A few months ago, my college classmate Eliya Smith’s name appeared in The New York Times. I knew Smith as someone fascinated by journalism: She spent many late nights at our college newspaper working on stories, ranging from a profile of a Boston Celtics dancer to a piece detailing her bout with scarlet fever.
While others toiled at McKinsey upon graduating, Smith worked for Adam Gopnik, a long-tenured writer at The New Yorker. But her name in the Gray Lady did not arrive as a byline. Instead, Helen Shaw, the paper’s chief theater critic, was touting Smith’s latest play, Dad Don’t Read This, as a NYT Critic’s Pick. “That was very generous of Helen to go out on a limb for us,” Smith tells me.
Just a few years after her full-time foray into playwriting, Smith, 28, is now one of New York’s most buzzed-about dramatists. Her work has been staged by the Atlantic Theater Company and appeared in the Greenwich House Theater, where Dad Don’t Read This transferred after the Times review.
The play—about four teenage girls who have a weekly sleepover—began its run in a Midtown church basement. But it first premiered years ago in a Williamsburg apartment. Using money from a playwriting prize she won in college, she purchased lights at Target and produced an early version of the show for friends. Gopnik, Smith’s then-boss, also watched a performance.
“He was like, ‘If you want to stay in journalism, that’s totally fine, but I think you should become a playwright,’” Smith recalls. “I, for months, was like, Oh my god, Adam thinks that I’m a bad journalist.”
Gopnik’s encouragement led Smith to continue scripting plays and eventually apply to the University of Texas at Austin’s three-year playwriting program. There, she penned Grief Camp, a play about a Virginia summer camp for grieving teenagers. Neil Pepe, the artistic director of the Atlantic Theater Company, saw a reading by undergrads during Smith’s second year at the school. One month after the reading, Pepe offered Smith to opportunity to stage the show off-Broadway. “It completely changed my life,” she said.
Smith regularly taps her own life experiences when she writes, noting that Dad Don’t Read This isn’t based on any particular sleepover, but does pull from her high school friendships. She didn’t realize how often people would ask whether the play’s main character is a riff on herself. “I would have made her way cooler if I knew that people would do that,” she remarks.
Smith is now spending the rest of the summer in the 2,000-person town of Deer Isle, Maine, where she’s working on her next play. She won’t share many details, but it’s likely Smith will continue working with her friends. Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky, the respective director and sound designer of Dad Don’t Read This, knew Smith from college. “We’ve been working together for maybe six, seven years, and there’s a sort of alchemy that I think is very special,” she says about the Goat Exchange, a theater company led by Claudel and Polonsky. “I think fighting to work with people that you love is worth it.”
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
‘I Live in Your Piss’: Florentina Holzinger on Venice, Violence, and Why Nudity Still Scares Us
Which ‘Odyssey’ Actors Have a Chance at the Oscar? Christopher Nolan’s Casting Director Weighs In.
‘Synthetic, Easy, Lethal’: A Psychoanalyst and a Boxer on Why We Can’t Quit Betting
A Year After Bob Wilson’s Passing, Six Artists and Collaborators Reflect on His Legacy
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
