Taped above Nick Johnson’s desk is the Kurt Vonnegut quote: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
Johnson said this quote embodies what it feels like to face writer’s block, a situation he tries to teach his playwriting students to overcome.
Now in his final quarter of graduate school at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television as the only playwright of his graduating class, Johnson has discovered that teaching Theater 30: “Dramatic Writing,” has helped him cultivate his passion for working with students.
Johnson acted in high school, but after attending UC Irvine as a music theater student for a year, he decided he no longer felt connected to the pursuit of acting. He dropped out of school and left for New Zealand, where he worked for an environmental organization for a few months. In 2010, he transferred to UCLA as an anthropology student, finding his way into the playwriting program through his theater classes with Professor Gary Gardner.
“I basically ran the complete opposite direction from theater,” Johnson said. “But while I was an undergraduate, the idea of new, evolving work in musical theater had stuck with me.”
Johnson said it was Gardner who pulled him aside after class one day and invited him to study in the playwriting program. In Gardner’s playwriting class, Johnson said he learned to write without censure for a set period of time, abstaining from editing or erasing in the process.
“The next day, go back and read what you wrote. It won’t be as good as you thought it was, but it also won’t be as bad,” Johnson said.
Since then, Johnson has completed his required repertoire for graduation, which includes two full-length plays, a screenplay and a teleplay or pilot – he has also written about 10 other full-length plays and 20 short plays outside of his studies. His last production, “The Other Town,” was produced and performed in UCLA’s New Play Festival in December.
Johnson is currently writing a one-woman show and taking a course on experimental theater, which includes trips to plays at REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, in Downtown Los Angeles. He has been working at the Geffen Playhouse for about a year now as a literary associate.
Amy Levinson, artistic associate and literary director at the Geffen Playhouse, said she was amazed at Johnson’s capacity to write rich, 3-D and complicated women in “The Other Town,” which she called a piece of work beyond his years.
“His biggest strength is his the love of the work, and in what we do, it’s very easy to get cynical,” Levinson said.
Johnson said though it is difficult to produce new work while juggling school and his job, he still makes an effort to write regularly.
“I tell the current playwrights in my classes, ‘If I had it to do over again, I would set aside more time for writing,’” Johnson said. “I try to sit down and write for at least three hours at a time in the morning before I start my day.”
Johnson said that in his first year at UCLA, he was frustrated because he felt his understanding of how to write a play was surpassing his ability to actually write one. The following summer, Johnson downloaded a list of must-reads – he said once he started interning at the Geffen Playhouse in September 2013, he was reading plays at work and then coming home to read plays for class.
“It was just 24-7 reading plays and breaking them down and understanding how they work,” Johnson said. “And that immersive experience was what helped me figure out how to translate what I’m trying to say into a dialogue.”
Johnson said what surprises people about his work is that at first glance it can be perceived as dark, which contrasts with his generally cheerful and upfront demeanor.
“What’s deceptive about that is I never write my plays as tragedies. I don’t write characters that wallow in misery,” Johnson said. “My plays are funny. They are these characters that are just doing the best that they can with the circumstances that they find themselves in.”
Scott Barnhardt, a playwriting graduate student who Johnson mentored when Barnhardt was accepted into the program, said that he admires how Johnson’s writing is beautifully influenced by some of his favorite playwrights and authors.
“Johnson’s work is very thoughtful and thorough,” Barnhardt said. “He’s investigative in his own work. I think he continually asks questions and he continually rewrites, and it shows.”
After graduate school, Johnson said he plans to go to New York City in search of new work and new mentors. For now, he said he is greatly inspired by the culture of plays, whether it be reading reviews of plays that have just opened in New York or reading plays for fun on the weekends.
Johnson said his goal is to eventually find the balance between being a writer, an artist and a functioning member of society. He said because writing as a profession is all-consuming, it is easy for it to be an excuse not to live.
“I do worry about burning out, and I do get exhausted sometimes,” Johnson said. “But I’m usually always ready to get started again as soon as possible.”