Burning Boy Scribe David West Read on Reliving His High School Nightmares at Roundabout Underground

About the Author:
David West Read already has an enviable educational pedigree, and the young playwright is quickly amassing a body of work to back it up. His NYU masters' thesis play Happy Face was part of the 2010 Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Repertory and had a staged reading directed by Sam Gold (Circle Mirror Transformation). Another play, The Dream of the Burning Boy, in which the sudden death of a high school overachiever tortures the dreams of a doting teacher, was workshopped at the 2010 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Now Read will get his first full New York production when Burning Boy bows at the Roundabout Underground on February 25. The talented young writer recently reflected on this milestone experience with Broadway.com, including why it’s worth reliving his own less-than-blissful high school days to see this story come to life.

I’ve been in and out of several educational institutions since graduating from high school almost a decade ago—the University of Toronto for my B.A., New York University for my M.F.A., and now the Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School—but still, it’s nightmares from high school that haunt me on a regular basis.

I’m late for my first period class. I haven’t done my math homework. I’ve somehow forgotten to attend my 12th grade history class—“Canada from a North American Perspective”—for an entire semester. (In reality, I had perfect attendance, and still…I remember nothing. Which, fortunately, has had absolutely no effect on my life in the United States.)

So it’s understandable that the construction of a beautifully detailed high school classroom onstage at the Roundabout Underground has me feeling slightly more anxious than usual. Beyond the fact that The Dream of the Burning Boy is my first major production in New York, every time I walk into the theater I am immediately transported back to that absolutely terrifying period of my life that was high school.

Set designer Lee Savage and lighting designer Ben Stanton have worked tirelessly to ensure that every component is perfect: cramped student desks, chairs and writing surfaces forever fused together, each meticulously vandalized and graffitied with profanity and pictures of genitalia. (I personally have been instrumental in realizing this last detail.) Daily homework assignments posted on dusty blackboards, nearly extinct in favor of ultra-sleek whiteboards. And those horrible fluorescent overhead lights, which are nothing if not flattering to our attractive cast.

Add to that the sounds of lockers slamming, buzzers between periods and hallway chatter—conjured and expertly integrated by lighting designer Jill BC DuBoff—as well as contemporary costumes tailored to the individual styles of each high school student—conceived by costume designer Jessica Wegener Shay—and the portrait is complete.

The tiled floors of our classroom extend beyond the first row of the audience, and as I sit in rehearsal, watching a scene in which English teacher Larry Morrow (played by the brilliant Reed Birney) speaks to his class, I have the distinct feeling of being a voyeur on this all-too-familiar episode. The young actors Jake O’Connor, Jessica Rothenberg and Alexandra Socha are no more than a few years out of high school themselves, and they look so young, especially when they shave. (I am speaking here mostly of Jake, not Jessica and Alexandra.) Reed has a commanding voice and a great pedagogical air that makes me wish he had been my English teacher (though he knows virtually nothing about Dante’s Divine Comedy).

It has been more than two years since I started The Dream of the Burning Boy in my first playwriting class at NYU, and as we begin previews, more than a year after its first reading at the Roundabout Theatre, I feel like I have already learned so much. Working with the support of the wonderful staff at the Roundabout, and the many talented individuals around me, the process of taking Burning Boy from page to stage has been a truly educational experience. And unlike high school, it’s one that won’t give me nightmares.