James Lapine Writes His Next Act

Moss Hart’s bestselling memoir, Act One, has inspired generations of theater wannabes. “The theater is not so much a profession as a disease, and my first look at Broadway was the beginning of a lifetime infection,” he wrote. A penniless immigrant kid who went on to become a giant of American theater, Hart got his start working with the most celebrated writer and theater-maker of his day, George S. Kaufman, in the 1930s. Now James Lapine, one of today’s Broadway A-listers, has turned Hart’s memoir into a Tony-nominated play.

The Hart-Kaufman partnership struck a chord with Lapine because the two men came from such different worlds, he tells Kurt Andersen. Lapine’s career also took off thanks to a collaboration in the 1980s with a star composer. Trained in design, Lapine was teaching design at the Yale School of Drama when he tried his hand at theater. It was luck that got him a gig with Stephen Sondheim, and it led Lapine to two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer for Sunday in the Park with George, the musical they wrote together in 1984.

But unlike Hart, Lapine wasn’t hell-bent on a career in theater when they did that show. “For me, it was just kind of a lark because I didn’t know it was going to go anywhere,” he says. “I figured, ‘I’ll go back to being a graphic designer if this thing doesn’t turn out well.’”

Still, Lapine feels like he missed out on the big time — the Broadway of the 1930s. People like Kaufman could jump between acting or composing or writing newspaper critiques. “It was a time when people in the theater didn’t generally have just one profession. It seems like a kind of exciting time to have been in the theater.”