David Adjmi's STEREOPHONIC, With Songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler, to be Presented at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons will present the world premiere production of David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, directed by Daniel Aukin, with original songs by Oscar nominee and Grammy winner Will Butler of Arcade Fire. Stereophonic mines the agony and the ecstasy of creation, as it zooms in on a music studio in 1976. Here, an up-and-coming rock band recording a new album finds itself suddenly on the cusp of superstardom. The ensuing pressures could spark their breakup — or their breakthrough. With Stereophonic, Adjmi invites audiences to be flies-on-the-wall in the studio, and the powder keg process of a band on the brink of blowing up. Stereophonic runs October 6 - November 19, and opens October 29, on the Mainstage at Playwrights Horizons (416 West 42nd Street).

David Adjmi (Elective Affinities, Stunning, Marie Antoinette; author of Lot Six: A Memoir) has been hailed by The New York Times as “virtuosic,” and celebrated in their pages for his “lifelong devotion to art as an identity-defining tool of self-expression” and “his talent for laugh-out-loud funny set pieces.” Stereophonic is a nuanced exploration of its characters’ relationship to art as an externalization of self—and asks how that functions in the collective formation of a band. Its sonically and spatially bisected set (with a control room and sound room, the latter completely sound-proofed from characters outside) creates a painfully funny confusion between public and private. 

Stereophonic also marks a stylistic shift for Adjmi, in which he takes a hyper-naturalistic approach to the storytelling; Adjmi presents characters’ constructive and destructive propensities; their artistic processes; and their stylistic and personal affinities (and disaffinities) with such meticulousness as to almost seem documentarian. For the playwright, this is just as much of an experimental gesture as his earlier, more stylized works. He says, “Typically, I've looked for expressive ways to talk about being alive in the world that I felt maybe a naturalistic play couldn't contain. But I wanted to see if I could achieve that instead with something that feels very lived in, very granular; to see if perhaps I could write an accumulation of moments that feel ‘ordinary’ amounting to some form of transcendence.” 

Director Daniel Aukin says, “There’s something about David’s conceit of the recording studio as the site of a play that is so very rich—something we have seldom seen on stage before, and certainly not with this treatment: people screaming and not being heard, people thinking they’re talking in private but being overheard. The possibilities are farcical, yet, stylistically, it couldn’t be farther from farce: it’s so natural, recalling something from a Robert Altman film, plastered with messy life,  hyper-specific in its musicality.” 

The cast is tasked to create harmonies and dissonances both sonic and emotional: all actors portraying band-members make the band’s music—as they achieve moments of revelation and hit countless walls in the studio—live. Aukin (Catch as Catch Can, Rancho Viejo, Placebo at Playwrights Horizons) guides them in inhabiting a play that simultaneously builds and deconstructs the mythology of fictional to-be-icons. The cast includes Will Brill (Oklahoma! on Broadway, A Case for the Existence of God) as Reg, Andrew R. Butler (Rags Parkland Sings The Songs Of The Future, The Skin of Our Teeth) as Charlie, Juliana Canfield (Fefu and her Friends, “Succession”) as Holly, Eli Gelb (Skintight, The Squid and the Whale) as Grover, Tom Pecinka (He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Torch Song) as Peter, Sarah Pidgeon (“Tiny Beautiful Things,” “The Wilds”) as Diana, and Chris Stack (Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra at Playwrights Horizons, Marie Antoinette) as Simon.

The Stereophonic creative team includes David Zinn (scenic designer), Enver Chakartash (costume designer), Jiyoun Chang(lighting designer), Ryan Rumery (sound designer), Justin Craig (music director), and Gigi Buffington (vocal, text, and dialect coach). Erin Gioia Albrecht is the production stage manager, and Andie Burns is the assistant stage manager. 

Adjmi describes the moment where the entire world of the play came into view: Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Going to Leave You” came on the radio on a flight to Boston, and he was struck by the lyrics’ emotional instability and duality—with the subtext of the song being “I can’t leave you”—which caused a “fulguration of lightning.” He describes, “I’d never seen this play, I didn’t know how to do this play, but I started seeing the design vividly and thinking about how I could play with sound and soundproofing a booth to have the bifurcation of a set match the duality of those vocals. A play where things are split between two spaces and there’s this constant battle between virtuosic creation and self-destruction. Where the nature of that split space often determines how characters’ relationships unfold. Where two opposite things can happen onstage simultaneously. That was very exciting to me.” 

So began the process of imagining the makeup of a band and how its admixture of personalities might contain those oppositions: this band’s perfect creative alchemy makes them immortal, and also causes their suffering. Adjmi, who delved into 1970s sitcoms with 3C, returns to the era of continual interest, “a prelapsarian moment” right before the corporatization of the 80s and America’s Reagan-led descent into late capitalism. Here, the act of musical creation by a rising-in-the-ranks band bore a level of innocence and naiveté, against which the viciousness erupting from their process feels all the more pointed. Adjmi wanted to explore “the organic contingencies of doing an album in 1976 in an analog studio with the technologies they had—and how that could inform the drama and dramaturgy of a play.” Before he had even drafted a word of the play, Aukin and Butler agreed to collaborate on it. 

Butler created the play’s musical world, writing the hits of a band that never existed. Each character has distinct songwriting styles and sets of references, and Adjmi recalls Butler mentioning he was taking a “Stanislavskian” approach: getting himself into the headspace and history of each character. Adjmi recalls, “Will has an encyclopedic knowledge of music. He was like, ‘I think Holly went to see Sylvester open for Bowie in San Francisco in 1972.’” 

Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield produced Adjmi’s first play, Strange Attractors, in Seattle in 2003, and says working with him again feels like a “homecoming.” He says, “In Stereophonic, David places impossible people in an impossible circumstance, and yet something beautiful and timeless – an enduring work of art – is wrought from the toxicity of their relationships. In the meantime, as a live theater event, audiences get to witness this music being born. The play is sneakily innovative—it is hyper-realistic, but with the wild proposition of creating a functional sound studio on stage. David  so beautifully incorporates music into the storytelling. I’ve never read a play that employs music so intimately.” 

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Stereophonic runs October 6 - November 19, and opens October 29, on the Mainstage at Playwrights Horizons (416 West 42nd Street). Tickets go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 5.

About David Adjmi (Playwright)

David Adjmi has been called "virtuosic" by The New York Times and named one of the Top Ten in Culture by The New Yorker.His plays have been produced at theaters around the world such as Lincoln Center, RSC, Steppenwolf, and Soho Rep--where he was the Mellon Foundation playwright-in-residence for three years. His play 3C was selected as one of the top ten plays of the year by The New York Post, Time Out NY, and The Advocate. Elective Affinities premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and received a sold out U.S. premiere at Soho Rep starring Zoe Caldwell (Top 10 of the year in Time Out NY and The New Yorker). Other plays include Stunning, The Evildoers, and Marie Antoinette. Adjmi was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kesselring Prize for Drama, and the Steinberg Playwright Award, among others. His new play The Stumble was recently excerpted in The Paris Review, and his two-part play The Blind King (co-written with Donald Seligman) is currently in development with The Public. With Lila Neugebauer, Adjmi is writing a musical based on Brian Wilson’s creation of the Smile album. He holds commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, Berkeley Rep, and the Royal Court (UK). His critically acclaimed memoir Lot Six was published by HarperCollins in 2020, and his collected plays are published by TCG.
 

About Daniel Aukin (Director) 

Daniel Aukin is a New York based director. Playwrights Horizons: Catch as Catch Can, Rancho Viejo, Placebo, This. Broadway: Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love.  World premieres: The Best We Could (MTC), Admissions (LCT & London’s West End), Skintight(Roundabout and Geffen Playhouse), Bad Jews (Roundabout), Fulfillment Center (MTC), What Rhymes with America (Atlantic), Suitcase and [SIC] (Soho Rep), The Fortress of Solitude (Dallas Theatre Center & The Public), Heartless (Signature), 4000 Miles (LCT), The Ugly One (Soho Rep, US premiere), Back Back Back (MTC, NY premiere), Everything Will Be Different, Cat’s-Paw, The Year Of The Baby, and Molly’s Dream.  Also revivals of A View from the Bridge and The Adding Machine. Playwright collaborators include Maria Irene Fornes, Dan LeFranc, Melissa James Gibson, Abe Koogler, Amy Herzog, Michael Friedman, Itamar Moses, Martyna Majok, Mark Schultz, Mac Wellman, Quincy Long,  Sam Shepard, Mia Chung, Joshua Harmon and Emily Feldman.  He was Artistic Director of Soho Rep 1998-2006, garnering three OBIE Awards.
 

About Will Butler (Original Songs)

Will Butler is an Oscar-nominated and Grammy-winning musician. As a member of Arcade Fire, he released some of the defining rock and roll albums of the 2000s—including Funeral (2004)and The Suburbs (2010), which won the Grammy for Album of the Year. He has collaborated with a wide range of film and video makers, including Spike Jonze, Chris Milk, and Roman Coppola. Along with Owen Pallett, he was nominated for the Oscar for Best Score for Jonze's 2013 film Her. He currently records under his own name for Merge Records, and has a forthcoming project with the band Sister Squares. Stereophonic is his first theater work since Godspell, in high school; he played the role of Jesus. 
 

About the Cast

Will Brill (Reg) first workshopped Stereophonic in 2015. Playwrights Horizons debut. Brill was most recently on Broadway in Daniel Fish’s revival of Oklahoma!, and Off Broadway in A Case for the Existence of God, directed by David Cromer at Signature (Drama Desk nomination), and Off Off Broadway in Uncle Vanya in a loft in Flatiron. He was in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The OA,” “Test Pattern,” and others on streaming platforms and networks.  Upcoming: “Fellow Travelers” on Showtime.  

Andrew R. Butler (Charlie) is an actor, writer, and composer. Playwrights Horizons debut. Off-Broadway: Rags Parkland Sings The Songs Of The Future (Ars Nova; Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical; Drama Desk and Lortel Awards nominee for Outstanding Actor in a Musical; cast album on Broadway Records); The Skin Of Our Teeth (TFANA), Futurity (Soho Rep/Ars Nova), Folk Wandering (Pipeline), Memory Retrograde (Under the Radar), Edelweiss (Dixon Place, Ars Nova). TV/Film: “Girls5Eva,” “Helluva Boss,” Friday Afternoon.

Juliana Canfield (Holly). Playwrights Horizons debut. Off-Broadway: Fefu and her Friends (TFANA); Sunday (Atlantic Theatre Company); The House That Will Not Stand (NYTW); He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box (TFANA); Zurich (Colt Coeur). Film/TV: “Succession” (HBO); “The Calling” (Peacock); “Y: The Last Man” (FX); “Amazing Stories” (Amblin/Apple); The Assistant; On the Rocks; The Neighbor’s Window (short, Academy Award winner). BA: Yale College. MFA: Yale School of Drama.

Eli Gelb (Grover). Playwrights Horizons debut. Stage: Skintight (directed by Daniel Aukin, Roundabout Theatre Company, Geffen Playhouse), The Twenty-Seventh Man (The Old Globe), The North Pool (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park). Screen: The Squid and the Whale, Holy Rollers, “The Newsroom,” Not Fade Away, Indignation. Proud member of Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Tom Pecinka (Peter). Playwrights Horizons debut. Off-Broadway: He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, Timon of Athens, Henry IV (TFANA); Troilus and Cressida, Richard II (The Public); The Soldier’s Tale (Carnegie Hall); Torch Song (Second Stage). Regional: Ghosts (Williamstown); Father Comes Home from the Wars... (Yale Rep, ACT); Arcadia (Yale Rep); Cloud 9, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hartford Stage) Television: “American Rust.”  Film: The Kill Room, Oh, Canada. Education: BA: Fordham University; MFA: Yale School of Drama.

Sarah Pidgeon (Diana). Playwrights Horizons debut. A Carnegie Mellon graduate, Pidgeon recently starred in the Hulu limited series “Tiny Beautiful Things.” Her performance as Kathryn Hahn’s character’s younger self earned her rave reviews and a Hollywood Critics Association award nomination. She can also be seen in Amazon’s hit series “The Wilds,” which received an Outstanding Drama Series' nomination at the 2021 GLAAD Media Awards. Up next, Pidgeon is set to star in Alec Tibaldi’s independent feature Lazareth, opposite Ashley Judd.

Chris Stack (Simon). At Playwrights Horizons: Kirk Lynn’s Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra. With David Adjmi: Marie Antoinette at Soho Rep. Other Off-Broadway: The Secret Life of Bees and Blue Ridge at Atlantic Theater Company, Ugly Lies the Bone (Roundabout), Afghanistan Zimbabwe America Kuwait (Rattlestick/Rising Phoenix Rep), Wayside Motor Inn (Signature), Killers & Other Family (Rattlestick). Film and TV credits include Midday Black Midnight Blue, Interview with the Vampire, and A Better Half. 

About the Creative Team

David Zinn (scenic designer). Playwrights Horizons: Circle Mirror Transformation, The Flick, Kin, Completeness, Placebo, Hir, For Peter Pan… Broadway: Kimberly Akimbo, Funny Girl, The Minutes, Diana, Choir Boy, Torch Song, Boys in the Band, Spongebob Squarepants, The Humans, Fun Home. Other: NYTW, MTC, MCC, Second Stage, La Jolla Playhouse, Old Globe, CTG, ACT, Berkeley Rep, Guthrie, Yale Rep, ART, National Theatre and Young Vic (UK), Staatsoper Berlin, Theater Basel. Zinn has won Tony, Drama Desk, Obie, and Howard Hewes Awards. 

Enver Chakartash (costume designer) is a British-born Turkish Cypriot. Playwrights Horizons: The Trees, Catch as Catch Can. Broadway: A Doll's House, Is This A Room. Off-Broadway: Public Obscenities (Soho Rep), Wolf Play (MCC/Soho Rep), English(Atlantic Theater Company/Roundabout Theatre Company), Bodies They Ritual (Clubbed Thumb). Other recent works: Tina Satter/Half Straddle’s Ghost Rings; The Wooster Group’s A Pink Chair, The B-side, The Town Hall Affair, Early Shaker Spirituals; Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group’s POWER. Film: Reality (HBO).

Jiyoun Chang (lighting designer). Playwrights Horizons debut. Broadway: The Cottage, KPOP, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (Tony nomination), Slave Play (Tony nomination, Drama Desk, Henry Hewes). Recent credits: The Far Country (Lucile Lortel nomination), Ride The Cyclone (Arena Stage), The Factotum (Chicago Lyric Opera), Bina’s Six Apples (Suzi Bass Award), Marys Seacole (Henry Hewes nomination), The World is Round (Obie Award), The Public, Roundabout, NYTW, MCC, Signature, ATC, Guggenheim, Berkeley Rep, CalShakes, Guthrie, Old Globe, OSF. 

Ryan Rumery (sound designer) is a 2017 alum of The Sundance Institute Music and Sound Design Lab: Documentary. Playwrights Horizons: Placebo. Rumery’s music is regularly heard on “This American Life.” Film credits include Food and Country (2023 Sundance), Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (2020 Tribeca), America’s Pandemic (2020 WaPo). Additional music for City of Gold (2015 Sundance), Awake: A Dream From Standing Rock (2017 Tribeca), How to Let Go of the World(2016 Sundance), and When We Walk (2019 Hot Docs).

Justin Craig (music director) is a Grammy-nominated record producer, composer, and music director. Playwrights Horizons debut. Since 2006, Craig has been touring and performing as an MD and multi-instrumentalist, as well as making records with artists, bands, and songwriters. In 2014 he was musical director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival. 

Gigi Buffington (vocal, text, and dialect coach). Playwrights Horizons: Downstate; Catch As Catch Can; Corsicana; Heroes of the Fourth Turning; Noura; Selected Off Broadway: Evanston Salt Cost’s Climbing; Prayer For The French Republic; Selected Broadway: Grey House, Between Riverside and Crazy, Cost of Living, The Minutes, Clyde’s, Slave Play, Pass Over, Linda Vista, Straight White Men; eight seasons at Steppenwolf; one season at Royal Shakespeare Company; Arts Professor, Tisch, NYU.

About the Stage Managers

Erin Gioia Albrecht (production stage manager). Playwrights Horizons: A Strange Loop, Wives, Dance Nation, Mankind, Bella, A Life, Men on Boats, Marjorie Prime, The Christians. Broadway: A Strange Loop, Bullets Over Broadway, Matilda, Bronx Bombers, Hands on a Hardbody. Other Off-Broadway: The Light, Charm, Punk Rock, The Village Bike, (MCC); India Pale Ale(MTC); Red Speedo (NYTW). Regional: The Alley, Woolly Mammoth, The 5th Avenue, The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse. MFA: UC San Diego.

Andie Burns (assistant stage manager). Playwrights Horizons: Corsicana. Recent credits include A Strange Loop on Broadway and, Off Broadway, Titanique (Daryl Roth), White Girl in Danger (Second Stage), A Raisin in the Sun (The Public). Regional: Teenage Dick and A Strange Loop (Woolly Mammoth), FLEX, Dracula, A Christmas Carol, Corpse Washer, The Santaland Diaries, Pipeline, Electric Harvest, Curious Incident…(Actors Theatre of Louisville), Grounded & The 39 Steps (Southern Colorado Rep). BFA in Stage Management from Millikin University.

About Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons is a writer's theater dedicated to the development of contemporary American Playwrights, and to the production of innovative new work. In a city rich with cultural offerings, Playwrights Horizons' 51-year-old mission is unique among theaters of its size; the organization has distinguished itself by a steadfast commitment to centering and advancing the voice of the playwright. It’s a mission that is always timely, and one that’s necessary in the ongoing evolution of theater in this country.

Playwrights Horizons believes that playwrights are the great storytellers of our time, offering essential contributions to civic discourse and illuminating life’s greatest paradoxes. And they believe in the singularity of a writer’s voice, valuing the broad, eclectic spectrum and diversity of American writers. At Playwrights Horizons, writers are supported in every stage of their growth through commissions (engaging several of today’s most imaginative playwrights each year), New Works Lab, Soundstage audio program, and Almanac, the organization’s literary magazine.

Playwrights Horizons presents a season of productions annually on their two stages, each of which is a world, American, or New York premiere. Much like Playwrights Horizons’ work, their audience is risk-taking and adventurous; and the organization is committed to strengthening their engagement and feeding their curiosity through all of its programming, onsite and online.

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