The Select Equity Group Series on Playwriting

Omnium Gatherum by Therea Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, Variety Arts Theatre, 2003. Photo: Joan Marcus. From left: Dean Nolen, Jenny Bacon, Joseph Lyle Taylor, Kristine Nielson, Edward A. Hajj, Melanna Gray, Phillip Clark.

I met Theresa Rebeck several years ago, when I invited her to speak to a class I was teaching at Columbia on the work of a new generation of playwrights. They included Tony Kushner, Kenneth Lonergan, Jon Robin Baitz, Peter Parnell, Frank Pugliese, Alan Ball, and Rebeck. These playwrights were also invigorating the writing of the independent film movement and television, and Rebeck was one of the first playwrights to move easily among these three forms of dramatic storytelling. After earlier plays like Spike Heels and Sunday on the Rocks, Rebeck wrote a series of scripts, for films including Harriet the Spy and Gossip and for such television series as NYPD Blue, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and The Webster Report. Her recent play Omnium Gatherum (written with Alex Gersten) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Bad Dates has been produced all over the country.

I don’t know of many contemporary American writers who have had the kind of season Rebeck just had, with three major new plays debuting: The Bells, a play inspired by the eponymous nineteenth-century melodrama, premiered at the McCarter Theatre last fall; The Scene, a story about the tangled relationships of a group of emotionally lost New Yorkers, was the critical success of the Humana Festival this spring; and her contemporary take on the Agamemnon story, The Water’s Edge, ran at the Second Stage Theatre this past summer. What is striking about each of these plays—and indeed about all of Rebeck’s work—is that they tackle tough questions about us as individuals, and about our society. They are political, but never didactic. The story is always rooted in the humanity of the characters and in the power of the language. Rebeck is funny and principled, and her work reflects these qualities.

In October, Rebeck’s new play Mauritius will premiere at the Huntington Theatre Company’s Wimberly Theatre in Boston, and in December, The Scene opens in New York at Second Stage. Her book Free Fire Zone: A Playwright’s Adventures in Film and Television will also be published this fall. This interview was conducted by phone between Los Angeles and New York.

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Issue 97 Fall 2006