In a bit of a hat trick, writer Anna Ziegler has new plays premiering in London and New York at the moment.
At London’s Donmar Warehouse, there’s Evening All Afternoon, a two-character jewel box of a piece about a woman and her teenage stepdaughter in the UK during the pandemic. At New York’s Public Theater, there’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), Ziegler’s take on the Sophocles play, starring Tony Shalhoub and Celia Keenan-Bolger.
Ziegler, who graduated from Yale and St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, is perhaps best known for her play, Photograph 51, about the X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of the structure DNA. Nicole Kidman famously starred in a production over ten years ago in London; Ziegler is currently working on a film adaptation that Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) plans to direct.
Here, Ziegler talks about what it’s like to have new work opening on both sides of the Atlantic.
How does it happen that you have a play in London and another one in New York at the same time?
Mostly by accident. Theater moves slowly until suddenly it doesn’t, and projects that have been developing for years can end up landing at the same time. These two plays were written at different moments and for different reasons. They found their collaborators and their homes on their own timelines. The fact that they’re now running in parallel is honestly a little surreal. The real challenge, of course, was rehearsing them simultaneously! But now that that part’s done, I’ll admit there’s something very cool about having two such different pieces out in the world at the same time, in a sort of conversation with each other across continents.
What was the genesis of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)?
I didn’t read Antigone in high school. I didn’t touch Sophocles’ play until I was in my 30s, when a theater in California commissioned me to adapt it. I read the original alongside Jean Anouilh’s adaptation and was moved by both. At first I stayed close to the original story—about Antigone defending the body of her brother. Then a friend read a draft and asked how it was relevant to me, to women, to our world. I had to start over.
What about Evening All Afternoon?
That play draws on people I’ve known, stories I’ve been told, poems and plays I’ve loved. Its title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, and to me the phrase captures the slippery, non-linear way time actually functions in our lives. There’s a touch of Hamlet in the play—ghosts on rooftops warning their children to beware of a parent’s new partner. It’s a more intimate piece, about family, memory, and the stories we construct about ourselves over time. What surprises me, looking at both plays together, is how much they share. Both grapple with motherhood: what it feels like to be a mother, to lose a mother, to contemplate becoming one..
Is it better to debut a play in New York, London, or somewhere else?
I’m a New Yorker, so there’s an added intensity to opening here—so many people in my life will see it. My family, my close friends, my son’s Hebrew school teacher, my mother’s tennis partner. That’s wonderful and terrifying in equal measure. In London, there’s a little more breathing room. The culture of theater-making also feels slightly looser there, more relaxed, with a bit more rehearsal time built in. Though I won’t pretend I didn’t need my customary two glasses of wine to get through previews there either. Truthfully? I don’t think one city is better than the other. Except that I’m from New York and have always been obsessed with London. Their critical landscape also feels a bit more democratic—which makes it a kinder environment in which to debut work. So I guess my answer is probably…Wichita?
Celia Keenan-Bolger and Susannah Perkins in Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) (Joan Marcus)
