Zayd Dohrn is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays, including Sick, Magic Forest Farm, Reborning, and Outside People, have been produced and developed across the country, including at Manhattan Theatre Club, Berkshire Theatre Festival, MCC, Marin Theatre Company, The Public (SPF), Naked Angels, South Coast Rep, The Vineyard, Southern Rep, Kitchen Dog, The Lark, and New York Theatre Workshop. He earned his MFA from NYU and was a Lila Acheson Wallace Fellow at Juilliard. He received Lincoln Center’s Lecomte du Nouy Prize, Theatre Masters’ Visionary Playwrights Award, the Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award, and the Sky Cooper New American Play Prize, as well as residencies and/or commissions from Ars Nova, Alchemy Theatre, Dallas Theatre Center, The Stella Adler Studio, and the Royal Court Theatre of London. He is currently writing screenplays for American Film Company and Vox3 Films as well as the adaption of Rachel DeWoskin’s memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing for HBO with DeWoskin (Dohrn’s wife and writing partner) and Eat Pray Love screenwriter Jennifer Salt. He teaches playwriting and screenwriting at Northwestern University.
Zayd on...
The Process
I try to be disciplined about it and write for around 3 hours every day. If I leave myself a whole day to work, I just end up wasting time. I usually write in the morning, teach in the afternoon, play with my daughters in the evening, stay up with my wife at night. That’s a good day.
Satisfaction Getting to spend some time in my own head.
Knowing I don't know if it ever feels exactly viable-- and I know I never had a moment when I was suddenly sure I could make it work. But there were a lot of little moments-- the first production, the first movie option, the first really great collaboration-- when it started to feel more like a career and less like a hobby.
Inspirations
So many... In film and TV: The Wire, Goodfellas, The Battle of Algiers, Boogie Nights, Do The Right Thing, Twin Peaks. In theatre: anything and everything by Ibsen, Brecht, Caryl Churchill or Tony Kushner. Plus novelists and poets like Tolstoy, G.M. Hopkins, Joyce, Faulkner, Anne Carson, and Chris Ware.
The First Time
My first play was produced in a tiny theater in Boston. There were cockroaches crawling up and down the walls next to the audience, and the actors had to stop for several minutes between each scene to move the furniture on the set, but it was a brilliant production. There's nothing more fun than seeing your work done by great actors and feeling like it's really working. That's what keeps us all coming back for more.
Advice
I wish somebody had told me to enjoy what was happening in the moment. It's easy, as a writer, to get fixated on the next thing, and to forget that the fun part is actually doing the work.
Dohrn's play "SICK" will be published by Samuel French in November, 2012
For more information on Zayd's past, present, and future endeavors, check here
