T ALKING TO JOHN EISNER IS LIKE hopping on a surfboard in a bracing sea and riding an endless wave. His thoughts, his views, his intentions keep flowing, and the rider sails briskly and attentively along. The sentences and paragraphs tumbling one over the next are all about enlarging the theatre’s play repertoire—that’s because Eisner (who seasons his sentiments with words like “challenge” and “making a difference” and “the job that’s got to be done”) is producing director of the Manhattan-based Lark Play Development Center. It’s the outfit where hot writers such as David Henry Hwang, Tanya Barfield, Sarah Ruhl and Theresa Rebeck have worked on their plays Yellow Face , The Blue Door , The Clean House and Mauritius , respectively—and then worked on them some more, and then even more, so that when the plays were finally considered production-ready, they impressed audiences, producers and critics across the country.

Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis, who’s presenting Yellow Face and Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Good Negro in his current New York City season, calls the Lark “a wonderful, nurturing and creative partner.” As a result of this kind of acclaim, attention is being focused on an organization that, until recently, has purposefully remained somewhat under the radar. The reason for Eisner’s continuing (if softening) reticence about tooting his and his company’s horn is closely tied into his underlying philosophy about playwriting. In a post–New Year’s interview during which each question is met with a torrent of responses, Eisner keeps the idea of mission simple: “The purpose of a place like the Lark is to create an extended development period for writers.” His oasis in a commerce-driven desert, he adds with a pleasant gravitas, is “all about how creators and artists are able to listen and process material and apply that material. The job here is to support writers without so much help from the outside. The challenge is to understand how they listen and process information.”

Eisner talks about the need for “balancing things against the ‘crucible feeling’—the feeling that things are boiling and hot, and that you’re forced to make decisions quickly. Sometimes that feeling drives you to good decisions. But at the same time, to make something truly beautiful, there are times that you need to create a longer-term plan.” He’s stressing, of course, the belief that plays can only realize their potential fully when the bottom line isn’t an immediate factor looming over the creative process.

A tall chap who often sports an expression of low-key astonishment at what he’s created, Eisner meets me in one of the main rehearsal rooms the Lark rents in a funky Eighth Avenue low-rise where other rehearsal rooms abound. The space is a rehearsal hall like any other, with practical chairs, a few tables, a curve-fronted riser and red velour draperies. (Eisner explains that the color red avoids a black-box atmosphere, which might tend to convey a finished-product impression to audiences.) The room, dubbed the Lark Studio, is where readings and rehearsals for plays can be held near the organization’s administrative offices so that the smallish staff can come and go easily.

It’s the same room where, a few days later, a playwriting workshop is in progress under the guidance of Lark workshop director Arthur Kopit and guest facilitator John Guare. Kopit and Guare are analyzing scenes from a handful of plays by Lark writers. Present and encouraged to throw in the occasional two cents is a contingent of 26 people, including participating actors and Lark staffers. At this extremely candid event, Eisner says he likes to “sit in a corner and speak only when I have something to say.” During the first two of the five discussions on the agenda, he only has something to say once. Otherwise he sits quietly with his large hands folded in his lap.

Clearly, Eisner sees his role as that of benevolent benefactor and wears the genial smile to prove it. He’s more than eager to let Kopit and Guare, who mention that they’ve had a long relationship of friendly combat, manage the continuing Q&A. (Q&A works best because uppermost in the workshop leaders’ aims is to suss out answers to such questions as: “What does the playwright need to learn now? What is crucial for the playwright’s progress?”) Afterward, Kopit, who signed on for this stint some years before, expresses his enthusiasm about the commitment: “The Lark is particularly good about developing a piece when they’re not sure what it is or what it will be. You have to be able to fail. If you can’t fail, you can’t produce anything that has great merit. At the Lark, you don’t have to please anyone but yourself. John is inspiring so much work. He’s a visionary when it comes to the idea of ‘How can we help the playwright?’ It’s all about the play. The resources are extraordinary, and the bar is set very high.”

BORN IN 1959, THE SON OF A DOCTOR WHO SPENT his residency in New York City and moved to Madison, Wis., to work at a local university, Eisner traces his life in the theatre to the year he decided to step off his pre-med track at Amherst College after he assisted Lloyd Richards at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. After Amherst, Eisner plunged headlong into acting in New York as well as at Massachusetts’s Williamstown Theatre Festival and American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco—and then, with his ACT mentor Allen Fletcher, he assisted in the founding of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s National Theatre Conservatory.

More acting in New York followed, about which Eisner now says, “I thought I was happy, but I wasn’t.” Developing new plays, he realized, was what actually made him happy, so in the early 1990s he inaugurated a new play operation at Rhode Island’s Westerly Shakespeare in the Park, which he’d also co-founded. But by mid-decade, he decided New York City was the place to be after all, and with friends Larry Gruber and John Stewart he launched a producing outfit called the Chelsea Playhouse Consortium.

The rigors of sharing a small Chelsea theatre with three other companies was what led Eisner to a decisive turning point. He recalls “a day, about three years into the project, when I realized that what I really needed to be doing that afternoon was spending time with this amazing playwright we were producing—asking her questions and giving her the kind of feedback and support she needed to make her play better. Instead, I was waiting for a lumber truck for four or five hours.

“I just realized everything has priorities,” Eisner continues. “Building a set definitely did not come first when the playwright was feeling so lonely and isolated and unsupported. I watched the set getting built. I watched how little time I had between marketing the show and greeting the donors and taking care of all the emergencies. Ultimately, we put up a play that was full of potholes, because I hadn’t been able to sit with the writer and force a conversation. We didn’t have the staff to support and look after the writer and the director in the back of the room who weren’t getting the artistic backup they needed. At the end of the year, I said to my partners, ‘We’re going to move uptown [to 939 Eighth Avenue] and we’re going to make good theatre—we’re going to focus on the thing that’s missing.’”

Gruber and Stewart (who have since changed directions in their careers) seconded Eisner’s ambitious plan and worked with him to create the Lark Play Development Center, which, despite its modest profile, is going great guns today, with programs that include an annual playwrights’ week, workshops and seminars, panel discussions and a range of granting opportunities for writers (one, the $2,000-per-month Playwrights of New York stipend, is geared to serve as a one-year salary for a playwright who might have to be otherwise engaged). Eisner is especially proud of “BareBones,” fully rehearsed play presentations the Lark regularly presents, as he is of the impressive international program he has put in place, working with artists from China, India, Mexico, Argentina, Congo and other far-flung locales.
 
Eisner in The Dybbuk with National Theatre
of the Deaf, 1987.

ASK EISNER HOW THE VARIOUS LARK ELEMENTS relate , and he says, “I think about them as a tool chest at the disposal of the inventor. Some jobs require a hammer, some a drill or a screwdriver. Each program has its own viability and usefulness to our constituency. The key is using the appropriate tool at the appropriate moment.” Ask him how his small staff gets so much done and he says, “Even if we work with 90 writers a year, we focus on projects that can really make a difference. Only 10 or 15 fall into that category. For others we’re a safe haven responsive to their individual needs. We don’t have to rush a playwright to solve a problem.”

As for ranking the Lark’s accomplishments so far, Eisner notes that “every unheard voice given a public venue is a success. We know that at least 72 Lark-developed plays had at least 85 productions or major workshops in the past two years.” Not a bad record, but he goes on to point out that major writers such as Hwang and Rebeck log Lark time when they’re working on particularly risky projects. He points to the PONY fellowships that eliminate the burden of hurried commissions, citing the steady progress of current recipient Carson Kreitzer ( The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer ); he mentions partnering with the Indo-American Arts Council to support a platform for South Asian diaspora writers, an effort that has reportedly led to the launch of five theatre companies.

Eisner not only keeps an eye on other development centers, he often coordinates with them—and draws careful distinctions between the Lark’s approach and theirs. For instance, he considers the venerable New Dramatists “a sanctuary for proven writers to strengthen their professional capacity” rather than a sounding-board for the Lark’s constant stream of new voices and new perspectives. After partnering with the people at Utah’s Sundance Institute, he notes, “What sets us apart is that we are in New York City and are looking to create a financial base to support a huge sort of intersection of artistic talent here. Our real interest is in what it means to bring different people to the table—people who speak different languages, come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and different generations , and for whom different things are funny.”

At the first read-through for poet Chisa Hutchinson’s lesbian-love-affair-themed She Like Girls , Eisner is once again a fly on the wall as the session’s participants, all in work clothes, form an informal Lark Studio circle, keeping bottled water within easy reach. Before director Kristin Horton runs the young ensemble through the first-time playwright’s piece, Eisner speaks up only to reiterate the Lark mission. Also on hand is artistic program director (and director-inher- own-right) Daniella Topol, who says, with no small measure of affection for Eisner, “I’ve learned so much by working with and for John. He’s truly a generous leader. Creating a larger platform for theatre isn’t just a philosophical matter—it lives for him. Because he has such a big heart, he’s attracted great advocates for the Lark.”

Indeed, Eisner seems finally to have shaped the kind of organization that satisfies the ambitions he has harbored since his early experience at the O’Neill. “Most important to me is that we are really about the spark of imagination—we are about how to support writers in stating and then realizing their visions. Our job is to identify new voices to bring into the theatre and to constantly challenge convention with respect to how plays need to be made. Our job is to create a platform for many, many perspectives to be present at the same time.”

David Finkle has written about theatre for the Village Voice and the New York Times. He is senior drama critic for TheaterMania.com , and has just finished a collection of short stories.