Who Lives Who Dies Who Sells Your Story

I’m not one of those people who can sit in a coffee shop with my laptop and just like, write or whatever, oblivious to my surroundings while my iced coffee melts into coffee flavored water. I always feel like I’m taking up the table too long while tired, thirsty travelers are looking at me thinking, “this fucking guy…”

And that may be why I never met Tommy Kail in the basement of the Drama Book Shop. This may be why I never helped Lin-Manuel polish the lyrics to the songs from In the Heights over coffee in the little downstairs theatre. Imagine me being like, “You’re rhyming abuela and escuela? That’s cute but are people gonna get it?” 

That kind of story is the stuff of legend. As a young playwright who just moved to New York City, I would loiter in the Drama Book Shop reading and looking around thinking, “Surely someone working here knows what they’re doing.” But no luck. Shit, they probably walked right by me.

I even remember what I thought was the original location on the second floor, in a dicey Seventh Avenue building, right in the middle of Times Square. It was a properly shady place; musty and mysterious and full of books and sheet music and posters of plays I had never heard of. A lifetime of things I had yet to learn about. Am I remembering that right or I am superimposing Colony Records? But that location was one of many going back more than one hundred years to 1917! 

And just like so many other things in the Theatre District, it was all so close and yet so far; the Drama Book Shop was portal in the back of the wardrobe to a world that I would one day be a part of.

Well, sort of.

While I did have some success as a playwright, it was a while ago and none of the three play publishing companies picked up my plays after their Off Broadway runs. I made it farther than many, and not as far as others. But the legacy of these guys, Kail and Miranda, reaching such heights (see what I did there?) and ostensibly starting in the same place that I did, always gave me pause.

Everyone knows the story by now, but in case you don’t, it went like this – the beloved Drama Book Shop on West 40th Street, announced that their evil scumbag landlord was raising their rent and they were closing. Then, out of the firefly-twilight of The Way Things Ought to Be came Lin-Manuel Miranda. Fresh off the good will of Hamilton, his folksy Twitter presence, affable talk show appearances and a fund-raising production of Hamilton in Puerto Rico, he came to the rescue. A loving husband with two kids, it’s possible to picture him scratching his head and digging his wallet out his jeans and going, “How much ya need?” So Tommy Kail, Miranda and two Hamilton producers bought the damn place and reopened it.

In almost the same spot, one block away on 39th.

Boom.

These guys met in the basement of the store, forged a creative team that would be forever etched into the theatre canon, then saved the store where they met, making the place bigger and better than it was. 

Again, the way things ought to be. 

Even in these times where conflict and cancellation seems to be the fuel on which social media runs, I could find nothing negative about this project.

The reopening was stalled for a year by COVID, but the big day finally came last month. There was so much press and buzz that you needed a reservation to go in. 

I did not go right away. I like to avoid the rush and lines. For instance, some people were scampering all over the place trying to get the vaccine – I strolled into a half empty Javits Center weeks later.

But the rush and the lines aren’t the real reason I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go because I knew I would feel like a failure. I used to go in that store on the way to the theatre and stand right in front of the shelf where my play would be once it was published. Of course, that’s not what happened, and I knew today it would still not be there and it never will. Life is mostly like that though, and certainly life in New York City.

Because New York is not here to make you feel better or tell you it’s going to be okay. Here, you must either keep going or go the fuck home, because there’s no time for anything else. Like the man said, “If a door doesn’t open, it’s not your door.” My only regret now is maybe knocking on it for so long. But not really, because the memories and friendships from my theatre days have made me who I am. Who I also am – and secretly knew all along – was a novelist, and that has got off to a promising start.

Maybe I should have picked up that copy of Playwriting for Dummies.

The new Drama Book shop is of course, perfect. It is large and wonderful. It smells great. There’s a café. The website says you still need a reservation, though I was 20 minutes late for mine and I was waved into a half empty store. 

I need to be a grumpy old New Yorker, for a minute, though. 

It’s different. 

And what else is there to do when you have lived here forever except say “I remember when Smith’s had a steam table,” and “The new McHales is shit,” and “CBGB’s used to be right there!” The old Drama Book Shop used to feel like the outer room of your theatre professor’s office. Random plays, and books by Uta Hagen strewn around with copies of Backstage and American Theatre magazine. Stacks of postcards and fliers for plays going on stacked by the register. Decades of knowledge and culture seemed to be everywhere – that blank page burning hot and bright in my mind.

The new place feels well… new; some shelves are a little empty (hey, don’t look at me,) and it still feels like it hasn’t been broken in yet – like everything is too perfect. It felt so much like a Rizzoli’s that I asked if they were part owners, and they are not. I hope they do those huge displays in the windows like they used to.

I think once Broadway reopens there will be a lot more foot traffic and stuff to go along with it. I am pretty sure the place is a pin in the map of theatre loving tourists on their way to the show. The back half of the store fills out into rows and rows of shelves of plays alphabetically by author. Shakespeare gets his own section still and there are rows of collections from festivals.

How-to, design and film and TV books abound everywhere as well and – thankfully – a beautiful oasis for the intersection of the performing arts and the written word has been sustained for generations of theatre artists. If you’re in the neighborhood and you have a friend in the performing arts, help keep this institution alive and know that you are supporting a local, independent business and get them a nice present.

Speaking of play-writing, I hope Lin is finding time to write the next one – cuz, um… it took seven years to write Hamilton and Hamilton came out seven years ago. So… what’s up?

Thank you so much for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe to our email list to stay updated on all the things TAWK offers! I promise you won’t be disappointed. Let us know what you think! Your feedback is so important to us!