Playwright Pulls Back the Curtains of His Life in New Memoir

Born in Brooklyn and now living in Los Angeles, award-winning playwright David Adjmi (“Stunning,” “Marie Antoinette” and “The Evildoers,” among others) is a shining exemplar of a certain variant of the American Dream. A clue is given at the very outset of “Lot Six: A Memoir” when he refers to both “my shrinks” and “classmates and teachers from my yeshiva” and when he recalls how his childhood experience of the Broadway stage inspired a longing to achieve “intensity and greatness” in his own life.

From an early age, his mother was his “ambassador to the outside world,” driving him into Manhattan to visit museums, theaters and “the lobbies of great hotels.” (Indeed, she figures prominently and crucially throughout Adjmi’s account of his own life story: “I schlepped you everywhere with me,” she tells him during a half-tragic, half-comic argument about whether he had a happy childhood.) Thanks to his mother, Adjmi soon recognized what mattered most to him: “Nature affronted me; I wanted culture,” Adjmi writes. “I developed an almost worship craving for anything urban, which I associated with God.”

All of these experiences are recalled in an extraordinary rich narrative that runs along parallel tracks —  Adjmi describes both what he saw and what he felt with equal mastery. For example, he describes a performance of “Sweeney Todd” at length and with the detail and precision of a seasoned theater critic. He confesses that the “raw grief and desperation” he saw on the stage “sickened and terrified” him. And yet he learned something about himself: “ ‘Sweeney Todd’ made me physically sick, but somehow the ugliness in it was exquisite,” he writes. “It was like a magic trick: the ugliness was made into something achingly beautiful.”

At the heart of Adjmi’s identity was his sense of being an outsider, which is a loose translation of the Arabic word that is the root of his last name. He vaguely understood that his ancestors had been exiled from Spain and found refuge in the Middle East, but “I could never grasp where I was from, what I was, and no one in my family bothered to explain my own provenance to me.” He came to understand that his family may have belonged to the Syrian-Jewish community of New York but only its “wafting margins.” The title of his book refers to a term used in among discount retailers (and applied to David by his family), a term that he understood to mean “something freakish …, someone who had no place in the world.”

At the heart of Adjmi’s identity was his sense of being an outsider, which is a loose translation of the Arabic word that is the root of his last name.

“Lot Six,” then, is the wholly compelling and endearing account of Adjmi’s struggle to find his place in the world. He wondered why the Bible was so highly regarded when “it didn’t make me want to bolt up and start singing or dancing or sobbing the way I did watching ‘The Wiz’ and ‘42nd Street.’ ” The old men in the synagogue “loved hashem so much they seemed like they might combust into flames,” but Adjmi realized that he felt only “potentially holy.” He turned to television to “[locate] myself in identifiable fragments from various shows, forging a sentient life in the kiln of popular culture.”

Adolescence presented even more vexing mysteries. “The line between religious etiquette and natural sexual curiosity felt unclear,” he explains. On his first date, “I knew I was supposed to initiate a kiss or hug, but I had no impulse to do it.” By this point in the book, we are not surprised to learn that the author was more interested in his male classmates: “I fantasized about Ralph during class and hated myself for my fantasies.” A new Broadway play attracted his attention: “The whole ‘La Cage’ scenario seemed a bellwether of something, but I wasn’t sure what.”

Adjmi enrolled at USC, where he found that he “hated the broad boring lectures in giant corporate amphitheaters” but enjoyed the movies he watched in a class called “Introduction to Film.” He also discovered the gay sex scene in West Hollywood whose “severity and brutality” attracted him: “[I]t felt like life,” he confides. Rejecting the “stupid football games and vapid Californians with their tinted sun visors,” he moved back to the East Coast to attend Sarah Lawrence College, but his search for an authentic self was not over yet. “I collected new traits and mannerisms: an empty series of gestures I could unpack at will, the way a child unpacks toys from a chest,” he writes. “I wore my arrogance like an insignia.”

The book reaches its apogee when Adjmi embraces the destiny that was predicted in early childhood: “I officially decided to become a playwright.” His problems did not evaporate, and the chronic stress and dysfunction within his family only grew worse, but he had come to know himself. “I didn’t need to relax, and in fact prized my agitation as a kind of survivalist wakefulness.” And the very act of writing a play was revelatory.

“I felt myself surrender to the chaos, the cacophony of surging detail,” he writes. “it was like a flame was lit from inside me that burned away the mundane borders of the self, the particulate matter I identified as me.”

Adjmi’s new play, “Stereophonic,” will premiere on Broadway in 2021. In “Lot Six,” we understand what that signal success really means to the author. “I believed my life was meaningless, that I was worthless in the eyes of the world,” he concludes. “But maybe the task of my life was to make a story, so I could give it to [my mother] — like one of those sword-bearing travelers from mythology, returning back home bearing a gift.” 

At one moment in his beautiful book, he describes how he “could feel my own flame of integrity burn brighter and brighter.” The reader, too, will discern the “flame of integrity” that Adjmi seeks and ultimately finds. From the first page, and on every page, Adjmi’s candor and good humor wins us over completely.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal.