The Agony and the Ecstasy of Stereophonic Playwright David Adjmi

The latest script by the playwright David Adjmi resembles a musical composition: carefully calibrated rhythms, a complex interplay of parts, intentionally orchestrated dynamics.

And the actors were screwing it up.

“I can't ever get it the way I hear it in my head,” Adjmi told me recently. We were speaking at the Broadway watering hole Joe Allen a couple of weeks before his play’s opening night at the Golden Theatre. “I can hear it at a frequency that they can't. Sometimes we get close. My plays are all born to fail, in a way.”

To protect the actors, the director Daniel Aukin has had to “muzzle” him during rehearsals, Adjmi admitted. “Don't get me wrong,” he said. “I have the most incredible cast, and I know how lucky I am, but I just… It's not that I can't be satisfied, but I do hear things like a composer and actors are not instruments. They're human beings and theater’s a live medium, so it can never be exact every night. And that's both the beauty and the horror, for me, of live art.”

Adjmi’s play Stereophonic transfered to Broadway in March after a tremendously successful off-Broadway run last year. In fly-on-the-wall, theater verité style, it chronicles a fictitious band’s fractious recording sessions for an album in 1976 and 1977. One of the characters, a songwriter and guitarist named Peter (a Tony-nominated performance by Tom Pecinka), happens to be a perfectionist who drives everyone crazy, including himself, in his efforts to realize the sounds he hears in his head. At the same time, Adjmi has also been developing a show about Brian Wilson trying to realize his masterpiece Smile in the 1960s. That album, hyped up to be Wilson’s magnum opus, ended up being the soundtrack to the Beach Boy’s nervous breakdown.

I asked Adjmi if he was risking a breakdown of his own with his obsessive pursuit of unattainable perfection. “It is maddening," he said, before clarifying, "I am very exacting, but I'm not an egomaniac. It's not coming from a place of ego. It's coming from a deep spiritual need to get something right.”

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AROUND TEN YEARS ago, Adjmi was struck hearing Led Zeppelin’s blistering 1969 track, “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” “It was the rawness and the vocals and the pain and the strange bowing between pain and longing and sex and desire,” he told me. “All these emotions blurring and ebbing and flowing. What was he doing when he made this exact vocal? What did his face look like? What was happening to his psyche? How did he channel these emotions? And then I saw him in the studio.”

Would it be possible to tell an entire story within the hermetic confines of a recording studio? Adjmi was intrigued by the possibility. “I didn't know totally how I was going to do it or what it was going to be—but I just knew. ‘Oh my god, I think I struck gold.’ That doesn't happen all the time.”

Adjmi is not a musician—not even “a music person.” “I do listen to music,” he allows, “but I’m not someone who’s infatuated with music and music production. I didn’t know anything about this world.”

So he set himself the task of becoming an expert, researching as intently as if he were conducting an anthropological study. He read Keith Richards’ doorstop-sized memoir Life and watched countless hours of music documentaries, including episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music and the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster. Outside of popular music, Adjmi has also cited the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Company: An Original Cast Recording as an inspiration. (On the other hand, he couldn’t bring himself to watch more than a few minutes of Peter Jackson’s 468-minute Beatles documentary Get Back. “I was like, oh no, this is killing my play.”) To learn about the technical aspects of recording, he consulted with audio engineer and Steve Reich collaborator John Kilgore.

He was fascinated by the disconnect between rock stars’ public selves and private selves. “When you’re in a band, the demarcation between public and private is extremely thin to non-existent,” while the recording studio is “this weird limbo space where there is no public, there is no private—it’s all just one big wash. I took notes on anything about process and about people's personalities. Anything intimate and not presentational. I was trying to look for glimpses of that anywhere that I could find it.”

While writing, Adjmi listened to the music that ruled the airwaves in the latter half of the ‘70s: Heart, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Steely Dan’s Aja on repeat.

Adjmi constructed a world around his unnamed band in a manner befitting a fantasy novelist. Audiences would never see it on stage but, in Adjmi’s mind, The Band drummer Levon Helm dropped in on the recording sessions. So did Electric Light Orchestra maestro Jeff Lynne. Adjmi also mapped out what happens to the band after the play, through the MTV ‘80s and beyond.

“When you see my early drafts, they look like I am someone who just fell off a truck and was released from a mental institution,” said Adjmi. “Everything that comes into my head, I'll write down. I want to give myself the widest canvas.” He also constructed the play with a farceur’s attention to choreography; the play, apart from anything else, is a complicated feat of word processing. “She’s in that room, he’s there, she goes over there, he bangs his drum, she shakes her tambourine… It was very hard to do that.”

To write the songs, Adjmi enlisted Will Butler, the Academy Award-nominated singer-songwriter and founding member of Canadian indie rockers Arcade Fire. Butler penned the songs according to highly specific briefs from Adjmi, fully buying into the mythos. “[Holly] probably had dinner at fucking Eric Clapton’s house at some point and he played her these two reggae records,” Butler speculated to New York Magazine.

From the start, it was a crucial part of Adjmi’s vision that the actors would perform their music live on stage. Non-musicians were cast in the roles anyway; the actress Juliana Canfield has said she may have overstated her piano-playing skills. (Will Brill had also never played bass before—though he had played a guitarist in another fictional band, in David Chase’s Not Fade Away.)

Chunks of rehearsal time were given over to band practice, with Butler and musical director and orchestrator Justin Craig retooling the songs according to the performers' strengths. A few weeks into rehearsals, they found themselves—though not without some trepidation—supporting Butler at a record release party at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. Today it’s the highest compliment to say that the band sounds like a band. The ensemble is impressively in sync, not just as actors but as musicians. 

The resulting play, at three hours and five minutes long with one intermission, combines the rock-geekdom of Behind the Music with the voyeuristic allure of Big Brother. In its depiction of the monotony and claustrophobia of band life, the wringing of beauty out of pain and the pathetic humanness of rock stars, it feels utterly authentic. “David Adjmi is right,” David Byrne has written of the play. “[T]he ridiculous pain and sacrifices we make for our art are sometimes unfathomable, full of self-justifications and cruelties.”

In its portrayal of weary souls and broken hearts, though, the play most resembles a family drama—a '70s-rock Uncle Vanya. Adjmi wrote Stereophonic at the same time he was dredging up memories of his childhood and adolescence for his memoir Lot Six. That writing project seems to have bled into this one. If Stereophonic is not literally the story of Adjmi’s family, the helix spiral of love and hate on stage feels very close to home. “I think I was writing my family drama,” he said. “If I’ve exposed myself, that means I’ve done my job.”

Given that, it’s little wonder that Adjmi has strong opinions about how the characters deliver their lines—they are literally like family to him. “I love them more than I think I’ve ever loved any characters I’ve written,” he said. “They’re very real to me.”

Of course, the play also joins a long tradition of truth-adjacent music histories that includes Dreamgirls, Grace of My Heart and That Thing You Do. There’s more than a rumor of the making of the seminal album Rumours in the play: the messy relationships, the collision of British and American musicians, the 1976-77 timeline and Californian setting. “[T]he bones are Fleetwood Mac’s,” as the New York Times noted in its review of the off-Broadway run. Some of the vital organs are Fleetwood Mac’s too.

“Fleetwood Mac is an amazing band,” said Adjmi. “They're one of my favorite bands, and they're one of the biggest bands of the 1970s. So yes, they're going to make their way in—I didn't want to be self-conscious about censoring how and when or why or which influences made their way in.” Ultimately, he insisted, the resulting play is “synthetic.” “It’s a massive riff.”

Whatever the source of Adjmi's inspiration, he has created an insightful meditation on art and the painful work of being an artist, a tragic love story but not necessarily of the guy-girl variety. “Making art is a love story,” said Adjmi. “This play is dedicated to all artists. It’s for all of us.”

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AFTER THE WORD-OF-MOUTH sensation that was its off-Broadway run, and opening on Broadway to ecstatic reviews, Stereophonic recently became the most Tony-nominated play in history. It is in the running for 13 awards at June’s ceremony, including for Best Play and Best Original Score.

The play is even being taught in acting classes. Young acting students have been emailing Adjmi, asking for tips. “I don’t know how they have the script,” he said. “I don’t love it.” Adjmi's play, apparently, is being bootlegged. Playwriting doesn't get any more rock’n’roll than that.

The runaway success of the show has surprised Adjmi, for whom Broadway was never a particular goal. “I initially thought it would go to Soho Rep. Broadway is something that most serious playwrights really don't aspire to,” he said. “I mean, if it happens, it happens, but it's not considered an end point for serious writers for the theater. But then when it happens, you kind of go, ‘Where's this been all my life?’ It's really shocking how it taps into some deep fantasy from when I was five years old and I saw Broadway shows.”

Strictly speaking, Stereophonic is “a play with music.” But it’s also no stretch to say that, this whole time, Adjmi was writing a Broadway musical—one with a uniquely effective way of expressing and tapping into the power of its songs.

Adjmi has intense memories of the musicals of his youth. His memoir opens with him relishing the cathartic terror of Sweeney Todd at the age of eight, and he remains nostalgic for the audacious artistry of shows like Chicago and A Chorus Line. (“Marvin Hamlisch, to me, is a genius.") And, well, if no one else is going to make musicals as pulse-poundingly alive as those, Adjmi might as well do it himself. Apart from the Brian Wilson project, there’s a movie he desperately wants to musically adapt—he’s in the process of acquiring the rights—and he’s in the very early stages of creating an original rock opera with Butler.

“There was just something more raw and real and electrifying that I don’t feel so much in the theater,” he said of those old shows, “and I want to feel it. If I don’t get the chills, if the hair on my neck is not standing up, I don’t want to be there.”

It turns out that one of the most thrilling figures to potentially shape the future of the Broadway musical is “not a music person.” “I just want to keep writing stuff with music. I want to keep collaborating with musicians. I want to reinvent musicals.”