Theater Kids

 

[The term "theater kid" (or “theatre kid,” as it is below) typically refers to a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows. 

[I wasn’t a theater kid.  As I explain in “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 September 2010, I was introduced to theater as a young boy, but though I did the usual school performances in elementary and middle school, I wasn’t “deeply passionate” about acting.

[I also don’t insist on spelling it t-h-e-a-t-r-e, as John DeVore asserts below that all theater kids do.  I will honor the preference of each theater organization for the spelling of its name, but otherwise, I go with the American spelling.  I do not buy the distinction that theatre refers to the art form and theater to the venue.

[By the way, "Broadway baby" most commonly refers to someone, often a performer, who is deeply involved with or passionate about Broadway theater.  I guess that applies well enough.  Though, I go to a lot of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater, and regional repertory productions as well.

[I did a couple of plays in high school, but only my first two years.  I transferred to schools in Switzerland for the rest of high school, and they didn’t have student theater—and I didn’t miss it.  (See “Going to a Swiss International School” [29 April, 2, 5, 8, 11, and 14 May 2021].)

[I did more stage work in college and joined the university’s Troubadours, the extra-curricular theater group, and then, when I was in the army and stationed in Berlin—and no longer a “kid”—I found myself drawn to theater and acting as an amateur.  (See “Berlin Memoir” [16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017].)

[Then I got out of the service and came to New York City—I’m a native Washingtonian—to go to acting school.  I got an MFA in acting, knocked around New York auditioning, doing a lot of Off-Off-Broadway shows, trying my hand at directing and doing a little teaching. 

[Then I saw that I wasn’t advancing in the profession.  I went back to school for a doctorate with an eye on teaching full time—just at the moment when I was offered a role by one of the theaters back in the city where I was born!  I’d already committed to attending school for that Ph.D., but I toyed with blowing it off for the stage gig . . . but I decided it was a chimera, and stuck with my original plan. 

[I discovered that what I was good at was writing about this subject.  I got some articles published, delivered a few papers at conferences—not really my favorite thing, it turned out—and contributed to a couple of books.  I even won a prize with one of my essays.  Then, in 2009, I started this blog.  This will be my 1,281st post—though not all of them have been on theater, or written by me.

[Now, to the matter at hand in this post, John DeVore’s memoir of his sojourn into the land of theater.  He says theatre, but I’m stickin’ to my guns (prop guns, of course).  In addition to “A Broadway Baby,” which is my memoir of encountering theater at a boy, I have posted a number of pieces here that touch on children and young people’s encounters with theater. 

[Some are about youngsters engaging in the theater world itself, and others are about theater in the schools.  What I’m not going to list here are the posts about “children’s theater” or “theater for young audiences,” which cover theater for young people by adults.  That’s an important gateway for kids to get into theater, but it’s different, I feel.

[Here’s the list, with links, to ROT’s coverage of theater and kids (note that several of these titles contain multiple articles):

    • “Missoula Children’s Theatre” (28 August 2009
• “Making Broadway Babies” (25 November 2013)
• “Kids on the Broadway Boards” (30 November 2013)
• “Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” by Oona Haaranen (9 January 2014)
• “Musical Theater Programs for Kids” (18 May 2018; rerun on 5 February 2023)
• “Jimmy Awards” (2 September 2024)

[For the other posts on children and theater and the arts in schools, I suggest using the search engine a the top left corner of the screen, or browse through the archives to the left of the text column.  You can also click on an appropriate label at the bottom of the post.]

“HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE A THEATRE KID”
by John DeVore

[This excerpt of John DeVore’s memoir appeared on the American Theatre website.   The piece is categorized as “Book Excerpts” and is dated 6 September 2024.  It wasn’t published in the print edition of the magazine.]

In this excerpt from a new memoir about his years toiling Off-Off-Broadway, the author reflects on what it means to be young and bitten by the acting bug. 

Lights up on a small theatre in Brooklyn, New York. Enter John DeVore, late 40s. His hair and beard are streaked with gray. He stands in a spotlight centerstage and says: 

My name is John, and I’m a theatre kid. I’m a theatre kid the way a raccoon is a raccoon, or a pineapple is a pineapple. I like to think of it as my astrological sign, something about me that is fixed. It is who I am, and I had little choice in the matter.

During one of my very first school plays, a teacher suggested I had been bitten by the acting bug, contracting a virus with no known cure. But I knew better: I had been screaming for attention since I was born. If I could have been the opposite of a theatre kid, I would have. But I can’t be who I’m not. I’m pretty sure the opposite of a theatre kid is a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Being a theatre kid is like that Groucho joke about not wanting to join a club that would have you as a member. That’s my experience, at least. I’ve never been a joiner. If I could change that about me, I would. I want to be loved and left alone at the same time. That is my default setting. My therapist is always telling me to open my heart to other people, and my usual response to his gentle requests is, “I’m trying, Gary.”

[Groucho Marx (1890-1977) was a comedian, actor, writer, and singer who performed on the vaudeville stage and in films and on television, radio, and the stage. Groucho made 13 movies with his brothers (Chico [1887-1961], Harpo [1888-1964], Gummo [1892-1977], and Zeppo [1901-79]), who performed under the name the Marx Brothers. He later had a successful solo career, primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show You Bet Your Life (radio: 1947-60; NBC-TV: 1950-61).

[As for the joke about joining a club, it was long attributed to Groucho, and in both his son’s biography of his father, My Life with Groucho (Simon and Schuster, 1954) and Groucho’s own memoir, Groucho and Me (Bernard Geis Associates, 1959), both men quote the “Resignation Joke,” which they record as Groucho’s withdrawal from the Friars Club (sometime around 1950-52). In Groucho’s rendering, he sent a telegram stating: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”]

I once denied being a theatre kid, a bit like how the apostle Peter repeatedly lied when asked by the mob if he knew Jesus. My denial happened years ago, in the late aughts. 2008? Right before the economy cratered. Those were dark times for me. I had gone on an impromptu weeknight bender with a former colleague—a lonely old journalist with a talent for sniffing out bullshit and a sickening thirst for crème de menthe—who suspected I had acted in high school or college. I just laughed him off. Me? A theatre kid? No.

And my ruse would have worked had we not stumbled, piss-drunk, into a nearly empty karaoke bar and had I not insisted on performing a sloppy, surprisingly poignant rendition of the popular torch song “On My Own” from the blockbuster 1987 Broadway mega-musical Les Misérables—which, if you’re not aware, is a weepy, blood-and-thunder pop opera written by Claude-Michel Schönberg [French; b. 1944] and Alain Boublil [French, born in Tunisia; b. 1941] and based on Victor Hugo’s [French; 1802-85] 19th-century novel [1862] about poor French vagrants suffering beautifully. “On My Own” is sung by the forlorn street waif Eponine, who pines after handsome revolutionary Marius, whose heart in turn belongs to Cosette, the adopted daughter of our hero, ex-convict Jean Valjean. Eponine is a lonely victim of unrequited love, and later she dies in Marius’s arms, fulfilling the deepest, darkest, most pathetic fantasy of anyone who has ever longed for someone they could never have.  

[The French version of Les Misérables premièred in Paris at the Palais des Sports on 24 September 1980. Its English-language adaptation, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer (1925-2020), produced by Cameron Mackintosh (b. 1946), has been running at the Barbican Centre London since 8 October 1985. The London show had its 15,000th performance on 28 September 2023.

[The musical had a pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in Washington, D.C., on 27 December 1986 and ran there for eight weeks through 14 February 1987. The production then transferred to the Broadway Theatre on 12 March 1987. It moved to the Imperial Theatre on 17 October 1990, and after 6,680 performances in 16 years, it closed on 18 May 2003. It won eight 1987 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. There were Broadway revivals in 2006 and 2014.]

My former colleague could see the truth in my tear-filled eyes as I sang with everything I had. I couldn’t help myself. I was feeling it. I sang like I was competing for a Tony Award. I did that thing Broadway divas do where they slowly push one jazz hand toward the heavens as the emotions swell. I was in church, and from the back pew, I could hear him laughing and pointing at me like I was a fool. He knew a theatre kid when he saw one.

Like I said: dark times.  

How can you tell if someone you know, or even love, is a theatre kid? Ask yourself this: Do they take a lot of selfies? Do. They. Enunciate. Every. Word? Do they frequently sigh heavily? Do they talk about themselves and their manifold feelings incessantly? These are just a few of the signs. Do they spell it t-h-e-a-t-r-e instead of t-h-e-a-t-e-r? That’s a good one. Only a true theatre kid spells it “theatre.” A “theater” is where you watch “theatre.” You see? No? This difference matters, and if you don’t think it does, you’re probably not a theatre kid, which may come as a relief to many of you.

Now, I need you to know that I know that t-h-e-a-t-r-e is just the British spelling of the word. But I much prefer the other explanation, don’t you? It’s more romantic. The theatre is an ancient art, a sacred, almost holy occupation. It’s a way to teach moral lessons and to celebrate the human condition; it is a story full of sound and fury that can levitate you or knock you sideways. The theatre is a spirit—and the theater is where you sit and cough politely, and then the curtain rises. There might not even be a curtain. A theater can be a space, any space. A storefront, an apartment living room, a parking lot.

This wisdom has been passed down from theatre kid to theatre kid from time immemorial. It was a veteran of my high school’s drama program who taught me the difference between theatre and theater. She was a full year older than me, but she knew things. I thought she was brilliant. I remember listening to her intently: Theatre was life. This lesson probably happened over cups of creamy, sugary coffee and plates of baklava at the local 24-hour diner, where all the theatre kids at my high school would go to celebrate after a successful production—a one-act or the spring musical.

We’d pour into the diner like an army of frogs, laughing and talking a mile a minute and singing show tunes, and the poor servers endured our overbearing youthful cheerfulness. My true theatre education happened either at that diner or backstage, during rehearsal breaks, and these impromptu lectures are the closest thing to an oral tradition in action I’ve ever encountered.  

These 16-year-old elders patiently explained the superstitions and rules of the theatre, and I did the same when it was my turn to pass on the lore. I remember the rules like commandments: Never whistle backstage or say the name of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy about that Scottish couple who make a series of poorly thought-out career decisions. Both of those things are bad luck. [See my four-part series “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” (14, 17, 20, and 23 August 2020).]

Saying “good luck” is also bad luck. You’re supposed to say “break a leg.”  

There are all sorts of explanations as to what that phrase means. I was told, over a plate of french fries, that in ye olden times, the mechanism that raised and lowered the curtains was called a leg, and so to break a leg would mean that the audience cheered for so many encores, the curtain went up and down and up and down until it broke. Is that true? I have no idea. That’s just how I heard it.  

Here are a few more sacred rules: Give flowers after a performance, not before. Always open the stage door for one of your fellow castmates and invite them to enter first with a graceful bow. One of my favorites warns against putting your shoes on any table backstage. Don’t do that. Why? I don’t think you want to find out. 

There were also practical, straightforward rules about rehearsal and being part of a production. Always be on time. (“If you’re 10 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” That was the mantra. I was told to repeat it and to repeat it.) Don’t skip rehearsal. Memorize your lines. Stretch before every performance, and drink nothing but hot water with lemon juice and honey if you catch a cold. And never, ever become romantically involved with someone in the cast—a rule that was broken during every production at my high school, sometimes multiple times. Show romances were a huge no-no. This rule was meant to keep rehearsals drama-free. But rehearsals are intense and intimate, and it’s almost impossible to keep theatre kids from trying to make out with other theatre kids.

Show romances—also known as “showmances”—were looked down on, even by those who had them. The only exceptions were hookups between cast and crew, which worked in my favor. I will always be a sucker for a girl who can use power tools, because I cannot use power tools, and I fell for stage managers and set builders. A boy never hit on me, but I was ready for it, just in case, and had practiced a flattered, “I like you, but I don’t like-like you” speech in the mirror. I never got to perform that speech, which disappointed me. A few years later, in college, a beautiful man kissed me on the dance floor of a party. It was a deep and playful kiss, and before I could stammer, “I like you, but I don’t . . .,” he had disappeared into the crowd, and now that I think about it, that was disappointing too.

When I was a senior I gave the newbies at the diner a variation of the speech I was given in ninth grade. It went something like: “Look around at this table. These are the friends you’ll have for the rest of your life.” That wasn’t true, but in the moment it felt true, and that’s good enough. I also passed along to them what was passed to me, from senior to frosh, and that is to always, always attend the closing night cast party, and to stay until the very end.

*  *  *  *

The publisher’s description:

Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s [1897-1962] novel As I Lay Dying [1930] inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience.

The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances. The reviews were tepid. Fewer than one hundred people saw it. But to emotionally messy hack magazine editor John DeVore, cast at the last minute in a bit part, it was a safe space to hide out and attempt sobering up following a devastating loss.

An unforgettable ode to the ephemeral, chaotic magic of the theatre and the weirdos who bring it to life, Theatre Kids is DeVore’s buoyant, irreverent, and ultimately moving account of outsize ambition and dashed hopes in post-9/11, pre-iPhone New York City. Sharply observed and bursting with hilarious razzle-dazzle, it will resonate with anyone who has ever, perhaps against their better judgment, tried to bring something beautiful into the world without regard for riches or fame.

Editorial Reviews:

“A wry and boisterous account . . . .  Electric prose elevates this homage to an enduring art form.” ―Publishers Weekly

“For those of us lucky to call John DeVore a friend, the skill and warmth with which he’s written Theatre Kids comes as no surprise. If you should not be in the elect group, however, the next best thing would be to read this book. There’s something funny, moving, surprising, or trenchant on every page. Often there’s all of these at once. Theatre Kids is a lemon tart made by someone who loves you, sweet and light and sharp and substantial all at once.” ―Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (see on Rick On Theater “The Method – a Review” [12 March 2022] and “Bombast to Beckett” [13 January 2025], both by Kirk Woodward)

“John DeVore is a master storyteller, and Theatre Kids is a delightful and moving read. It's a valentine to the New York City theatre scene in the late ’90s and early aughts, told through the eyes of one of the many young people who have for generations come from hamlets, small towns, and sprawling suburbs hoping to make their mark in the glittering city. DeVore will keep you laughing, gasping, and sometimes cringing all the way to the last page.” ―Catherine Burns, former artistic director of The Moth, a storytelling theater group in New York City’s Financial District

“Like all beautiful memoirs, John DeVore’s Theatre Kids will tell you not just about the author, but about things and places and people dead and gone. DeVore brings them alive again. How glad you'll be to meet them, and him. This is a funny, sad, loving, and mournful look at what artistic strivers and dreamers put themselves and others through on the quest for greatness―or, perhaps, just plain old survival.” ―Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don't Teach You in School)

“"Theatre Kids is a rickety roller coaster ride into the hearts of New York City’s downtown theatricals – that rare breed that can turn a moldering black box and a couple of folding chairs into a diorama of the divine."” ―Mike Errico, author of Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter

“This moving memoir recounts DeVore’s life-changing experience having a bit part in a tiny, four-hour production adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel “As I Lay Dying” as he struggled with addiction and grief. The cast and crew were scrappy but passionate as they tried to bring their vision to life in a windowless theater in Brooklyn in post-9/11 New York.” ―New York Post

[John DeVore (b. 1974) is an award-winning writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and one-eyed mutt, Morley.  His debut memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway, was published by Applause Books and came out in June 2024.]

Jules Feiffer, Part 2

 

[This is the second of two Jules Feiffer interviews from The Dramatist, the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional organization of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.  Like the first interview, posted as Part 1 of the short series on 16 June, this conversation with dramatist, songwriter, journalist, and theater historian Jeffrey Sweet, was dated 1 March 2025 and ran in the Spring 2025 issue (vol. 27, no. 2), under the heading “Tributes.”

[As usual, I recommend reading Part 1, Christopher Durang’s interview with Feiffer, before reading Jeffrey Sweet’s.  There’s a lot of information in the first conversation that crops up again below, and there’s also some commentary from me that I won’t repeat here.

[And a word or two about the editing—not mine, but The Dramatist’s: the editor(s) have made a fair number of insertions here for some reason, and they’re marked with brackets.  But, then, so are mine—and you may not be able to distinguish them.  Sorry about that, but I don’t know a way around that.] 

“THE NEXT PART OF THE PUZZLE:
JULES FEIFFER INTERVIEWED BY JEFFREY SWEET”
by Jules Feiffer and Jeffrey Sweet 

The following interview, conducted in 2014, is excerpted from Jeffrey Sweet’s What Playwrights Talk About When They Talk About Writing (Yale University Press [2017]).

FEIFFER: The only class I taught in playwriting was [at Yale]. [Robert] Brustein called me up and he said, “Jerzy Kosinski was supposed to teach a class in playwriting and Jerzy tells me he’s going blind and he can’t teach. We have to find a replacement. You and I have talked about you teaching. Will you take over the class?” And I started laughing about Jerzy Kosinski going blind; I didn’t believe a word of it. I can’t remember if it was known by that time that he hadn’t written his books, but I don’t think it was out yet. He was somebody I knew and been entertained by and I liked him enormously. But I almost never believed a word out of his mouth. And so I didn’t take his going blind seriously. But I thought, “My friends are always telling me I should teach, and so why not try.” 

[Brustein (1927-2023) was then the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre. In 1979, he left Yale after 13 years and established the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard University. Feiffer taught a playwriting class at Yale in 1973-74, despite having no formal training. (He attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design college based in Brooklyn, and the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan.) He drew upon his own experience and improvisation to help his students.

[Kosinski (1933-91), a best-selling Polish-Jewish novelist who had survived the Holocaust, allegedly produced some of his books through a combination of plagiarism and ghost writers. There is no concrete evidence to confirm that, in conjunction with the health issues he faced near the end of his life, Kosinski was going blind before his death by suicide. (nb: These remarks were originally footnotes, which except for one recent post, I don’t use on Rick On Theater. I’ve amended the notes slightly. ~Rick)]

I asked for [plays by the students] in advance to see some of their work and figure out what to do. And one of them was this kid named [Christopher] Durang [1949-2024; see the interview in Part 1]. He sent me a play called Titanic. And I thought, “What the fuck do I teach him?” And there was also a kid named [Albert] Innaurato [1947-2017] and so on. Just an amazing group of young people. But Chris was the one I fell in love with, more than any other. And something I said in class about Titanic he put in a play collection. He quoted me: “A prepubescent temper tantrum.” 

[Durang’s Titanic should not be confused for the 1997 Broadway musical of the same title, with which it has no connection aside from the title and setting (i.e., the ill-fated ship). Durang’s play is a one-act described as an “outrageous tale of sex and seduction aboard the titular ship” in The Facts on File Companion to American Drama (Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, eds.; Infobase Publishing, 2010).

[Titanic was presented in a workshop at New York City’s American Place Theatre in 1973 and was then performed at the Yale Experimental Theatre at YSD (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) in May 1974. It had its professional première at the Off-Off-Broadway Direct Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District in February 1976 and then transferred Off-Broadway to the Vandam Theater (in SoHo) from 10 to 16 May 1976.]

SWEET: When you came to the class, did you have any theories about how to teach playwriting? You didn’t go through formal training yourself. 

FEIFFER: Not ‘til this minute. 

SWEET: But obviously you figured out a course of study for yourself somewhere along the line? Or is that too formal a phrase for it?

FEIFFER: Yes. What course, what study? 

SWEET: The first time your work was put onstage was as a special project in 1961 in Chicago by Second City [improvisational comedy troupe initially founded in Chicago in 1959].

FEIFFER: What made Second City such a natural for me to fall in love with and work with was that I had always improvised on paper. My basic thought process to this moment is making it all up as I go along. After it’s made up, I then start organizing it and try to give it form if the form has not emerged. Often, the form will take care of itself. If you’ve got the right story to tell, the form invents itself as you’re doing it without thinking about the form. But I’ve always been an improviser, you know, without even thinking that that’s what I was doing. 

[Second City director] Paul Sills [1927-2008; director and teacher of improvisational techniques, applying the techniques of his mother, Viola Spolin (1906-94), author of the first book on improvisation techniques, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1963)] wanted to put on the cartoons, and that became the show called The Explainers [1960], which later became Feiffer’s People [1969]. The second act included longer pieces like “Passionella” [1957] and “George’s Moon” [1962]. I thought Paul was a wonderful director for Second City—traffic guiding these guys. But for cartoon characters that were written on paper, he had very little to add or seemed to want to add. Mike [Nichols] [1931-2014] came out to see it and said he wanted to bring it to New York, but he wanted to do another version of it. I happily handed the whole thing over to him to do whatever he wanted. Mike was directing for the first time. Lewis Allen [1905-2000] was the producer. He put up the money to try it out at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse [Clinton, New Jersey, July 1962; summer stock revue] and to bring it to New York [according to Sondheim, it didn’t get there]. Mike got Steve Sondheim [1930-2021] to write some songs for “Passionella” that were going to be part of the show. Steve had not yet done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [first try-out, New Haven, Connecticut: March 1962]. He wrote a couple of songs that were just extraordinary. And Mike put together a company of actors; some of them were wonderful, some of them were so-so, but mostly they were good. Ronny Graham [1919-99] and Dorothy Loudon [1925-2003]. Dorothy Loudon was so brilliant in everything that she did. She was loud, she was noisy, she was funny. I loved her. 

I was getting an education. At Second City, I understood these cartoons don’t belong on stage because they’re cartoons and they have no life. In rehearsal, what we were now calling The World of Jules Feiffer, I thought this is great stuff, but I don’t belong on the same bill with Mike and Steve. They’re too good for this. Everything they’re doing seemed to be upgrading material that was not up to their own level. I didn’t feel that I belonged in that room. I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want my first play on Broadway to be carried by Nichols and Sondheim. If I was going to write for the theatre, I wanted to be a legitimate playwright, and not to become a hit because of the favors of my friends.

SWEET: But along the way you did learn.

FEIFFER: For me it all comes out of having something to say. Politics and my anger. And my determination to say something about America that wasn’t being said. All that starts with—not the need to be funny or to write a play—but a need to blow everything up. “Look, you fuckers, don’t you know what’s going on out here? Pay attention!” And figuring out a theatrical or fictional way of saying it and inventing characters to go along with it, who then would take off in their own directions. I knew that if I expressed my rage and anger as much as I felt, there’d be no audience. I had to learn sleight-of-hand. Pretend that this was pure entertainment, and make it very funny, but deliver this impassioned, anti-authoritarian, anti-military argument. [See Part 1 for some coverage of this topic.]

I first started thinking playwriting in terms of TV writing, because of Paddy Chayefsky [1923-81] and his kitchen sink dramas [e.g.: teleplays – Marty, 1953; The Bachelor Party, 1953]. Paddy was a friend.

SWEET: And he went through a kind of metamorphosis into a satiric vein himself after the kitchen sink stuff.

FEIFFER: And for all I know I might have been an influence on that. He was in a rage, but he was always in a rage about everything, and it showed. 

SWEET: You were talking about the starting point for your plays is some kind of rage that you have to transform into a form.

FEIFFER: By the time I was 50, the rage had somewhat dissipated, but it took all that time. [See discussion of Feiffer’s Grown Ups in Part 1 for some insight on this.]

SWEET: Was there a moment when you said, “Oh, I know how to do this”?

FEIFFER: At the end of the first day’s work on Little Murders, I knew I could do this. I had never known it before, but I did the first day’s work. I was having such a good time, and I knew I could make the characters do pretty much any goddamn thing I wanted to, and I didn’t suffer over it, and I had an easy time, a fun time, writing it. I thought, “I’m a playwright.” Now, the two or almost three years to write my novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, I never for a moment thought I was a novelist. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that I was just determined to get it done, but I was not a novelist. 

SWEET: Did that lead you to think about the differences between writing novels and plays? Why one was a good fit and the other wasn’t?

FEIFFER: This is odd for somebody who does what I had always done for a living. I’ve never been very observant. I don’t see things. I see people and expressions and how they move and how they sit, and I can draw any person in any pose that they get into from my imagination. I don’t need anybody posing for me. But I don’t know what this table looks like. I don’t know what this house I live in looks like. I don’t see inanimate objects. Until [I wrote my graphic novel], Kill My Mother [Liveright Publishing, 2014], I never drew a car in my life. I could not draw cars. The first airplane I’ve ever drawn is in that book, and I had to Google “airplanes.” All the backgrounds that are rich in that book were things I didn’t know how to draw. I just don’t see these things.

I love the naturalist writers. I love the evocative writers. [Leo] Tolstoy [Russian; 1828-1910] when he writes about nature. [John] Steinbeck [1902-68] writes about scorpions crawling across the railroad and the names of trees. The only way I can name a tree is to make up the name for it, because I don’t know what any of those trees are. I don’t know the name for anything in nature. A novelist has to have that, some minimum level of equipment, where he knows what’s around him. And I don’t. 

But what I do know is how people talk. What’s always interested me, and [what] remained one of the mainstays of my comic strip, was people speaking in code. How you say one thing when you mean another. That’s basically what my work has always been about. That helping to decipher the codes in which, from childhood on, we are taught exist, and yet when you expose the code everybody denies that there is one. 

SWEET: Someone talking about acting would call that subtext.

FEIFFER: Of course, there’s subtext when a good actor goes to work with a good director. The [Mike] Nichols production of Angels in America for TV [HBO miniseries, 2003]. Al Pacino [b. 1940], who plays Roy Cohn [1927-86; lawyer and prosecutor; chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-57; U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57)], listening to this kid who is worried about his marriage. Pacino/Roy is very sympathetic and very close to him and trying to be very helpful and fatherly, and you can see him making the moves on him, just very subtly, nothing sexy, but a touch here and touch there. I sat there and I held my breath. I could not believe what he was doing, because it was so gorgeous, and it was so clear. That to me is subtext at its finest.

But [what I’m talking about is] beyond subtext. It’s telling us what really is true as opposed to what appears to be happening. Now sometimes that involves subtext, other times not. 

What I loved about playwriting was—up ’til then I had to figure out how to do all that stuff in six panels or eight panels. How far can you go [in that space]? You couldn’t expose [code] in a real relationship, with two people or three people talking. That requires a scene which a comic strip isn’t going to allow you (unless it’s a graphic novel which wasn’t being done at the time and I wouldn’t have been interested in at that time). But the chance to create for myself, theatrically, the equivalent of what I saw onstage in [Eugene] O'Neill [1888-1953] and in [Arthur] Miller [1915-2005] in Death of a Salesman [1949], the Biff-Willy [Willy Loman is the lead character in Salesman; Biff is his elder son, 34] confrontation scene—where] you slowly reveal—or a character comes to reveal—a truth. The difference between Miller and me that I’ve discovered over the years is that he thought, as in the Biff-Willy scene, that you arrive at the climax and you know what the truth is. And I decided years later that you never know what the truth is, and the characters never know what the truth is. Because if you do a confrontation scene, which is supposed to lead to a climax, which was act three in those years. But in life, act three is followed by act four, act five, act six. . . [.] That confrontation is followed by other confrontations. There is no such thing as discovering the truth. It’s all the facets, all the different angles.

SWEET: And participants have their own version of what happened, and they were both right.

FEIFFER: Someone may be more right than the other, or the playwright may favor one of the people, but you have to give everyone his argument. [Except, what] Arthur would do—there’s always the lawyer character or the architect—some middle class guy with a degree that Miller never got—and you know that’s the good guy. What I determined, from the beginning, was that there weren’t going to be good guys. Nobody was going to represent my point of view. My point of view would be in everybody. All the characters, together, if I do the job right. If there’s an argument to be made here, the argument comes in putting together all the contradictory things that everybody says, as opposed to one single character speaking the truth and a light bulb flashing.

SWEET: Your cartoon work consistently depicted the corruption of logic. Frequently you have somebody start off with a statement and then there’s a modification to the statement so that in the last panel they’re saying exactly the opposite of what the first statement was. This carried over into your play The White House Murder Case [Circle in the Square Theatre, 1970], which of course came out before Watergate [political scandal of the Nixon reelection campaign and administration. 1972-74].

FEIFFER: Yes.

SWEET: Which is essentially Watergate but that people in your play spoke better than [Richard M.] Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74; resignation, 9 August 1974] and his gang did.

FEIFFER: Well, [in that play] I had a liberal president. Not Nixon, but a good guy who wanted to do what was best. His wife gets murdered, and by the end the “best thing” to do is cover up his wife’s murder in the White House because otherwise he would not get re-elected and those other guys who were a lot worse would be in charge of the country. So, your own wife is murdered and you end up participating in the cover-up. What mattered was policy. And what really mattered was their retention of power. Basically that’s all that counted. 

SWEET: I always wanted somebody to run that in rep with my favorite underestimated [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616], King John [believed to have been written around 1594-96; published, 1623], which predicts Richard Nixon.

FEIFFER: [A] Broadway producer called me up at the time of [the] Gore-Bush [election]. He wanted to put that play on just before the election. So we had a reading of the play. And he got a wonderful cast including Alan Alda [b. 1936] and Tony Roberts [1939-2025] and invited an audience that was made up of potential backers. It played like gangbusters. It was incredible. Alan was wonderful, everybody was wonderful. And we all went out afterwards to celebrate and drink. And then it became clear that the backers didn’t want anything to do with it. No reason was given, but clearly it scared the shit out of them. This was some 25 years after the play’s premiere, and it was still too hot. There was a message in there that was still too hot for Broadway.

[Gore-Bush (2000 U.S. presidential election): Incumbent Vice President Al Gore (b. 1948; 45th Vice President of the United States: 1993-2001) was the Democratic nominee running against George W. Bush (b. 1946; Governor of Texas: 1995-2000) as the Republican nominee. Their running mates for Vice President were, respectively, Joe Lieberman (1942-2024; Senator from Connecticut: 1989-2013) and Dick Cheney (b. 1941; Secretary of Defense: 1989-93). Considered one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history, with long-standing controversy about the result.

[On election night, 7 November 2000, Florida’s electoral tally showed that Bush had won by such a close margin that state law required a recount, so it wasn’t clear who’d won the presidency. After a series of legal battles, a highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore ended the recount with Bush winning Florida. This resulted in a major post-election controversy which was only concluded when, in a televised address on 13 December, Gore publicly conceded the election to Bush following the SCOTUS decision.

[Gore emphasized that while he disagreed with the Court’s decision, he accepted the finality of the outcome and urged his supporters to unite behind the next president. While the election conclusion led to some questioning Bush’s legitimacy, Gore’s concession helped to solidify the outcome and promote a peaceful transition of power. Bush and Cheney went on to be reelected narrowly—though less so than in 2000—in 2004 for a second term.]

SWEET: I imagine that you know that there are certain plays that are related to certain periods in your time, and certain experiences, and certain plays that you wrote earlier that if you wrote them now, you would write them differently because you’re a different writer.

FEIFFER: I’m a different human. There was a celebration of Mike [Nichols] at MOMA [Mike Nichols, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, 14 April-1 May 2009], and after they screened Carnal Knowledge [1971], I said to him, “I wouldn’t know how to write that anymore.” And he said, “I wouldn’t know how to direct it.”

SWEET: You seem to be one of the few people who is able to start from theme and make a persuasive play. I find usually when people start from theme, some life goes out of the play.

FEIFFER: I’ve always thought that, too. I thought White House would be my last theme play. I loved writing White House and Little Murders, but I thought, “I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to start with the characters and have the characters tell me what the play is about. And not really be all that sure where I’m going until the characters lead me there.” So pretty much, that’s what I’ve done since.

It was perhaps beginning with Carnal Knowledge that I was thinking [for] the first time of not leaving any fingerprints. I didn’t want to sound like playwriting or dialogue. And I remember years later I stopped in to see the movie, after not seeing it for years. Watching one of the college campus scenes, I sat there thinking, “They’re making this up, I didn’t write this.” And it thrilled me, because there’s not a thing they said that I hadn’t written. But it sounded improvised to me. And I loved that, I loved that. I love it coming out of the characters and not out of the writer.

I swore after Elliott Loves [sic: see note below] that I would never do another play. I said to Mike during rehearsals of Elliott, “This is the best I have in me. if this doesn’t work, I’m out of the business.” (And he said, “Me, too.” And I knew he was lying.) But if all this work that I did out of pure love was going to continue to be critically rejected, I was no longer making money that could allow me to be a playwright by avocation. With young children in my life, I needed to find ways of making money. At one point I could get a movie a year, to write a screenplay which they never made, and that would give me a couple of hundred thousand dollars and that would be fine. But that stopped happening when they caught on to me. For two or three months, I’d write something that I actually liked but I knew they wouldn’t make it and they never did. 

[The Dramatist’s spelling of the title of this play is incorrect: it’s Elliot Loves (with one t). The press of the time used both spellings; in at least one instance, in the same article. (I read one article in which it was spelled “Elliott” in the headline and immediately below, it was spelled “Elliot” in the column’s first sentence.) The clincher, however, is the show’s poster, which clearly says it’s Elliot Loves. (nb: I have not corrected the error in the transcription here.)

[The première was at the Goodman Theatre Studio, Chicago, on 23 April-13 May 1990. It débuted in New York at the Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side on 7 June-15 July 1990.  Mike Nichols directed both productions.]

SWEET: You must have had a strong sense of the difference between writing for film and writing for stage. 

FEIFFER: Yes. Writing for stage is for yourself and writing for film is for money. Only with Nichols did it really work [for me in film]. Because he and I were working so closely together, and I knew that he was totally on my side.

SWEET: And he also had the power to exercise on behalf of the script.

FEIFFER: I knew also that when he found something wrong with something, it wasn’t because it was Hollywood bullshit. Even when I disagreed with him, I had to seriously consider what he was saying. Playwriting was always fun. Screenwriting became fun as a secondary enterprise. But, other than Carnal Knowledge, I never took it that seriously. It was mainly for the payday. Then I would try to get involved and I would try to do work that I thought would make a good movie. But I understood that I wouldn’t be doing this at all if I wasn’t getting a lot of money for it to pay the rent.

SWEET: One of the things that I’ve been bringing up is the contrast between American and British playwrights. In England they are often allowed to tell big stories. We in America are not allowed to tell big stories anymore. John Guare [b. 1938] had that one huge play at Lincoln Center, Free Man of Color [Vivian Beaumont Theater, 18 November 2010-9 January 2011; cast of 26]. And the other exception is Robert Schenkkan [b. 1953] and All the Way [Neil Simon Theatre (on Broadway), 6 March-29 June 2014; cast of 20]. It surprised everybody by actually breaking even and making a couple of bucks. But American playwrights think we can’t do more than ten people or we’ll never get it on.

FEIFFER: Ten people is a mob! Jesus Christ! Four or five at the tops.

SWEET: One of the reasons nobody revives Sidney Kingsley [1906-95] is today you can’t afford to have 35 people on stage. You can’t hire an actor to come on and do five lines.

FEIFFER: I liked Kingsley. I liked Detective Story [Hudson Theatre and Broadhurst Theatre, 23 March 1949-12 August 1950; cast of 34].

SWEET: Detective Story is a hell of a play. It may be old fashioned but once you give in to it . . . it takes you to the end.

FEIFFER: Those old guys were terrific. When I first came on the Dramatists Guild Council, these guys were on the Council with me. Marc Connelly [1890-1980], was a sweetheart. He was deafer than I am now, and he was the warmest and most ingratiating. As deaf as he was, I’d see him at off-Broadway plays in the front row thinking he could hear. There I was, a little Jewish cartoonist pretending to be a playwright and I was on the Council with Connelly and Kingsley and Paddy Chayefsky. How’d that ever happen? I could not believe it. I could not believe I was in the company of these extraordinary people.

SWEET: Back to teaching at Yale . . . [.] When you were working with young Chris Durang, aside from encouraging him and telling him he wasn’t deluded and that he was doing something valuable . . .

FEIFFER: I didn’t know how to teach at all. I didn’t go to college. But I had them bring in their plays, I cast the plays among the students, we read the plays, and we sat around and talked about what worked and what didn’t work and what could have been strengthened, where the story went. [I would read the plays we were going to talk about] on the train up to New Haven. To figure out how I was going to be smart about them and what I would have to say. And also, I’d have an essay point or two in my mind to make in relation to the play and theatre in general. While we had these plays to talk about, that went very well. There was some good stuff being done. 

[The practice Feiffer describes above for his ’70s Yale playwriting class sounds very much like the way George Pierce Baker (1866-1935) worked in his famous 47 Workshop at Harvard in the 1900s.  See my friend Kirk Woodward’s discussion of this program, the first such course in a U.S. university, in “Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 1)” (27 February 2025) and “Part 2” (2 March 2025).]

And then we ran out of plays. And [then] there was a lot of complaining going on about the School and the way they were being treated. And there was a lot to complain about. To get a play on, you had to find a director in the director program to do the play. Or you would not get a play on. And I thought that was outrageous. I thought that was inexcusable.

SWEET: So the directors were deciding what did and didn’t get on.

FEIFFER: I heard enough of this and finally I went to Howard Stein [1922-2012; supervisor of the Playwriting Program at Yale; playwright, essayist, and editor], who was running things while Brustein was in London, and I said to him, “This is bullshit. These guys are here to see their work done and the only way they can learn is to see their work on stage.” And he said, “No, they are going to have to work in the professional theatre and this is a way of teaching them about the real world . . . [.]” Howard, who never had a job outside of the academy in his life, was telling me, who had never worked in the academy, what the real world was like, and he had not a clue. I lost all respect for the whole operation. 

SWEET: So you did it one year?

FEIFFER: One semester. 

And in addition, because I was too busy being their friend, I couldn’t get these guys to write assignments.

They would bring in nothing. Because I was too busy being their buddy, I didn’t have the wherewithal to lay down the law and say: either get this in by next week or you guys are flunking. The next time I taught, which was at Northwestern [University; Evanston, Illinois], I thought, “How do I do this differently?” And the first thing was: don’t be their friend. I’m their teacher, not their friend. That means I can be a nice guy and I can be helpful when I can, but I can’t be good old Jules. Because they will take advantage of it just as your children take advantage. That was an important lesson to learn. Be as helpful as you know how to be, be as friendly as you know how to be, but make it clear: this is what you do, and if you don’t do it, you have no business being in this class.

SWEET: What was the official title of the Northwestern class?

FEIFFER: It was a humor writing class, which involved them writing a one-act play, just as I do now at Stony Brook Southampton [a campus of Stony Brook University in Southampton, Long Island, New York; part of the State University of New York (SUNY)]. At the end of the semester, I have them write a one act play, but up until then I have humor pieces, which are based on whatever idea I come up with. I want them to get outside the voice they normally wrote in. [A voice] is a good thing to have, but it also becomes a trap because you think it’s the only way you know how to write or can write. You become secure in that, and therefore, instead of it being an advantage, it can easily become a disadvantage because it leaves you terrified of doing anything else. 

So, the first thing I have them do, because it’s humor writing and humor is often about victimization . . . [.] Somebody has done something you take great umbrage at—not anything major—but you are very pissed off about it. Write about that, either in the first or third person, but write about that. And then we read it in class and talk about it. And I say, “For the next assignment, you’re the other person. And you write from the point of view of the person who did something to you.” It turns them topsyturvy and they have to have another argument and another voice, and they have to start thinking in a different way.

SWEET: Can you talk about specific responses that interested you?

FEIFFER: The students I used to have in the first six or seven years of the class [in Southampton] were often the beaten-up dregs of society who had gone into self-exile in Southampton. They were broken by drugs or marriage or divorce, some had been in jail, and they all had stories. And they all had a level of motivation and determination about them. But they all had stories. And I helped them tell their stories and put perspective on their stories by giving them humor. I really felt as if I was making a contribution. I really felt as I never felt doing a comic strip. Readers [would say] “how much you’ve helped me” and I never believed any of it. But I could see the results here. I could see the difference in how somebody wrote in a month or so, and it had to do with what I was doing. I thought, “For one of the few times in my life, I’m doing some good here.” And I loved it. 

But after a while the students became more the middle class: nice twenty-year-olds from middle class homes who had gone to NYU [New York University] or the New School [university in New York’s Greenwich Village; formerly the New School for Social Research] or Columbia [University[ or Hunter [College; part of the City University of New York (CUNY)], hadn’t had that much happen to them, and who didn’t have stories, and weren’t that interesting. And I couldn’t alter that much, and I ended up not caring that much about them. So that’s why I stopped after this year doing that class and starting a graphic novel class. We’ll see how that goes.

[Feiffer doesn’t say when this change occurred, but he seems to have started at Southampton in 1997, when the school was part of Long Island University.  In 2006, a year after LIU had closed the campus, it was purchased by the State University of New York, which served a different segment of the population, both national and statewide.  (LIU’s student body comes largely from the New York metropolitan area, including New York City and Long Island. One of its two main campuses, the original college, is in Brooklyn, which is at the western end of Long Island; the other is in Brookville, Long Island, in Nassau County.)  I wonder if this was partly responsible for the shift in student type Feiffer was seeing in his classes.]

Being a writer comes out of need. I need to write. I need to write because I need to put things down because I need, even if I don’t understand what it is, to say whatever it is that’s making me do this. Or I need to paint, or [make other] art. I need to get this out of me. I’m not even sure what it is I’ve got to get out. In those early students, I found that need. In the later ones, it’s more an exercise in a writing class would be run [sic; ‘fun’?], let’s see what it’s like.

I had one 55-year-old Irish woman from Queens in the class who was the oldest one there, who had a checkered family background. She was writing everything from what she knew. She could be very funny and very crazy and overwrought, and she was a pain in the ass. She’d get mad at me and she and I would get into fights in front of the class. But she was a real writer and she had things that she had to get out. And I loved her. She was wonderful.

[The New York City borough of Queens (also a county with the same name) is on Long Island between Brooklyn (Kings County) and Nassau County. Both Southampton and Stony Brook are in Suffolk County, the easternmost division of Long Island.]

Look, anybody with a brain knows, “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I have to figure out.” If you’re an artist, you’re obsessed with finding a way through, not to the answer—although you may fool yourself into thinking that there is one—but to something that completes the puzzle a little bit. At least enough to stop haunting you for a couple of minutes before you go on to the next part of the puzzle. And that’s what artists do. That’s what painters do. That’s what composers do. That’s what writers do. And if there’s not that need to do that, I don’t know why you’re doing it. 

[Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) was a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and once the most widely-read satirist in the country.  The author of over 35 books, plays, and screenplays, Feiffer established his career in the 1950s as a staff cartoonist for The Village Voice.  His wit and diversity of talent earned him an Academy Award for his animated short film Munro (1961), the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, a place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, and the Dramatists Guild’s own Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.  He joined the Dramatists Guild in 1966 and was elected to the Guild’s Council in 1970.

[Jeffrey Sweet was a resident writer at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, where they produced more than a dozen of his plays, winning Chicago’s Jeff Award, two Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Awards (American Theatre Critics Association), and the Audelco Award.  Jeff directed his play The Value of Names in London (Hint of Lime Productions in association with ANDTheatre Company, White Bear Theatre, 11 February-1 March 2025), and his play A Change of Position débuted at New Jersey Rep (New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey; 11 December 2023). His book The Dramatist’s Toolkit (Heinemann, 1993) is in use as a text in a number of playwriting programs.]

Jules Feiffer, Part 1

[Back in early June, my friend and generous contributor to Rick On Theater, Kirk Woodward, e-mailed me with a heads-up about two potential articles I might want to repost on the blog.  He wrote that “in the Spring 2025 issue [of The Dramatist] there are two interviews with the late [cartoonist and playwright] Jules Feiffer, both treasures as far as I'm concerned.” 

[His evaluation was right on, and so, I’m going to run both of them, back to back, while I finish my report on the live telecast of Broadway’s Good Night, and Good Luck from a week ago from last Saturday.  (I couldn’t finish it for today, but I hope to have it ready for the 24th.)

[The Dramatist is the official journal of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional organization of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists—of which Kirk is a member.  (The professional association for writers in film, television, radio, and online media, is the Writers Guild of America.)  The Feiffer interviews, dated 1 March 2025, ran in the Spring 2025 issue of The Dramatist (vol. 27, no. 2), under the heading “Tributes.”] 

“CONVERSATION WITH JULES FEIFFER”
by Christopher Durang and Jules Feiffer 

Jules Feiffer was the subject of a Dramatists Guild “Conversation With” session moderated by Christopher Durang under the auspices of the Guild’s Projects Committee (Gretchen Cryer [b. 1935; playwright, lyricist, and actress] and Terrence McNally [1938-2020; playwright, librettist, and screenwriter] co-chairs, Sandra Schreiber director of special projects). The transcript of this conversation, edited with the approval of the participants, originally appeared in the Winter 1987 edition of The Dramatists Guild Quarterly [the predecessor, until 1998, of The Dramatist] and is excerpted below.

Christopher Durang: I thought the first question I would ask is about your work as a cartoonist. I am curious about how you got started.

Jules Feiffer: My mother saved everything I ever did, back to my scrawls when I was four years old. There was no question from the start that the scrawls were anything but cartoons. So it’s hard to say what started me off. I seem to have always done cartooning.

Durang: When did you start making a living at cartoons?

Feiffer: Not at four. As a kid, I was able to make a quasi-living as an assistant to some cartoonists, but when I started out on my own in the early 50s, trying to sell my own work, it developed quickly that this work was blatantly uncommercial, and I really couldn’t sell it anywhere. For years, I thought my ambitions were strictly to be a syndicated strip cartoonist, meaning that I would do a daily, which would involve six daily strips plus a Sunday page of an adventure or a humor strip. My heroes at the time—and I’m talking about the late 40s and early 50s—were people like Al Capp (“Li’l Abner”), Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”), and the man I worked for, Will Eisner, who did a story strip called “The Spirit.” I wanted to be as good or better than these gentlemen.

[Capp (1909-79) drew the satirical comic strip L’il Abner that appeared in multiple newspapers in the United States, Canada, and Europe for 43 years, 1934-77. It featured a fictional clan of hillbillies living in the impoverished fictional mountain village of Dogpatch, USA, and was immensely popular.  Capp won many comic-book industry awards and honors, and his creation spawned hundreds of verbal expressions that became part of standard American speech.  L’il Abner inspired dozens of songs, movies, and other comic strips.  In 1956, a successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip, titled Li'l Abner, opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre and ran for 693 performances, followed by a nationwide tour and was adapted into motion picture in 1959.

[Caniff (1907-88) created Terry and the Pirates, an action-adventure comic strip, which ran from 1934 to 1973.  In 1946, Caniff won the first Cartoonist of the Year Award from the National Cartoonists Society for his work on the strip.

[Eisner (1917-2005; cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur) created The Spirit, his fictional masked crimefighter in 1940; the strip ran until 1952.  Eisner was a pioneer of American comic books and is credited with the establishment of the graphic novel as a literary genre.]

Then I got drafted [1951] during the Korean War [1950-53], discovered the U.S. Army and so discovered rage, hate, fascism, and all those other complicated ideas that a life in the Bronx with my mother [Rhoda Davis Feiffer (1889-1974)] and David Feiffer [1888-1963] had left me unaware of. This gave me a real enemy to strike out against, as opposed to my parents and high school teachers and girls who wouldn’t date me. I found that a mild liberal vision turned into a hotly radical and lifelong jaundiced vision of the state’s authority and language as used by the state. I began to do work illustrating this new vision.

The first was a rather narcissistic story called Monroe [sic; see note below] about a four-year-old boy who is drafted into the army by mistake and finds that nobody will understand that he’s only four. The form I chose was a traditional children’s book, but the story of what happens to Monroe in the army is horrendous. The people in the animation business I took it to had a hard time dealing with the anti-military politics. This was at a time when McCarthyism [also known as the Second Red Scare, 1947-59] was officially over, but the resultant suppression and fear were still very much hallmarks of society. In fact, the blacklist in the entertainment industry didn’t end until some years later, so the entertainment industry wasn’t likely to take to anything with a message such as this.

[The story of the four-year-old army draftee seems actually to have been entitled Munro, mistranscribed above. It was written in 1953, but not published until 1957 in Passionella and Other Stories. (It’s also in Feiffer’s Children [Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1986].)  The story was made into an animated film called Munro by Gene Deitch (1924-2020) in 1961.

[The Hollywood Blacklist, when actors, writers, and other artists who were tainted with the label “communist,” deservedly or not, were denied work and even jailed or threatened with jail, started in 1946, reached its height in 1952-56, and petered out between 1960 and 1965. Some of the career damage that was done by the blacklisters that was remediable—restoration of screen credits, for instance—was only corrected in the 21st century.]

The publishers I took it to also had problems with it. They had a hard time reconciling the innocence of the form with the bleakness of the satire. They also didn’t know how to market it. They explained to me over and over that unfortunately I was not William Steig [1907-2003] (who was famous) or James Thurber [1894-1961] (who was famous) or Saul Steinberg [1914-99] or Robert Osborne [sic: Robert Osborn (1904-94)] (who were famous), therefore nobody would buy since nobody had heard of me, even though they thought the work was very good. I understood instantly the necessity of becoming famous in order to sell my work. The Village Voice had started just about a year earlier [1955]. The Voice had a pitiable circulation at the time, maybe several thousand, but the[re] were several thousand book editors. I got the cynical notion (I was 27, fully time enough to grow cynical) that the very editors who turned me down because I wasn’t known and commercial enough were among the small number of people who read the Voice, so if they saw my work there they would think, “Oh, this man’s in print. I guess he’s commercial.” So I went to The Voice, and we cut a stiff deal. They would publish anything I wrote and drew as long as I didn’t ask to be paid. It was the best deal I had yet been offered in my career, and I grabbed it. And it worked just as I had fantasized it would. An editor said, “Oh boy, this guy is good, he’s in The Voice,” and accepted the same stuff his company had turned down when I had come to their offices as an unpublished cartoonist. Eventually, a book of cartoons from The Voice was published under the title Sick, Sick, Sick [McGraw-Hill, 1958]. It became a best seller, and from that point on, the satire I had wanted to do but couldn’t, I now could do because it was marketable.

[nb: I added two commas in the last sentence above to make it more easily readable. I hope it helps.

[Feiffer drew for the Voice from 1956 to 1997. His strips at first carried the title Sick Sick Sick, then Feiffer’s Fables, and finally simply Feiffer. His work then began to appear in the London Observer and Playboy magazine. His cartoons were syndicated nationally in 1959. In 1997, the New York Times commissioned Feiffer to create its first Op-Ed page comic strip, which ran monthly until 2000. After Sick, Sick, Sick, more collections followed.]

Durang: How and when did you decide to become a playwright?

Feiffer:  When I was a kid, the two fields I thought I’d want to enter (had I the hubris) were literature and theatre. But I didn’t believe for a minute that I could be a “real” writer, and so I pretty much gave up those notions. Over the years, I piddled around with attempts at TV plays, particularly during the alleged golden age of television—the years of Playhouse 90 and the Philco [Television] Playhouse [television anthology drama series that ran 1956-60 and 1948-55, respectively]—but the stuff was really quite bad, and I never got very far. I didn’t really think about theatre seriously until the choice was, in a sense, removed from me.

I had written a novel in the early 60s called Harry, the Rat with Women [McGraw-Hill, 1963] just to prove that I could write a novel. It took two hard years, and I managed to get out 180 pages. But I’m someone who really wants to get pleasure out of his work, and there wasn’t a single moment’s pleasure in writing that book.

I had pretty much decided that fiction was not for me, and then John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63] was assassinated [22 November 1963]. I found myself thrown into a fit of gloom as to what this meant in terms of what America had become, but I saw no way of encapsulating these feelings into cartoons of six or eight panels. There was just too much on my mind and too much I wanted to say, so I started to write my second novel. In it I was going to tell all the things I felt about the country as a result of the Kennedy assassination. But I was also going to try to prove that I was a much better and more proficient writer than I was in the first novel. 

I got stalled on the book and, in desperation, got myself admitted into the wonderful writers’ community upstate in Saratoga, New York, called Yaddo. I took all four hundred pages I had written up with me. I read them in one night and one day, then I went to town and bought a bottle of Scotch and finished that and then tried to figure out what to do. I was supposed to stay there for three more weeks to work on my book, but the book was terrible. But I couldn’t just go home. It would have been too humiliating. My friends had given me a party before I left. If I’d come back early, they would have laughed at me. So, since I was supposed to be up there anyway, I thought I’d take the time to look at my original notes for the book. It seemed to me that it was still a good idea and that the material I had written had had nothing to do with that idea. So I decided to start it again, only this time as a play.

The reason I had avoided doing anything in regard to theatre up to that point was that it seemed to me that any play I really liked—any play about difficult subjects or themes—closed very fast, and the hits were plays that I didn’t like. So I thought that if l ever wrote a play I liked, it would probably only run a week like the other plays I liked. Who wanted to put all that work into something that would only run a week? 

But, as I say, it wasn’t working. So, being desperate to do something with this material, I ignored all the reasons for not doing it as a play and began dramatizing. And, in 24 hours, I discovered that I was a playwright. The form—creating characters, putting them into action and writing dialogue—came naturally to me, and writing it was a lark from beginning to end. Even the things that didn’t work were fun. It was fun to go back and find out why they didn’t work. Even writing the grimmest stuff in the play, which I called Little Murders, was a joy. And writing scenes of people doing awful things to each other was a joy. I never stopped having a very, very good time, and, three and a half weeks later, I had a first draft. I realized that whatever happened to the play, whatever fate it met, I was addicted. I was a playwright. As a footnote, the play opened on Broadway and it closed in a week.

[Little Murders was supposed to début at the Yale Repertory Theatre in October 1966, but an imminent Broadway staging preempted that launch. The play started previews at Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre on 10 April 1967 and opened on 25 April. The première closed on 29 April after 16 previews and 7 regular performances.

[Sir Peter Hall, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, had put Feiffer’s début play into the RSC’s season at the Aldwych Theatre, its London house, where it ran successfully from 3 July through 9 December 1967.  The play was soon revived Off-Broadway with Alan Arkin (1934-2023; actor, filmmaker, and musician) as director at Circle in the Square Theatre (downtown) in Greenwich Village from 5 January to 30 November 1969. (Arkin also made his directorial film début when he helmed the movie adaptation of Little Murders in 1971.)

[Little Murders was revived again Off-Broadway by Second Stage on 6 May 1987 with John Tillinger (b. 1938), who updated the play a little, directing. The show ran on the Upper West Side, the neighborhood in which it’s set, until 7 June.]

Durang: Some years later Little Murders was revived off-Broadway, directed by Alan Arkin, and was quite a success. This opens the question of how different productions can affect a play. 

Feiffer: I don’t think the success of the off-Broadway version was simply a matter of the quality of the production, although that certainly had something—perhaps a lot—to do with it. It also had to do with different times. I structured Little Murders to look and sound in many ways like a darkened version of a traditional Broadway comedy. You had this kooky family and their upright daughter who stands for all truth and strength and energy and all the basic verities of apple pie. She’s the darling of the family, and she brings home this guy who is some kind of weirdo radical extremist who stands for none of the things the family does. What we’ve learned from years of Broadway theatre is that this nut can get off wonderful lines and do terrific takeoffs on and insults of the family. The audience loves this as long as, according to tradition, by the climax of the play he admits that he’s wrong about everything, the family forgives him, he discovers the error of his ways and goes into business with the father. Or he reveals that he was just kidding. But the sense in the traditional scenario is, “None of this is serious, folks.” None of this titillation, none of the leg-pulling of the audience, none of the nose-tweaking—none of this is for real.

I planned the structure of the play to go by those rules. Then, just as the fadeout is about to come and the hero, Alfred, admits he was wrong about everything and he doesn’t want to live in the world that he believes in, he’d much rather live in the world that the heroine Patsy believes in, and she rises from the fallen and says, “I hope this is a lesson to you,” and they hug and kiss and the family comes on to look proudly on what is obviously the end of the play—just at that moment, from a window across the street, a sniper fires a bullet and blows her head off and the 1960s begin.

From that point on, the play investigates how these theatrical figures that we’ve known all of our lives will deal with a world that has changed on them, a world which is no longer a safe society but contains Vietnam and Lee Harvey Oswald [1939-63; assassin of JFK] and Jack Ruby [1911-67; nightclub owner who murdered Oswald on 24 November 1963]. To me, the play never was particularly about urban violence. Urban violence was a metaphor for American violence in the world, for the rules breaking down everywhere in Western society. This odd period encompassing no more than fifteen years of our lives saw all the icons crumble. Belief in the family fell apart, belief in organized religion fell apart, belief in liberal social orthodoxy fell apart, and belief not in the promise but in the fulfillment of the American dream fell apart. The belief that this was a just society, the belief that the President did what was best, that Congress was more or less honest, all of that came unglued. The play took a look at what this did to our psyches. How this crumbling of faith left us almost nothing but a sense of chaos and how violence filled the vacuum.

Durang: So you think that by the time the off-Broadway production happened, that dark view was more acceptable?

Feiffer: I think that when the play was first done in the spring of 1967, what I was saying was news. At any rate, it was news to the critics. Vietnam hadn’t appeared on the theatre pages yet, so they didn’t know about it. Audiences, however, certainly responded. The first production was dreadful, and only intermittently did the play come through. Even so, on any given night, particularly in previews, the audiences hooked into it. There was a lot of talk going on around about it, and I had this odd sensation of watching what I knew was a sure flop and at the same time feeling rising excitement because this flop was being responded to. People were responding to something coming of the stage that reflected what they felt going on in their own lives, and in the world they lived in, but which they hadn’t seen dealt with before. This wasn’t unlike the response my cartoons had received at the beginning. This was terribly exciting. About two and a half years later, when Alan Arkin’s infinitely better (and as far as I was concerned brilliant) production of the play was done downtown at Circle in the Square, it was a great success and ran a long time. But I felt that a lot of the threat of the play had dissipated simply because the audience had caught up to a lot of what was going on onstage. For me, the fun of theatre is not to be even with the audience but to pull their strings, to set them up one way and then turn around and do something else, lead them down a path where they hadn’t been before, not to make them aware of what they already know.

[U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in the early 1950s and intensified when the French withdrew in 1954. U.S. forces weren’t officially engaged in combat however, being officially labeled “advisers” to South Vietnamese troops. On 7 August 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in response to reported attacks by North Vietnamese naval forces on U.S. ships in international waters, thus giving President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-73; 36th President of the United States: 1963-69) authority to use military forces against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This began the U.S. war in Southeast Asia that continued until the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces in 1973 and the final retreat from Saigon in 1975.

[U.S. involvement in Vietnam became a major concern to the American public primarily after the Tet Offensive from 30 January to 20 March 1968. The increase in troops in Vietnam and the concomitant escalation of inductions made this event a subject of intensified news coverage at home.]

That’s one of the things that bothers me, by the way, about the anti-nuke plays. Generally they cover what the audience already knows. They reinforce the values the audience has brought into the theatre. This may be good politics, but I don’t find it very interesting theatre.

Durang: You’ve mentioned the family a few times in relation to Little Murders, and it made me want to jump ahead and ask you a bit about Grown Ups.

[Grown Ups premièred at Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theater at Harvard University on 24 May 1981, directed by John Madden (b. 1949).  It played at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District from 27 November 1981, when it started previews, through opening on 10 December, to closing on 20 February 1982, for 15 previews and 83 regular performances. It was nominated for 1982 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play (Cheryl Giannini), but won neither. It was later revived by the American Jewish Theater at its Susan Bloch Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood from 12 January to 10 February 1991.]

Feiffer:  The family in Little Murders turned out to be—though not deliberately—a trial family for Grown Ups. For reasons I haven’t looked into, as I’ve continued writing plays I’ve moved progressively away from political and social statements toward plays more concerned with personal relationships. Whether this has to do with times changing and becoming less overtly political, moving from the 60s through the 70s and into the 80s and my passively going with that, I don’t know.

Specifically with Grown Ups, my mother had died in February of 1973 [sic; her gravestone says “Feb 18 1974”]. I knew that I could handle that because I’d spent eighty-five years in psychotherapy talking about my mother and working out all of our problems. Except that the day that she was buried, I couldn’t go to the funeral because I had a fever of 104 and no voice. Something had gone wrong. Since I couldn’t get a refund on my psychotherapy, I decided that this needed looking into in some other way . . . [.] So maybe I’d better write a family play. 

There was a problem: I am cursed with instant boredom and immediately move into naptime when I touch on anything directly autobiographical. When I start telling people about something that’s really happened, I lose interest instantly because I know the ending. I see no point in telling it. So I had to create characters who were related to me and my family but weren’t simply photographs of paste-ups of those people.

The parents in Grown Ups I made as close to my parents as I could. In the first draft of the play, I had a hard time recreating their voices. When I finished it, I realized that they were the conventional Jewish parents of modern-day novels and plays. They weren’t my parents. So I went through my files and was fortunate enough to discover letters that my parents had written to me from the 40s and 50s. I rediscovered their voices. I remembered again how they talked, how they sounded, and I started jotting down notes. Then I rewrote the play with the real parents.

After I revised the script, I put it all on tape to hear what it sounded like. It was chilling. I shuddered with the realization that I had raised Dave and Rhoda Feiffer from the dead. It was scary and wonderful and moving, but the one thing it wasn’t was a play. It was just an act of memory. So I had to go back like a playwright and do the difficult job of cutting all the stuff that was nice writing as I wrote it but turned out not to be so nice when it was all put together. So I did that and then decided, for personal reasons, that it was simply too potent a piece of work to put on the stage at that particular time. My first child was seven or eight years old then, and I really didn’t like the idea of her seeing this onstage until she was older. So I waited seven years. Then Robert Brustein [1927-2023] went to Harvard to start the American Rep [1979]. He had read it before and liked it, and he brought it up again. We had a reading of the play in my apartment, he came up with the idea of getting John Madden to direct it, and the play was launched.

Q: Mr. Feiffer, do you feel that economics defeated your Broadway production of Grown Ups? If you had it to do over again, would you opt for an off-Broadway production first?

Feiffer: If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have written any plays. As I say, this makes sense only as an obsession. Beyond that, there’s no sense at all. I keep swearing that I would never do another Broadway play, and I stick to that until I write a play and somebody says, “O.K., we’ll put this on Broadway.” 

I can’t complain about the review [Grown Ups] received from Frank Rich in the New York Times [“‘Grown Ups’ By Feiffer at Lyceum,” 11 December 1981], but the power of the Times did not seem to go all that far with this play. My assumption is that if it had been done off-Broadway, it would have done better. The question is would the cast have been as good? I don’t know. I’ve seen off-Broadway plays with wonderful companies, of course. But if you get a wonderful company off Broadway, you’re more likely to lose them when the agents and producers and movie and TV people come around and discover them and take them away for their projects.

Q: Grown Ups was also done on television [Showtime, premièring on 25 November 1985]. Did you find that the change from stage to TV — moving from a public medium to a private one — required you to do any appreciable rewrites?

Feiffer:  No. I insisted that John Madden direct it again, and we put together a completely different company of actors—Jean Stapleton, Martin Balsam, Charles Grodin, Mary Lou Renner, and a Canadian actress named Patty Campanero. We had three weeks of rehearsal and shot it in something like six days. I was just bowled over by the work Madden and his company did. I had nothing to do with the production. I just dropped in now and again. I had a bit more to do with how it was edited—“This works,” “This doesn’t,” “Can we tighten this”—which was easy enough. But what happens to the play on TV is that it becomes much less a public event, one that you can laugh at with a bunch of other people in the theatre. Watching it at home on TV, in the middle of your own family situation, it seems to be much more personally threatening. The laughs go. They come back with a large audience. I showed the TV version at the New School [university in New York’s Greenwich Village] once, and with a group of over 50 people it was a laugh riot. But in a room of five or six people, maybe you’ll get an ironic groan from them out of the entire two acts. If you ask me which I prefer, I think I love it both ways. I would hate to miss the laughs in the theatre, but I don’t miss them on TV.

The laughs I get are out of an ironic disposition toward social situations. I’m very bad at making up jokes. I was never a big gag cartoonist. My focus is more along the lines of dealing with two people in a relationship wanting different things and how they do or do not deal with that. How they do or do not deal with that may come out funny, but it’s not because they’re joking. It’s because they’re not joking. It’s because the characters have no sense of humor about the situation they’re in, no distance. So the laugh comes not out of a joke but out of thwarted objectives or outright lies which the characters may not catch but the audience does.

Q: Can I ask you about screen writing, with particular reference to your work with Robert Altman [1925-2006; film director, screenwriter, and producer] and Mike Nichols [1931-2014; film/theatre director and comedian]?

Feiffer:  Altman has a better visual sense than just about any other American filmmaker. He can take anything and make it visually credible, and so I was sure he could take the [E. C.] Segar [1894-1938; cartoonist who created Popeye in 1929] characters that I had in my Popeye script [1980 musical comedy film directed by Altman and written by Feiffer]—the Popeye of 1936, 1937, 1938—and make that world real. That is what he did, exactly. He cast almost impeccably. He had a town built that housed cartoon characters as if they were people out of a documentary. He created a reality on the screen that made almost anything possible. And he shot maybe 45 or 50 percent of the script I had written. This was something of a record for him. I mean, when you work with Altman, you know from the start what the rules are going to be, so I had no real complaints. I knew what I was going to be getting into. We had our disagreements, our fights, but unlike some other industry people I’ve had fights with, he behaved like a gent. He showed extraordinary generosity during the shooting of the film.

I did have problems with the film. Like any bigoted writer, I think if he had shot every line I had put into the script, it would be a better film. On the other hand, I think in many ways it is pretty good. I know that it has been very successful in video stores and that kids love it. People talk to me about it a lot, now even more than when it came out. So it seems to have a shelf life, which pleases me. That’s the story on Altman.

With Nichols, it’s another story. As I said before, I wrote Carnal Knowledge [1971 comedy-drama film directed by Nichols and written by Feiffer] originally as a play, and I sent it to Nichols. I had originally sent Little Murders to Nichols, and I’d never heard from him about it. So I was surprised when, within 24 hours, he called up to tell me he loved the play but he thought it wasn’t a play but a movie, that we could shoot it just as it was written (which turned out to be grossly untrue); also that the role of the lawyer from the Bronx could only be played by a young actor who was in a new movie I should see called Easy Rider [1969 road drama film written by Peter Fonda (who also starred and produced; 1940-2019), Dennis Hopper (who also starred and directed; 1936-2010), and Terry Southern (1924-95; novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer)]. Jack Nicholson [b. 1937]. So I went to see Easy Rider and thought, “This is weird.” And Nichols said that the other part could only be played by Art Garfunkel [b. 1941; pop singer, actor, and poet; best known half of the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel], who had never acted in a movie until something Nichols was then finishing called Catch-22 [1970 satirical comedy war film]. I thought that was weird, too. And then he suggested Candice Bergen [b. 1946], who I didn’t think could do it. And Ann-Margret [Olsson (b. 1941); Swedish-American actress and singer], to whom I objected strongly.

It generally went that way. I had learned a bit about casting from the Broadway version of Little Murders. I was directly involved in several awful mistakes in casting on that, so when Arkin was going to do Little Murders, the one demand I made was that he not consult me on casting, and he didn’t. Every time I heard that so-and-so was going to be cast in a particular part, I said, “That’s awful. That’s a terrible mistake.” And his choices turned out to be perfectly right. So, when Carnal Knowledge was being cast, every time I thought Nichols was making a mistake, I figured I still had a bad sense of casting (I am much better at casting my friends’ plays than my own). I didn’t quite stay out of it, but I made leaps of faith with Mike that paid off.

As far as script changes went, it really was a matter of taking stage dialogue—which sounds fine in the theatre but sounds weird on film—and finding new ways of saying the same things or finding visual metaphors. A lot of the time, material which would have been fine onstage is redundant in film because, say, a closeup of someone’s eye shifting will get across what onstage might have required explanation. It was about this sort of thing that Mike was particularly knowledgeable.

There’s one scene in Carnal Knowledge in which the character played by Nicholson and the character played by Ann-Margret are in the bedroom, and Nicholson says the most awful things in the world to this woman. He curses her up and down, verbally and morally numbs her. The night before we were supposed to shoot this scene, Mike said, “Let’s go for a drive.” So we did, and he said, “I don’t know about this scene. I don’t know whether audiences will accept it. It may be too strong. I just don’t know. I’m really worried about it.” He didn’t ask me to defend it, and I didn’t. I just didn’t. By then we had been into the movie long enough so that I felt I didn’t have to argue about it or say, “This is crazy. What do you mean?” At the end of the drive, he said, “No, we have to do it. We have to shoot it because this is what would happen.” He understood from his own point of view that the logic of the story he was telling made the scene absolutely necessary, so, despite his concern about the audience reaction, he went in and shot it.

Durang:  One of my favorite scenes in Carnal Knowledge is the one in which Nicholson shows slides of the women he’s been involved with, talks about each of them and is absolutely beastly about each one. I was curious, was that in the play as well?

Feiffer: Yes, and it was even longer.

Q: I wonder what your thoughts are on being a hyphenated artist, someone who’s successful as both a cartoonist and a playwright.

Feiffer: When I embarked on my theatrical career, I knew that, because of the subject matter that interested me, it would be perilous. But I was able to enter it with total abandon because I had flop insurance in that I was already a successful cartoonist. If you have success and only use it to conserve what you’ve got, then you become a kind of prisoner to it, and that stops you from progressing in your work. It seemed to me that if I wasn’t able to use my success as a tradeoff against commercial failure in the theatre and getting lumps from the critics, then there was no point to that success. This was what I had in mind when I started, and it helped me launch myself into work that I had been afraid to do before because I’d been afraid of failure. Having a cartoon that comes out in front of an audience once a week guarantees that you can recover from a play that gets terrible reviews—though I must say, it takes longer periods of time for me to recover these days. I’m not as resilient as I used to be.

[Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) was a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, and once the most widely-read satirist in the country.  The author of over 35 books, plays, and screenplays, Feiffer established his career in the 1950s as a staff cartoonist for The Village Voice.  His wit and diversity of talent earned him an Academy Award for his animated short film Munro (1961), the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, a place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, and the Dramatists Guild’s own Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. He joined the Dramatists Guild in 1966 and was elected to the Guild’s Council in 1970.

[Christopher Durang’s (1949-2024) plays include Turning Off the Morning News (2018), Why Torture Is Wrong And The People Who Love Them (2009), Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike (2012; Tony Award for Best Play; recipient of the Dramatists Guild’s Hull-Warriner Award), A History of the American Film (musical; 1978; Tony nomination), Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You (1979), Baby with the Bathwater (1983), Laughing Wild (1987), Betty’s Summer Vacation (1999), Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge (musical; 2002), Miss Witherspoon (2005; Pulitzer Prize finalist), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985; Hull-Warriner Award), Sex and Longing (1996), and a musical, Adrift in Macao (2007), with music by Peter Melnick (b. 1958).  Together with Marsha Norman (b. 1947; playwright, screenwriter, and novelist), he directed the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School from 1984 to 2016.  He joined the Dramatists Guild in 1978, was elected to Council in 1981, and received the Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024. 

[A previous post from this same source, “‘In Conversation: Lynn Nottage & Paula Vogel’" by Tari Stratton, was posted on ROT on 7 October 2017.  The second Jules Feiffer interview from The Dramatist, "The Next Part of the Puzzle: Jules Feiffer interviewed by Jeffrey Sweet,” will be posted here on Thursday, 19 June.  Please come back to Rick On Theater to read more from playwright-cartoonist Feiffer.]