On Writing : The Stage: Playwright Jesse Eisenberg -- the screen actor presents his 3rd stage play and Scott Elliott directs it by LindaAnn Loschiavo

New York, NY - - - A fraction of those who know Jesse Eisenberg as an actor know him as a playwright. But in the years following his nomination for an Academy Award for his role as Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network,” he has quietly established himself as an off-Broadway scribe, with three major New York productions: “Asuncion” (2011), “The Revisionist” (2013) and now, with the New Group, “The Spoils,” in previews for a Tuesday opening. In each of these plays, he has written a part for himself. In the “The Spoils,” he plays Ben, a fast-talking, pot-smoking, grad-school dropout living in a luxury apartment paid for by his wealthy father. Ben has taken a roommate, Kalyan ( Kunal Nayyar), a warm, ponderous Nepalese immigrant and business student at New York University whose father is a farmer. Of the pair, Mr. Eisenberg said, “One of them is given everything and appreciates nothing. The other is given nothing and appreciates everything.” Mr. Eisenberg modeled Kalyan after a close friend from Nepal, and he modeled Ben after “a horrible version of myself—which is to say entitled, unappreciative, lucky, naive.” (It bears mentioning that Mr. Eisenberg has played the least lovable character in all of his works for theater.) “The Spoils” is equal parts comedy and morality tale. Mr. Nayyar, a cast member of the CBS television show “The Big Bang Theory,” called it “the perfect balance of humor and heartbreak. Jesse has a very unique set of skills both as a talented writer and a talented actor. Mostly you will have one or the other. He has both.” Writing for screen doesn’t compel Mr. Eisenberg, because it is a realm where executives and celebrities have too much creative control, he said. “Some dumb actor can show up on set and decide that if his character played with a yo-yo it’d be funnier, and that his girlfriend should have a part. It trumps everything.” The inverse is true in the theater, he said, where the playwright trumps all. “This is a medium where I thought I could get my ideas across with the least amount of meddling.” Mr. Eisenberg was born in Queens and raised in New Brunswick, N.J. At the time of his birth, his father was pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy and his mother was a choreographer at a Catholic boy’s school. His plays, he said, can be located thematically in the center of his parent’s Venn diagram: “intellectual themes but from an emotional place.” One has to wonder how Mr. Eisenberg, who is 31 years old, found time to write plays given the demands of his acting career. Since his first play, “Asuncion,” premiered, he has appeared in more than 10 films—- often in a leading role —including “Now You See Me,” “To Rome With Love” and “The Double.” But film actors, he said, have much more free time than the public imagines, both while they are shooting a project and between projects. New Group’s artistic director Scott Elliott, who is staging “The Spoils,” isn’t surprised that Mr. Eisenberg can juggle multiple careers. “He’s really focused, and he has a lot to say.” The two met 14 years ago, when Mr. Elliott directed Mr. Eisenberg’s younger sister Hallie in the Broadway production of “The Women.” “Jesse used to hang around a lot,” said Mr. Elliott. “He was always in the theater. It was kind of cute.” When Mr. Elliott first read “The Spoils,” he said, “I couldn’t say no. I loved the accuracy of the character portrayals and I thought I could help them go farther and deeper.” He said he considered having another actor play the part of Ben. “But it was so hard to think of anyone who could play the part so well.” To play the role, Mr. Eisenberg has had to forgo much more lucrative opportunities. The Actors’ Equity scale rate for this production is $532 a week, and he turned down two films that would shoot during the run of the show. “I recognize that if I did this all the time,” he said, “I couldn’t live in New York.” . . . - - - since The Wall St. Journal will charge non-subscribers to read this article, I posted most of it here (for free) - -