Interview with the Playwright


Ted Sod, Roundabout’s Education Dramaturg, sat down with playwright Andrew Hinderaker to discuss the play.


Ted Sod: Will you give us some background information on yourself: where you’re from, where you were educated, when you decided to become a playwright? Andrew Hinderaker: I grew up in Wisconsin, which I think shapes a lot of my writing. There’s a Midwestern earnestness that’s at the core of what I write despite the dark and even sarcastic premise of some of the work. I lived in Madison, Wisconsin through high school and then I went out to Stanford to do my undergraduate/graduate degrees. I started taking fiction writing classes and wrote a number of short stories. In my junior year, I entered a one-act competition on a bet, which was accepted as part of a festival. It really was not a good play. I’m not being modest; it was a very bad play. But that experience of being in the rehearsal room and working with actors and a director, I immediately felt an excitement that I hadn’t felt in any other academic pursuit. After graduating, I realized that I’d gone though my undergraduate degree and had done very little theatre and very little reading even though I had a degree in English and creative writing. So I ended up designing my own master’s program at Stanford. I stumbled into these great opportunities and put things up on stage routinely. I did a couple internships out at San Jose Rep and TheatreWorks and got immersed that way. Finally, I came up to Chicago and got started there.


TS: What inspired you to write Suicide, Incorporated? AH: There were a couple years in Chicago that I actually took off from writing. For about two and a half years in Chicago, I worked at Northwestern University in a Student Affairs position, doing a bit of teaching, and I had the opportunity to supervise a number of students. One of the students that I supervised, who became a friend of mine, committed suicide in November, 2005. At the time, I had already been working on a presentation with this psychologist who works at Northwestern, a man named David Shor. He does these presentations on masculinity and it was fascinating research. I was there as a co-presenter; none of these are my ideas. But he talks about masculinity; he talks about some of the archetypes of what it means to be a man. His idea was to take all these archetypes of being strong, competitive, successful and even being emotionally controlled and open up what they meant, so that the definition of what it means for men to be strong would be broader. I found it fascinating, and the reason that I mentioned it is because when I lost this friend of mine, he was, in a lot of ways, very archetypically male. He was 6’6” and 250 lbs. He was an athlete. He was Vice President of his fraternity. He was all these things that a lot of guys would associate with being a man. He was somebody that everybody went to for help. In hindsight, it became very apparent that it prevented him from asking for help. Being the person who had to be impenetrable made it difficult for him to say, “I don’t know what’s going on here, I’m losing control of a lot of different things.” And so that realization led me to appreciate the fundamental statistics about the fact that 80% of suicides are male in this country and that one of the largest groups is late teens to late 20s. Guys are entering that stage in their life where they “should” be


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figuring out what it means to be a man. And it seemed to me there was a dialogue that wasn’t happening. So that’s where the play came from.


TS: What would you say your play is about? AH: In some ways, it’s about the relationship between masculinity and suicide, particularly in this country. Growing up in Wisconsin with that Midwestern ethos where you don’t really ask for help, I wanted to put men on stage and show them being vulnerable with each other in a way that felt honest and important. I fundamentally feel like many of the men who consider or complete suicide do in fact have relationships in place, often with other men, and there is support there if only those two guys can find a way to connect; if they can find a way to be vulnerable and ask for and offer help. What the play is really trying to encourage is for more of those conversations to happen. Ultimately, even though the play ends on far from what I would describe as a happy note, it’s a life affirming one. It is one that celebrates the kind of connection that can happen between two people.


TS: Was there any other research that you had to do to write the play? AH: I reached out to the Jed Foundation. They specialize in suicide prevention for college students. I explained what I was doing with this play and they were understandably a little wary. I imagine they thought, “Well, this looks like it might be treating the matter lightly, but let’s find out more about it.” I crafted a message that they sent out to a few of the folks they knew. A couple of young men who had attempted suicide and some parents who had lost their sons to suicide got in touch with me and I had conversations with them. Even though it was just a few conversations, it was really important in shaping the story. It was affirming to know that


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