When she started her writing career at St. Anthony Messenger in Over-the-Rhine, Theresa Rebeck knew she wanted to be a playwright, not a journalist.
She just wasn’t sure how a kid from Kenwood could make that leap.
Fast forward more than four decades later, and Rebeck has come full circle. The award-winning playwright (The Family of Mann), film (The 355, Harriet the Spy, Catwoman), author, and television writer (NYPD Blue, Smash, Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is directing the play she wrote, I Need That, at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati four blocks away from her old Franciscan Media office on Liberty Street. She brought the play here after it premiered on Broadway in 2023 with Danny DeVito.
“It’s been a great experience for me to be here,” says Rebeck, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I love the Ensemble Theatre. I love (producing artistic director) Lynn Myers. This building is so remarkable.”
While sitting in the theater lobby at 1127 Vine St., Rebeck saw a picture of the building when it was a Fifth Third Bank. “My grandfather worked here! In this branch! The history of Over-the-Rhine is so rich in my family. My grandparents lived here when they would run pigs through the street,” she says.
Rebeck grew up on Appleknoll Lane behind Moeller High School and attended Ursuline Academy in Blue Ash. After her brief stint at the St. Anthony Messenger, she earned a master’s degree in English and doctorate degree in Victorian era melodrama from Brandeis University in the 1980s and was on her way to becoming the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time.
Her play Omnium Gatherum was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004. She’s received the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award, the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award, a Lilly Award and more. She won a Writers Guild of America award and her work on NYPD Blue was nominated for two Primetime Emmys.
“She’s skillful in a way that I don’t think gets enough credit,” actress Tyne Daly told The New York Times when starring in Rebeck’s Downstairs family drama in Manhattan a few years ago. “She has learned how to construct, how to build — and how to surprise and delight along the way ... She should be revered.”
The Ensemble Theatre calls I Need That a “hilarious, heartfelt and human play about a curmudgeonly father (David Wohl), his exasperated daughter (Maggie Lou Rader) and his patient best friend (Kenneth Early)” helping the old man sort through his clutter or be evicted. Rebeck is making her Cincinnati directorial debut after tweaking the script that went straight to Broadway in November 2023 for DeVito and his daughter, Lucy.
“With that much visibility around it, I didn’t have time to fix a few things — cut some lines, move a speech — before it’s published by Sam French (a major play publisher),” she says.
I Need That, which closes March 2, is Rebeck’s fourth play produced in her hometown. Dead Accounts, commissioned by the Playhouse in the Park, opened in 2012, while NBC was premiering her Smash musical-drama. Bad Dates has been staged here twice, and The Understudy once. Sometime next year the Playhouse will premiere another commissioned work called Talk.
Rebeck calls it “a demented comedy” about a brash female who hosts a TV talk show during which “so many points of view are being tossed around that are extremely consequential but (panelists) never face any of the consequences of their own talk. But in this show, something goes awry and there are consequences.”
Ensemble Theatre Artistic Director Lynn Meyers praises Rebeck for “changing the field for female writers forever. She pioneered a very rough terrain in the film, television, and theater industries. Her writing is so good that it cannot be ignored ... She writes with a truth and an honesty that you don’t see coming, and that you take with you afterward.”
Next Rebeck is collaborating with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominee Cyndi Lauper on a musical for the La Jolla Playhouse this fall based on Working Girl, the 1988 film starring Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, and Harrison Ford.
“I’m so excited. We’re having a really good time. I find Cyndi a thrilling collaborator. She’s everything you’d want her to be. She’s really kind, sturdy, combative and brilliant. I’ve learned so much from her,” she says.
“We’re going to present in La Jolla, and a lot of people will come from New York to see it. Obviously the hope is to get it onto Broadway. This is a big Broadway musical. It’s funny, it’s powerful and it’s a beautiful story, and Cyndi’s score is sensational.”
Rebeck also has some movie and television projects in the works that she wrote “before the pandemic interfered. I wrote several teleplays and a couple of screenplays, and those things are finally edging forward eight years later in film and TV,” she says.
She’s been so prolific that I had to ask: When she gets an idea, how does she decide whether it’s a play, novel, movie or TV show?
“I started as a playwright. To my bones, that’s really what I am. Anytime I have an idea, the first question is: Can I make a play out of this?” she says. “I’m a thrifty Midwesterner. My husband (Jess Lynn) and I are thrifty, so we have enough money, and I can just write what I want now, and then see where I can get it. So I’m thinking in terms of plays and books because it’s more centered on the writing” and gives her more control over what she’s written.
“I just keep going. I don’t think very well if I’m not writing,” she says. “When I’m at rehearsals, I always hold a pencil because I think better with a mechanical pencil still in my hand.”
She traces her prolific output to her Cincinnati roots — specifically her father, George Rebeck, an engineer and executive at X-tek, formerly the Tool Steel Gear and Pinion Co.
“My father was an extremely determined and hard-working guy. I didn’t realize how much that influenced me. He just worked hard and he expected that of his kids. He expected it out of me, and I learned how to work hard, and I continue to work hard,” she says.
