“The worst thing that happened to the country was the best thing to happen to this play,” the Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire said, a little sheepishly, during a recent talkback at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
He was referring, respectively, to President Trump’s reelection and The Balusters, which he began writing nine years ago. A sharp-tongued, high-energy affair with an all-star ensemble, the play centers on the intergenerational, interracial, and often ideologically opposed neighborhood association board of the fictional Vernon Point—a leafy, landmarked East Coast oasis where the ideals of progress and preservation appear to be mutually exclusive.
Directing it is Tony winner Kenny Leon, with whom Lindsay-Abaire shares “a very similar disposition and outlook and inappropriate sense of humor,” he tells me later over Zoom.
That sensibility was forged during his working-class childhood in South Boston. “For me, comedy and tragedy were always right next to each other. Really horrible things happened to my friends and neighbors and family members, and usually our coping mechanism was to laugh about them and to make fun of horrible things,” Lindsay-Abaire says. With Leon, he found, “I never had to explain the play to him. He just got it from the very beginning. And we hired actors who knew how to do that as well.”
The 10-actor ensemble includes veterans Marylouise Burke and Richard Thomas, as well as two performers making their Broadway debuts: Carl Clemons-Hopkins (Hacks) and Kayli Carter (Private Life, Mrs. America).
“I was a little nervous about the subject matter because it’s all the stuff that we’re afraid to talk about: race and privilege and entitlement and generational wealth and diversity and legacy,” says Margaret Colin, who plays Ruth, the snarky, truth-telling board treasurer. Still, she adds, “I have to say, it was the naughty girl—the shit-stirrer—in me that went, yes, please. Bring it. Let’s see what happens.”
Bring it, The Balusters does. Over the course of four months, the board members squabble over speed humps versus bumps, racial profiling, homophobia, neighborhood surveillance, PETA, nepotism, a baby named Rocket, and—yes—period-inappropriate balusters. Alliances form. “White girl tears” are shed. Identity politics surface and resurface. Faux pas and microaggressions abound.
Lindsay-Abaire is used to writing toward fear—his 2006 drama Rabbit Hole, which he wrote as a new father, centers on child loss—but this play fostered its own breed of anxiety. “Am I scared? Sure, I’m scared…this is 10 people discussing porches,” he says. “But every play that I’ve written scares me in some ways.”
One risk in this case involved writing for so many identities that were not his own. “I was worried about getting them all wrong,” Lindsay-Abaire says. “But because the play was so much about a community, and not just one person on a journey, I felt like my job was to create a fully fleshed-out, dimensional community.” To stay on track—especially when it came to his nonwhite characters, of whom there are several—he did something he rarely does: he shared the script with trusted peers, especially writers of color, throughout the revision process. “They not only gave me permission but encouraged me to make the characters of color as prickly as the white characters,” he says.
“On reading it, there wasn’t one moment where I thought, ‘Oh, she probably wouldn’t say that,’” says Anika Noni Rose, who plays the straight-shooting Vernon Point newcomer Kyra, in whose comfortable living room the play’s action is set. “As a Black woman, with someone from a different space writing for me, you often have a moment where you feel like, Can we talk about this? But we didn’t.”
The rowdy board in the play was inspired by the neighborhood association in Lindsay-Abaire’s own historic district, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park South—of which his wife, Christine, is a member. The playwright sums up their conflicts as “operatic,” and recalls Christine returning from a meeting to recount the fallout over a drainage ditch. “I would think, What is this really about? It can’t possibly be about the drainage ditch,” Lindsay-Abaire says. “Someone is obsessed with something else that’s much deeper in their soul.”
He began to suspect that legacy, mortality, and a desire for control were often at the root of these divisions—themes he brought to The Balusters, and which have proven highly relatable for a wide swath of theatergoers.
“Other plays have addressed these issues, but not in a kind of pressure-cooker way,” Colin says. “Here, we go from moments of incredible pathos to explosive laughter in two lines.”
“We’ve got all these different people coming to see the show,” says Rose. It’s really thrilling. And I tell all of them, ‘Tell your friends and tell your family,’ because I don’t know that people realize how much this play is for all of us. It’s for every single one of us.”
The play, it turns out, is also for the real-life board that inspired it. Though Lindsay-Abaire worried what his neighbors would think when they went to see it, their response was enthusiastic. “They were downright giddy, to be honest,” he says. “I think they laughed more than anyone in the house last night, and it was a very laughy house. It was really gratifying—and a relief—that they didn’t want to march over to my house and burn it down.”