Adam Bock’s play The Drunken City was produced last season at Playwrights Horizons, and his play The Receptionist received its World Premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in fall 2007 in a sold-out extended run. His other works include The Thugs (OBIE Award), Swimming in the Shallows (3 BATCC Awards, Clauder Award), Five Flights (Glickman Award), The Typograoher's Dream, The Shaker Chair and Three Guys and a Brenda (Heideman Award). His plays have been commissioned, developed and produced in NYC by MTC, Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, SoHo Rep, Primary Stages, The Vineyard, Rattlestick, Clubbed Thumb, and regionally at Yale, Trinity Rep, the O'Neill, the Humana Festival, UCross/Sundance, in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Salt Lake, Montreal, Toronto, London, and Edinburgh, among others. He is the resident playwright at Encore Theater, a Shotgun Players artistic associate, and a New Dramatist member playwright. He is currently writing a screenplay for Scott Rudin/Miramax.
Check out Adam’s plays,
available from Samuel French
THE OFFICE PLAYS:
The Receptionist
The Thugs
THE DRUNKEN CITY
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Q & A with Adam Bock
Q:When and/or how did you know that you wanted to be a playwright?
A: Years ago, after grad school, I decided to quit playwriting. I was discouraged by the theater, thinking UGH this is no life this desperation and old mattresses and no new clothes. But then I started again, because three of my friends wanted to dress up like Chanel models and I thought "Gosh, that would be fun."
And then I got swept into writing a loopy Nutcracker for the gay community in Rhode Island. Back then, there were no public Christmas celebrations for my gay friends and our families. So I wrote one. And eighteen lesbians leaping in tutus and workboots and the Mouse King and the Chanel models doing their version of A Christmas Carol made me laugh, and made lots of people laugh and relax and it made me remember why I love theater in the first place.
Because people wanted to be in the shows - Mark wanted to play an angel, Dougie wanted to be Queen Elizabeth, and leathermen were willing to tapdance, and a little girl named Danika stuffed herself into her Lifesize Barbie’s dress to play a fairy. And because, through word of mouth, one night 250 people came from all over Rhode Island to watch a Gayboy Nutcracker in a tiny dance studio. And more came the next year, and then more, until four years later I was rehearsing 40 amateurs and 800 of their friends watched.
And because, by imagining a joyful Christmas, we created one. That's what theater can do.
I love building plays. I love actors. I love that it's my job to notice the quiet or hidden truths that are everywhere but easy to miss because we are too busy with our lives. I feel successful when someone comes up to me after one of my plays and says "I never saw it that way" or "I disagree with you completely" or "That was funny". I love it when my actors get to play parts they never get to play; when the sidekick gets to play the ingénue, when a gay actor gets to play the romantic lead opposite another man, when a woman over forty is the lead, when I have given voice to someone who normally is silent. |
