The not-ready-for-Broadway playwrights

Plus:

• Oh, the places she'll go: Sandra Oh, the sarcastic sawbones of Grey’s Anatomy, steps back onto the stage in the racially charged Brooklyn drama Satellites.
• TONY’s Tonys: Our critics sift through the nominations and predict the results of Broadway’s big night.

The past few months have been hard on American playwrights. In April, the Pulitzer committee decided not to award a prize for drama. The New York Drama Critics’ Circle found no homegrown work worth lauding when it doled out its awards May 23. Lisa Kron’s critically acclaimed but publicly underappreciated Well closed after playing to two-thirds-empty houses. Come June 11, odds are The History Boys—a veddy English school dramedy written by a 72-year-old Yorkshireman—will snag the Tony for Best Play. All this in a season in which three Irish works (Faith Healer, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Shining City) dyed the Great White Way distinctly green. The noble calling of literary giants such as Miller, O’Neill and Williams is dead, right?

Don’t believe it. Just as the Grammys and Oscars aren’t barometers of musical and cinematic taste, the Tonys and Pulitzer won’t necessarily tell you what’s worth following in theater. But we will. The ink-stained talents collected here are young and hungry. None of them is the greatest living American scribe (that plaque goes to Albee, Mamet or Kushner,take your pick). They’re not even among the upstarts who’ve generated the most coverage (sorry, Adam Rapp, Rinne Groff, Will Eno and Lynn Nottage). But they’re producing the most stimulating work in town—and they’re why this is a great time to go and see a downtown show.—David Cote

Mysterious ways

Lose yourself in Washburn if... you swoonfor Sofia Coppola’s dreamy filmmaking, wish that Björk would star in more movies and devour Haruki Murakami novels.

Anne Washburn, 38, poster child of both the Civilians and the DIY playwrights collective 13P, can be a tough writer to pin down: One minute she’s confiding ghost stories (Apparition), and the next she’s introducing historical she-monsters to each other (The Ladies), only to follow it all up with a fish-out-of-water fable, half spoken in gibberish (The Internationalist). But what her pieces have in common is the way she captures her characters’ discombobulation, whether due to travel, the supernatural or some dizzying postmodern device. Her plays, steeped in the disorienting techniques of nonnarrative giants like the Wooster Group, nonetheless have strong stories at their core. The resulting juxtapositions are provoking, mysterious and rich with her sense that, as she puts it,“we are surrounded by things we can’t see, can’t control and can’t understand.” Her next work, I Have Loved Strangers, a lyrical investigation of false and true prophets, materializes at the Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival (at the Ohio Theatre, Sunday 4–June 10), while The Internationalist will pack its bags for a much-deserved Off Broadway run at the Vineyard this October.—Helen Shaw

Fight makes right

Go to the mat for Nguyen if... you’re pissed that they changed the ending of V for Vendetta,can quote from Kill Bill and have purchased at least one Buffy the Vampire Slayer calendar.

Fans of Qui Nguyen’s company, the Vampire Cowboys, got quite a shock at his recent show Trial by Water. Where they expected the Nguyen usual—a chop-socky snarkfest—they found a wrenching account of Vietnamese boat people in extremis. Nguyen’s background is in fight choreography (on display starting Saturday 3 in the Brick Theater’s Kung Fu Importance of Being Earnest), but even a flying split kick doesn’t take that kind of flexibility. Nguyen, 29, seems chill about the change in genre, juggling plans to finish a trilogy about the Vietnamese experience with fare like Living Dead in Denmark (a Joss Whedon–inspired saga of butt-kicking, undead Shakespeare heroines). His comfort with cartoon violence actually serves his straight drama; there’s something unflinching and brisk about the way he makes his characters suffer. Critics have noticed, but the plaudits aren’t going to his head: Nguyen primarily gigs with Vampire Cowboys, making theater for nontheater types and dreaming of the day when he can afford a serious prop budget. “Think of how much blood we could get onstage,” he muses, already preparing for his next show, an all-girl modern-day version of The Three Musketeers. They’ll be samurai this time out, he says, “because carrying foils on the subway just wouldn’t work.”—Helen Shaw

The sad clown

Johnston’s cockeyed worldview might match yours if... you smile knowingly at the sensitively morbid humor of Six Feet Underbut wish it had a touch of John Waters’s irreverence.

“Years ago, I wrote what I thought was a terribly sensitive and feeling play about a gay relationship,” David Johnston confesses. “But people found it hilarious. What can you do but pretend that is what you intended all along?” Today, Johnston, 39, is more comfortable identifying himself as a comic playwright—though his subversive humor often holds hands with pain, in a style that sometimes evokes the wild tragifarces of Christopher Durang. Raised in Virginia, Johnston began writing between gigs as an actor in regional theater. In 2003, to his surprise, Blue Coyote Theater Group staged Busted Jesus Comix, about a young illustrator persecuted for his grotesque cartoons about infant rape. (“I had given that play to everybody,” he recalls. “It’s a play about fucking babies.”) Blue Coyote remounted Busted Jesus Comix last year, and Johnston’s ascent continued early this year with the afterlife buddy comedy Candy & Dorothy; his latest project, set to debut next winter, is an ambitious adaptation of The Oresteia, in which he unsheathes a modern comic edge to slice through Aeschylus’ ancient Greek tragedy. “I’m a white Southern Protestant: We’re just not people who die for love,” he says. “We think that’s silly.”—Adam Feldman

Rise of the machines

Meriwether will activate your laugh receptors if... you™Charlie Kaufman’s self-referential frolics or George Saunders’s corporate-kitsch dystopias.

Inanimate objects speak to Elizabeth Meriwether and she, in turn, puts them onstage. While photocopying a fat stack of documents during an internship at Playwrights Horizons in 2003, the Yale grad, now 24, found herself mesmerized by the whirring noises of the copier and began imitating them. That technophilic quirk begot Wilson, the brainiac man-child and unlikely romantic lead of Meriwether’s The Mistakes Madeline Made (which closed last month at the Culture Project). The playwright also put the ghost in the machine with Heddatron, a cheeky mash-up of Ibsenite bourgeois tragedy and robot paranoia, produced by Les Freres Corbusier. But for all her geeky fascination with technology, Meriwether admits that she’s always been drawn to sloppy, neurotic women. Heddatron featured a gun-waving, bipolar housewife kidnapped by robots, and Madeline’s protagonist was a caustic young woman who develops a fear of bathing. “I like things to be a bit messy,” Meriwether says. “I buy too many books and keep them in stacks, and I buy cheap clothes and keep them in piles on the floor. I’m a pack rat: I get a bunch of ideas, and they don’t necessarily fit together. I’ve never been fascinated by structure the way other playwrights are: perfect scenes leading neatly into others.”—David Cote

Documentary shredder

Cosson is on your brain-wavelength if... you enjoy the referential layering of Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings, the eclectic Readings section of Harper’s and the gently off-center observational wit of NPR’s This American Life.

When explaining the work that he has created for the Civilians, the red-hot theater troupe he founded in 2001, Steven Cosson tends to end his sentences with mild question marks, as if everything might be up for revision. Such contingency is at the core of the playwright-director’s most recent shows, 2003’s Gone Missing and 2004’s (I Am) Nobody’s Lunch: brilliantly suggestive latticeworks of intellectual vaudeville, studded with song and dance. Cosson, 37, resists describing them as documentaries, although they are woven from the texts of real interviews conducted by the company. “A documentary investigates something to know more about it,” he says. “A creative investigative process—which I’m trying to coin—reveals what you don’t know about something.” Cosson is currently working on multiple projects: an interview-based look at conservative Christianity; a revision of a play set in the final days of the Paris Commune; and a piece about time, the research of which involves trips to Panama and Northern Canada. “I want to do experimental theater for the public,” he says. “For an audience that is not composed of professional theater-attending people.”—Adam Feldman

Delicate balance

Bock should float your boat if...you would high-five Dave Eggers in the street,TiVoed Showtime’s Weeds and think the Scissor Sisters and Bach are equally fab.

Fifteen years ago,Adam Bock,44, had just about given up on playwriting, committing his time instead to AIDS activism, when three friends decided they wanted to perform in a coming-out show. He dusted off his Brown dramatist credits, contacted his inner fashionista and wrote The House of Chanel Goes to ACT-UP! Suddenly, Bock says, “I discovered it was fun to write for myself.” That set him off on a series of drag shows, which eventually cascaded into sensitive, linguistically agile dramatic comedies—from the family frolic Five Flights to the adorable Swimming in the Shallows (which dares to ask, “Can a boy find lasting love with a shark?”). Bock’s plays are like Chopin études: disarmingly light, rigorously structured and built with a powerful underlying logic. Though audiences giggle through them, he somehow makes us confront environmental responsibility, the absurdity of American materialism and what he calls “the shape of our circle of concern.” His next piece, The Thugs, a horror story for temps (is there anyone more vulnerable?), premieres at Soho Rep in October.—Helen Shaw

Shock treatments

Get queasy with Bradshaw if... you like the blunt trauma of Dave Chappelle’s nastiest sketches and enjoy squirming through Todd Solondz movies.

Thomas Bradshaw, 26, is no stranger to controversy: He’s been censored since childhood. Strangely, his high school got pissy when he wrote a drama about a grade-school teacher molesting his students—so they banned the piece and, to add further insult to injury, wouldn’t let him try out for Godspell. Bradshaw didn’t quite learn his lesson. Last year’s lacerating Prophet involved a white man commanded by God to “reenslave” his black mistress, and Purity (opening in January at P.S. 122) stars not one but two pedophiliac teachers. But Bradshaw claims he tries to shock us because he cares. “We all develop this comfortable worldview, and I want to shake people out of that,” he explains. The writer describes his plays as hyperrealistic, because his characters simply speak what other authors would leave as subtext. When, in Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist, Thurmond’s pregnant black maid declares (deadpan) her love for him, the scribe is dramatizing what the fictionalized late senator believes to be true. And if Bradshaw turns your stomach, so much the better. “When other people get shocked, I’m shocked,” he maintains. “This is the world we live in.”—Helen Shaw

Higher learning

You’ll rave about Sun’s urban exposés if... you keep the Roots and The Diary of Alicia Keys on shuffle and loved Zadie Smith’s cultural ventriloquy in White Teeth.

Gus, the mixed-breed stray Nilaja Sun took in last year, worries about his owner. That’s because when Sun, 31, develops a show in her Crown Heights apartment, the pooch watches the playwright-performer test new voices. Sun generates her multicharacter solos by working out a story in her head, jotting down plot points on index cards, then doing extensive improvisations in front of a mirror. “If I’m cackling or in tears, I write it down,” Sun explains. “And sometimes, Gus barks at my characters or looks at me funny, like he doesn’t know who I am.” There’s no such confusion prompted by Sun’s latest work, No Child (at the Beckett Theater through June 18). The powerful and layered social drama examines the disrepair of the public school system through the eyes of teaching artists, students, security guards and principals—all impeccably incarnated by Sun. She writes from personal experience: eight years working with the most at-risk teens in the city, battling bureaucracy and the children’s apathy. “I’m just one person telling a small portion of the big scope of what’s happening in the schools,” she explains. The born-and-bred Lower East Sider will continue teaching, but hopes to move past solo performance to compose full-cast plays. Going it alone as both writer and actor, she says, can get a bit confusing: “It’s schizophrenic. Just a little.”—David Cote

Contrarian at the gate

You’ll fall for Leaf  if... you can imagine the clean, story-oriented neoclassicism of a Clint Eastwood–directed movie merged with the literacy and seriousness of late-period, postleftist Saul Bellow.

In the world of New York theater, Jonathan Leaf belongs to a bona fide minority: He’s openly conservative (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Having left Trenton, New Jersey—“Harlem without New York,” he quips—the soft-spoken, literary-minded Leaf, now 37, founded a progressive political group at Yale University; after graduation, he began a rightward drift that eventually led him to covering the arts for National Review and TheWeekly Standard. Meanwhile, thanks in part to money he won on a Dick Clark quiz show in the early 1990s, he began writing plays that are only now seeing the light of day. “To me, the most important thing is to have a strong story and inherently interesting characters,” he says. “I don’t know why people have gotten away from that.” Last year saw the debuts of Leaf’s cultural-historical drama, The Germans in Paris, and his terrorism-themed nail-biter, The Caterers, but his most impressive play remains unstaged: Pushkin, an evocative five-act historical tragedy in blank verse. Though his dramaturgy may reveal a right-of-center bent, Leaf resists easy categorization. “My politics are not particularly predictable or orthodox,” he explains. “A lot of my opinions probably wouldn’t sit well with anyone.”—Adam Feldman

Get surreal

Callaghan’s piquant surrealism will please your palate if... your iPod contains Sigur Rós and Regina Spektor, you dwell on John Ashbery’s verse and you focus on Jean-Luc Godard flicks.

Many playwrights dream of being rock stars, but Sheila Callaghan is actively pursuing it. Accompanied by her husband, composer Sophocles Papavasilopoulos, the 33-year-old playmaker croons her sensual lyrics in the electro-pop outfit If I Told Napoleon (gigs pending). Pop music is a perfect hobby for the whimsically dark writer, whose plays exude a restless postpunk sensibility: an urge to trash forms but also a longing for mythic transcendence. Callaghan’s poetry-drenched adult fairy tales (The Hunger Waltz, Kate Crackernuts) make for a passionate yawp at the cosmos. Her latest work, Dead City (at the new downtown venue 3LD through June 24), is a riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses; Callaghan injects Joycean stream-of-consciousness into the daily routines of contemporary New Yorkers and gender-flips the classic novel’s two heroes. Though she has scored commissions on both coasts, Callaghan isn’t holding her breath for big-time producers. “I don’t think audiences sitting in Broadway houses are less sensitive or intelligent. They’re just buying a package rather than a piece of art,” she says. “I like theater that doesn’t taste so good while you’re eating it, but you remember it. You’re like, What the hell is this in my mouth? It’s kind of slimy and wet.”—David Cote