High School Flashbacks
Stephen Karam’s Speech & Debate captures the awkward (and awesome) parts of being a teen
By Joanna Horowitz |
Playwright Stephen Karam |
When Stephen Karam was a 14-year-old high school freshman, he had a total Diwata moment.
He performed the duet "Last Night of the World" from Miss Saigon in front of the entire
student body of his large public high school.
"I had no idea that might not be a cool thing to do—I was obsessed with the show at
the time, wanted to sing it...so I did," Karam said. "By the next year I was already too
self-conscious to do something like that again. At 16, I lost all of the fire that Diwata
has in Speech & Debate, I started to worry how people viewed me.
Karam's play—written when he was 26 (he is now 30)—is filled with the delightful
unselfconsciousness of high school outsiders. Like Karam, who describes his high school self as
"clueless and confident," teenagers Diwata, Howie, and Solomon still have the passion, chutzpah,
and shamelessness to do something outrageous (say, start a speech and debate team to expose a
possible sex scandal).
The beauty of Speech & Debate is its honesty, and from that honesty, terrific humor.
Its dialogue and characters are relatable whether the audience member currently has a locker
combination, or can only vaguely remember the joy of skipping an assembly.
Karam is acutely aware of the intergenerational appeal of his play. He says the music in the
play (of which there is a lot, including some original songs), helps all of the play's
subjects—including teen sex—come across without being too awkward.
"The energy of the music (and the precise timing) supports every line of the IM Chat in Scene
One. And that timing creates a comic energy that's important to the piece," Karam said. "It helps
to convey the emotion of that situation properly to, say, an 80-year-old audience member who has
never had a sexually charged IM chat in their life—and who otherwise might find the whole
thing uncomfortable and scary."
Karam has had the opportunity to see the play in front of several live audiences now, most
notably for its 2007 premiere as part of New York's Roundabout Theatre's Underground series. And
that production garnered him some pretty glowing reviews. Variety said the play is "bristling with
vitality, wicked humor, terrific dialogue and a direct pipeline into the zeitgeist of contemporary
youth."
Not bad for a fairly green writer. Before Speech & Debate, Karam's most notable piece
was a musical adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma that was performed on the main stage at
Brown University, his alma mater. He's also hanging onto a parody he wrote in high school of
Terrence McNally's Master Class, called Master Ass, for possible eBay sellage if
he has a long enough career.
And his career is really just taking off. He's currently in New York working on a screenplay
version of Speech & Debate for Overture Films, a libretto for a chamber opera and a new play for
Roundabout.
"To this day I'm trying to take risks as big as 14-year-old-oblivious Stephen," Karam said. "He
was brave."
