Interview: Bekah Brunstetter on PlayMakers' THE GAME and Broadway's THE NOTEBOOK

Bekah Brunstetter is a native of North Carolina who just so happens to be a prolific playwright. Among her works are F*CKING ART, I USED TO WRITE ON WALLS, BE A GOOD LITTLE WIDOW, GOING TO A PLACE WHERE YOU ALREADY ARE, and THE CAKE. She’s also written for several television shows such as SWITCHED AT BIRTH, AMERICAN GODS, MAID, and THIS IS US (the latter of which earned her three Primetime Emmy nominations as a producer on it). Most recently, she made her Broadway debut as book writer on the new stage musical adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ THE NOTEBOOK. Not to mention that a new play of her’s is getting ready to premiere at PlayMakers Repertory Company titled THE GAME. I had the great pleasure of interviewing her about all of this and more.

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To start things off, how are things going with THE GAME?

BB: They're going great. I'm actually back at my home in L.A. right now, but I was there in rehearsal with them last week. I just sort of got to see the work they were doing and then I did a bunch of rewrites and threw a bunch of rewrites at the actors. Now they're working on the new material. I think next week they start doing runs of the whole show to show the designers. So it's a pretty quick process, but I'm really happy with where we're at right now.

Would you mind telling us about the play?

BB: The Game is an adaptation of Lysistrata, which is an old Greek play about a group of women that band together to go on a sex strike to end the Trojan War. My adaptation takes place in the present day. It's about a group of women who come together because all of their husbands and partners are addicted to playing a video game and they decide to go on a strike to get their husbands to stop playing the video game. But the husbands don't care or notice and just wanna play the game. So it's a comedy about marriage and friendship and community and the ways in which we all rely on technology these days to connect with other people and keep us happy.

How did you come up with the idea for THE GAME?

BB: It's an adaptation of Lysistrata, so the basic story was already there. But when I sit down to write something, I'm always thinking about my own life. My husband is a huge gamer. I'm not a gamer at all. I don't play video games. So over the years of us being together, I've had to really come to understand why he loves them and the purpose they serve in his life. So I just thought it would be a great adaptation of Lysistrata because obviously there's a real war happening in our world right now. But we've also got a lot of video games that have brought the concept of war into our domestic spaces. So it just seemed like a good modern take on the story.

What have you been enjoying most about working with PlayMakers?

BB: I went to college at UNC. I studied theater and I wrote my first play when I was there working with Playmakers. When you're an undergraduate drama major at UNC, you work on the Playmaker shows. It's kind of like a homecoming. It's really cool. When I was there last week, I got to talk to some students. I used to be in a class at UNC talking to having guest lectures come and talk to me. So it's very full circle. I'm from Winston-Salem near Chapel Hill, so it's just nice to be able to come home. I now live on the other side of the country. So it feels good to go there and visit. 

Going back to the beginning, how did you first get started in the theatre?

BB: I mean, it kind of started at UNC Chapel Hill. I was in plays in high school, just kind of in the chorus, but I was always writing as well. When I came to UNC as a freshman, I was studying fiction writing and poetry writing, but I was also a drama major. But pretty early on I wasn't really interested in acting or directing, but I loved to write. So my first semester I wrote my first play and I was absolutely hooked and continued to write plays through my four years at UNC Chapel Hill.

You’ve also worked quite a bit in television. How did you end up making that transition?

BB: I went to grad school for playwriting in New York. I went to the new school for drama, a program for playwriting, but a little bit of TV and film writing as well. Then after grad school I was just in New York writing plays and submitting them and working with some small theater companies while also working survival jobs. After a couple of years I was lucky enough to get an agent at William Morris. Through that agent who saw just like a reading of my play at a theater, he started to put me out there for TV work. It took a while. It wasn't like an overnight, like “you work in TV now,” but I got a writer's assistant job on a very old MTV show in Brooklyn. That kind of led to my first staff job and now I've been sort of gradually moving up the ranks and doing it for about 12 years now.

What are some of your favorite experiences of working in TV so far?

BB: I love the collaboration and how it is kind of similar to theater in a writer's room. You're building a story together. You are figuring out as a team what's gonna happen every episode. That reminds me a lot of being at a play rehearsal and talking about the best way to tell the story. It's very collaborative and I really love being on set with all the moving pieces and just the excitement of seeing something that you've only had in your head become real in front of you. It's similar to the first time you see a run of your play. 

You recently made your Broadway debut as book writer of the new musical, THE NOTEBOOK. How did you get involved with that?

BB: The producers, Kevin McCollum and Kurt Deutsch, years ago just were big fans of the movie and the book and had the idea that it might make a good musical. They brought Ingrid Michelson on board or they kind of talked to her about the concept and she immediately started writing the music because she also loved the story of The Notebook. Then they needed a book writer. I think it was my agent who heard that they were looking for somebody and brought the concept to me as if I would be interested in this. At that point they sent me a couple of the songs that Ingrid had already written and I thought they were beautiful. I decided to start working on it with her and the two of us started developing the material together and then we brought directors on board and started developing the idea. All in all, it was a seven year development process. They take a long time.

How familiar were you with the source material prior to this?

BB: I had seen the movie a number of times. I did not read the book until I was deciding whether or not to work on the project. The book is beautiful. The movie is one of the best adaptations of a book I've seen. In my screenwriting and TV career, I do some adaptations of books to screen and it's a hard thing to do to take characters that are beloved and a story that exists in a book and figure out what to leave out and what to change to make it a successful story for the screen. It's a really good adaptation.

What was it like for you getting to try your hand at writing a musical?

BB: It's been wonderful. I've always loved musicals. I can't sing or dance so I cannot contribute to them in that way. Writing the book for a musical is just my way to be around them and contribute creatively without having to sing or dance. So it's been wonderful. I love it and I can't wait to do it again.

Do you have yourself attached to any other musical projects at the moment?

BB: I have another musical that I've been working on at the same time as The Notebook. It's called A.D. 16 because it takes place in the year A.D. 16. It's about teenage Mary Magdalene, falling in love with teenage Jesus. It takes place in Nazareth. It's like this big lovely teen bible musical. We did that at the Olney Theatre in Maryland a couple years ago and we're trying to figure out what to do with it next. But there’s currently no other musicals, just that one.

Back to THE NOTEBOOK, I was fortunate enough to have spoken with one of your actors, Joy Woods, while she was in the Triangle area last year doing DREAMGIRLS at North Carolina Theatre. I did ask her about getting to be a part of the world premiere production. What was it like getting to work with your cast and creative team?

BB: We have a wonderful cast. A lot of them have been with us through workshops over the years, especially Maryanne Plunkett. She's been with us for many workshops. We did it in Chicago in the fall of 2022. Getting to work with a lot of the same actors and designers for a long time is so great because it just means that you have a shared language about the piece and you try things together. You try new things together. You kind of figure out what works and everybody gets real comfortable and there's a sense of ownership that I think is really important in creating something wonderful is everyone involved feeling like they can have their hand in it and they get to sort of like be their best creative selves because they feel like it's theirs too. We definitely have that with this. Everyone has that sense of ownership.

For those who’d like to pursue a career in scriptwriting, where do you think would be a good place to start?

BB: I mean, I started with my education. I studied different kinds of writing in both college and grad school. That's kind of a big commitment. Graduate school is especially very expensive with writing. The thing that's more important than connections than any program is to write. That's what's so wonderful and we're lucky to wanna be writers. Actors and directors have to sort of wait to be selected to work on projects. It's harder to kind of do your own thing. But the most important thing if you wanna write, is to write and to develop that muscle and to keep writing and build your body of work and find your voice. Also take in a lot of other content, read books, see plays, see movies, see what else is out there. Just become a fan of other people's work. Become an expert of all that's out there so that that can sort of inform what you're doing, but mostly just write. That is the hard part is just to keep doing it.

Before we go, do you have any other upcoming projects that you’d like to share with us (aside from the aforementioned A.D. 16)?

BB: Just The Game and The Notebook. That's all I got right now.

Bekah, I thank you very much for devoting your time to this interview. It was great getting to talk to you.

BB: Thank you, Jeffrey. I appreciate it.

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Be sure to catch PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of THE GAME from April 10th-28th. You can also catch THE NOTEBOOK running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway. For more information, please visit:

www.playmakersrep.org/show/the-game/

www.notebookmusical.com

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