When Alliance audiences first met up with playwright Josh Tobiessen, it was 2008 and his dark comedy Election Day — a finalist in the Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition — was being read on the Hertz Stage.
Josh was fresh from graduate school in California, looking to make a living as a playwright. Election Day, his first big play, looked at the price of personal and political campaigns. It had a full production at Second Stage in New York (The Times liked it; a few other publications did not). And he’d begun working on Spoon Lake Blues, which he did intensively in 2009 at the prestigious summer lab at the Eugene O’Neill Playwright Center in Waterford, Conn.
Tobiessen (pronounced toe-BEE-sinn) is the first Kendeda alumnus to return to the Alliance, no small feat. The Kendeda roster includes such names-to-watch as Tarell Alvin McCraney, Megan Gogerty, Carson Kreitzer, Sarah Gubbins and Mat Smart. Spoon Lake Blues, another dark comedy, is Josh’s heftiest project since Election Day. It follows two brothers who leave no stone, stereotype or septic tank unturned in an effort to save their house from the bank. In both plays, the action spins on a mix of singular and universal truths.
Tobiessen’s main goal in writing plays “is just not to let people get bored,” he says self-deprecatingly.
He likes to take on weighty themes, issues that we all face as a country. And he likes to make people laugh.
In short, he writes funny plays about big ideas. His goal: to engage audience members in theatre as a means of discussion. He’s into inclusion, not polarization, whether the core topic is politics, the housing crisis or idealists creating a commune in Kentucky.
Tobiessen, originally from Schenectady, N.Y., is an only child. As he played alone with his action figures, he says he made his first efforts to write dialogue. He acted in high school and in college, where he studied psychology. After college, he moved to Chicago and found more work in improv than as an actor. As he learned how to create dialogue and action on the spot, his thoughts turned to playwriting.
Since he’d always wanted to live abroad and he only spoke English, he chose a graduate program in Ireland. After collecting one master’s degree and some hands-on experience running a theatre company, he moved on to San Diego for practical reasons. Attending graduate school there would help him make connections in American theatre, he felt. For the most part, his plan has worked.
At 36, Tobiessen is no beginner, but he’s at a grateful place. He and his girlfriend, a theatre director, are at home in Brooklyn. And, although he stills takes on temporary office work to help pay the bills, he knows he’s had it better than a lot of playwrights.
“Good things have happened to me,” he says, “but they have been kind of spread out. I’m still climbing my way up.”
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Kathy Janich is an Atlanta theatre artist and freelance writer. After years in daily newspapers, she’s found a second career as an artistic associate at Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre. Visit synchrotheatre.com.
