Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta, from the album Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

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Ken Ludwig: The worst thing you can do as a writer if you like to write comedy is to keep anything in that the audience knows, and you know, is asking for a laugh and doesn't get it. If it doesn't get the laugh and—and it clearly is a line that was meant to get a laugh and it doesn't get the laugh, get it out of there.

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Jo Reed: Those are words of wisdom from playwright Ken Ludwig, whose play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise recently had its world premiere at Arena Stage. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

Ken Ludwig has been called the reigning king of theatrical farce. He burst onto Broadway with Lend Me a Tenor, which won two Tony Awards, and followed that with Crazy for You, which also won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Hit followed hit and they include Moon Over Buffalo, Twentieth Century, Be My Baby, Leading Ladies and so on, and so on. And the awards continued, as well—Oliviers, a Helen Hayes, and so on, and so on. Ken Ludwig also turned his hand to writing mysteries for the stage, adapting Murder on the Orient Express and Baskerville, and creating The Game’s Afoot, which won an Edgar Award.

But Ken Ludwig’s play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, mines new ground yet again. It’s a two-character play and it’s based on his parents’ correspondence and subsequent meeting during World War Two. It’s a straightforward story about two very different people who get to know each other fall in love through their letters to one another.

Ken Ludwig: My father was a doctor. He had just graduated medical school, and he was drafted, and he lived in Pennsylvania but he was sent to the West Coast to a little town of Medford, Oregon. He started helping the incoming wounded from the Pacific Theater. He was in a hospital there. My mother, meanwhile, was in Brooklyn, New York where she had graduated high school, had started college, but decided to leave college and wanted to become a showgirl. So, she was living in a—one of those Broadway boarding houses with other Broadway hopefuls, taking tap dancing and singing lessons, and they couldn’t have been more different from what—as—as that sounds. He was shy. She was outgoing. And their fathers knew each other and said, “Oh, you should meet. I’m going to give you his address. I’m going to give her address.” So, they started writing letters and that’s how they got to know each other, and that’s the basis of the whole play.

Jo Reed: How much of those letters of your parents did you actually use in the construction of the play when you wrote it?

Ken Ludwig: Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t have the letters. I knew that the letters existed—Family lore. My mother had told me that. My father pre-deceased my mother. My mother still kept the letters and then towards the very end of her life, she died eight years after my dad, told me that she had destroyed the letters, and she never told me why, specifically, but looking back on it, my brother and I think that she must’ve felt there was an intimacy about them that she really didn’t want her boys to see. Now, whether they were actually very intimate in terms of any shocking way, I sort of doubt. But I think in her mind they were enough that she thought, “No,” she didn’t want us to see them. So, I knew they existed. So, in writing the play, I wrote from scratch.

Jo Reed: I have enormous respect, I would like to say, for anyone who opts for privacy. <laughs> I really, really do.

Ken Ludwig: That’s what it was. That’s what it was. In doing research for the play, there were lots and lots of correspondence out there. At the play itself, people come up to me and say, “Oh, you know, I have my—my parent’s letters or my grandparent’s letters and we love this and this evoked that,”—and some of these sets of correspondence have been published over the years. So, I was able to get a hold of those and that really gave me some real facts and figures about this exact time, and where doctors would be stationed abroad and things like that.

Jo Reed: And how close to their actual story is Dear Jack, Dear Louise?

Ken Ludwig: It’s very close. I talk about in—in the play, for example, that my father’s mother was one of 12 sisters and that was true. What I don’t mention in—in the play is that there was actually a brother also <laughs>. It didn’t work out in describing the stories as well, but there was a brother. Can you imagine being the one brother and having 12 sisters? Amazing. It’s all true. My dad grew up in a little town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, which was a steel town. He put his self through college by working in the steel mills. And my mother grew up in Brooklyn. That was all true. She wanted to be in the theater. She—she was there with other hopefuls. A fellow named Van Johnson—Well, he became a huge international movie start, and—and Oscar Levant who became famous. He was in a lot of Gene Kelly movies and things. And so, all of that is true—that they met by letter, that they wrote the letters. And then I had tried to just make sure that the story had shape and form a—as I think all plays need. Certainly, the kinds of plays that I write. A real beginning, and a middle, and an end.

Jo Reed: Can you tell me about your thinking as you created it? Had you always imagined it as a two-hander?

Ken Ludwig: No, actually. When I first thought about writing it I thought, “Well, it might be interesting to set this in the army base in Medford, Oregon,” and then I’d need to some extra research about what it was like living in an army base, and then it would’ve looked a lot, I think, like a lot of my other plays. Most of my plays, not most, but some, are one-set, eight-character comedies—Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo, Leading Ladies, Game’s Afoot. Those—those all, for some reason, eight seems to be the sweet spot for me. And I’ve written a different kind of play, more like Baskerville. It has five—five characters, people playing lots of roles. But, I’ve never tried anything with just two actors on stage. Watching it the other night, it occurred to me they, of course, have long stretches where each of them speaks without interruption because these are letters, and I was thinking about a—a play that I admire a lot that’s gotten a lot of wonderful publicity over the years called The Weir that was done at The National Theatre in London. It’s a monologue. And I thought, when I first read it, I thought, “How can you sustain a monologue, really, for the life of a play and make it dramatic?” As I’ve studied playwriting over the years, the one thing I’ve always thought is two characters, for purposes of conflict, is really a play. Otherwise, a monologue doesn't function as play, but I was wrong, and I found out in writing this that as long as you can sustain a level of story, that the story makes it a play.

Jo Reed: Well, this was the world premiere and this is the process I really want you to walk me through. So, how many readings had you had before it was mounted on a stage?

Ken Ludwig: I had three. I did the first one in my living room. I invited two actors I knew in the community. I invited a few friends and we sat around. There were six people to listen, simply because I wanted to hear it out loud. I don’t usually do that with plays and I may do that with the next play—It was really fun, usually, because my plays have more characters and—and people are walking in this entrance and out another exit. So, I—we did that one and the script didn’t change very much from reading to reading. The second one—I've been on the board of trustees of the Folger’s Shakespeare Library for 10 years and all my friends there know all about my work, and so I talked to the head of the theater. I said, “Hey, how about giving me the theater for a day?” So, I hired two actors and—and did it at the Folger, one night. The place was packed with 250 people and I really got a sense of what worked. I picked the sound effects. I had a—a production manager. And then the next time, the third time, of all things, is Theater J here in town, in Washington, said “Would I direct a reading for a benefit for their theater?” And I directed that about eight months ago and then we did the production.

Jo Reed: Okay, on one hand, I mean, you are the consummate theater pro. Anybody in the theater would love your resume. But, this is also something that’s really, really close to you. It’s about your family. Was that kind of challenging for you to be able to maintain a critical distance sometimes? Did you have to talk yourself down? As we all know, when you’re writing, you know, as we say, killing puppies is something that has to happen <laughs>.

Ken Ludwig: Well, you know, it’s funny you say that. There—there were no puppies <laughs> to kill in this case. No, it really flowed and it surprised me. It certainly—I wrote it more quickly than I’ve ever written a play before because it seemed to be—I don’t want to say I was channeling them, but I was sitting down—I always write longhand, and I was writing letters. And I thought, “I’m just going to write letters to each other.” And this play sort of wrote itself, I guess because I knew the characters so well.

Jo Reed: When you saw the play, not as a reading but mounted as a play, did you have to, sort of, jiggle here and there and—and fix things? Or, again, was it basically just <laughs> like Athena from the head of Zeus?

Ken Ludwig: No, there we really went through a process and the process was really fun and interesting. When I directed the readings, I put the two actors behind two desks and they literally read the letter. They read their own letters. So, Louise, my mom, was reading her letter and then Jack would read his letter. The important thing in the play is that they don’t look at each other. These are letters. It’s the person in their mind. So, they’re looking out. That—I understood that from the get-go. There’s always a tendency by all of the actors who have done it to just want to look at each other. I said, “No, no, no.” So, I—I was directing it and they sat at the desks and, of course, these were readings where I only had the actors for about three or four hours before we put the show on that night. So, we didn’t have time to try to do anything. When we got into the rehearsal hall—Jackie Maxwell directed the play, and she’s done just a magnificent job directing it, and she’s a magnificent person, and she’s a wonderful director. And from the get-go she had the thought of, “Wait a second. We don’t want to trap them behind desks the whole time.” We’re in the Kreeger. It’s a big theater. We have a fantastic set by Beowulf Boritt, and we said, “Well, we have two desks but let’s get them up and get them moving. They should memorize the texts,” and as they—maybe she pulls a little dressing gown on when she’s on tour. He will pick up something from his bookshelf, a newspaper, and read Elenore Roosevelt’s latest column, you know. Get them moving. Never again looking at each other, not interacting physically, per se, but make it more of a—kind of a ballet of their movements as they tell these letters, as they, in a sense, read these letters. And it worked out beautifully. She just did a great job. So, that—it—it feels more like a play with movement. You wouldn’t think to yourself, “Oh, yeah, they read those letters,” because they didn’t. They’re memorized and—and they acted them.

Jo Reed: When you did you first know you wanted to be involved in theater?

Ken Ludwig: When I was six years old <laughs>. Without a doubt. My folks took my brother and I to a play in New York City because my mother’s folks lived in Brooklyn. And every year we’d go up around the holidays, and we’d see a show, for years, and within, oh, three or four years I thought, “This is it.” That’s all I want to do. I just want to be in the theater.

Jo Reed: And your mom, I'm assuming, stayed active in the theater. I mean, if not on Broadway...

Ken Ludwig: She stayed active in theater, all right. My dad’s practice took him to York, Pennsylvania where I was born and raised, and they have a wonderful community theater there called York Little Theatre—now it’s called the Belmont Theatre—and she was part of it, and she’d be in shows, and my brother and I’d sit in the audience and watch her. So, she was able to fulfill her love her for the theater by being in community theater.

Jo Reed: Which is fabulous, of course.

Ken Ludwig: Fabulous.

Jo Reed: What about playwriting? What was it about playwriting that made you say, “Ah-ha”?

Ken Ludwig: Well, as a kid, when I was in high school, I was in all of the shows. I was an actor because we all think, I think, at that age, in order to fulfill ourselves in the theater—we want to be in the theater. “Oh, I’ll be an actor.” At least there’s a moment of that. There certainly was for me. So, I was in the shows. I played Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady,” I’ll have you know, and it was said that I was the greatest Henry Higgins since Rex Harrison <laughs>.

Jo Reed: I won’t ask who said it <laughs>.

Ken Ludwig: No, it was said by my mother <laughs> but it was said. And then I got into college and I directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and a few other things, and then I—all the while knowing that by that—that time that I wanted to write. Why? Well, I’ve always been that sort of, kind of, somebody who lives in my own head probably too much and I loved reading plays. I mean, I’ve read thousands of plays. It’s what I do and—and I love it. I love the history of theater. I’ve written a book about Shakespeare. I’m a big Shakespeare geek.

Jo Reed: Yes, you did. That’s “How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare” and that is a great book.

Ken Ludwig: Well, thank you.

Jo Reed: I gave it to my godchild for his kid.

Ken Ludwig: Oh, thank you very much.

Jo Reed: You’re very welcome.

Ken Ludwig: Thanks a lot. And I loved writing it because I taught my—it’s called “How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare”, and it’s about teaching my children how to recite Shakespeare because that’s how you learn, really learn Shakespeare, is if you memorize passages. And I loved that, and I just live that stuff every day. It’s an odd little niche. I know everybody has their own niche and that’s my niche, and it’s—it’s what I love.

Jo Reed: Were your parents supportive of—of this move to theater?

Ken Ludwig: They were, very much so, with this caveat <laughs> that when I got out of high school and then went to college—I went to college, and after—then towards the end of the college they said, “Well, now what are you going to do?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to be a—in the theater for the rest of my life. I’m going to be a playwright.” They said, “Well, that’s very interesting. We’re a—all for that. How wonderful. But what are you really going to do? Because you’ve got to earn a living.” So, they convinced me to apply to graduate school. So, I did and went, all the while knowing all I really wanted to do was be a writer in the theater.

Jo Reed: Okay. Your plays are typically funny, even Dear Jack, Dear Louise. It has some very funny moments in it. Writing comedy—this is not for the fainthearted. What drew you to comedy? Comedy is hard.

Ken Ludwig: Comedy is hard. I think it’s Edmund Kean who said, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” This was on his deathbed. I’ve often asked myself that and—and my friends will say, I hate this question, they’ll say, “Are you going to write something serious.” I say, “Well, no, no. You don’t get it. Comedy is very serious. It’s just as serious.” We should be doing more comedies. We should be doing comedies. When people teach Shakespeare, they’ll typically teach the four big tragedies in high school, and I say to teachers all the time, “No, no, no, no. You should also be teaching Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing, and Midsummer Night's Dream.” Because they’re just as great and they have a different view of life that you have to—kids have to understand as well. So, I—I think I’ve always done comedy ultimately because I’m optimistic. I really do believe in my heart—it’s sort of a—It’s—it’s an optimism. I don’t think it’s a Pollyanna-ish kind of optimism. I think it’s a realistic kind of optimism. That’s how I look at life. I do look at life that if we band together as communities and as friends, with an open mind, we can push the ball forward. We can push it a little bit. Even if it’s one one-hundredth of an inch, you can make a contribution in that direction and that’s what I live for.

Jo Reed: Comedy’s really hard. <laughs> I mean, I’m always in awe of people who write it, people who act it, and you know, you get an instantaneous response. Something is going to land or it doesn't. There’s no in-between anywhere.

Ken Ludwig: No, there isn’t, and a—and a good rule is if you’re—if you’re in the middle of a show and there is a tendency to say when a line doesn't land and you think it should, and you get your first audience. Because the first audience tells you everything. You don’t know until you have that first preview audience there. And then, if a line that you think was going to be terrific doesn't land, the tendency as a writer is to say, “Wait a second. That was the actor’s fault,” and then you go to the director, and then you say, “Let’s take a beat before that,” and finally <laughs> you got to go, “No, it’s the line. It was my mistake,” and then you just got to take out. The worst thing you can do as a writer if you write—like to write comedy is to keep anything in that the audience knows, and you know, is asking for a laugh and doesn't get it. If it doesn't get the laugh and—and it clearly is a line that was meant to get a laugh and it doesn't get the laugh, get it out of there.

Jo Reed: Because it’s so painful. As an audience person, it hurts. It really hurts when that happens.

Ken Ludwig: It does. Absolutely.

Jo Reed: Your comedy is—seems, to me, to come out of character as opposed to a punchline.

Ken Ludwig: Thank you. I hope so.

Jo Reed: Yeah. And—and you’re also really good at physical comedy, like Lend Me a Tenor. There’s movement on stage and so there’s a physical aspect of comedy that you also write that, you know, also comes out of character. I just wonder—I mean, really, I wonder how you do that but I realize that’s just not a good question to ask, but—So, if you had advice for somebody who wanted to write comedy for theater, what would you say to them?

Ken Ludwig: Well, the answer is that you read, and read, and read. When kids come to me and their parents come, or I’m doing graduation speeches, this or that, people say I want to be a writer. The answer is read. Read, read, read and, of course, you’re lucky if you don’t want to be in the theater you also can go, go, go and go see plays. But you really learn from the people who came before you. It’s the old Newton standing on the shoulders of the geniuses who came before. You have to learn how Shakespeare did it—the God. But you also have to learn how Goldsmith wrote She Stoops to Conquer, probably the greatest comedy after Shakespeare. You have to understand how Sheridan—Richard Brinsley Sheridan did it—a contemporary of Goldsmith in about 1775 and 6 with The Rivals and The School for Scandal. I’m just jumping around—Arthur Wing—Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, the first dramatist who was ever knighted who wrote a series of great farce—farces in his day, and then you got to jump right up to Wilde, and Coward, and Kaufman and Hart, and if you don’t understand those comedies, if you don’t have them in your bones, if you don’t really know how they’re written, you can’t write great comedy for the stage. You just can’t.

Jo Reed: Lend Me a Tenor was your first Broadway play.

Ken Ludwig: Right.

Jo Reed: Can you walk me through that? How long had you been writing it? How was it produced? I mean, the first time on Broadway, that’s huge.

Ken Ludwig: It was huge. Lucky, lucky me. What happened was I wanted to be a playwright. I was writing in the mornings—I had a day job, and I would write every morning for four hours, and I had my first, second, third play. They were done in church basements with 20 to 30 people. And then, I was at a party in New York and met somebody who said he’s a director in—in London. He’d heard I was a playwright, and would I give him a copy of my latest play? So, I did. His name was David Gilmore. He took it back with him to London. He called me three days later and said, “I want to direct this play. I really like it—(It was Lend Me a Tenor)—and I want to show it to a producer friend of mine,” and I acted like a complete jackass, as you do when you’re young. I still do but I did especially then, <laughs> and—and I said, “Well, you know, I know a lot of producers too. I’m—I’m not such a nobody as you think I am. I know a lot of producers. Who’s your friend?” And he said, “Andrew Lloyd Webber,” and his friend producer was Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Andrew Lloyd Webber called me three days later and said, “I want to produce your play in the West End,” and lo and behold he got me on a plane three weeks later. I arrived in Heathrow Airport. His chauffeur picked me up. I met him at the American Bar at the Savoy and off we went, and—and six months later he had it on in the West End at the, what is now the Gielgud Theatre—it was called the Globe on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a big hit. We got Olivier Awards. We got this and that and the other thing, and I got to know Andrew very well because I lived over there with all these people for the six months of getting the show ready—and then Andrew produced it on Broadway. So, first it was the West End, and then it was on Broadway, and we got lots of awards, and it played, and it was a big hit. So, suddenly I went from having, you know, really paid my dues and spent time in the vineyards, working in the vineyards, toiling away, learning my craft, learning about the theater for those three or four years first, and then had this break where Andrew Llyod Webber started producing my plays. So then, the next thing that happened was I got a call—I had Lend Me a Tenor running on Broadway—and I got a call out of the blue from somebody named Roger Horchow who was a wealthy American businessman who had acquired the rights to the songs of George and Ira Gershwin and said would I write a musical using those songs as the songs in the musical, and at first, I said, “No,” because I don’t know how to write musicals. Dumb me. I did it again. But then I said, “Yes,” and I wrote Crazy for You, and Crazy for You was on Broadway for five years at the Shubert Theater, and we won the Tony Awards’ Best Musical, and then it went to London and won the Olivier there. So, with those two under my belt, I was on my way. I didn’t need a day job anymore, and—and I--

Jo Reed: I would think not. <laughs> Yes.

Ken Ludwig: And I was able to—to make a career in the theater.

Jo Reed: <laughs> I remember with Crazy for You, Frank Rich in the New York Times wrote such a glowing review. It felt like an insult if you did not go and see that play <laughs>. Like you were somehow insulting Frank Rich. Oh my God, that review. I—was amazing! Well, of course, I’m sure you remember.

Ken Ludwig: It was amazing. It’s framed on my wall <laughs>.

Jo Reed: Yes, I bet. What a review. So, how did you have to adjust your writing with so many songs? I mean, that’s a play packed with songs.

Ken Ludwig: It is packed with songs and I think there’s one too many songs and I’ve always felt the second act had one too many songs. But in order to tell the story, I kind of needed it, and the director and I talked a lot about it. It was very different, and—and I was sincere when Roger Horchow called me and said, “I want you to write you a musical.” I was very sincere in saying, “I—I don’t think I know how to write a musical. I don’t know the form as well as I know plays.” Sure, I know lots of musicals and I’ve seen them.

Jo Reed: But it’s a different animal.

Ken Ludwig: It’s a different animal and—and it’s an animal where the songs have to tell the story. And when you do a jukebox musical—we were one of the first, if not maybe the first jukebox musical—jukebox musical meaning that—a trunk musical, where the songs already existed by great masters of song—what I did is I went out to stores. In those days, there were CDs. Tower Records existed and I went out and got every CD I could possibly find that had the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. So, I had a stack of about 20 CDs or 30 CDs and I’d play them, and play them, and play them. I’d try to pick songs that would advance the story that I had sort of sketched, a general story about a banker who wants to be in show business and his mother, who’s in the banking business, wants him to foreclose on a little theater in Deadrock, Nevada. And that’s where he meets a wonderful woman who—whose father owns that theater that’s about to go under. So, I had to think of what songs would advance that story. I can’t be bothered now to tell the story of a banker who can’t be bothered with banking. He wants to be in show business himself. “Someone to Watch Over Me”—She’s the only gal in this town and she has nobody she can rely on. Her father dotes on her but the town’s full of people who don’t understand her. So, one after another I started putting songs in place that would tell the story and—and, of course, the book scenes in a musical can’t be very long. They have to be short. They have to just get you into the next song. As quickly as possible tell the story and if it's a comedy, as this was, land a good joke and get on with the story. And it is a different artform so, it was sort of patchwork putting it all together.

Jo Reed: Wow. Interesting though. So much of your work is based in or around theater. Obviously, you do love theater. But what is it about theater that’s so ripe as a place where you can place your plays?

Ken Ludwig: That’s a great question and I—I’ve tried to think it through, and I think there's a couple of reasons. Theater by its nature is a metaphor for the whole world—greatest cliché in the whole world—"All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”. But there’s a reason that he says that in As You Like It. The reason is, is because—theater is a metaphor for the bigger world, and it certainly functions for Shakespeare all the time that way. He has lots of little bits of theater running through the plays, you know. In Hamlet there's a play that’s the hinge of the whole—everything. Second of all, I think it’s because as I was growing up in York, Pennsylvania, little York, in the Amish country—York and Lancaster are the real Dutch country. We call them, you know, Amish country of Pennsylvania. You know, there wasn’t much theater. It was a quiet community. It’s a farming community. And I think as I grew up I thought that the theater was this great unknowable, unknown world that I didn’t have access to, and so I idealized it, and as I idealized it and romanticized it in my own mind I thought, “Well, of course, I’ll write about the theater”, because people have pointed it out to me since, and I didn’t know it when I was writing it. In Lend Me a Tenor—Lend Me a Tenor is about a fellow named Max who is an assistant to the producer of an opera—of the opera of the Cleveland Grand Opera Company. All of my comedies are set in small towns. Cleveland was a—is a small town. It has some great institutions but it’s a small town. So, being in a small town and Max wants to be an opera singer. He wants to get out of the business world and become an opera singer. At the time, my day job was as a lawyer and I wanted to be in the great world of the theater. So, Max was me. I didn’t realize that until 20 years later and people <laughs> started to point it out to me. And in a way, Bobby in Crazy for You is—is much the same story. He’s a banker who wants to be in show business. So, that was why show business was always the thing I wanted to write about.

Jo Reed: Well, you’ve turned your eye also on Sherlock Holmes with Baskerville and The Game’s Afoot, which is, again, back to theater, setting it on the actor--

Ken Ludwig: William Gillette who played Sherlock Holmes for 30 years.

Jo Reed: Thank you. Yes, and he becomes the main character of The Game’s Afoot.

Ken Ludwig: Right, and he becomes—becomes Sherlock Holmes, and my latest play, which opens next season, is called Moriarty, which is another play in the same tradition of Baskerville, which is having five actors on stage—a Holmes, a Watson, and then three actors who play 40 parts. And I’ve—I’ve sort of fallen in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories. I was between plays. I didn’t know what to do. I picked “The Hound of the Baskervilles” off the shelf, reread it and went, “This is a great piece of literature.” It’s really, I think, one of the two great adventure stories ever written in the English language.

Jo Reed: What’s the other?

Ken Ludwig: I think “Treasure Island,” And—and I thought, “This would be fun to dramatize this in some way, but it’s a big story. How can I dramatize it?” So, I thought, “By making it with as few actors as I can.” Because that made it interesting and it made it—it made it a play about the theater as opposed to just a play about Sherlock Holmes.

Jo Reed: Exactly, and was that fun then using those five actors to create 40? Obviously, you had to write them differently.

Ken Ludwig: Lots of fun. It was really fun. It was an adventure to write it. I felt the same way with Moriarty. It made—Yes, I have to think about it and I have to think quite specifically about the doubling and the tripling. You know, because who went out one door? How can you come in, in a different costume and another? Not just to get laughs at a costume. To try to tell the story with integrity. I mean, what I tried to do in Baskerville, and I hopefully have done in Moriarty—different challenges because The Hound of the Baskervilles is already written as a whole novel. Whereas, Moriarty I had to take different stories and create my own mystery. The—the challenge, in terms of stagecraft was the same—How to tell the story with as much integrity as I could muster, really get invested in the characters. The second one, Moriarty obviously has Moriarty in it. But also, Irene Adler when the one time in the canon of 56 stories that Sherlock Holmes loses his heart, and make it about romance, and make it about love, and make it about a conflict between duty and love, and—and really concentrate there, and if it’s funny doing that, great. But tell the story with integrity.

Jo Reed: You’ve directed, also, throughout the years.

Ken Ludwig: I have

Jo Reed: How is it directing your own work?

Ken Ludwig: Well, I think it’s more challenging because I don’t have a second perspective on it. So, on the one hand, it’s fun to direct. I love it. I love being in charge and rolling up my sleeves, and saying, “Do this. Do that.” Hey, who wouldn't want a God mic in their hand yelling, “Do this. Do that”? But, I do miss the extra perspective that a really smart director can bring me. So, I don’t do it too often. I do it now and then.

Jo Reed: But I wonder also what your stints, or experiences rather, as a director, how that added to your skillset as a playwright?

Ken Ludwig: Oh, I think a lot. A lot. I realized really some practicalities I needed. It—it gave me renewed respect for directors—of how they put things together, and the idea of bringing to directing a genuine level of creativity that says, “I’m bringing to the table not just pushing actors indoors and outdoors, and putting a costume on them but creating the world in a way that I think the playwright wants.”

Jo Reed: So, next year Moriarty?

Ken Ludwig: Next year Moriarty.

Jo Reed: We’ll look forward to it. Ken, thank you so much for coming and congratulations on Dear Jack, Dear Louise.

Ken Ludwig: Thank you so much. Thanks a million.

Jo Reed: You’re welcome.

Jo Reed: That’s playwright Ken Ludwig. His play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, had its world premiere at Arena Stage. You can keep up with Ken at kenludwig.com

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, and I hope you do, and then I hope you leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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