It wasn't necessarily a Fed 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 Adjmi is my name, and playwright is my game.

Adjmi 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 Adjmi.

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. It's some of the most

psychologically astute writing you'll ever hear on a stage.

And then there's the music. Stereophonic is not a musical, not even close, but the music says

a lot of things the characters aren't able to. And the music was written by Will Butler,

a longtime member of the band Arcade Fire. Last year, as we were trying to make a series about the strange economics of the live

theater industry, Stereophonic had just moved to Broadway from a well-received off-Broadway

...