Atw - Downstage Center

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire talks about returning to his South Boston roots with the play "Good People", how the characters are amalgams of the people he grew up with in that private neighborhood and why he chose it as the setting for a play about the class system in America. He also talks about moving beyond his "Southie" roots as early as seventh grade, when he received a scholarship to a private school and how he had to learn to fit in there; his earliest plays, written for his classmates at that same private school; his theatrical studies at Sarah Lawrence College and later at The Juilliard School; his professional "Plan B", a career in arts administration, fostered by his work at New York's Dance Theatre Workshop; his excitement at his first New York production, "A Devil Inside", at SoHo Rep, which began his long collaboration with (and perpetual atonement for) actress Marylouise Burke; how Manhattan Theatre Club, now his longtime creative home, showed early interest in, and then almost passed on, hi