The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

It took David Adjmi 10 years to write his

new memoir, “Lot Six” (HarperCollins).

The last four months were spent ensuring

there were no legal issues.

“I never wanted to write a roman à clef

but it ended up being that because you can’t

use all these names,” the playwright said re-

cently. “I had enough trouble already,” he

added, laughing.

Perhaps he was alluding to his satire

“3C,” which brought on a legal battle with

the copyright holder of the sitcom “Three’s

Company.” (Adjmi won the case in 2015.) Or

perhaps the reference was to his experience

at Juilliard, when he fell on the bad side of a

teacher he calls Gloria in the book.

Adjmi’s Off Broadway debut, “Stunning,”

in 2009, drew from his childhood in a Syrian-

Jewish enclave in Brooklyn. The “Lot Six”

title refers to a pricing code for three, an odd

number associated with gayness — “as in

three-dollar bill,” he said. The stylized, bit-

ingly funny show, and its author’s unortho-

dox back story, attracted the attention of

HarperCollins. Adjmi, now 47, set out to

compose essays about his cultural influ-

ences, but started sliding toward more per-

sonal territory — a move his publisher en-

couraged.

“They said, ‘You need to make it about

how you became a writer,’ ” he recalled.

Adjmi may be a relatively niche play-

wright (the memoir ends with the closing of

“Stunning”), but his lifelong devotion to art

as an identity-defining tool of self-expres-

sion gives the book a fervid tone that is hard

to resist; his talent for laugh-out-loud funny

set pieces does the rest.

He is the same in conversation, pin-

balling from raucous laughter to tears, and

sending an interviewer to the dictionary to

check out what “agon” means (it’s ancient

Greek for conflict, naturally).

“David is so witty and he’s also quite pre-

cise,” said the actress Cristin Milioti, who

counts “Stunning” as one of the best shows

she’s ever done. “The way he writes is so

rhythmic.”

It’s not a surprise, then, that music fea-

tures prominently in Adjmi’s new stage

projects. These are edited excerpts from the

conversation, by FaceTime from Los Ange-

les.

Your life has not always gone smoothly but

the Juilliard period, with the instructor you

call Gloria, stands out as a painful low. How

did you recover?

To this day, I talk to my peers about that ex-

perience and they’re like, “No, she likes you,

she cares about you.” I think I was looking

for a certain kind of permission, and I had to

give myself the authority. Art is a disrup-

tion, you’re declaring war in a certain way,

you’re telling everybody else, “This is my

point of view.”

In the acknowledgments you thank the

actress Marian Seldes “for teaching me

what it means to be an artist.” What is that?

I wrote “Elective Affinities” for her and she

did it at Juilliard. I was asked to leave the

program and I sort of had a breakdown. I

was blocked, I was very depressed, I just

felt so lost. One day the phone rang... I feel

like I’m going to cry [pause]. It was her. She

said, “I just want you to know that I will al-

ways be part of your circle and you will al-

ways be part of mine.” [He tears up, com-

poses himself.] She was something for me

to latch on to in terms of the idea of the in-

tegrity of an artist. She was so gracious and

generous to me, and I try to do that for

younger artists, to make myself available to

them.

You write about your “essential worthless-

ness as a person.” But it feels as if some-

times that feeling blocks you and some-

times it fuels you.

I had this feeling of displacement from

when I was a young kid, and also from being

gay in a very homophobic, Republican cul-

ture in the 1980s. People think, “Oh, homo-

phobia, whatever,” but it was a very, very in-

tense thing. But then I also felt this endoge-

nous, strangely insistent feeling that I did

have worth. I didn’t know if I was delusional

or megalomaniacal, I didn’t understand

why I felt my voice had any value. That al-

terity set in motion a series of experiences

that gave my life meaning and gave me an

advantage that I think is incredibly pre-

cious and hard-won.

What was the impact of “Stunning” in your

old community?

After I left Juilliard, I was so broken. I

thought, “I’m going to write five plays and

maybe I’ll just pitch myself off a building or

something.” Who would have thought that

Lincoln Center was going to put on this vio-

lent, stylized, crazy play about Syrian Se-

phardic Jews? Some of the people [from

that community] behaved really badly. The

actors would tell me stories of people wait-

ing for them outside of the theater, saying,

“Are you Jewish?” Or people screaming,

“Dyke! Dyke!” That was in the stage man-

ager’s report. It was pretty hard-core.

Your last show in New York was “Marie

Antoinette” in 2013. What have you been up

to since then?

I’m working on a trilogy about 20th-century

American music. One play that’s almost

done is called “The Stumble,” about the

composer Oscar Levant and his obsession

with George Gershwin. Another one, I’m

getting the rights to someone who is alive.

Then there’s “Stereophonic,” which is done

and was supposed to happen on Broadway

next spring but I don’t know now. We’ve

done workshops with Cristin, so who

knows? It’s a four-act play with music about

a 1970s band making an album, which

you’re watching take shape: They’re cut-

ting songs, changing the arrangements,

bringing riffs. And then it’s like Chekhov

where their lives are falling apart. Will But-

ler from Arcade Fire is writing the concept

album. I’m so excited to show it to people —

I’ve worked on it for such a long time and

I’m really proud of it.

Megalomania

And Misery

By ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020

Responding to criticism that its site has be-
come a bazaar for the sale of looted Middle
Eastern antiquities, Facebook said on Tues-
day it would remove any content “that at-
tempts to buy, sell or trade in historical arti-
facts.”
The decision came after archaeologists
and activists who monitor the illicit antiqui-
ties trade said they had identified at least
200 Facebook groups with nearly two mil-
lion members who were using the platform
to find black market buyers and to offer tu-
torials on how best to dig up and deliver the
most sought-after items.
Common examples include burial relics,
stone sculptures, mosaics and in some in-
stances entire sarcophagi from Syria,
Egypt, Iraq and North Africa.
Greg Mandel, public policy manager at
Facebook, said, “We’ve long had rules pre-
venting the sale of stolen artifacts.” But, he
added, “To keep these artifacts and our us-
ers safe, we’ve been working to expand our

rules, and starting today, we now prohibit

the exchange, sale or purchase of all histori-

cal artifacts on Facebook and Instagram.”

The Facebook policy defines historical

artifacts as “rare items of significant his-

torical, cultural or scientific value” that in-

clude ancient funerary items, coins, tomb-

stones, engraved seals, scrolls and manu-

scripts.

In many cases, according to video footage

obtained by the Antiquities Trafficking and

Heritage Anthropology Research Project —

an investigative study endeavor led by an-

tiquities experts — the middlemen running

the Facebook groups give real-time instruc-

tions to looters on which items to excavate

and steal.

Katie Paul, co-director of the project, said

in an interview: “They literally will post pic-

tures from auction catalogs and say, ‘See,

this is how much this stuff can sell for, so go

for it guys.’ ” Online traffickers, she added,

will also try to reassure illicit buyers that

they are getting genuine items by posting

photos or videos showing the objects being

unearthed in situ.

Ms. Paul said buyers and sellers will use

coded language to discuss the antiquities,

then move to an encrypted app where they

can complete the deal. The Twitter feed for

the investigative project she helps direct

features screenshots and videos from Face-

book pages showing brazen instances of

looting and thousands of objects put up for

sale.

Ms. Paul and her co-director, Amr al-

Azm, a professor at Shawnee State Univer-

sity in Ohio, have been capturing images

and video from the Facebook groups for

several years. In a report last year titled

“Facebook’s Black Market in Antiquities,”

the pair said, “Facebook has become a

sprawling digital black market, facilitating

illicit trade in antiquities from across the

Middle East and North Africa.”

Ms. Paul said Facebook had been slow to

admit the problem and lax in policing crimi-

nal activity online. “For years, Facebook

has served as a massive outlet for antiqui-

ties looters and traffickers as they seek to

feed material into a widening global net-

work,” she said.

But she said the recent decision by Face-

book “represents an important shift in their

position on the trade in cultural heritage

and demonstrates that they recognize that

this is an illegal and harmful activity that is

occurring on their platform.”

She added, however, that “a policy is only

as good as its enforcement.”

Mr. Azm said he wants Facebook to pre-

serve all evidence of trafficking rather than

simply delete it.

“The photos and videos of artifacts we

see posted on Facebook, often while still in

the ground, may be the only evidence of that

object’s existence,” Mr. Azm said.

A Facebook Shift on Antiquities Sales

Citing looting concerns, the

company will ban the trading

of illegally excavated items.

By TOM MASHBERG

Artifacts said to have been taken from the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria have

been offered for sale on Facebook, the kind of activity a new ban addresses.

OMAR SANADIKI/REUTERS

There’s a fervid tone

to David Adjmi’s

new memoir tracing

how he became a

playwright.

David Adjmi, above, is known for “Stunning”

(far left, with Charlayne Woodard, left, and

Cristin Milioti) and “Marie Antoinette” (near

left, with David Greenspan and Marin Ireland).

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

ERIK CARTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES