the culture but then it’s always really a way for me to talk
0:01:04 about me the plot of stereophonic is so slender that it barely sounds like a plot a five-piece band
0:01:10 is struggling to record their second album the band very much resembles fleetwood mac at least
0:01:16 superficially there are two sound engineers also and the entire play takes place in california
0:01:23 recording studios in the late 1970s that’s it but that slender plot supports an entire universe of
0:01:29 emotion some of the most psychologically astute writing you’ll ever hear on a stage and then
0:01:34 there’s the music stereophonic is not a musical not even close but the music says a lot of things
0:01:41 the characters aren’t able to and the music was written by will butler a longtime member of the band
0:01:47 arcade fire last year as we were trying to make a series about the strange economics of the live
0:01:53 theater industry stereophonic had just moved to broadway from a well-received off-broadway run
0:02:01 at playwrights horizons i saw the play a few times i loved it we wound up making a pair of episodes
0:02:08 about it we interviewed producers cast members and david ajmi stereophonic went on to be nominated for
0:02:15 more tonys than any play in history and at one five including best play and so when i was recently
0:02:20 in london for some other tapings and i saw that stereophonic was in rehearsals for its debut in the
0:02:26 west end i asked ajmi if he would meet up in a recording studio and tell us everything he’s been up
0:02:33 to as you’ll hear he is a fun person to have a conversation with he is super smart but also earnest
0:02:41 he’s remarkably candid he’s rarely mean-spirited except toward himself sometimes and he’s consistently
0:02:48 interesting at least to me i hope you will agree today on freakonomics radio after a stereophonic
0:02:52 size success what can david ajmi possibly do now
0:03:12 this is freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host
0:03:31 david ajmi grew up in brooklyn in a turbulent syrian jewish family he describes the turbulence well in a
0:03:37 memoir called lot six we also learned that ajmi started reading the new york times when he was two
0:03:43 he saw his first broadway musical at five he went to college at sarah lawrence and the grad school for
0:03:49 playwriting at both juilliard and the university of iowa and then came the hard work
0:03:58 the last time we spoke which was just as stereophonic was starting to explode you said there have been times
0:04:04 when you thought about just quitting playwriting but you didn’t and now you’ve been writing plays for
0:04:12 roughly 30 years and when you look around you realize that almost nobody really does that anymore yeah
0:04:18 i think it’s true i sort of made some decisions and choices that compromised me in terms of the kind of
0:04:24 life i would have i was willing to do that because i knew that my purpose here is really to do a certain
0:04:31 kind of writing and to be very very truthful and exploratory in the kind of work i do and if i can’t
0:04:37 have that freedom to explore and sort of mull over what i believe the truth is for me in this kind of
0:04:43 dramatic dialectical context of a play i don’t want to do it and i don’t know if i want to do anything
0:04:49 you know what i mean that kind of feels like that is my reason for being so i made a lot of sacrifices
0:04:55 to get to write these plays what do you mean by sacrifices i would live in people’s homes i’d live in
0:05:02 attics i’d live in basements i’d find patrons essentially i went into an enormous amount of debt
0:05:08 credit card debt credit cards and you know i couldn’t pay my taxes the problem is they tax grants
0:05:12 which prior to reagan they didn’t do so when artists got grants if i got guggenheim let’s say
0:05:17 which i was fortunate enough to get one then i would use that money to try to pay some of my debt
0:05:21 the grants were a huge boon and then suddenly it became the bane of my existence because i was like
0:05:26 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
0:05:31 money hooray and then you want to go out and celebrate and it’s like oh no i’ve got this albatross
0:05:36 of these taxes that makes me sad because i feel like someone should have said to you hey the first thing
0:05:41 you need to do is take 30 of that and just set it aside but nobody said that to you nobody said it
0:05:46 but i also think maybe i wouldn’t have listened because i wanted to experience the ecstasy of money
0:05:54 were you somewhat hedonistic yes on what well i took myself out for nice dinners maybe i bought a little
0:05:59 outfit here and there that doesn’t sound hedonistic for me it was it’s so funny because people thought
0:06:05 i was so rich i remember having dinner with a professor of mine from college for my undergraduate
0:06:10 after my first play opened in new york and she’s like you must be doing so well now financially and
0:06:15 i said they paid me seven thousand dollars what was she a professor of she taught literary theory
0:06:19 and literature i would have thought she would understand the economics of theater a little bit
0:06:25 she had not the vaguest idea i saw her recently we had dinner again a couple months ago and she said i
0:06:29 remembered that day really vividly because it was such a shock to my system people don’t understand
0:06:35 that playwrights make literally nothing and just how broken it is and of course now it’s just we’re
0:06:39 going down even a darker black hole which i didn’t even think was possible but of course it always is
0:06:47 during the 10 or 11 year gestation period of stereophonic which is the show that people now
0:06:53 know you for talk about how close you came or how many times you came close to quitting playwriting
0:06:59 what i realized making stereophonic was that i couldn’t give up this is the kind of torture i think
0:07:05 that gets crystallized in the play itself because i think people realize i love this too much and the
0:07:11 thing that i love is killing me and i will never stop loving it that’s why the play rings i think with
0:07:18 the intensity that it has because i was really living it for real i made the play over 10 years i thought it
0:07:26 was never going to get done at some point i mean it’s hilarious in a dark way because it does mirror the
0:07:30 trajectory of the play because the play is about this album that’s like never getting finished and everyone’s going
0:07:37 insane and people are wondering like am i going to make it alive out of this studio to see this record
0:07:42 come out and i was really feeling that and yet that was the thing that kept you in it didn’t make you run
0:07:48 from it it was a bit of a beckett situation you know i think about the end of strindberg’s play i think it’s
0:07:54 a dream play where the character says you want to stay and you want to go and wild horses are tearing you
0:08:00 apart in both directions simultaneously and i really felt those two opposite emotions with equal intensity
0:08:04 i learned how to be quite disciplined during that period
0:08:06 and very very rigorous
0:08:08 and
0:08:13 just put my emotions to the side as much as possible but there were times when i really thought
0:08:17 i was losing my mind i had holes in my clothes and i couldn’t afford anything i mean
0:08:19 it got really really bad for me
0:08:22 and my director daniel walken was actually quite worried about me
0:08:24 even to the point where
0:08:28 when we were in previews at playwrights horizons i made sort of a dark joke
0:08:34 we were up in the roof he was smoking a cigarette and i sort of alluded to the fact that
0:08:37 well if it doesn’t go so great maybe i’ll just you know and i kind of
0:08:41 nodded downward and he just burst into tears because i think he was so worried about me
0:08:46 the relationship you two have along with will butler is i think quite remarkable because you
0:08:50 were collaborators for years and years and years before there was a play yeah
0:08:53 yeah i mean you were a team you formed a band essentially
0:08:58 we just sort of decided that we would have unconditional faith in each other it was some
0:09:03 sort of spiritual contract that we made i don’t know how we made it or why we did it
0:09:08 but we intuitively just knew that we could trust each other and that we were going to be
0:09:14 really decent with each other and that i was going to learn how to be civilized which i
0:09:20 maybe wasn’t prior to this process because i am quite controlling and i am very demanding
0:09:26 daniel sat me down prior to the process and said listen you have a reputation of being very demanding
0:09:30 this is how i need to work can you work this way and i said yeah
0:09:33 just to be clear you drafted these guys into your band
0:09:37 several years before anyone would have ever heard of stereophonic
0:09:43 and they worked for essentially free for years for 10 years so this is will butler who was at the
0:09:50 point still in arcade fire he was in arcade fire this was 2013 he’s so smart he’s so dramaturgical will
0:09:56 he has the mind for theater and that was something i did not know it’s an accident you went to him
0:10:01 because you were able to find a connection yes or you reached out and he said yes i reached out to
0:10:06 arcade fire period i was like i want arcade fire to do it just because you love them i love arcade
0:10:09 fire and i just thought there was something about the anthemic quality of some of the songs
0:10:14 especially in their first album i was like there’s something about the intensity of this and the sort
0:10:20 of fever of some of these songs that i think will rhyme with what i want for this show and i love them
0:10:25 and then they were all busy no no no i can’t do it and will was like well i’ll meet with you
0:10:30 and i just thought i like this guy he’s a bit like peter pan or something i mean he’s kind of
0:10:37 iconoclastic for a rock star he’s a sweet sweet soul he’s goofy and he’s silly and he’s really fun
0:10:43 and he’s very very brainy when we were doing my show he moved to cambridge and got a degree in
0:10:50 public policy from harvard in the middle of recording for arcade fire he’s a unicorn in the world of rock
0:10:56 music and then daniel auken is a working director in new york his father i think was head of the
0:11:02 national theater here in london for a time yeah he was yeah so when you say you know we all made this
0:11:07 contract where we agreed to be good to each other and to collaborate in a certain way i could see why
0:11:14 you would want to do that right you’re the writer and you need them a director and a musician to write
0:11:20 what is a very essential piece of this play but what was in it for them i have no idea i think
0:11:25 daniel you know we went to sundance together they have this theater lab and i developed my first
0:11:30 real play there called the evildoers daniel saw the reading which was quite extraordinary michael
0:11:34 stubert was in it and it was great he got really jazzed about it and thought i want to work with
0:11:40 this guy so we had been talking about doing something together and i remember thinking this is the play for
0:11:43 daniel like i saw it in my mind’s eye and then i just went that’s for daniel
0:11:50 what did your script look like over the years and how much archival stuff is there are there
0:11:55 cartons full of paper versions was it all on a computer i’m really bad at archiving my stuff
0:12:00 because i’m so disorganized what i was doing in the beginning was just taking notes of every single
0:12:07 thing that i could learn about a recording process in the 70s jargon equipment what they would say to
0:12:12 each other what their problems would be then i would riff on it and make dialogue it was a very
0:12:17 batter shot process my assistant now is saying like what’s your process explain to me so i can
0:12:20 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
0:12:25 intuitions did all the characters already exist when all this is going on no no no they didn’t exist i
0:12:30 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
0:12:35 the studio i didn’t know anything and then i said okay i’ll have an engineer and then i showed it to
0:12:40 john kilgore who is this very famous engineer producer who worked for philip glass and steve reich and all these
0:12:45 people and john was amazing and we said could you be our advisor he read through what i had and he said
0:12:50 why is there only one engineer he needs an assistant and so that opened up the dramaturgical thing of
0:12:55 like oh there’s two guys and now it becomes like rosencrantz and guildenstern so then that became the next
0:13:01 draft i developed it in workshop so i do it like 10 or 15 pages at a time 20 pages here and there
0:13:07 i think for people who aren’t accustomed to making things especially over a really long period of time
0:13:12 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
0:13:17 feel like you’re getting money’s worth it’s three hours long but i think it’s not natural to think
0:13:22 about the ingredients or the process you know if you and i were to go to have a really nice dinner
0:13:30 somewhere we don’t stop to think about all the growing and planting harvesting preparing education
0:13:35 that goes into that one meal but it’s years and years and years and years and similarly what you’re
0:13:40 describing now is years and years of minute work that’s gone into this thing that people will show
0:13:46 up and buy a ticket and love it or not love it whatever and then it’s over does that get to you
0:13:51 that people don’t generally think about or understand what it takes to make something like this
0:13:55 well that’s where i wrote the play i heard an interview i think it was about barbara streisand
0:14:01 barbara streisand was in the studio and they were playing these violins and she said one of these it’s
0:14:06 flat and they were like what are you talking about there were like 12 violins and she goes which one play
0:14:13 it you that’s the kind of expertise that when you hear the anecdote you’re like oh my god barbara
0:14:17 streisand doesn’t brag about this hey do you know what i do i have to listen to all these flat
0:14:24 instruments she’s just focused on the work at hand i find there’s such nobility in that for me
0:14:31 that artists often don’t have to display their expertise they just do their work i find that very
0:14:38 beautiful there are romantic relationships among the characters in your play that ebb and flow but
0:14:42 even among those for whom there’s no romantic relationship being in a band is a little bit
0:14:47 like being married to several people simultaneously right i like the idea that you’re getting to
0:14:52 there’s something in there but i don’t understand it the reason i’m asking is that i was in a band and
0:14:59 i quit as we were kind of at the brink we’d gotten a record deal we were in pre-production on our first
0:15:06 record and i decided this was not the life that i wanted we were on arista records it was oh my god
0:15:13 i’d been working toward it for clive davis yeah clive came to cbgb’s to see us play and then he led us out to
0:15:19 his stretch limousine it was very cold he put his silk scarf around my neck oh my god oh my god and
0:15:24 we went up to his office the next day and he had aretha franklin get on the phone with us to tell us
0:15:32 how great oh my what it was but anyway once we got into the making of the record and once i had
0:15:38 exposure to people who were successful i realized it was not the healthy lifestyle for me because it’s
0:15:44 too much fun but the band i deeply loved every individual in that band it’s just a very hard
0:15:50 relationship which is one of many reasons i loved your play i think it’s a dynamic that your play helps
0:15:54 people understand about themselves maybe the thing that i started out with when i was writing the play
0:16:01 was collaboration and working together and being together and functioning as a collective and also
0:16:07 as individuals inside of a collective like that tension how do you do it how do you partner where
0:16:13 are the nightmares because i do have trouble with that i’m much better one-on-one than i am working
0:16:21 inside of a group however ironically with this play with this group i can’t tell you how harmonious it is
0:16:28 it’s very beautiful and very magical and we do fight and sometimes i want to fight more probably
0:16:32 should be fighting more but i just love them so much i don’t want to fight with them i don’t like
0:16:37 conflict i want to be loved and just everything to be nice with everybody but i sometimes push things
0:16:43 into conflict because of that but not gratuitously i don’t think it’s ever gratuitous because i love
0:16:48 harmony and i don’t like to fight with people but then i will sometimes push things one particularly
0:16:54 compelling element of this play to me and i think to many people is peter he ends up being the leader
0:17:02 of the band by merit but it wasn’t a vote it just happened because he was the most let’s say driven and
0:17:10 talented i’m just curious if that dynamic that reality of you know a leader emerging and everyone
0:17:15 is kind of bitchy about his being the leader in the way that he is the leader because he is very
0:17:22 exacting but they also benefit hugely by his being that kind of leader and so he’s in this kind of
0:17:27 difficult situation where he too wants to be loved like you just said he wanted to be invited over for
0:17:34 that chicken dinner does that have a connection to you or anyone in your life i think that’s like
0:17:40 the obverse that’s like the dark night version of me that’s where it could have gone but i think peter
0:17:45 couldn’t have survived and doing theater because theater you can’t control it every night and you
0:17:49 can’t record it and get all the levels exactly right which is sort of what i want to do is that
0:17:54 why you don’t go to the performances then that’s part of it because i am compulsive i literally sometimes
0:17:59 spasm when the actors don’t do something the way i want them so if you’re sitting in the audience you
0:18:05 might shout what are you doing it’s kind of what i’m doing the whole time in my head and and i think i would
0:18:12 just my energy no but it is dark comedy i am compulsive and peter is compulsive i am an
0:18:18 obsessive person and i hear things at a frequency daniel keeps saying my director he just goes you hear
0:18:23 things at a frequency that normal people can’t and i’m like going well that doesn’t help like he thinks
0:18:28 that like oh it’s not a big deal that we don’t do that because you hear it and so specific but no one
0:18:34 else will know all i can do is tell you what i need to hear but i have a really good bedside manner
0:18:41 i can be charming i’ve cultivated this new york jewish persona that i work the room with it’s not just a
0:18:46 persona i actually do have this sort of sense of comedy about myself and my own obsessiveness and my
0:18:52 neuroses and i have a light touch and a kind of weird hovering overview of the absurdity of everything
0:18:59 that we’re doing all the time so that i don’t get so you know annoying about things i try anyway i mean
0:19:03 i did like say to will this song needs a bridge and this song needs that and i want it more intense and
0:19:07 blah blah blah and he’d be trying and at some point will would just be like god damn it and he just
0:19:13 started screaming at me and i was like will what can i do calm down it’s gonna be good what can i do
0:19:21 stereophonic was good it won all those tony awards and sold out night after night in new york
0:19:27 so why did it close after just nine months that’s coming up after the break i’m stephen dubner
0:19:30 and this is freakonomics radio
0:19:45 stereo phonic opened on broadway in april 2024 and it was a runaway hit some hits play on for years
0:19:54 but stereophonic closed in january 2025 after just nine months i asked david adjmi why well we were
0:19:59 kicked out of the house it’s not up to me or the producers we were trying to fight for more time
0:20:04 but the schubert people wanted to put in another show the schubert organization is the biggest
0:20:10 landlord on broadway they own 17 of the 41 theaters they made a promise to another show and
0:20:15 we had maybe the opportunity to move to another theater but then that’s a whole other expense
0:20:20 we just decided let’s just end on a high the good thing about closing when we did was like
0:20:25 we had sold out houses through the entire run but i can imagine that the producers must be saying
0:20:29 there’s so much money we’re leaving on the table yeah i mean we had just
0:20:33 recouped like a couple of weeks before we close and i think that it would have been nice for the
0:20:37 investors and everyone to make a little bit of money from it can you explain that to someone who
0:20:43 doesn’t know the economics of broadway how can one of the biggest hits in a long time only recoup
0:20:48 after eight or nine months and not make money well because there are running costs every week they’re
0:20:52 paying the actors they’re paying the stage fans but it’s a relatively cheap cast and you were able to
0:20:58 charge quite a bit for tickets as it became a hit we were and yet we had to pay back the investors
0:21:02 it was something like a three or four million dollar production so we had to pay all that back
0:21:08 and also pay for the running costs every week i don’t understand exactly like the compass of how
0:21:13 that all works because i kept saying when are we going to recoup i can’t wait and my agents were like
0:21:18 well it’s happening soon we don’t know but also they put in money for advertising and then they put in
0:21:22 money for this and then these campaigns and i don’t know it just all costs money somehow
0:21:27 much more money in new york than here in london though right every producer talks about
0:21:33 the huge spike in costs in new york everything from building sets to advertising to union labor
0:21:38 it’s a unions really in america they’re very hardcore in america and maybe not so much here
0:21:42 they’re definitely not i’m guessing you’re the kind of person who politically aligns with
0:21:48 union i do i do but i do think it might end up being the death of the american theater
0:21:53 it’s so intense the demands of the unions and it’s so expensive to put on shows so then you know
0:21:57 they put on these shows with movie stars and then they charge five hundred dollars eight hundred dollars
0:22:05 for a seat that’s not going to help us build a theater culture in the united states and it’s
0:22:12 heartbreaking for me do you see a way around that a way forward right now i’m feeling very very lost
0:22:17 and you haven’t even spoken about the regional theaters they’re in even worse shape i think
0:22:21 they’re in worse shape i think covid really struck a blow to so many regional theaters and so many
0:22:27 non-profit theaters in america and then now what’s happening with the new priorities of this particular
0:22:32 administration new plays isn’t really something they care about is that why you’re planning to move to
0:22:37 london i don’t know if that’s for public consumption yet i haven’t announced it but i’ve told my friends
0:22:43 they have a special visa it’s called a global talent visa out here and if you are talented enough
0:22:48 that’s a humble title i don’t know what to do i’m not blaming you i know but when i found out about it
0:22:53 i thought well i’m going to avail myself of this if i’m globally talented enough to qualify i’m going to do
0:23:00 it did you decide this before you were over here for stereophonic we were out here for auditions
0:23:04 and i kept telling my music director i really think you should move out here you would love it here
0:23:09 look how great it is here and then i realized i was kind of doing some freudian thing where really i was
0:23:15 saying it to myself and then i went to a party and this woman who’s american she told me about this special
0:23:19 visa that i could get because i was thinking well maybe i could live out here but i don’t know if i could
0:23:24 get a visa she said no no i think you can get one why do you want to move here i’m a little bit
0:23:30 disconcerted by some of the political goings-on in the united states right now but also i just like it
0:23:37 here i think new york has become crazily expensive and such a luxury playground for the rich and tech
0:23:43 people you know i grew up there i’ve seen the city change and change and change i suddenly realized like
0:23:49 maybe i feel a little alien here i was looking for a new apartment i was looking in guanis which is not
0:23:53 necessarily the most you know glam i mean they’re trying to build it up and turn it into tribeca
0:23:58 for those who don’t know just describe guanis most famous for its toxic canal well they have the toxic
0:24:04 canal and so you probably get cancer and everything but it can be nice i remember growing up there’s
0:24:09 park slope and then there’s guanis in between and then there’s carol gardens if there was a party at
0:24:13 park slope but then we wanted to go to carol gardens we just run through guanis because we were so
0:24:18 petrified because there was just nothing there except for this toxic canal and maybe muggers but
0:24:22 then they said oh let’s build this up and turn it into a playground for the rich so that’s where
0:24:26 you’re looking i was looking and i thought i’d like to have an office i’ll get a two-bedroom
0:24:32 and they were so expensive i was like do i really want to spend this kind of money and live here
0:24:37 i don’t know that i do so when i came out to london i just thought actually it’s a little bit less
0:24:43 expensive here and i kind of like it and maybe i’m ready for something new so so let’s talk if you
0:24:49 don’t mind about the state of theater in general let’s say new york versus london no you make a sad
0:24:54 face the ft ran a piece i don’t know how much you might agree with it or disagree with it but it said
0:25:02 that the west end has maybe surprisingly become a better place to do good theatrical work it’s
0:25:08 definitely cheaper to produce here than it is on broadway and that broadway has become as we all
0:25:16 know the redoubt of celebrity casting and or sitcom ish shows etc etc so in that way stereophonic stood
0:25:23 out have you sensed any significant ways in which writing for the stage in england is significantly
0:25:28 different than writing for the states and is that part of why you want to be here it’s not actually a
0:25:34 factor in my coming here no i did a show at the rsc about 20 years ago that was like one of my first
0:25:38 ever production royal shakespeare at the royal shakespeare company in stratford it came to london
0:25:43 as well as let’s just like a one person show that the royal court commission when i was like a graduate
0:25:49 student and that was really fun what i’ve noticed just in general is that it’s a very humane place in
0:25:55 a lot of ways the funding is not what it was let’s get that straight right now in england anywhere the
0:26:01 arts are underfunded it’s bad everywhere although here there’s much more from the state much much more
0:26:05 and i’m sure that’s going to be more pronounced once we lose you know our national endowment of the
0:26:11 arts which will probably happen very soon in america so that’s absolutely true i think there’s a theater
0:26:17 culture here that does not exist in america in general there’s a certain kind of value placed on
0:26:24 the arts in england and that is the thing about this tradition right we’re part of a history this is part
0:26:28 of how we do things it’s very codified and there’s constricting elements of that and then there’s very
0:26:34 wonderful elements to it so you really do feel that the theater going is part of our culture and
0:26:39 that’s why like you know in the royal court they have seats in the bleachers for like 10 pence so
0:26:44 everyone can come because it’s part of the democracy that is part of the democracy that’s how the greeks
0:26:51 thought of it as well i thought of you and this play the other day we were up in chester england it’s an old
0:26:58 roman city they’ve still got intact roman walls and there’s a thousand year old cathedral and while we were
0:27:03 there we went to the races the oldest horse racing track in the world is there it’s almost 500 years old
0:27:11 it’s fun and it’s also weirdly identical to what it must have been almost 500 years ago you’ve got animals
0:27:17 you’ve got people on them and other than like the hats that the ladies wear they call fascinators them
0:27:22 being made of things that i’m sure materials that didn’t exist 500 years ago otherwise it’s pretty
0:27:28 much the same i was thinking that that’s a tradition that carries on maybe it’s because it’s a form of
0:27:33 entertainment where you can also bet but it’s social right people get together in the sunshine you drink
0:27:37 and i was thinking about well theater you know the same time that chester was happening like
0:27:42 shakespeare probably went to the chester race course at some point right and i’m just thinking
0:27:46 about the trajectories of these two things in some ways are very similar they’re analog things that are
0:27:53 events but the theater sadly to me and i gather to you as what would seem to be a different trajectory
0:28:01 going forward what do you think is lost for humankind oh my god listen i’m a playwright so clearly i like
0:28:06 it i think there are a lot of bad plays i think it’s a very hard medium i think some of the curators
0:28:11 are a little bit boring but i think in terms of people getting together in a shared space and having
0:28:18 a collective experience it can be breathtakingly beautiful and important and you know again i go
0:28:24 back to the earliest democracies i mean it was a democratic requirement to go to the theater
0:28:31 in ancient greece not for women because they weren’t considered people or slaves but still okay there was
0:28:37 this idea that theater and democracy they go together and the theater was often about the
0:28:41 ideas of the day it wasn’t pure entertainment we should say yes yeah there were ideas of the day but
0:28:46 then it was also who knows people were stabbing each other and killing the sheep and going crazy i guess
0:28:52 those are the ideas of the day we’re all going mad but you know there was a kind of psychic penetration
0:29:01 that those plays engaged there was a shadow side of human behavior and what it meant to be part of
0:29:08 a social contract and also to be a leader of some kind or to be disenfranchised those are the plays
0:29:15 that really move and interest me sometimes we go into phases of history where boulevard plays i guess
0:29:20 they’re called that are just lovely and entertaining and kind of throw away but fine in the moment
0:29:26 become more the order of the day and then i think there are moments in history where
0:29:34 the work can get more difficult speaking of work that can be difficult the street that we’re on
0:29:39 today old compton in soho central london do you happen to know anything about who lived on the street
0:29:44 in the past gay people i’m guessing that’s all i know it’s like a gay area yeah i’m guessing that’s
0:29:51 true who lived here well many people but the most noteworthy when i looked up was wagner richard
0:29:57 wagner lived here oh my god i asked my favorite ai search engine what wagner and david ajmi have in
0:30:02 common oh no we’re both control freaks didn’t give me that it may not know you well enough yet
0:30:09 says david ajmi and richard wagner share several notable commonalities rooted in their contributions to the
0:30:14 performing arts you like it so far this is crazy particularly in how they both innovated within
0:30:21 their respective mediums okay so this is legit ready therefore pioneering theatrical storytelling
0:30:26 ricard wagner as a composer and libretticist to revolutionize opera with his concept of
0:30:32 that word i can never say the sum constant yeah i love that and david ajmi as a contemporary playwright
0:30:36 known for pushing the boundaries of dramatic form and content i don’t know what you call the face
0:30:40 you just made it’s all right it’s like a jewish it’s like my larry david okay if you say so
0:30:48 number two focus on music as central to their work okay not a bad point i mean he was a musician but um
0:30:54 okay number three exploration of artistic process and creative tension wagner’s works often depict
0:31:01 artists gods and mortals struggling with creation ambition and interpersonal conflict while ajmi’s
0:31:08 stereophonic similarly dramatizes the intense often fraught dynamics and number four influence and
0:31:14 controversy both have attracted controversy wagner for his personal views and the revolutionary nature
0:31:21 of his art ajmi for legal disputes over the sources and inspirations for plays including stereophonic
0:31:26 and its alleged parallels to fleetwood mac’s history so all right that’s what the ai machine has to say
0:31:31 about you and wagner what do you think no comment can you give me some kind of response to this
0:31:38 the lawsuit that the ai brings up this was a fleetwood mac adjacent lawsuit there was a settlement i
0:31:44 understand say what you can or will i can’t say anything you know i’m not allowed we settled it i’m so
0:31:50 glad we settled it the play did not have to change as a result of the lawsuit i assume or am i wrong no
0:31:55 was there serious concern at some point that you might have to either shut down the show or rewrite parts
0:32:02 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
0:32:08 it was too fraught i know the settlement amount is not made public as it never is in these cases
0:32:15 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
0:32:17 i mean i don’t think i’m allowed to say but no
0:32:24 the case had been brought by ken calais a producer and engineer who worked on fleetwood mac’s record
0:32:31 rumors and who wrote a memoir called making rumors there are as i mentioned earlier a lot of fleetwood
0:32:37 mac parallels in stereophonic from the makeup of the band itself to the way that the peter character
0:32:42 like lindsey buckingham in real life winds up taking over the project there’s also the fact that both
0:32:48 peter and lindsey have a brother who’s an olympic swimmer but now that the lawsuit has been cleared
0:32:55 stereophonic is playing in london with sold out houses and rave reviews and there will be a u.s tour
0:33:00 later this year i’m stephen dubner this is freakonomics radio we’ll be right back
0:33:13 so what’s different about the london production of stereophonic from the new york production
0:33:19 the cast is three of them came from new york and they all had the option to come but the rest of
0:33:23 them said no we don’t want to come okay so we recast it all did have the option they all had the option
0:33:31 listen it’s a very very draining play to do they were just like we’ve done it we came out in january
0:33:37 and we recast the four other roles and it was very very hard because it’s not just about getting
0:33:42 people playing instruments and who are good actors they have to feel a certain way i mean i really cast
0:33:48 for the quality first and then it’s like okay how can you act and can you play instruments what do you
0:33:53 mean cats for quality first i wanted people who felt like artists and that they were a little bit weird
0:34:00 i didn’t want people that felt like actors a lot of actors are really good actors but they feel like actors
0:34:07 acting i didn’t want that for this show and i really wanted to give the audience a very easy ramp into
0:34:13 the kind of naturalism that we’re asking in the play and we found these actors but there were like one or two
0:34:20 like okay you could play that role you’re the only one you could do it all of england kind of but that’s
0:34:21 what happened in america too
0:34:31 several cast members of stereophonic in new york weren’t really musicians tom pasinka who played the
0:34:35 peter character it told me that before he started training for rehearsals he only played what he called
0:34:42 garbage guitar but some of the london cast members are experienced musicians at playwrights horizons it was
0:34:45 like you know what’s that movie where they were getting the ship up the hill
0:34:51 fitz carraldo that’s what that was it was a little bit like oh my god this is going to kill me whereas
0:34:55 you know three days in they were playing all the songs and it sounded great they’re musicians they can
0:35:02 do this with zero disparagement toward american cast would it have been a different experience had you cast
0:35:08 actors who were also musicians for the american version i’m sure it would have been different would it have
0:35:13 been better not necessarily because so much of the charm and the deliciousness of that experience
0:35:20 was the meta story of can we make ourselves a band can we do this can we play instruments
0:35:28 it was wild seeing them step up to that plate for will brill to learn how to play bass and for tom to
0:35:40 learn the riff for masquerade they were so petrified but inside of that fear was a kind of laser focus like
0:35:47 i’m in it to win it and it brought out something very primal and thrilling that made its way into the
0:35:51 performance so i actually think it helped us in a certain way i understand there’s a new song
0:35:58 for the london production yeah it’s not in the production in the play diana speaks about this song
0:36:04 which is from the first album and it’s the song that starts creeping back up the charts and then
0:36:10 propels their album into success so will said i’m gonna write that song and then he said i’m gonna give
0:36:16 the cast something to do that’s their own to let the british cast shine for themselves and they kill it
0:36:31 i read that brad pitt’s film production company has acquired rights to stereophonic true i don’t know
0:36:37 if they acquired the rights they’re just my producers for the film which i’m writing right now oh so you’re
0:36:42 writing the film i’m writing the film i just decided not to sell it to a studio quite yet because i’d like
0:36:48 to take my time and get it right and not have to take notes part of the problem is like okay you like
0:36:54 the play now what do you imagine the hollywood version of it to be i don’t even know what it is
0:36:59 yet i have to redo the whole thing in my mind is this going to take another 10 years roughly i hope to
0:37:06 god not i mean i am working on it right now and i can’t rush it but i don’t want to do a bad movie
0:37:12 i really want it to have the integrity that the play had but it can’t be a play can you give a couple
0:37:17 ideas just of how the film would be different from the play i can’t talk too much about the film
0:37:22 because i don’t want to jinx it there are talky speeches that will never be in this film i love
0:37:27 them and they’re central to the play and they can’t have anything to do with it there’s a character who
0:37:33 is alluded to this receptionist who is an aspiring singer model person who sort of works her way through
0:37:39 the band who becomes a character in the film i love writing her it’s a big thing in the play this
0:37:44 demarcation between public and private those spaces are quite collapsed in the play everything becomes
0:37:49 public because they’re just in the studio and there’s no escape it’s inspiring to me that you’re
0:37:54 so confident about this because it’s a different kind of writing it’s totally different and you have
0:37:59 to embrace it but i don’t have an ego about it all so i think that’s where playwrights get in trouble
0:38:05 like oh my wonderful play it’s like no no i’ve got to kill it’s like oedipus kill the play marry the movie
0:38:10 you know what i mean that’s how i’m approaching it i can’t deify this play this play is its own
0:38:15 thing and there’s things that i’m going to keep because they’re going to work in the movie but i
0:38:19 have to figure out the proportions and stuff it’s just different what about other plays what are you
0:38:26 working on i’m doing a play for the public theater that i can’t really talk about it’s a two-part play
0:38:32 is it contemporary it is but it also spans something like 50 years it’s very different
0:38:39 from stereophonic it couldn’t be more different and i can’t talk about it i can’t i’m gonna get in
0:38:46 trouble does it engage more with the outside world than stereophonic does whether that’s political
0:38:53 engagement or whatnot yeah it does but not because i felt an obligation to i think that’s where artists
0:38:58 get into trouble when they’re being pointed oh let me write about the issue of the day because it’s
0:39:03 very important and i need to speak to it i never do that i don’t like those kind of plays and yet
0:39:10 i’ve written one despite the fact that i dislike it it came from a place of obsession and not
0:39:16 understanding what i was examining that’s when i trust myself when i’m coming from a place of rational
0:39:22 inquiry that’s when i know i’m on the wrong track i’ve heard you talk about this notion of an event
0:39:29 a thing that happens in a given place in time and that there’s less and less appreciation of that and
0:39:34 i will say as a human that worries me a little bit because we’ve lived the entirety of our civilization
0:39:43 with that notion so i don’t know open thread on digital versus analog i just think it’s very
0:39:49 troubling that it was so controversial that i had a play that was three hours it was such an object of
0:39:57 controversy that people couldn’t bear to have the attention span to sit with a play like that it was
0:40:01 so daunting for them you sure your play was really singled out it’s just that you paid more attention
0:40:06 because it was your play maybe i was paying more attention i think that feels to me more like a
0:40:13 symptom of a kind of tiktokification of people’s attention span and that worries me that people don’t
0:40:22 know what it is to really pay attention and to devote sustained attention to a work of art on the other hand
0:40:27 the way you just described it there no offense makes it sound a little bit like homework whereas the point
0:40:32 of a piece of theater is that you become so immersed that you kind of are holding your breath
0:40:38 everard alby once said to me that’s a good sentence however it ends i know right he once said entertainment
0:40:47 isn’t just about you being entertained it’s about what you are willing to entertain i think there is a
0:40:54 fine line between edification you might call it homework and a certain kind of devotion and attention
0:41:01 that really does pay dividends and pay rewards but that it’s not always instant gratification
0:41:08 and there’s something about that ethos i guess that’s sort of how i was raised a little bit when
0:41:14 i read hegel and kant in college i wasn’t going oh my god this is so riveting except ultimately it was
0:41:21 riveting to me i assume that this play has brought you already and will bring more financial security that
0:41:29 is a little bit surprising and unusual to you yes yes up to a point it’s not like i’m set for life
0:41:37 the money has been unbelievably helpful for me and has kind of healed me poverty is just no fun feeling
0:41:41 like you’re constantly trying to figure out how am i going to pay my rent next month how am i going
0:41:46 to pay my rent i have three months of rent i can pay okay now what about this that’s a drag and that
0:41:53 has been alleviated and i’m very grateful for that talking today you seem pretty normal you seem like
0:41:59 you’ve i’m not adjusted no no you’re just i’m faking it because i know you’re very shy i am shy is that
0:42:05 where the sunglasses came from the sunglasses came from when i was at playwrights horizons and i was
0:42:11 starting to get extremely anxious about having to do press not even press it started on the first
0:42:17 rehearsal something happened to me maybe i’m getting more neurotic as i get older but i feel really naked
0:42:26 and i feel very nervous and shy and embarrassed i feel so flayed more than other plays yeah why do you
0:42:33 think it was for this show i think this is the most nakedly honest thing that i’ve ever written even
0:42:40 though from the outside there’s nothing or anyone in the play that remotely resembles david adjmi
0:42:46 right but there were times in auditions actors were reading scenes over and over that i thought i was
0:42:50 going to have a nervous breakdown because i couldn’t keep hearing the lines anymore i was like i can’t
0:42:58 handle this play okay so you write this play it does as well as one could possibly wish you win the
0:43:03 awards you’re selling out all kinds of real rock stars are coming to see the play people like jeff
0:43:10 bezos are coming to see it how did this whole experience change your self-image your self-identity
0:43:16 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
0:43:24 have so much to prove and i have so much to myself and to the world do you wish you were able to kind
0:43:30 i don’t want to say normalize more but respond in the way that most people might think you would
0:43:36 respond or are you very satisfied having the same gestalt you’ve got i feel like dolly parton is like
0:43:43 a good north star she’s totally who she is she’s self-possessed she respects herself she’s an artist
0:43:48 and that’s the end of it that’s the end of the conversation and now it’s like let’s get to work
0:43:55 and be humane and be a good citizen that’s my goal i will say this i hope theater continues to exist and
0:44:02 thrive if only so that future people who are as obsessive and compulsive will have a productive
0:44:08 thing to do with their lives those people are going to find their way into this no matter what because
0:44:15 when you are really driven to do this and this is your life you are going to do it no matter what
0:44:19 you will lay down whatever you need to lay down to make sure that it happens i feel like that’s what
0:44:25 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
0:44:34 to do this the end that again was david ajmi in a london recording studio on the street where
0:44:40 wagner used to live i’d like to thank ajmi for the conversation and i’d like to thank you as always
0:44:46 for listening please let us know what you think our email is radio at freakonomics.com coming up next
0:44:53 time on the show we head back to the real world at one point early on after the russian invasion of
0:44:58 ukraine before i could actually get into ukraine i decided that i would meet my ukrainian counterpart
0:45:03 dmitry kuleba on the border between poland and ukraine and technically set foot into ukraine
0:45:10 i talked to former secretary of state tony blinken on the fragility of democracy the care
0:45:18 and feeding of autocrats and how diplomats like him do what they do that’s next week until then take
0:45:23 care of yourself and if you can someone else too freakonomics radio is produced by stitcher and
0:45:29 renbud radio you can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at freakonomics.com
0:45:35 where we publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by alina kullman with help
0:45:41 from zach lapinski it was mixed by eleanor osborne with help from jeremy johnston the freakonomics radio
0:45:47 network staff also includes augusta chapman dalvin abuaji ellen frankman elsa hernandez jasmine
0:45:53 clinger gabriel roth greg rippon morgan levy sarah lily and teo jacobs our theme song
0:45:57 is mr fortune by the hitchhikers and our composer is luis guerra
0:46:05 it’s not like we’re completely extirpated good vocabulary you sir oh thank you thank you
0:46:13 the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything
0:46:18 stitcher
For years, the playwright David Adjmi was considered “polarizing and difficult.” But creating Stereophonic seems to have healed him. Stephen Dubner gets the story — and sorts out what Adjmi has in common with Richard Wagner.
- SOURCES:
- David Adjmi, author and playwright.
- RESOURCES:
- “The West End is enjoying a theatre revival. Can Broadway keep up?” by Daniel Thomas (Financial Times, 2025).
- Lot Six: A Memoir, by David Adjmi (2020).
- Stereophonic, (2023).
- EXTRAS:
- “How Is Live Theater Still Alive?” by Freakonomics Radio (2025).
- “How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway,” by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
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