ORDINARY DAYS's Adam Gwon Talks Interning and 9/11 with the New York Times

It has been two days since The Roundabout Theatre Company premiered Ordinary Days at the Black Box Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, and the positive notices have been pouring in.  

In addition to their favorable notice yesterday, Erik Piepenburg of the nytimes.com sat down with the show's creator Adam Gwon for a Q & A, where they discussed everything from Gwon's experience interning at the Roundabout to the playwrights experience on 9/11.

In an excerpt from the interview, Gwon tells nytimes.com: 

NYT: The show in some ways is a familiar one, about young people trying to make it in New York. What inspired you to write your own take on that theme?

AG: I was feeling I was having a patchwork kind of life, trying to be an artist, having a day job and having a creative life. I come from a family that's not involved in the arts. I felt like I was bouncing around between bubbles of existence. I found myself wondering how these different pieces of my life fit together.

NYT: There's a song in the show, called "I'll Be Here," that brings up some pretty painful memories of 9/11.

AG: I wanted to write something that was of the here-and-now, that was contemporary. I was here for 9/11. I had just graduated from college. Something that is very apparent to me, living in New York, is that 9/11 has become part of the fabric of the city, but not in a doom-and-gloom, emotionally draining way. But the fact that it happened is woven into the tapestry of the city.

Read the full interview in the nytimes.com here.

Ordinary Days is a new musical with Music & Lyrics by Adam Gwon, directed by Marc Bruni. Ordinary Days features Lisa Brescia as "Claire," Hunter Foster as "Jason," Jared Gertner as "Warren" and Kate Wetherhead as "Deb." This production marks the first musical presented in the Black Box Theatre.

Ordinary Days, part of the Roundabout Underground series at the company's Black Box, captures with stinging clarity that uneasy moment in youth when doubts begin to cloud hopes for a future of unlimited possibility.

'What am I doing here?' one of the quartet of anxious New Yorkers sings in this genial, quietly affecting show. The same question haunts all of them at one point or another, as the certainty of finding satisfaction seems to recede in the distance, like the last taxi in sight driving off with somebody luckier on a rainy night."

Ordinary Days is the third production of Roundabout Underground, an initiative launched in 2007 to introduce and cultivate artists in Roundabout's 62-seat Black Box Theatre, at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre. Prior productions include Speech & Debate (2007) and The Language of Trees (2008). For more information and tickets visit, www.roundaboutunderground.org

 

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