Prolific playwright Sam Brooks made his name bringing queer stories to the stage, many drawn from his own life. But how much of himself is really hiding in his plays? Words by Karl Puschmann.
Sam Brooks is obsessed with time. If he notices I’m a couple of minutes late to our interview at a hip cafe on Auckland’s K Rd, he politely doesn’t mention it. Instead, he takes a sip of white wine and says, “I’m not getting into productivity language here, because I hate that stuff, but I want to use all the time I have as well as I can.”
This obsession goes some way to explain the untiring drive that has seen him become one of New Zealand theatre’s most prominent and prolific figures. As a playwright, he’s penned 54 plays, had more than 20 of them produced, and won every award going, including the prestigious Bruce Mason Playwriting Award, the Adam New Zealand Play Award and the Dean Parker Award.
By any metric, that level of output should have you questioning what you’ve been doing with your time. But alongside this successful career, he’s forged a reputation as a theatre critic and journalist, spending seven years as Culture Editor at The Spinoff.
“If I didn’t have to sleep, I happily wouldn’t,” he says, before adding, with begrudging resignation, “But I am a person, so I have to.”
Brooks isn’t certain where his obsession began, but thinks his speech impediment has a part to play.
“How I experience time warps greatly,” he explains. “What’s probably two to three seconds for you feels like half a minute up here,” he says, tapping his brain with his finger. “So I have a very skewed perception of time. If I’m taking the time to say something, to work through the impediment, it’s probably because I’ve thought about it, and it’s ‘worth listening to’,” he says, making air quotations with his fingers.
“But there are times when I’ve encountered a block and just gone, ‘Nah, it’s fine. I don’t care anymore. Just move on with the conversation’.”
Alongside the ever-ticking clock, Brooks’ other great motivator was his desire to see more queer stories on Aotearoa’s stages. When he couldn’t find them, he decided to write them himself.
“It’s not that there weren’t any, but I didn’t see a lot of queer plays or queer playwrights. I felt that theatre, for whatever reason, was lagging way behind the other arts, so I was just like, ‘Okay, I’ll write some queer plays then’.”
The first play to get widespread attention was 2014’s Riding in Cars with (Mostly Straight) Boys, a queer, coming-of-age story that received critical recognition, toured nationally, and has since found an ongoing life with high schools and university theatre groups around the country.
“It’s an intensely autobiographical play that I wrote when I was very young,” he says. “People still mention it to me every other week. They must have a very different idea of who I am based on that play.”
Not that he minds. He long ago accepted assumptions would be a byproduct of his autobiographical writing. But as he’s grown older and moved further away from the young man who wrote it, he’s begun to reflect on identity, his work and how others perceive him.
“Given the two industries I work in, it’s rare that I actually get to introduce myself as a blank slate. People have usually encountered my name in some context before they meet me. I wrote over a thousand pieces at The Spinoff alone.”
He says people still approach him to debate a 2019 feature he wrote that ranked all 151 original Pokémon. The site dubbed it his “magnum opus”, but he barely remembers writing the piece.
“If I were to do that list again now, it’d be so different,” he laughs, before returning to his point. “But it’s an example of how I’ve become so detached from my name, from the name ‘Sam Brooks’. I’ve really had to come to terms with, ‘That’s how I saw myself at that point in time, but it’s also how people are going to see me now’.”
As a young storyteller finding his feet, he filled his plays with self-insert characters. Still, he took precautions not to reveal all his life’s secrets.
“If a character is my avatar in a show, I’ll put at least one concrete thing in there that is absolutely not me,” he states, giving the example of having a character drink red wine instead of white.
“It seems like such an arbitrary thing,” he says, “But so long as in my brain I have plausible deniability, then that’s enough.”
He muses for a second, then says, “If someone read all of my plays, I’m sure they could do so much psychological analysis about who I really am. But no one will do that, so I’m fine.”
If Riding in Cars was his early autobiographical success, his big hit was a sharp handbrake turn from that style. His 2018 play Burn Her was an award-winning, female-led political thriller about ambition, scandal and the price of power.
“It put me on the map,” he says. “If I were to die in the morning, heaven forbid, Burn Her would be the first play after my name, even though I think I’ve done plays that are better and more exciting. Not to discredit the play, I can acknowledge it’s very good because people have said so, but I think it was the right play at the right time. It spoke to a lot of things that were happening in the world at the time, but were not in my brain when I wrote it. But it’s become the standard that I now have to meet every time I put something on.”
He describes it as “a very traditional play,” in a way that could be read as dismissive, but I suspect is factual. In the same way he’s not the 20-year-old who wrote Riding in Cars, he’s no longer the 25-year-old who wrote Burn Her.
“After I wrote it, I realised I couldn’t do another play in that form better than it, or that would be received better than it. It’s not a pressure anyone has ever actually said to me, so it’s probably just me reading into things, but I feel everyone wants that play again and it’s not going to happen. I never want to do the same thing twice.”
Where he once mined his life, he now sees the value in “constructed fiction”, even if this has him philosophically grappling with the widely accepted notion that something born out of lived experience is automatically more authentic than something entirely conjured.
“There’s this idea that you have to put all of your real self into your work to have worth or meaning. But autobiographical work doesn’t necessarily offer that all the time. I don’t live a very interesting life now, but it’s really happy,” he says, before wryly adding, “And really happy people don’t tend to make for very good plays in my experience.”
Instead, he’s writing about people whose stories haven’t been told. His upcoming play She’s Sold follows two middle-aged women of colour, and he’s working on a play about queer senior citizens.
“Every time I write a new play, I want it to be something that I haven’t done before. I want to build on my craft, explore the form and bring something different to an audience. I really challenge myself to do that.”
He gives an example he’s clearly tickled by.
“I’m putting 45 actors on the Basement stage for a single night in December in a meta response to Riding in Cars with (Mostly Straight) Boys,” he says with a grin. “It’s called Riding in Riding in Cars with (Mostly Straight) Boys with (Mostly Straight) Boys.”
From someone whose eyes seem set on new horizons, it’s a rare look back at not just one of his most enduring works, but also at the person he once was. It also plays with the question that’s followed him since his early days: how much of himself does he honestly put on stage?
“If you show people 5% of yourself, they’ll be curious about the remaining 95,” he replies. “But if you show them 60%, they won’t ask about the remaining 40. I give people enough so that they don’t ask questions.”
It’s a great answer, but I sense there’s more there and pose one final question: What are you hiding, Sam Brooks?
“As a person, I’m actually a pretty open book,” he says nonchalantly.
Then he laughs loudly and says, “But there are a few key pages that are glued shut.”