The Wunderkind

“Anyway, that’s what they do. Is they build you up. And then act like you did it to yourself and they knock you down.”—Benjamin, the novelist in The Four of Us, on the role of critics

In 2005, Moses had what the Los Angeles Times called his “Icarus-like moment.”

“This is how incongruous my life was at the time: I came out of an SAT tutoring session with some 15-year-old,” he says, “and there was a voice mail message from Tom Stoppard telling me that he liked Outrage.”

After graduating from Yale, Moses had enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. There he continued to transform his Yale humanities thesis—on Socrates, Bertolt Brecht, and the Inquisition victim Menocchio—into Outrage. A dissection of revolution, martyrdom, and academic politics, the play hopscotched eras and played with theatrical conventions, improvising on European history and the history of theater. (In a nod to post-modernist self-consciousness, the play’s Brechtian narrator was none other than Bertolt Brecht.) Moses now sees Outrage less as a critique of revolutionary ambition than as an example of his own hubris. “The ambition is in, I think, the play itself—how big it is, how many characters it has, how many story lines it has,” he says. “It’s a hallmark of how ambitious I was at the time: ‘I’m going to write a giant play, I’m going to write the biggest play anyone’s ever seen’—without regard to the fact of whether I had the craft to pull it off.”

It was when Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater produced Outrage in 2005 that Moses first met Stoppard. The two spoke on a panel at the theater together and then shared a late train back to New York. The Wilma had given Stoppard a copy of Outrage, according to Moses, and Stoppard left him the voice mail message three or four days later.

“So we were in touch for a while after that,” Moses says, as though that were the most natural development in the world for an aspiring 20-something playwright who had yet to have his first New York production.

Sure, “privately, it was really exciting,” Moses says. But he insists that the relationship never amounted to a full-fledged mentor-protégé bond. “I think people imagined us in a room by candlelight and him imparting stuff, and nothing like that ever happened. We exchanged a bunch of letters and he read a couple of my plays, and when he was in town, we went to eat a couple of times. And that was it.”

Not quite: Stoppard also penned a very brief laudatory preface to the Faber and Faber edition of Moses’s first published play, Bach at Leipzig, that called the young playwright “a new and original voice in the American theater.” His imprimatur colored the reaction to Bach at Leipzig, whose fusion of philosophy, wit, and farce earned such adjectives as “Stoppard-like” and “Stoppardesque.” But Moses insists the play owes at least as much to Molière and Oscar Wilde.

A fictional version of an actual eighteenth-century event, Bach at Leipzig revolves around a competition for an organist’s post at a church in Germany. The work’s form mimics that of a fugue, with characters repeating themes and variations. A half-dozen organists, all named either Georg or Johann, not only audition, but perform for one another—debating music and metaphysics, donning disguises, cutting deals, and resorting to fraud, bribery, and blackmail. Moses’s targets once again include the conventions of playwriting. One Johann expresses the longing to “write a play in which the demands of its form do not supersede the truthfulness of its content!”

Reviews of the 2005 New York Theatre Workshop production were largely dispiriting. The most devastating attack, by Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, dismissedBach at Leipzig as “an ardent but hollow literary homage” whose “needlessly complicated architecture fails to conceal the void of real ideas at its core.” But some critics, and audiences, were enthusiastic. The Wall Street Journal’s Teachout pronounced Bach at Leipzig the year’s “best new play.”

Still, the critical bruising left its mark on Moses. “The thicker the Stoppard lenses are through which they’re looking at the play,” he told me, “the less capable [critics] are of actually experiencing the play. Apparently, naming your influences is just like handing people a stick to hit you with.” His mostly good-humored wit can turn mordant on the subject of critics: “I think tone is the issue—coming into a play with a sort of arms-folded, eyebrows-raised skepticism, as though the playwright is secretly trying to get something past you. I don’t know any playwrights who write that way. We’re never doing it to annoy you! We’re trying to do something deeply felt that is meaningful. But there’s this weird presumption of malice on the part of the playwright.”