David Adjmi

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. Written by David Adjmi and featuring original music by Arcade Fire's Will Butler, Stereophonic invites the audience to immerse themselves - with fly-on-the-wall intimacy - in the powder-keg process of a band on the brink of blowing up.

The place: Sausalito, California. The time: the mid-1970s. The carpet: brown shag. Stereophonic brings us inside the elusive world of a recording studio, as a rock band on the brink of superstardom attempts to create their difficult second album. Running on a diet of booze, sleep deprivation, and a giant bag of cocaine, interpersonal relationships are pushed to breaking point as a process that was meant to last a few weeks becomes a never-ending ordeal. With original songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler, David Adjmi's play is an electrifying portrait of a band wracked with division that nevertheless just might be on the verge of creating a masterpiece. Stereophonic opened at Playwrights Horizons in New York City in 2023, directed by Daniel Aukin. It transferred to Broadway in 2024, becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time and winning Best Play – and to London's West End in 2025.

An epic play with music that examines the human costs of the quest for artistic greatness.The place: Sausalito. The time: the mid-1970s. The carpet: brown shag. Stereophonic brings us inside the cloistered world of a recording studio as a rock band on the brink of superstardom attempts to create their sophomore album. The ensuing pressures open up cracks in the band's once-easy camaraderie, and spats over issues like tempo and song length begin to reveal deeper problems in the band's foundation. Running on a diet of booze, sleep deprivation, and a giant bag of cocaine, interpersonal relationships are pushed to the breaking point as a process that was meant to last a few weeks becomes a neverending slog. With original songs by Arcade Fire's Will Butler, David Adjmi's play is an electrifying portrait of a band wracked with division and disillusionment that nevertheless might be on the verge of creating a masterpiece.

"David Adjmi has written one of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?" -- Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely CityIn a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art.Brooklyn, 1970s. Born into the ruins of a Syrian Jewish family that once had it all, David is painfully displaced. Trapped in an insular religious community that excludes him and a family coming apart at the seams, he is plunged into suicidal depression. Through adolescence, David tries to suppress his homosexual feelings and fit in, but when pushed to the breaking point, he makes the bold decision to cut off his family, erase his past, and leave everything he knows behind. There's only one problem: who should he be? Bouncing between identities he steals from the pages of fashion magazines, tomes of philosophy, sitcoms and foreign films, and practically everyone he meets--from Rastafarians to French preppies--David begins to piece together an entirely new adult self. But is this the foundation for a life, or just a kind of quicksand?Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 1970s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of Reagan's 1980s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six offers a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture. Adjmi's memoir is a genre bending K nstlerroman in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Alison Bechdel, a portrait of the artist in the throes of a life and death crisis of identity. Raw and lyrical, and written in gleaming prose that veers effortlessly between hilarity and heartbreak, Lot Six charts Adjmi's search for belonging, identity, and what it takes to be an artist in America.

"One of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?" -- Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely CityIn a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, award-winning playwright David Adjmi (the playwright behind the most Tony-nominated show of all time and winner of best new play, Stereophonic) explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art. Brooklyn, 1970s. Born into the ruins of a Syrian Jewish family that once had it all, David is painfully displaced. Trapped in an insular religious community that excludes him and a family coming apart at the seams, he is plunged into suicidal depression. Through adolescence, David tries to suppress his homosexual feelings and fit in, but when pushed to the breaking point, he makes the bold decision to cut off his family, erase his past, and leave everything he knows behind. There's only one problem: who should he be? Bouncing between identities he steals from the pages of fashion magazines, tomes of philosophy, sitcoms and foreign films, and practically everyone he meets--from Rastafarians to French preppies--David begins to piece together an entirely new adult self. But is this the foundation for a life, or just a kind of quicksand?Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 1970s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of Reagan's 1980s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six offers a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture. Adjmi's memoir is a genre bending K nstlerroman in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Alison Bechdel, a portrait of the artist in the throes of a life and death crisis of identity. Raw and lyrical, and written in gleaming prose that veers effortlessly between hilarity and heartbreak, Lot Six charts Adjmi's search for belonging, identity, and what it takes to be an artist in America.

A dual volume from "virtuosic" playwright David Adjmi (New York Times). About Marie Antoinette: "David Adjmi's Marie Antoinette is audacious and stun-ning. The work skewers the oblivious royals and one-percenters, understands their bred-to-be-bad behavior, and strips away the illusion of not only the monarchy but of democracy, too--a hat trick that Adjmi performs with the delicate balance of comedy, tragedy, and wild imaginings." --Variety The eyes of the court are on Marie Antoinette. Times change, and even the most fashionable queens go out of style. Drawing comparison of the gluttonous excess of Marie's era to the decadent materialism of the present day, Marie Antoinette holds up a mirror to our contemporary society, which just might be entertaining itself to death. About 3C: "Bitterly funny and inventive, 3C appropriates the sit-com structure of iconic Three's Company and pumps it full of sexual panic and existential horror. Adjmi's quick-cutting script is intensely funny and unnerving in equal measure." --Time Out New York The war in Vietnam is over and Brad, an ex-serviceman, lands in L.A. to start a new life. When he winds up trashed in Connie and Linda's kitchen after a wild night of partying, the three strike a deal for an arrangement that has hilarious and devastating consequences for everyone. Inspired by 1970s sitcoms and 1950s existentialist comedy, 3C is a terrifying yet amusing look at a culture that likes to amuse itself--even as it teeters on the brink of ruin.

The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays is an anthology of six outstanding plays from some of the most exciting playwrights currently receiving critical acclaim in the States. It showcases work produced at a number of the leading theatres during the last decade and charts something of the extraordinary range of current playwriting in America. It will be invaluable not only to readers and theatergoers in the U.S., but to those around the world seeking out new American plays and an insight into how U.S. playwrights are engaging with their current social and political environment. There is a rich collection of distinctive, diverse voices at work in the contemporary American theatre and this brings together six of the best, with work by David Adjmi, Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Katori Hall, Christopher Shinn and Dan LeFranc. The featured plays range from the intimate to the epic, the personal to the national and taken together explore a variety of cultural perspectives on life in America. The first play, David Adjmi's Stunning, is an excavation of ruptured identity set in modern day Midwood, Brooklyn, in the heart of the insular Syrian-Jewish community; Marcus Gardley's lyrical epic The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with the migration of Black Seminoles, is set in mid-1800s Oklahoma and speaks directly to modern spirituality, relocation and cultural history; Young Jean Lee's Pullman, WA deals with self-hatred and the self-help culture in her formally inventive three-character play; Katori Hall's Hurt Village uses the real housing project of "Hurt Village" as a potent allegory for urban neglect set against the backdrop of the Iraq war; Christopher Shinn's Dying City melds the personal and political in a theatrical crucible that cracks open our response to 9/11 and Abu Graib, and finally Dan LeFranc's The Big Meal, an inter-generational play spanning eighty years, is set in the mid-west in a generic restaurant and considers family legacy and how some of the smallest events in life turn out to be the most significant.

The war in Vietnam is over and Brad an ex-serviceman lands in L.A. to start a new life. When he winds up trashed in Connie and Linda's kitchen after a wild night of partying the three strike a deal for an arrangement that has hilarious and devastating consequences for everyone. Inspired by 1970s sitcoms 1950s existentialist comedy Chekhov and Disco anthems 3C is a terrifying yet amusing look at a culture that likes to amuse itself even as it teeters on the brink of ruin.

From David Adjmi, the virtuosic playwright dubbed one of the "best and most original theatre artists of a generation" by Vogue, come a wholly original one-woman show. Elective Affinities takes the audience into the apartment of Alice, a witty octogenarian offering a funny and savage portrait of cultured life, promising to initiate a vital discourse about what it means to be civilized.

How's a queen to keep her head in the middle of a revolution? Marie Antoinette delights and inspires her French subjects with her three-foot tall wigs and extravagant haute couture. But times change and even the most fashionable queens go out of style. In the humorous and haunting Marie Antoinette idle gossip turns more insidious as the country revolts demanding liberte egalite fraternite!

The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays is an anthology of six outstanding plays from some of the most exciting playwrights currently receiving critical acclaim in the States. It showcases work produced at a number of the leading theatres during the last decade and charts something of the extraordinary range of current playwriting in America. It will be invaluable not only to readers and theatergoers in the U.S., but to those around the world seeking out new American plays and an insight into how U.S. playwrights are engaging with their current social and political environment. There is a rich collection of distinctive, diverse voices at work in the contemporary American theatre and this brings together six of the best, with work by David Adjmi, Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Katori Hall, Christopher Shinn and Dan LeFranc. The featured plays range from the intimate to the epic, the personal to the national and taken together explore a variety of cultural perspectives on life in America. The first play, David Adjmi's Stunning, is an excavation of ruptured identity set in modern day Midwood, Brooklyn, in the heart of the insular Syrian-Jewish community; Marcus Gardley's lyrical epic The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with the migration of Black Seminoles, is set in mid-1800s Oklahoma and speaks directly to modern spirituality, relocation and cultural history; Young Jean Lee's Pullman, WA deals with self-hatred and the self-help culture in her formally inventive three-character play; Katori Hall's Hurt Village uses the real housing project of "Hurt Village" as a potent allegory for urban neglect set against the backdrop of the Iraq war; Christopher Shinn's Dying City melds the personal and political in a theatrical crucible that cracks open our response to 9/11 and Abu Graib, and finally Dan LeFranc's The Big Meal, an inter-generational play spanning eighty years, is set in the mid-west in a generic restaurant and considers family legacy and how some of the smallest events in life turn out to be the most significant.

Characters: 2m 4f / DramaDavid Adjmi received the first ever Steinberg "Mimi" Playwright Award in 2009Sixteen year old Lily knows nothing beyond the Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn where she lives a cloistered life with her much older husband. Soon an unlikely relationship with her enigmatic African-American maid opens Lily's world to new possibilities - but at a huge price. David Adjmi's daring new work shifts from caustic satire to violent drama as it exposes the ways we invent and def