Meet the Playwright: Anna Ziegler
Exploring THE WANDERERS writer’s sharply observant and deeply empathetic plays
“I feel like I can’t write a play unless l love everyone in it in some way,” playwright Anna Ziegler said in an interview with Forward. In her play The Wanderers, onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 5 through October 6, 2024, that deep empathy and sense of good will sustains a story about insular religious observance, marriage and intimacy, and professional frustration. It is also part of what keeps the Lantern returning to her incisive, funny, and deeply felt work: The Wanderers is the third Ziegler play we’ve produced.
Ziegler’s work, including Photograph 51 (produced by the Lantern in 2015) and The Last Match (produced by the Lantern in 2019), have been seen on stages across the country and around the world. A West End production of Photograph 51 starring Nicole Kidman won London’s 2016 WhatsOnStage Award for Best New Play. Among the many awards and nominations for her plays, The Wanderers won the San Diego Critic’s Circle Award for Outstanding New Play. A collection of her plays is published as Anna Ziegler: Plays One.
Ziegler has also moved from the stage to the screen. She is currently writing the screenplay for Photograph 51, as well as developing and writing projects for Apple TV, HBO Max, AMC, and Paramount+. She graduated from Yale and holds master’s degrees in both poetry and dramatic writing; this early experience in poetry infuses her work with a potent lyricism that deepens the rich humanity of her characters and their stories.
Ziegler’s topics run the gamut from sports to science to adolescence and back again. Boy, nominated for the John Gassner Award by the Outer Critics Circle, is based on the true story of a male raised as a girl after an accident when he was an infant; as an adult, he must navigate the complicated terrain of gender identity. Actually, winner of Los Angeles’s Ovation Award in Los for Playwriting of an Original Play, is a thorny drama about consent, gender, race, and multifaceted truth. The Minotaur is a thoroughly modern adaptation of Greek myth, while The Great Moment and Another Way Home are sharply witty and empathetically observant family stories.
All produced by the Lantern, Photograph 51, The Last Match, and The Wanderers are different from each other and the rest of her canon in subject matter, but they share the keen eye and open heart with which Ziegler approaches all her characters and their struggles. Photograph 51 focuses on Rosalind Franklin, the overlooked female scientist who unlocked the structure of DNA, while The Last Match takes place far from the lab, on the tennis courts of the US Open, where an aging champion and the young hotshot are vying for the trophy.
In an interview conducted during our 2019 production of The Last Match, we asked Ziegler about how these two plays — with such different settings and characters — explore similar questions around ambition, achievement, and how and why we do the work we do. Ziegler responded, “They are themes I come back to a lot...I think the idea of ambition and never being satisfied is everywhere in my plays. The Last Match and Photograph 51 really are both about hard work, and where it can take you and where it sort of stops short. How much do we have control over? And in the end it really does come down to our personalities, and how we’ve been formed as people is sort of what determines what happens to us, I think.”
The Wanderers is also invested in our ability, or lack thereof, to be satisfied, whether in our careers, our marriages, or the life we’ve made for ourselves — or the life we’re expected to make. It’s a story of two couples, whose experiences are intertwined in surprising ways in the same Brooklyn neighborhood: Sophie and Abe, secular Jewish novelists in a long marriage in hip Williamsburg, and Esther and Schmuli, members of the strict Satmar court, starting a life together a few blocks away in their insular part of Hasidic Williamsburg. In our 2019 interview, Ziegler noted, “The Last Match, I think, has in common with a bunch of my other plays this idea of the way we carry our parents with us.” The Wanderers — set worlds and years away from the bright lights of the tennis court of The Last Match — shares this concern. How do our parents’ expectations and choices shape our own? What can we control, and what are we fated for? Can we be satisfied with the answers?
This is the central issue running through Ziegler’s diverse array of topics in her varied plays: finding satisfaction. In the interview with Forward, Ziegler said of her Wanderers characters, “They’re all looking over their shoulders to see if there’s some better life out there or some other life that might be more satisfying. In some ways I think probably all of my plays are about this theme, to some degree…This one probably most explicitly. I think it’s a disease all the characters are struggling with.”
Whether it’s a world-class scientist whose work is subsumed by flashier scholars, a tennis champ who can’t bring himself to put down his racquet, a celebrated novelist whose marriage is too comfortable, or any of the searching and well-meaning humans populating her plays, Ziegler’s work is characterized by her deep empathy for them and their choices, even when they’re wrong. She believes in their ability to be their best selves, and she hopes that these characters — and those of us watching — can find a way through the thicket of dissatisfaction to peace on the other side. In an interview with Roundabout Theatre during their 2023 production of The Wanderers, she summed up her hopes for the play — and for us: “I hope, to steal a line from the play, that it makes people think about putting aside a sort of galvanizing restlessness that leaves us always empty. To endeavor to enjoy our lives for what they are as opposed to what we’d wish them to be — a nearly impossible task (for me, at least) but worth a shot anyway.”
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is onstage September 5 through October 6, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
