641. What Does It Cost to Lead a Creative Life?

641. 过上创意生活需要付出多少代价?

Freakonomics Radio

2025-07-18

46 分钟
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For years, the playwright David Adjmi was considered “polarizing and difficult.” But creating Stereophonic seems to have healed him. Stephen Dubner gets the story — and sorts out what Adjmi has in common with Richard Wagner.   SOURCES:David Adjmi, author and playwright.  RESOURCES:"The West End is enjoying a theatre revival. Can Broadway keep up?" by Daniel Thomas (Financial Times, 2025).Lot Six: A Memoir, by David Adjmi (2020).Stereophonic, (2023).  EXTRAS:"How Is Live Theater Still Alive?" by Freakonomics Radio (2025)."How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway," by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
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  • It wasn't necessarily a fait accompli that I would have this kind of hit or anything like that.

  • I was taken to task by the critics and I was considered really polarizing and difficult.

  • Let's back up for a second.

  • Please say your name and what you do.

  • David Ajmey is my name and Playwright is my game.

  • Ajme has been a playwright for a few decades now.

  • His work was typically staged in regional or repertory or experimental theaters,

  • but never under the much brighter lights of Broadway or the West End.

  • That changed last year with a play he wrote called Stereophonic.

  • Stereophonic is a play about a dysfunctional family and art making and about the struggle to become an artist.

  • That's another way of saying that Stereophonic is a play about the mind of David Ajme.

  • I always work off of tropes in the culture,

  • but then it's always really a way for me to talk about me.

  • The plot of Stereophonic is so slender that it barely sounds like a plot.

  • A five-piece band is struggling to record their second album.

  • The band very much resembles Fleetwood Mac, at least superficially.

  • There are two sound engineers also,

  • and the entire play takes place in California recording studios in the late 1970s.

  • That's it.

  • But that slender plot supports an entire universe of emotion.