Brian Yorkey

Playwright

• Born: October 27, 1970
• Place of Birth: Omaha, Nebraska

Contribution: Brian Yorkey is a Tony Award–winning American playwright, lyricist, and screenwriter. Yorkey shared the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with composer Tom Kitt for their musical Next to Normal.

Background

Brian Russell Yorkey was born on October 27, 1970, in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved with his family to Issaquah, Washington, at age ten. Yorkey’s first exposure to theater programs took place at both Issaquah Middle School and Issaquah High School.

During his teenage years, Yorkey immersed himself in all aspects of theatrical production. He performed many odd jobs at Issaquah’s Village Theatre, including house manager, ticket sales, and audience membership. He would later attribute witnessing the theater’s production of Eleanor, a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt, from the very beginning stages through to completion as a particularly influential experience.

Despite his growing interest in musical theater, Yorkey’s true passion remained playwriting. At age seventeen, Yorkey cowrote a musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s famous children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Unable to secure theatrical rights to the film version of the book, Yorkey and his fellow collaborators requested permission to rewrite the work for theater from Dahl himself, who complied.

In 2022, it was announced that Yorkey was developing a film based on the memoir Like Crazy: My Mother and Her Invisible Friends by Dan Mathews. Yorkey graduated from Issaquah High School in 1989 and enrolled at Columbia University.

Career

After his graduation from Columbia in 1993, Yorkey, still intending to embark on a career as a playwright, successfully applied for the role of artistic director at the school’s traditional Varsity Show program. While there he wrote four shows for the century-old program, assisting undergraduates with the writing, production, and performance of a new musical for several consecutive years.

During his tenure as artistic director at Varsity Show, Yorkey met the American composer and musician and fellow Columbia alumnus Tom Kitt. In the late 1990s, after several years of collaboration, the two conceived of a ten-minute musical about a woman suffering from depression who undergoes electric shock treatment, entitled Feeling Electric. The work premiered at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in 1998 and received some criticism from audiences and long-time theater professionals for its unconventional subject matter and narrative opposition to traditional themes in musical theater.

Yorkey and Kitt received an equal amount of positive responses to the work, however. This praise—coming mostly from audience members for whom depression had affected their lives or the life of a family member—compelled the two composers to expand Feeling Electric from a short ten-minute piece into a fully evolved musical theater production. The two worked on the project in concert with other endeavors throughout the first half of the 2000s. Yorkey’s other work during this period included writing the lyrics for the 1999 Off-Broadway production Making Tracks. He also penned the book for the 2005 country-music musical Play It by Heart, which premiered at the Village Theatre.

Feeling Electric was over three-and-a-half hours long at its debut at the New York Musical Theater Festival in 2005, when the pair received feedback from famed producer David Stone regarding its potential. Feeling Electric’s debut also caught the eye of Carole Rothman, the artistic director at New York City’s Second Stage Theatre, who expressed interest in producing the musical Off-Broadway.

Additional edits and a pairing down of the play’s musical numbers aided in its eventual rebirth under a new title: Next to Normal. The work debuted at New York City’s Second Stage Theatre in February 2008. Continual edits by Yorkey and Kitt in response to ever-growing positive feedback from audiences and critics alike eventually persuaded Stone to produce the play on Broadway, where it debuted at the Booth Theatre on April 15, 2009.

Next to Normal ran for over seven hundred performances and was nominated for eleven Tony Awards in 2009. Yorkey and Kitt won best original score for their music and lyrics; the show also won best performance by leading actress (Alice Ripley) and best orchestrations. In 2010, the work was honored with the Pulitzer Prize, becoming just the eighth musical to win the honor since it was first awarded in 1918.

In 2010 Yorkey and Kitt began working on a project written for actor Robert Downey Jr.; the pitch, for a film musical entitled Score!, was sold to Warner Bros. The pair also collaborated on the musical In Your Eyes, which had a private showcase production at Festival of New Musicals in Issaquah, Washington, in August 2010.

In 2013 Yorkey also began working on scoring the musical adaptation of the popular feature film Magic Mike (2012). After years of development, a May 2019 lab presentation of the show was postponed due to artistic differences and the subsequent departure of members of the creative team. Later that month, it was announced that the show’s November 30 world premier at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston was canceled.

The next Broadway show for the team of Yorkey and Kitt was the musical If/Then, starring Tony Award–winning actor Idina Menzel in its lead role as Elizabeth. The highly anticipated show began previews in March 2014 and officially opened that same month. Yorkey, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Kitt, who wrote the music, received one of the show's two 2014 Tony Award nominations, for best original score, along with a 2014 Outer Critics Circle award nomination for outstanding new score.

Yorkey collaborated with British musician Sting to write The Last Ship. Sting wrote the music and lyrics while Yorkey wrote the book and directed. The Last Ship was previewed in September 2014 and debuted on Broadway in October 2014. The show picked up a slew of honors, including two 2015 Tony Award nominations, for best orchestrations (Rob Mathes) and best original score (Sting).

In addition to Broadway musicals, Yorkey has also created a Netflix series, Thirteen Reasons Why (2017–2020), which he wrote and produced. In the show, a teenager named Clay Jensen finds a box of tapes made by his classmate and crush, Hannah Baker, in which she attempts to explain why she committed suicide two weeks prior. The show received a Golden Globe nomination for best actress (Katherine Langford) among other honors, and proved popular yet controversial due to its subject matter. In 2019, Netflix removed a graphic first-season sequence that showed Hannah committing suicide. The streaming service’s decision came in the wake of a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry in April 2019 that found a link between the series' release in 2017 and a spike in the suicide rate among children ages ten to seventeen in the United States. The show’s fourth and final season was in 2020.

Impact

Brian Yorkey has come to personify a new guard faction in contemporary American theater and has inspired a new generation of young playwrights and composers. His creative process has helped to restore a sense of collaboration and unity to the conception of musical theater. He has also demonstrated that the genre is prepared to tackle complex subjects.

Bibliography

Cheek-O’Donnell, Sydney. “From Class Project to Broadway Hit.” Pioneer Theatre Company. Pioneer Theatre Company, U of Utah, n.d. Web. 28 July 2013.

Getlin, Josh. “The Ballad of Kitt & Yorkey.” Columbia Magazine. Columbia U, Fall 2010. Web. 26 July 2013.

Grobar, Matt. "‘13 Reasons Why’ Creator Brian Yorkey Developing Film Based on Dan Mathews’ Memoir ‘Like Crazy’; Ted Malawer to Adapt Screenplay." Deadline, 16 May 2022, deadline.com/2022/05/13-reasons-why-creator-brian-yorkey-developing-like-crazy-film-1235025268/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

Healy, Patrick. “Pulitzer-Winning ‘Next to Normal’ to Close in January.” New York Times 11 Nov. 2011: 2. Print.

Itzkoff, David. “Sting and Brian Yorkey Embark on a New Musical, ‘The Last Ship.’” New York Times. New York Times, 1 Sept. 2011. Web. 22 Aug. 2013.

“Magic Mike Musical Heads to Broadway.” BBC. BBC, 25 July 2013. Web. 22 Aug. 2013.

Weicking, Steve. “Brian Yorkey: From Issaquah to a Tony Award.” Seattle Weekly. Sound, 15 Feb. 2011. Web. 26 July 2013.