If you’re ever tempted to offer playwright Theresa Rebeck an idea for a new play, maybe hold off. She has quite enough of those as it is.
“A play is like a license to explore things that my curiosity is really piqued by. I have a lot of curiosity,” she says. “I have a lot of things on my mind and a lot of curiosity.”
This fall, New York City has become Rebeck’s playwriting playground. She’s directing her own work “Dig” at 59E59 Theaters, and her “I Need That” has landed on Broadway starring Danny DeVito and his daughter Lucy.
“I Need That” is Rebeck’s 21st professional production in New York and her fifth on Broadway, making her easily the most-produced female playwright of her generation on Broadway.
“A friend of mine said to me one time, ‘Well, there’s no question the muse is with you.’ And I thought, ‘That’s an interesting way to put it,’” says Rebeck, laughing.
Fate brought these two plays together, a combination of the pandemic and waiting for stages to open. Both plays, at their heart, explore the fraught relationships between fathers and daughters. There’s even a moment in “I Need That” when two of the three characters talk about gardening, an obvious theme of “Dig.”
“The productions overlapped in a way that was startling,” says Rebeck.
“Somebody asked me at one point what I was trying to say about father-daughter relationships. And I was like, ‘Actually, nothing.’ They were not meant to be presented as a block. I don’t mind that they are. But I wrote them seven years apart.”
Rebeck’s plays often contain mysteries — stolen money, a secret stamp collection, an inheritance, a personal lie — as well as fast, funny and profane dialogue. She wants there to “be blood on the floor. I want it to be a visceral experience.”
“There’s always a sort of muscularity to the storytelling,” she says. “More and more I’m overlapping comedy with tragedy, but most of my plays are comedies. And I think there’s also a sound to the language that is recognizable.”
Rebeck, who created the backstage Broadway TV soap opera “Smash” for NBC, is the kind of playwright who writes for actors, and she was in her element giving notes to the cast of “Dig” before a recent performance.
She congratulated one actor for finding her way through a scene, another for her “pure” approach. She applauded a third for his decision to tuck in his shirt onstage, which created peals of laughter. She suggested to another that she let a scene hang — “Give it a little air.”
“That’s it, mostly. I felt strongly that the whole week was, to my mind a triumph,” she told the group. “It’s a big lift this play, and there’s an emotional availability that everyone has to provide and you guys are wonderful, just great.”
“Dig,” set in a dying plant store in a dying urban neighborhood, made its premiere in 2019 at the Dorset Theatre Festival in Vermont. But Rebeck is not averse to tweaking her script right up until opening night in New York.
When Megan, the neighborhood screw-up, mocks the shop owner’s passivity with a customer, the line was: “Wow. Put your heart into it. Get behind it. Sell those plants.” Rebeck had initially used “flowers” instead of “plants,” but changed it back after “flowers” triggered laughter.
“Flowers is better,” she says after the note session. “It’s great not to be precious about your stuff, to just go, ’OK, I was wrong about that. Do it this other way.’ I have no idea why ‘flowers’ is a funnier word.”
