Playwright Steven Levenson is known around the world as the Tony Award-winning writer behind the book of Dear Evan Hansen, but his story began here in DC. A Bethesda native, he remembers a theatre-filled childhood: seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Starlight Express, playing the Ed Sullivan role in Bye Bye Birdie (in sixth grade), and going to Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth, the Kennedy Center, and Studio Theatre.
Levenson left DC to study under Paula Vogel at Brown University, where he majored in English and Theater. While there, he penned Seven Minutes in Heaven—the first of his plays to receive a full production. Levenson went on to write other works that center on portraits of life in modern America: The Language of Trees, Core Values, and The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin.
In these earlier works, as in If I Forget, Levenson confronts highly political issues by grounding them in the everyday people who they affect. In The Language of Trees, which premiered at Roundabout in 2008, Levenson tackles the Iraq war—not from the combat zone, but the breakfast table. Zooming in on one translator preparing to ship out, and the fragmented communications that tether him to his wife and son once overseas, Levenson captures the ripple effects of an international conflict brought home.
Levenson credits his local upbringing with his flair for political theatrics (and theatrical politics). “As a kid growing up just outside of DC, I always loved politics,” he said. “I loved the palace intrigue, the feisty pugilism of the Sunday morning talk shows, the thrill of the horse race. For me, it was just another form of entertainment—sports for smart people.” Levenson chooses to anchor his plays in remarkably unremarkable groups of people. Seven Minutes in Heaven, produced by the HERE Arts Center in 2010, tracks the romantic fumblings of six high school students in the 1990s. The New York Times described it as “so real that you almost believe it was written by one of its characters,” noting the hyperrealism characteristic of Levenson’s work.
In 2013’s Core Values, which premiered at Ars Nova, we enter the antiseptic fluorescence of a workplace conference room, where a travel agency is holding its weekend retreat. But beneath the mundane surface lurks a conflict between a world moving at a dizzying pace and one man’s desire to find solace in the loyalty and companionship of his employees.
And in The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin, Levenson tackles crime, punishment, and justice. When a white-collar criminal is recently released from prison, he must work to rekindle relationships with the family he left behind. During the play’s 2013 debut at Roundabout, The New York Daily News noted that The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin is “about disconnection… breaches that can and can’t be repaired.” Here too, Levenson homes in on how societal issues play out on the smallest, most quotidian level: unable to secure housing with a felony record, the titular character must crash on his son’s couch.
In If I Forget, Levenson brings his pitch-perfect specificity back to DC. Set just across the District, the Fischers’ Tenleytown neighborhood positions them in the heart of affluent DC, while approaching the question of how they—a modern Jewish family—reconcile and live with their individual and collective histories.
Each of his plays, says Levenson, gives him the space to explore issues and uncertainties. “I could write a play about, say, money and politics,” he explains. “But I know how I feel about that. Whereas, when I don’t know where I stand, it’s cool to explore that.”
If I Forget orbits deftly around the touchstone issues of life—politics, religion, family, history, and identity—with attention paid to intricately-wrought everyday people and circumstances. And in this case, some get personal. Drawing from conversations with his own family, Levenson interrogates what it means to be Jewish in today’s America—both in relation to the past, and in shaping what comes next.
—Jennifer Clements