What’s it like inside the mind of James Lapine, celebrated playwright and a winner of this year’s Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre? It’s a whimsical, free-flowing place where anything could become the spark for his next project. Lapine followed a characteristically meandering path into the theater but stuck around, following his creative impulses until they led him to another great of the theater world: composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Their creative partnership proved fruitful: there was the Pulitzer Prize–winning Sunday in the Park with George, a play about the Post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. And there was the Tony Award–winning Into the Woods, a show about the dark underbelly of fairy tales that was made into a film and has been performed everywhere from Broadway to school auditoriums.
When Lapine set off on his own, he wrote Act One, a show based on playwright Moss Hart’s autobiography, which he developed on Martha’s Vineyard – a place Lapine has come to every year for nearly four decades to relax, go out for ice cream, and dream up what’s next. In a recent conversation with Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, Lapine talked about his career, his relationship with Sondheim, and his Jungian studies. An edited transcript follows.
Martha’s Vineyard Magazine: How did you, someone who majored in Middle Eastern history in undergrad and studied photography in graduate school, first begin directing plays?
James Lapine: Okay, you got some time? [laughs] Well, I wasn’t initially that interested in the theater. I was hired to design the Yale theater magazine and eventually to work there full-time. At the school, in January, everyone did something outside their area of expertise. My students, who I was teaching graphic design to, they found this Gertrude Stein play called Photograph. Well, the title was up my alley. After doing it in New Haven, my girlfriend at the time said we should do the show in New York. So we went to New York, we found a loft – and this is how hokey it was – we put up signs all around SoHo to find our cast. We had the cashier at the health food store, my yoga teacher from Yale. But the lead critic for The New York Times ended up giving it a rave review, and, suddenly, I had a career in the theater.
MVM: I’ve seen your early work described as experimental or avant-garde. What inspired you back then and what were you trying to accomplish?
JL: Well, it was often visually driven. I had also been very into Jungian studies, and there was a haunting story he tells in his book about a girl who had twelve dreams at the age of ten or so. Her father was a psychiatrist, and he gave Jung a record of her dreams, but he didn’t tell him whose dreams they were. Jung went away and came back and said these were the dreams of an older person approaching death. And then the little girl died about six months later. I was so chilled when I read that story that I wanted to do something with it, so the first thing I did was this play, Twelve Dreams. I enacted the dreams and wrote surrounding scenes to set them up. That was the first play I wrote.
MVM: You met Stephen Sondheim in 1982 and your first collaboration, Sunday in the Park with George, won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Tell me what those years were like.
JL: I’m of the hippie age, and during the Vietnam War, everything was very much about living on the edge. I wasn’t a careerist. I wasn’t career-driven. I was just on a ride. I was driven to do things that interested me and excited me. When I met Sondheim, I had only seen one of his shows, because I didn’t really go to Broadway shows. We were introduced by a producer because I had an idea for a musical I wanted to do. Sondheim, oddly enough, had come to the two other shows I had done and said he’d love to meet. He didn’t want to do the show that I wanted to do, but he said he’d talk to me about something else if I had any other ideas.
So, I brought him a box of images and we would get stoned, sit on the floor, and pull out a picture of this, a picture of that, a photograph of somebody famous. I had a picture of Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. We just started talking about it, and I was pointing out to him how no one was looking at each other, and the disproportionate size of the characters, blah, blah, but he was totally intrigued, so we started talking about why it could be an interesting musical.
MVM: In his review of your book, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Alan Cumming said he thinks people are either artists or scientists, regardless of what medium they work in. He considered Sondheim to be more of a scientist and you to be more of an artist. What do you think about these classifications? Do you think he was right?
JL: Yeah, I think that’s accurate, actually. We have two very different minds and we worked so differently. When you ask about how we did that show in two years, it was about that difference. I just throw up things, I get on a roll, and he’s more regimented. There was a nineteen-year age difference, but somehow we balanced each other in an interesting way. He also came from a very privileged background and I’m from Ohio. My parents weren’t college-educated; I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. But we were very curious about each other’s lives. I was never bored; we never ran out of things to talk about. We had a lot of fun; we were always laughing.
MVM: Your musical Into the Woods explores some of the darker sides of popular fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Why were you interested in that aspect of stories like Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk?
JL: I think it had to do with all my Jungian studies. Jung saw fairy tales as being kinds of dreams, because they are. You know, if you go into any culture, you will find a Cinderella story. That’s so amazing. But I really just followed my gut. I think what’s good about Sondheim and me is I followed my gut, and he followed his brain. Then I got into his gut, and my brain got into his brain, and somehow we connected.
MVM: How did you feel when you learned you’d won a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre?
JL: Old. Very, very old. [laughs] In the announcement, they said I’d had eighteen Broadway shows. I said to my wife, “That’s not possible,” but I’ve had eighteen Broadway shows. The thing is, I never think about the past; I just think about the future. I think of the next projects, I never think about what I’ve done.
I felt mixed, I have to say. Obviously, it was flattering in a big way – and mildly depressing because I thought, “Am I being sent out? Am I being put out to pasture now?” As in “He’s been great, okay, bye!”
MVM: Well, when you think of the future, what else would you like to do?
JL: I have one more project I want to do, that I hopefully will do next season. It’s been one I wanted to do forever, by Edward Albee: The Goat. He was somebody I knew and was influential to me. I don’t know after that. I want to travel. There are places in the world I’ve never gotten to. I want to follow my gut.
MVM: Tell me about your connection to Martha’s Vineyard. When did you first come to the Island and what kept you coming back?
JL: My wife’s grandfather had a house here since the mid-1930s. I was not a Vineyard person; I was not a water person. I’m the proverbial fish out of water here, but slowly but surely, we got hooked. I came to love the water. I came to love swimming. It was sort of transformative for me, actually, coming here. It was one of those things where we came for a week, and then maybe ten days. At first, I didn’t know a soul but, then I finally went to the [Martha’s Vineyard] Playhouse, started realizing Julie Taymor was down there, and well, I knew Julie from New York. I realized, “Oh, there are people here I actually know.” Now we spend three months here in the summer. So it was little by little but now it’s been thirty-five, moving on to forty years that we’ve been coming.
MVM: Where do you like to go while here?
JL: Besides the ice cream store? I love to ride my bike. I go to the Playhouse and the Vineyard Arts Project. That place is incredible. I came and developed shows there.
MVM: Do you think there’s anything about being on the Island that’s especially conducive to your work?
JL: Getting out of New York is always good for your work, no matter what you do. Though New York is also good for your work in another way. I just think there’s a chill energy about the Vineyard that makes people relax. There’s no pressure, and when you do a reading or something, you don’t have this sense of people making judgments about what you’re doing. It’s a place to work on things.
