To interview Chicago playwright Andrew Hinderaker is to meet a humorous guy, one so appreciative of a good Laffy Taffy punchline that he'll write it into a play. The audience cracks up when a lost-soul character, Norm, remembers wooing his girlfriend with the candy-wrapper joke: "What do you call a fish with no eyes?" The answer? "Fshhhh."
So it's a bit startling to catalog the subject matter of Hinderaker's critically acclaimed plays: suicide, cancer, school shootings, domestic abuse. The contrasting penchants for dark material and light wit make playgoers simultaneously laugh and think.
Norm, played by Private Practice actor Michael Patrick Thornton, is a customer on the verge of killing himself in Suicide, Incorporated. The play's world premiere played to sold-out crowds at Chicago's Gift Theatre in June and July, and an additional run was added from August 20 to September 12. In October, Stage Left Theatre in Chicago will produce Kingsville, about a community that, after surviving a part-Columbine, part-Virginia Tech, shooting, allows children to come to school armed. "Andrew takes an issue with which you're familiar, and he slightly shifts the world in a way that gives you a different perspective and forces you to see things in a new way," says Vance Smith, artistic director of Stage Left and director of Kingsville.
Hinderaker, '01, MA '02, draws inspiration from real-life events, which he scrambles with sardonic speculation. Years ago in the Midwest, when he was working at a university dorm, Hinderaker felt devastated when a resident-assistant friend killed himself. Later, he briefly worked at a company that "edited" (but actually heavily rewrote) college application essays. The two experiences inspired a play about a sleekly efficient company that helps its depressed clients write more trenchant suicide notes. (Management encourages upselling: "Take a look at our platinum package. . . . Ninety-six percent of our clients would recommend the service to a friend.")
"Suicide, Incorporated is as much about the people left behind as the people who commit suicide," Hinderaker says. "It was a subject I felt was important to talk about. [But] how do you tell that story so it doesn't feel like a lecture, like a PowerPoint presentation?"
With Kingsville, he features two 13-year-olds whose dads feel very differently about their sons carrying firearms to school. Early in the play, the boys try to fish the best prize out of a "Claw" arcade game—will they snag the Uzi or have to settle for a .22? "Yet another light fare for me!" Hinderaker says.
These productions let Hinderaker—a heterosexual man who lives in the gay village of Boystown— explore American stereotypes about masculinity, especially those that insist Real Men have to be stronger, bigger, more competitive, more emotionally controlled and more territorial. "We have these archetypes we celebrate." But given how men predominate in national statistics about suicide and violence, he thinks Americans need to redefine masculinity and see reaching out for help as an act of strength.
The playwriting impulse was strong with Hinderaker even when he was a kid inventing backstories for his Starting Lineup action figures. In his junior year on the Farm, his was one of three plays selected for the annual Ram's Head Winter One Acts. Christmas Feast was about a young writer whose dad physically abuses his wife. "It's not autobiographical!" Hinderaker says. "My poor dad, who came to the show." Next came A Song for Lazarus, about two roommates—one dying of leukemia. "You felt like these people really existed," remembers actress Jessica Donaghy, '01, who directed both plays. "You really have to be a talented observer of human nature to capture that." Hinderaker also has written Out, about three Stanford grads who move into a house together, and Coup de Grace, set in the afterlife after a disgruntled customer shoots a postal worker.
This fall Hinderaker heads to the University of Texas in Austin, where he will work on an MFA in playwriting and teach. He plans to finish Dirty, about a porn company that promotes the social good (it hires only women 25 and older and raises money for breast cancer), and to revisit Christmas Feast by adding music. Austin, he notes, is the live-music capital of the world.
KAREN SPRINGEN, '83, is a Chicago-based writer. She writes the Cardinal Conversations blog at stanfordalumni.org/blogs.
