David Adjmi interview: Stereophonic (The Guardian)

The playwright was about to quit theatre but hearing Babe I’m Gonna Leave You led to a sensational, Tony-winning collaboration with Arcade Fire’s Will Butler

In 2013, I was desperately looking for a way to quit writing plays. I’d had a terrible, scarring artistic collaboration a couple of years prior, and it broke me. And on top of that, I was actually broke, financially. So I decided to give up playwriting, move to Los Angeles and make some money writing for film and television. But just as I’d made that decision, I received a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation. It came with a significant chunk of money, so I was thrilled. Only it also came with conditions: one of which was that I needed to write a new play. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll write a very short one-act to fulfil the requirements of the grant and then be done with theatre for ever.”…

Justin worked his magic in a similar way, figuring out orchestrations to Will’s songs which, according to the story, are meant to go from pretty good to great in real time, sometimes over the course of a single scene. The process of collaboration was enigmatic, and none of this should have worked: I was asking too much of everyone, and I required a degree of expertise from my collaborators in areas that weren’t really anyone’s areas of expertise. But everyone loved what we were making and they rose to the challenge. Stereophonic is a play about artistic collaboration that was born from a soul-crushing collaborative process – but our collaborative process was heaven on earth. I just happened to fall in with a group of crazy geniuses who were mavericks and up for anything. I got very, very lucky.