April 28, 2016 -- It took viewing a play that reminded Rajiv Joseph of Cleveland Heights High School for him to realize that he could be a playwright.
“I had always experienced theater as sort of white-bred. Classical and mannered in a way that didn't really connect with me,” he said in a recent phone interview. And then he saw Our Lady of 121st Street, a moving, authentic drama set in modern-day Harlem, with a cast as diverse as Joseph’s former high school.
“They displayed this cross-section of humanity that reminded me of Heights,” he said of the experience thirteen years ago. “It was so different than what I’d previously experienced as theater and it ignited something inside me.”
The Brooklyn-based Joseph, who graduated from Heights High in 1992 after attending Belvoir Elementary (now Gearity Professional Development School) and Monticello Middle, took that spark and used it to fuel a fire.
He switched from screenwriting to playwriting to earn a Masters of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. He’s been busy in the years since: teaching writing at NYU and writing 11 award-winning plays as well as co-writing the screenplay for the hit Cleveland-based movie Draft Day and several seasons of TV’s Nurse Jackie.
He credits the sheer size and diversity of Heights High’s student body as key to forming his identity. “That experience was profoundly important to me.”
From his elementary years and all through high school, Joseph felt he and his classmates were being groomed for success in the real world. “It was all connected and truly formative.”
He describes the “reverse culture shock” he felt while attending Miami University for college. “I had come from the exciting, cosmopolitan world of Heights High and ended up in lily white Oxford, Ohio. It opened my eyes to how unique my high school experience had been and made me cherish it all the more.”
From his participation in the Heights Singers and Choir to his extracurricular involvement on the Speech and Debate Team and in the Drama club, Joseph felt like he had countless outlets for his creative energy. “The fact that we had a jazz band and a gospel choir plus English courses like African American Poetry and Drama is just amazing. I was in artistic awe of so many people.”
That awe is now being aimed in his direction. Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, he won the Steinberg Playwright Award in 2013 and the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award for The Guards at the Taj in 2015.
His most recent play, the psychological mystery Mr. Wolf, is on the stage at the Cleveland Playhouse throughout April. After recently spending a month in his hometown, Joseph said he was struck by how much he really misses this city.
”Cleveland is in a great spot right now, especially artistically with the new director of the Cleveland Playhouse. It makes me incredibly proud to be a small part of that.”