“What Do You
Do With a BA in English?”
Just Ask Jeff Whitty
by Gillian Granoff
When Jeff Whitty, the wildly
successful writer of Avenue Q, sat down
to talk about his path as a writer, it became abundantly clear that the trajectory
of his career read more like a Jack Kerouac novel than the libretto for a Broadway
musical. As he approaches, I am immediately struck by his earnestness. Despite
his enormous success, he is refreshingly humble. He does not carry himself
with the airs of someone who is commissioned to write screenplays for A-list
celebrities, and who is courted by Broadway royalty like Tony Kushner, but
resembles in many ways, the mid-western sincerity of an upbringing in Coos
Bay, Oregon. The self-described “subversive” is one of six children.
His father, an attorney, imparted an attention to detail while his mother was
the creative force. Creativity clearly permeated his childhood home: one brother
is a jazz musician in New York and a sister is creative in public relations.
His early mentors are a high school teacher, “a wildly liberal feminist” and
a history teacher who was a “ruthless critic and thinker” and instilled
in him the importance of revisions. Whitty evinced irony early when he wrote
and performed a play in 6th grade entitled The Cow That Smiled, A Murder Mystery, a play about a cow that did not exist. In 1993, after
receiving his bachelors in English from the University of Oregon, Whitty came
to New York to pursue acting. He traveled via the Green Tortoise a “sixties
throw-back” which enabled him to see the United States along with other
young students in an empty school bus with beds in the back. In New York he
continued to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He waited tables
at Joe Allen’s, where he networked with many big wigs in the theatre
industry. He recalls nostalgically
the scripts of bombed shows that wallpapered the restaurant.
In 1994–97, Whitty received an MFA in acting at NYU’s Tisch School
of the Arts, where he credits the skills he learned in acting school with making
him a better writer. For example, his intuitive grasp of dialogue is something
he cultivated from his training as an actor, not a writer. After graduating
and writing a series of plays he describes as “sentimental and sincere,” he
took a big artistic risk and wrote something “just to amuse myself.” Over
lunch with a friend he came up with the idea to write a parody of the Laramie
project, concocting a tragedy set in a small town in Washington called The Plank Project. It deals with an 1100-pound person who falls through
a plank, into a well, and dies during liposuction surgery. His irreverent sense
of humor and artistic risk taking paid off when it attracted the attention of now agent, Peter Franklin
of the William Morris Agency. “The
day Peter took me on as a client was the day that changed my life.” Five
months later, Franklin presented him with the opportunity to work with the
producers of Rent in writing a musical starring puppets. The play was Avenue
Q and Whitty wrote the libretto (book). “People
always say to me that it must have been such a fun show to write, but it was
hard,” Whitty states candidly. Despite
the conflicts and artistic differences they faced, Whitty and his collaborators,
Robert Lopez and Jeff Marks, won a Tony award.
The success of Avenue Q has opened
many doors for Whitty. His upcoming
projects include a pilot for a new Fox series, which involves a car chase loosely
based on the Dukes of Hazard, and a film project starring Jennifer Anniston, This
American Life, based on the life of a
33-year-old international private investigator and adventurer in Los Angeles,
who has almost finished her Ph.D. Other projects in the works for the prolific
writer is a parody of Hedda Gabler and a dark children’s musical. Whitty gets inspiration as a writer
by acting in the plays of his contemporaries and the work of those he “envies.” Among
the writers he admires are his friend Amy Freed, and his “idol” Craig
Lucas, the writer of Reckless.
He credits Tony Kushner, the writer of Angels in America, and Steven Sondheim for teaching him to use comedy
and laughter to engage the audience in the deeper emotional complexity of the
work. He vociferously objects to work that tries to “broadcast how an
audience should respond.” It should come as no surprise that his preference
is for writing devices like satire and parody. He deplores sentimentality in
his own work and the works of others and is candid in his opinion that Show
Girls is a better movie than Mystic
River.
His advice for aspiring writers
is simple. “Read, read,
read and expose yourself to everything and anything in the field.” He
recommends keeping a journal, and not being afraid to put yourself out there.
Whitty is unwilling to give a
recipe for success and is reluctant to comment on his own. “The day I
gave up on my notion of success was the day I really began to work well as
a writer,” he declares. He does recommend a well-rounded diet, which
combines reading the classics with trashy literature, and finding
mentors in a range of fields. “Writers who only know writers will miss
something ineffable.” He warns that talent will only go so far. You have
to take risks. Most important, Whitty says, is hard work, commitment and “putting
yourself out there.” Emotional honesty in characters, he believes, only
comes from living, and exposing oneself to everything. It is the bumps in the
road, not the paved paths that yield true creativity. “I didn’t
mature as a writer until I had gone through a lot of hard knocks, because at
a certain point, your sense of humor and irony about yourself is only useful
after you’ve been through a certain amount of anguish and you come to
terms with what your expectations are versus the reality.” So what do
you do with a BA in English?” This
telling question from the lyrics of
Avenue Q’s central song, are, in Whitty’s opinion “the
essence of Avenue Q.” At the end of the interview with Jeff Whitty, I
still am still left without a simple answer, but assuaged by the notion that
perhaps, it is the question not the answer that counts.#
