Daily Inspiration: Meet Adi Eshman

Today we’d like to introduce you to Adi Eshman.

Hi Adi, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Hi there! My name is Adi Eshman. I’m a screenwriter, producer and playwright.

I grew up in Venice Beach, CA, born on July 30, 1993. My parents are both writers — my dad is a journalist. He was the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Journal. And my mom is an author and a rabbi.

I grew up going to Jewish schools and Jewish summer camps. I struggled socially, and felt lonely a lot of the time. Books became my refuge. I became hungry for stories, stories that helped me get out of my head. I read all the time, watched tons of movies and TV. I wanted to tell my own stories, and I started writing sketches and short stories in elementary school.

When I was 14 or 15, I walked into a production company’s office and asked for an internship. I worked at HipTV Studios as their youngest intern probably ever. I also enrolled in night classes in screenwriting and directing at Santa Monica College.

I moved to New York in 2011 to attend NYU Gallatin. In my senior year, I decided to take a playwriting class. I always loved writing dialogue so it seemed like a natural fit. Tony-nominated playwright Lucas Hnath was my professor. He instilled in me a love for the art form. I also worked at a small theater in the West Village, called the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. I decided to write my first full length play. Every day, I’d walk to the Novel Cafe (which doesn’t exist anymore) and wrote ten pages a day. Eight days later, I had my first full-length play, entitled OSTROPOL.

After college, I stayed in New York, and got a job assisting screenwriter Ed Solomon (Men in Black, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) on a new HBO series, called MOSAIC. And I continued writing plays. I wrote a play called PAINTERS about my college friends and our bumpy transition into adulthood. I started writing plays for an improv troupe called Off-Top. And in 2017, I wrote a short play called ANNE. It was about two actresses – a white, Jewish actress and a Black actress — auditioning to play Anne Frank, and the debate they get into before the audition.

A few different theaters started performing ANNE around the city. At one of the performances at the Bowery Poetry Club, a woman named Desiree Abeyta came to see the show. She made a beeline towards me and said she was a film director and wanted to make it into a short.

In 2020, the pandemic shut down theaters across the country. I had applied and been accepted into USC’s School for Dramatic Arts. to earn an MFA in Playwriting. I decided to move back across the country, and found myself, after 9 years hustling in New York, back in my childhood bedroom.

My three years in my MFA program were an education in so many ways. I bonded with my professors and fellow students, and wrote A LOT. Meanwhile, Desiree raised they money to make our short film ANNE. We released it to festivals around the country and acceptances poured in. Over 35 festivals would end up screening ANNE for their audiences. It was even in consideration for the 2023 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short.

In my final year of grad school, the masters program produced my first full-length production, a play called WEEKEND WARRIORS. It’s a play about people who reenact battles from World War II on the weekends, and it’s also a satire about identity, memory and history. The play was well-received, and we sold out our whole run at USC.

Around this time, I was selected for the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, an important way for playwrights to get noticed in New York. My play WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE HOMELESS, was a satire about the ways people in Venice Beach talk about homelessness. It ended up being a Top 13 Finalist out of 600 plays.

I moved back to New York that summer. I have such great friends and family in LA, but after three long years of COVID and shutdowns, I was ready to be back on the East Coast.

In 2024, I was hired out of grad school to produce live conversations and talks onstage at the 92nd Street Y. I’ve produced talks with icons from film, politics, journalism, science and art. It’s an incredible job that I feel grateful to have. I love my colleagues and the events that we work on together. In February, it will be two years since I started working there.

Also last month, I had my first New York City production, a play called CABIN PRESSURE. It’s a satire on toxic masculinity and what happens when a bachelor party really goes off the rails. We sold out our run at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, and it looks like there’s interest in producing it in 2026.

There’s a lot to look forward to next year! And it’s possible one of my projects will take me back to my home in LA. We will have to wait and see.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has definitely not been a smooth road. There is no guidebook for becoming a playwright in New York. There’s no way one to do it. And it’s a frustrating road, and sometimes it looks like people are just zooming along and having an easy go of it, and it can be disheartening when things aren’t going well.

Financial struggles were a big one. I was underemployed for most of my twenties, and cobbled together a bunch of part-time tutoring work to make ends meet.

I’ve also struggled with some of my collaborators — directors, actors and producers — who don’t always see eye to eye with my vision. And sometimes we find a middle ground and the work moves forward in an exciting direction. And sometimes, the collaboration breaks down and we need to part ways. It’s always unfortunate when that happens, but it does happen.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I write dark comedies that look at challenging topics through a lens that is a little comic and skewed. I’m drawn to big questions about our society. I studied political science and American history in college, and the ways that stories have influenced our laws and policies. So I’m drawn to the ways that we use stories to make sense of our world.

My short film ANNE has probably garnered the most attention of anything I’ve written. It’s been in over 35 film festivals and had international premieres in Canada and Slovenia. It took home awards from a number of festivals, including two top prizes at the LA Diversity Film Festival. And it was in consideration for the 2023 Academy Awards for Best Live Action Narrative Short. I’m extremely proud of the short, though I’m proud of all my projects, because they made me the writer I am today. I’m proud of my play CABIN PRESSURE. It started in a totally different place than it’s in now. And it was my first NYC production.

What sets me apart from other writers is that I’ve been doing this now — writing plays and screenplays — for 12 years. And I have a great list of people I like to work with, who trust me that I’m a good, empathetic collaborator. I love to get feedback and move the work in a direction that everyone’s happy with.

But I also have a good internal instinct for the stories I want to share, and the things that make me laugh or go, “Oh shit…” And the people I work with trust me and there’s a lot of mutual respect there.

Also, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist playwright Kristoffer Diaz once said that I write like Jackie Siblings Drurie, if she were white and a man.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Something most people don’t know about me… it may not surprise people I’ve been in therapy for a long time.

It might surprise people to know I started therapy when I was 14 to deal with social anxiety. It’s funny because most people see me as an extroverted person, who loves being around people. I really struggled socially in high school. I started seeing this woman, let’s call her Michelle. And she was objectively a very bad therapist. She’d recommend that I just go and sit with the popular girls in class, uninvited. The girls didn’t love that.

But I see a therapist now over Zoom and we get along. I don’t know. I’m a work in progress.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.adieshman.net/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adieshman/?hl=en
• Other: https://newplayexchange.org/users/16295/adi-eshman