62 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
“No, not a hostile witness, Your Honor—a frightened armadillo.”••
got there at eight-forty-five to stretch,
and Adam was already in a full sweat,
like he’d been there for at least an hour
working out. He brought a discipline
to his physical prowess that most of us
didn’t learn until well into our second
year.” Driver and Ebert got an apart-
ment in Queens, and Driver would run
five miles to school every day. He did
pushups by the hundreds in the hall-
ways and ate six eggs for breakfast
(minus four of the yolks) and an entire
chicken, from Balducci’s, for lunch.
Driver met Joanne Tucker, a class-
mate, during his first year. “She read a
lot of books, knew a lot of shit,” he
said. “She was very composed.” Her
family lived in Waterside Plaza, in
Murray Hill, and Driver would go over
and eat all their cereal. Feldman, who,
in 2013, officiated at their wedding, told
me that Tucker didn’t stand for Driv-
er’s holier-than-thou attitude: “She
doesn’t take any nonsense.”
Acting wasn’t entirely different from
military life: both required a team effort
and a sense of mission. But when Driver
saw his marine buddies he would poke
fun at his cushy new life, ashamed that
he hadn’t joined them overseas. In his
third year, he and Tucker started Arts
in the Armed Forces. At Camp Pen-
dleton, the “mandatory fun” had in-
cluded a skateboarding show and a
trivia game in which you could win a
date with a cheerleader. (The “date”
was a stroll around the parade deck.)
“Even at the time, I was, like, This is
nice, but it’s playing to the lowest com-
mon denominator,” Driver said. He
wanted to bring the troops something
smarter, and show them that theatre
didn’t necessarily mean men in tights.
Feldman told me, “Adam was always
trying to unite these two aspects of his
life that seem to us in contemporary
America so contradictory: how can you
be a soldier—a marine, of all things—
and an artist?”
Driver appealed to the U.S.O., butwas told that the military demographic
wouldn’t be interested in plays, so he
went to Juilliard’s president for fund-
ing and solicited alumni to participate.
In January, 2008, he returned to Camp
Pendleton for AITAF’s inaugural show,
along with Ebert, Juilliard graduates
including Laura Linney, and Jon Ba-
tiste, a jazz student from the music di-
vision (he is now the bandleader for
“The Late Show with Stephen Col-
bert”). Ebert recalled, “Jon and I stood
in front of a grocery store at Camp
Pendleton and handed out flyers for
hours. ‘Hey, you want to see some mono-
logues? You want to see some jazz?’”
Around a hundred people showed up—
the competition was the college-football
championship—and watched mono-
logues by Danny Hoch and Lanford
Wilson, under a marquee that read “Juil-
liard Performance: Adults Only.”
During his third year, Driver was
cast in a play at the Humana Festival,
in Louisville, Kentucky. Juilliard has a
policy against students taking profes-
sional roles before graduation, so he
would have to drop out. Feldman urged
him to stay. “I asked him to think about
whether he had ever had the chance to
finish anything in his life,” Feldman re-
called. “He’d left college. He had to leave
the Marines, because he got injured.
And I challenged him to finish this.”
Driver went through every step of quit-
ting except for turning in his keys—and
then changed his mind. His fourth year,
he performed “Burn This” with Tucker
and got an agent. He graduated in 2009.
Driver had thought about becom-
ing a firefighter if acting didn’t pan
out, but his career took off almost im-
mediately. In 2010, he appeared in a
Broadway revival of Shaw’s “Mrs. War-
ren’s Profession,” with Cherry Jones,
and in the HBO movie “You Don’t
Know Jack,” starring Al Pacino as Dr.
Kevorkian. The next year, he played a
gas-station attendant in “J. Edgar,” di-
rected by Clint Eastwood, and Frank
Langella’s son in the Broadway play
“Man and Boy.” He and Langella be-
came close. “He’d come up to my coun-
try place on his motorcycle, play bad-
minton, help move furniture, do the
dishes,” Langella recalled. “Once, at
my New York place, I gave him some
old suits of mine, and he left, bunch-
ing them in his arms, heading for the