How to Begin a Writing Career at Any Stage of Life, with Playwright Ellen Abrams

ELLEN ABRAMS’ work as a playwright came later in her career. I’ve seen and heard her wonderful — and frequently hilarious — work, and invited her to talk with me about many things, not the least of which is how to begin a writing career at any stage of life. Listen in and read along.

Marion: I’m delighted to have you here. And I’m really delighted that you say in several of your online profiles that you came late to the work of writing plays and I just think that’s terrific because age is such a tricky topic in art. And some people go to such great lengths not to discuss it. Perhaps, I don’t know, thinking that maintaining some sort of timelessness keeps the work fresh. But my audience is writers, many of whom have had to, oh, I don’t know, work to afford the writing they want to do later in life and who are now at some age getting to the work. So, let’s talk about that. There’s a lot involved in that moment of turning toward our artists self. So fill us in. What were you doing before you became a playwright?

Ellen: Okay. For many years I worked in trade publishing in New York city and I wrote book jacket copy, and advertisements, book ads, catalog copy, sell sheet copy, other kinds of copy. And I was pretty good at it and I enjoyed it enormously. It got a little tedious after a while at first. You love seeing the books you’ve written copy for in the bookstore, but you haven’t really written the book, have you? You’ve just written the selling copy. So I would take down the-

Marion: Good perspective.

Ellen: Yes. You’d take down a book by Gay Talese. “Oh, I wrote this.” “Really?” “Well, I wrote the copy for it not what’s inside.” But that got tedious after a bit. And I… Because it was mostly trade, sorry mostly a mass market. So it’s 20 or so books a month that I would work on and it just… It gets tedious to keep writing and writing and writing and not… There’s a thing in books where if the book doesn’t do well, it’s the fault of the copy and if it does do well, it’s because it’s a good book.

Marion: Yeah, there is that thing. There’s a whole lot of those things out there in publishing. Yeah. So one day you say to yourself, “I want to be a playwright.” And after that you say to yourself, who do you say that next to? Who do you turn to and say, “I want to be a playwright,” after you say it to yourself?

Ellen: I have one of these, in my view, I hope inspirational, and certainly, oh my God, “that really happened” stories. I was a person who saw plays a lot. We had a… My parents loved plays. My mother of course, was a teacher as so many of our mothers are or were and my father actually was a copywriter for a time, but we lived in Philadelphia, not in New York, and boy, was I hungering to get to New York, as was my sister, and not so much my brother. So I saw a lot of plays as a kid, even in Philadelphia. We used to come to New York a couple of times a year and see plays. And then I got to move here after college and I saw a lot, a lot of plays. And with this boyfriend and that boyfriend and this husband.

Now here’s the lesson, follow your passions. I always stayed away from writing plays because I thought it’s impossible to get a play put on and it’s impossible to make your living from it. I’m here to tell you it is not impossible to get a play put on. I haven’t been to Broadway or even off Broadway, but if what you want is to write plays and see any kind of audience, any size audience see your play, you can do it. It can be done and it doesn’t matter how old you are.

Marion: And you are such a fine example of that. And I’m fascinated with the background, the whole going to the plays, of course. And you also mentioned that you went to a lot of musicals and I went as a kid. My mother took us down to La Mama theater where our little minds got blown. I think it’s the first time I saw somebody take their shirt off on stage. I probably was seven. Eye opening. Yeah. And we went to the Lower East Side and I was astonished by Gilbert and Sullivan. So what about musicals? What did that infuse you with, do you think? Because I think a lot of people have a lot in their background. They just don’t know they can draw from it.

Ellen: Well, my family is somewhat musically inclined and I like to say we were living room performers and we listened to a lot of musicals. My parents had the musicals of the day, and we would get them out of the library as well and we sang all the time. Now this wasn’t necessarily the happiest household and it was a very chaotic household, but when things simmer down there was singing. A lot of singing and we all featured ourselves as good singers. I suspect we weren’t as good as we thought we were, but we sang anyway and we just loved it. And I know I shouldn’t say this to an intellectual crowd, but really, I prefer musicals over opera. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know I’m middlebrow, but there you have it. I just love them.

Marion: Oh, undecidedly middlebrow. Undecidedly middlebrow. I think… And I think it’s a good thing to know where you stand. And I think that that’s kind of what I was trying to get at, is I think a lot of people think musicals are just sort of the lower tier and yet, the experience of language that is communicated to the back row, that sits on top of a note is a lot of communication about how to write, right? And I think there’s great energy and education there in the American musical. I will always believe that.

Ellen: I agree. I agree. And that they’re Stephen Sondheim. I know it’s popular now to adore and praise him, but our family was adoring and praising him in the seventies before many people were. He’s just so smart. It’s such a joy to hear it. There’s this great rhyme he does in Sunday in the Park. It’s something along the lines of, “Isn’t it rapturous to see how artists capture us?” I mean, is that not a great line?

Marion: Yeah. Well, and everything you need to know about being a creative is in the song, “Finishing the Hat,” in “Sunday in the Park with George.” Everything… It’s a song I listened to almost every day for many, many years. Yeah. I think it’s perfect and it experiences with you the loneliness and solitude of staying in while other people are out. At least when Mandy Patinkin sings, it re-inhabits this great hollow loneliness, but it also says, but that, that is your ticket and yeah. I’m a great, huge believer in the musical. I’m delighted. I was just delighted to read that about you. And I think that people just don’t think they have on them, what they need and I say, yeah, you do, right? Yeah, you do.

Ellen: Yeah. You do. I think if you think you’re a writer, try writing, you may be a writer.

Marion: Is that a t-shirt you think maybe you should be selling on a side gig? Yeah, I like it.

Ellen: I like that. I do a lot of knitting too, so maybe I could combine the two. But the genesis of my playwriting was, I wrote all kinds of other things. I wrote two novels that I couldn’t interest anybody in. I wrote some kids’ books and I don’t draw, which is problematic. I mean, I couldn’t interest anybody in. And then after I lost a job through publishing mergers, I was talking to my brother and we were, you know how we do, mocking our mother who was still alive at the time and we had some… Yes, we had… Each of us had, “Hey, remember what she did this? Remember when she did this?” And my brother goes, “Hey, one of us should write about her.” And a few months later, I call him up and I go, I have a act one. And he goes, “Act one of what?” The mommy play. It was then I thought, I can do this. Yes. She certainly was a colorful person, and that was the cause of my so far one full length comedy.

Marion: That is it. We start in our own backyard. And I say this to people all the time. And you may have started late, but do you have an impressive number of plays that have been staged, produced and aired. In your topics you take on the sanctity or not of the eulogy, you turn Hamlet into a detective to solve the problems of others. Not the first person I would have chosen to take my troubles to. You could not resist the brief marriage of Rock Hudson, thank you very much. You’ve written about the COVID lockdown, the Roosevelt’s, created what you called an almost completely false story behind the creation of Roget’s Thesaurus. You got Bernie Madoff playing canasta with Carlo Ponzi of the Ponzi scheme Fame, and you’ve adapted an O. Henry story to name just a few. So let’s start with the idea. Where, when? I get great ideas or mediocre ideas, or I’m so glad I got any ideas at all, while I’m chopping vegetables with the most dangerous knife in my drawer, or when I’m driving a car. That’s when it mostly comes to me. How about you?

Ellen: Absolutely. I sometimes, I just sit there on my bed with my laptop. My husband has the living room as his office because his real office was too crowded with books for him to work in. So he had to move into the living room and I get the bedroom, which is fine. And I actually like it. And actually for “Metonym,” the almost completely false story behind the creation of Roget’s Thesaurus, I sat there and I thought, what is a wacky short play idea? Wacky. Wacky, short play. It came to my head and my play, a more recent play that was performed at the 10 by 10 Festival at the Barrington Stage was “Lizzie Borden Gets Engaged.“

Marion: Yeah, it was.

Ellen: And, oh, that’s right. You saw it, of course. And it’s hard to pin down where ideas come from, but sometimes I just sit there going, what would be an odd thing to write about and with a good title that is catchy. And oftentimes for the short plays, I come up with the title and then fill in the play and that seems to work often. For the longer plays of course, it’s much more heavily outlined, and I think it through, and I go back and forth. But for the short plays, it’s more of a ramp for me.

Marion: Well, I think a ramp is a wonderful word that liberates all of us. And I recently watched the 10 by 10 New Play Festival on the Barrington Stage and I loved it. And yours was my favorite of the 10, I have to say. And it gave me… Well, it gave me a lot to think about, I mean, lots of women, historical women get stamped with one word. In this case, oh, I don’t know, murderess.

Ellen: Murderer, murderess.

Marion: Murderer. And I’ve seen an opera about her, I saw the recent indie movie about her, I’ve read books about her. She’s been kind of a lifelong obsession, but I have to tell you, I had never considered dating like before-

Ellen: A comedic side?

Marion: So you say that you kind of, you let go with the short ones. What would make a great title? What would be a romp? And I think “Lizzie Borden Gets Engaged” is a romp. And… But such a welcome romp. I don’t know if you’re watching the show Dickinson on television, where we take on Emily Dickinson. I love it. And it’s… I’ve been begging people, anybody ever to just look at Emily differently because I just think this sort of withered, dressed in white spinster thing. It’s like, have you read her? No, that’s not who she was.

So they take her on with a sexual appetite and with real relationships. And it helps a lot to understand the work. So, women we know. In other play, you choose women with whom we have some knowledge. You let us listen in on Eleanor and Alice Roosevelt and they are as the title includes friends, cousins, and rivals and you have the meet at eight crucial moments in their lives. So one’s a Democrat, one’s a Republican. Why did… This is a few years ago. But why did you choose the now of then to put them in front of us? What was going on in the world that you said these two right now let’s listen in?

Ellen: In part, it’s their difference. In part, it’s their absolute difference. They couldn’t have disagreed on anything more. And cousins, I mean, we all don’t necessarily get along with our cousins, but it’s when diametrically opposed to them in every single aspect of life like Eleanor and Alice were… No, I don’t think so. Well, I haven’t seen it anyway. And the thing of it is I actually just, it was on the Urban Stages. Urban Stages in New York, did a sort of audio version of it. An abbreviated audio version of it. So it was just two women. We knocked it down to an hour long instead of its natural two hours. And the thing of it is, in American politics, these things never go away. The victories won never stay won completely. We thought voting rights was taken care of with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now… The voting rights act.

No, apparently it wasn’t. Not in Florida and Georgia and we have to keep litigating and fighting these things over and over again. It seems ridiculous, but that’s the way it is. So some of these topics are like weirdly evergreen. The difference between Democrats and Republicans, who will spend money for the common will and who will not spend it for on the common will. Who will… Can we give cash payments or tax reductions to regular working people or do we only do that to corporations and the very, very wealthy? Apparently these topics will never go away. And so it was for “Eleanor and Alice.”

Marion: Well, “Eleanor and Alice,” has been performed at a variety of places. It was at the Roosevelt Homestead National Historic site in New York’s Hudson valley, and it was at the Brooklyn Public Library. So let’s talk about that a bit. I don’t know if everybody understands that theater of course has been performed everywhere before. Suddenly we’re saying, “Oh, we’re going outdoors,” and “Oh, we’re going on the radio,” and “oh, we’re meeting in libraries.” And is this a good thing to be back everywhere, do you think in terms of performance?

Ellen: I think it is. I love that there’s audio. I think it’s very hard to watch a play on Zoom. I think it’s easier to listen to it on the radio. Because if you’re watching, your instinct is to want to see scenery and sets and costumes. But if you’re on Zoom, of course you don’t get that and movement. But if you’re listening, you fill in all that in your head and you’re not distracted by the lack of it. And good actresses as I’ve been lucky enough to have, really sell the audio. And you really feel like you are there. I don’t know. I guess Zoom will last, but I don’t know any performer who loves it. And I don’t know… Audio is different. And I don’t know any writer who loves it. I don’t think you’re giving the play it’s due on Zoom. Although audio, like old radio, I think you’re getting a lot from that.

Marion: I think you are. I think you’re required to bring something that… On Zoom, we think is kind of supplied, but it’s not, I’m not sure we’re experiencing the kind of catharsis that we do in live theater when it’s Zoom. I think that when we meet in a room with a bunch of strangers and we watch and listen and process our sort of emotional selves, we get that cleansing or exercise or whatever we get and we get that on the radio. But somehow I agree. There’s something about the Zoom thing that it’s not quite enough and it’s a little bit too much in the same way. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. I hadn’t figured that out before. I’m glad we figured that out here. That’s very helpful.

Ellen: I’m glad.

Marion: So let’s return to this stage for a moment though. I’ve only once witnessed a stranger reading something I wrote and it was in a Greek restaurant in Manhattan, when across the room, I watched someone read a piece I had written.

Ellen: Oh, that must be good.

Marion: It was wild. But, you kind of know about this. I mean, I suspect the Chinese or the Greeks have a word for this. I do not. There’s some fear, there are some… It’s more complex than just mere confirmation, but it remains a vivid moment for me. So, I’ve always wanted to ask a playwright this. You’re sitting in an audience, your words are being spoken on the stage by actors, with whom you’ve worked and the people in the audience are laughing in all the right places. What happens to you?

Ellen: I can’t explain what a great feeling it is. And when I was young and have a somewhat performative nature, I thought as a lot of people do. I wanted to be an actor, but I’m blabby but shy. So this is… It was a conundrum. But to hear people laughing at what comes out of your head and they’re supposed to be laughing. It’s just like, “Oh my God, they got it. Oh my God. I am funny. Oh, oh, this is intelligent writing.” It is such a kick and such an affirmation really that, Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah, maybe I kind of know what I’m doing with this. Maybe it is worthy of my time and attention and ambition to do this. It is a terrific, terrific feeling.

Marion: Oh, I hope so. It’s one of those things I think I’ve dreamed about almost. It must be very directly satisfying.

Ellen: Yes, it’s feasible. Yes. My husband, like you, who’s a writer he once saw somebody reading a book of his on the subway. Is that like the great New York story? And he went up to him and he said, “How do you like the book?” And the guy said, “Oh, I like it. And Kevin goes, “I wrote it.” And he looks at the author photos, “Ah, so you did!” It’s a great thing.

Marion: It’s a great thing. It’s a great thing. So, reading through your work, that the words dark comedic or absurd come to mind? Which means you might have had a field day during the Trump years when the material was just kind of flying. And I know you wrote on the couch, which floats the idea of Trump being in therapy with Freud if only. So talk to us about being in trying times and using those as places from which to create. A lot of people writing I think aren’t sure if we’re supposed to go onto the desk and wait for this to pass, grab it, use it. They feel like, well, I’m writing about it now, but it won’t be finished for six months or..” So you’ve got these short plays that you write and produce relatively quickly. They’ve got them in COVID and you’ve got them in Trump with Freud. So talk to us about grabbing and turning it around. Using the now and responding. What’s that like, and let’s get into that in terms of the artist’s responsibility too.

Ellen: Well, with Trump, it’s a double-edged sword. It was a double-edged sword. I wrote it, I think in 2017. So we’d already been in for a year or almost a year. And I thought it was hilarious and I kept laughing and laughing and there’s this sort of absurdist quality and part of it. And we had a woman playing Trump and with a giant, a huge red tie and like a clown, fright wig and stuff. And when we showed it at the emerging artists theater, I was among the few people who were laughing. It was too soon after the election and people were just still in pain. And even though it was showing Trump as an absurd figure, and part of the premises that he’s going to be impeached, you see, I predicted that. Oh, I knew that was going to happen. As soon as he was elected.

It’s like looking at all of his… The press secretaries. When Sean Spicer came in, I thought he won’t last. When Scaramucci came into town, he won’t last. There’s some things, some absurdities you can rightly predict, but the Trump play, I found it hilarious, but other people are just… I thought it was hilarious in it’s absurdism and I thought it would be a nice escape, just like looking forward to the day when he would be impeached. But people were still in too much pain and they couldn’t laugh at it. With the COVID, unfortunately, it’s gone on for so long. So there was time to write about it. Now I just saw somebody and I’m sorry, playwright, I don’t know your name, has written a full length play about COVID, which he or she, I think it’s a woman, has must have been working on from like day one to get it in good enough shape 15 months later.

So I didn’t… I wonder. I think a lot of these short COVID plays, like I wrote I guess two COVID plays. I can’t imagine there’ll be an audience for them afterwards, unless there’s some kind of backwards nostalgia for what happened. And I can’t, I don’t predict that. And I think most people won’t want to hear the words COVID 19 for a very long time. I suspect it would be like the flu was in 1918. I presume you couldn’t have had anything written about the flu in the twenties, even. You would have had to wait many more decades for that to be something people were willing to listen to. But if you can write short, then you can write things that pertain to the times in which we live. I’ll be curious to see how this new, full length play about the pandemic pans out.

I also wrote a monologue sort of based in the pandemic and that already got like listened to. It was performed and archived in this thing called the Fifth Avenue Theater. And so that… But it’s short. It’s four minutes I think. Anything else it’s going to have to encompass so much more than just COVID. It’s going to have to open itself up to other relationships. Trump relationships that were troubled before COVID and then COVID. It’s like 911 plays. There were a slew of nine 11 plays written, but I don’t think they’re performed much now. But it was such a traumatic moment writers had to write it down. You had to inscribe it.

Marion: And that’s okay that they’re not performed now. I mean, I think what you’re positing here is that you help us process it, get it on the page. If you’ve got an idea, get it on the page, get it down, use a form like the short play, the monologue that can be performed, that can go out there. You’re contributing to the conversation is what I try to tell people that I work with. And don’t start thinking about posterity. Don’t necessarily start thinking about posterity. How about we just try to contribute to the conversation that we’re having right now?

Ellen: Yeah. That’s well put. I think there’s a danger for all writers to think, Well, how will this play in 20 years? Don’t worry. Don’t worry about 20 years. Who knows what will happen in 20 years? Who knows what will happen in two years? Yeah. Write your play, write your memoir in the now. As it occurs to you now, and as you’re feeling it now. That’s good enough.

Marion: Yeah, I think so. And what seems fascinating to me is people say, oh, magazines are closing newspapers don’t run essays anymore. Blah, blah, blah. And I always say, no, actually this is the best time in the history of the world to get published, to get something out there. And when I went online and I was looking around about how one finds a play, I found NPX the National New Play Network. And if I’m reading this right, it’s a menu of playwrights and their plays. So is this how the world works right now? Do we go looking for a playwright or a topic online for a theater or a radio spot or a festival? Is that how somebody finds you and says, oh, I need a monologue on this. Or how is it that it works once you’ve got the work up and running and how do we locate you?

Ellen: In part, NPX is an exceedingly, a good source. I just got contacted a few weeks ago through NPX a play I have, the Metonym, a play about the Roget’s Thesaurus that was performed in Fairfield, Connecticut. So the people are getting opportunities that way. And there is another group called Playwrights’ Center. Like NPX has a subscription, but it’s not much. It’s a monthly subscription of maybe six or $7 a month. There’s another thing called Playwrights Center, also subscription, but also have a similar price. It’s not too much money and they posts submissions. NPX, you post your play, sometimes they post submission opportunities. Playwrights Center is not only post submission opportunities, there you can do online classes, and they have online opportunities. They have all kinds of things. They have suggestions. They have all kinds of things. And there’s another group called, I think it’s exclusively for New Yorkers.

It’s called NYCplaywrights dot org. These are three great submission places. MPX is more or less like a holding place that you can get submission opportunities from. The other two are exclusively submission opportunities. And with Playwright Center, PWC, other things as well. And, you can join online groups. There’s a group I belong to. I don’t know what their official name is. They call themselves bingers. twice a year, Playwrights Binge, maybe that’s it. Twice a year in March and September, they take 30 days. Everybody is… You can, you don’t have to. And it’s cost nothing. You submit. You sort of make a deal with yourself to submit at least one plate every day for 30 days. No, I don’t submit a play every day for 30 days. But what they do is, they… All the individuals send to the members of the group submission opportunities that they’ve routed out somehow.

Some are submission opportunities you have discovered on your own, but not all. And some are just things that aren’t appropriate for your writing or what you’re doing. And so you don’t have to submit to that. The downside of it is, that these places are then getting inundated by all the people on the Playwright’s Binge, who are submitting in those two months. But, people get hits from them and people report back, “Oh, I got a binge hit. This place in Florida is doing my play. This radio thing is doing my play.” And another thing that I highly recommend though, I poo-pooed it for many a year, writing groups. I poo-pooed it for many a year because when I went to graduate school and got my MA in creative writing and I wasn’t a playwright yet, I was writing short stories and a novel.

If you’ve confined yourself a good group and in New York, right now that everybody’s on Zoom, but I suspect every area has a playwriting group that you can be a part of. I never believed it until recently, but when you hear your play read out loud, it actually, not as a performance, just as a reading, as a casual reading in a small group or a large group of people, it actually does help you hear it. And when people comment, sometimes their comments are asinine and idiotic, but not all of them are. And some of them will like resonate with you. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. They’re right about that.”

Yeah. Like something you didn’t realize that you were thinking about it and then it highlights it to you. Yeah. That is stupid. Oh, that should be different. Oh, I didn’t make that connection. It makes a difference. And when I was in graduate school, one or two people were exceedingly good at critiquing plays and the rest were, hmm, okay. And this is the truth of any writing group. Some people you will like what they have to say, some people, your voice won’t match with what they want to hear. But it’s part of being a big girl and taking what you can from it and issuing what doesn’t work for you.

Marion: Absolutely. Well, these are really great pieces of advice. You’re talking about community, you’re talking about finding this calls for submissions online, you’re talking about finding alternative spaces that we didn’t… We thought everything had to be on the stage. And I have to say, I’m almost ashamed that I’ve been terribly glib about this for years. Having met just one, too many brain surgeons who tell me that when they retire, they’re going to become a writer and I’m not very nice to them.

I usually say, well, when I retire, I’m going to become a brain surgeon. And then I just kind of smile and walk away. But you’ve made me feel a lot more generous. And so, as we wrap this up, I just wonder if there’s anything else you would say to people who have this play idea on them and they would like to start it. And they’re chopping vegetables with their most expensive German knife and they’ve got someone in the other room maybe to call out to and say, “What if Lizzie Borden gets engaged?” And that person says, “Ellen already did that play, but keep thinking, honey.” Anything else that you would like to toss out as advice for everybody before we go?

Ellen: When you have an idea, take a walk or chop vegetables. Because as you move away from your computer, things pop into your head. It doesn’t happen every time I take a walk. But it happens sometime working on a play or stock or something like that. Take a walk. Something will click in — or chop vegetables.

Marion: Thank you. Thank you, Ellen. I’m so grateful for you.

Ellen: I’m grateful for you, Marion. Thank you so much.

Marion: It was a joy. The writer is Ellen Abrams. Catch up with her work online. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorena Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a story review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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