Creative Writing alum finds niche in playwrighting
By Lindsey Kennedy
Rajiv Joseph didn’t quite know what he wanted to do with his life when he first came to Miami, but a desire to take Introduction to Creative Writing led him to become a successful playwright of four off-Broadway plays and a fifth play which will debut in Los Angeles this May.
His talent for words and storytelling through a handful of play productions (Huck & Holden, All This Intimacy, The Leopard and the Fox, Animals Out of Paper, and the upcoming Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) has helped him land prestigious awards, like the Vineyard Theatre’s 2008 Paula Vogel Award, presented annually to an emerging playwright of exceptional promise.
The playwright recently found out he also received the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant along with the Center Theatre Group for Outstanding New American Play for his latest play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. This play is set to appear at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles in 2009. (Update (5/19/09): Read the LA Times review of the play here.)
Joseph’s ever-growing popularity and fame can all be linked back to a 30-minute conversation about Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” It was this encounter that inspired the 1996 Miami graduate to become a creative writing major—and to stick with it. Like many undergraduates, Joseph thought he would just change his major when he eventually figured out what he wanted to do. However, he wasn’t prepared for one of his English professors to sit him down and begin discussing Carver’s work with him.
“I knew right then and there I was going to be a creative writing major. He kind of seduced me into it,” said Joseph, laughing.
Joseph graduated from Miami sure that he wanted to pursue a writing career, but he felt like he needed more life experience. Staying true to a dream he’d had since his high school days in Cleveland, Joseph joined the Peace Corps and spent three-and-a-half years in West Africa.
“That was really the experience that transformed me, I think, into being a writer,” he said. “I was writing in my journal every day.”
During his first year in Africa, he wrote six short stories—the most he’d ever written in that amount of time. Even so, Joseph felt like something was lacking.
“At Miami, I always knew I could write, but I just had a hard time with fiction,” he said. When he wrote fiction, he’d often think of writers that he admired and make an attempt to imitate their styles.
After the Peace Corps, Joseph settled in New York and got a job in the corporate world. When he and half his company were laid off after 9/11, he fully embraced his passion for writing as a graduate student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Initially honing in on screenwriting, Joseph soon realized that his creative needs were better satisfied by playwriting.
“When I write a play, even in early drafts that I know aren’t going to be very good, I feel very free,” he said. “I enjoy the process mentally.”
Writing plays was less intimidating than writing short stories.
“The truth was when I started writing plays, I was so unfamiliar with theater that I had no one to imitate and no one to hold myself up against,” said the 34-year-old. “I felt like I was free to do whatever. That was very liberating.”
After earning his MFA from NYU in 2004, Joseph entered a play he’d written as a grad student in the Mentor Project, a program for new playwrights, at Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village. Out of 300 entries, Joseph’s Huck & Holden was one of three plays chosen for production. Its run was so successful that Cherry Lane put it in its regular season the following year, gaining Joseph more exposure and critical attention. As a result, the play was picked up for production at the Black Dahlia Theatre in Los Angeles.
Joseph said that his inspiration often comes from little stories found on the back pages of newspapers and random happenings in his life. Life’s random moments led to Animals Out of Paper, produced last summer at New York City’s Second Stage Theatre Uptown.
“I was on a Greyhound bus in the middle of the night at the time, and the woman sitting next to me was doing origami,” said Joseph.
“I started researching it and realized it was a fascinating field with a huge subculture that no one really knows about.” Animals Out of Paper tells the story of three origami artists and their unique relationship with each other.
Besides writing plays, Joseph teaches an essay-writing course at NYU. He hopes one day to make a living strictly from playwriting, though, and thinks about possibly venturing into screenwriting and television writing.
Wherever his success leads him, Joseph’s talent and passion for playwriting will always be linked to those 30 minutes talking about writing with his professor. He finished that conversation with a better grasp on his calling in life.
“I remember very fondly my classmates and teachers at Miami because I felt there was a real sense of community there—a community of writers that thought deeply about literature and poetry,” he said. “That, as my foundation, led me forward.”