NYU's Kristoffer Diaz makes his Broadway debut with 'Hell’s Kitchen'

Playwright and NYU arts professor Kristoffer Diaz remembers the first time he met with Alicia Keys, the multiple Grammy winner and musical powerhouse. It was 2012, and she was talking to playwrights and writers about working on a musical loosely based on her early life in New York City.

Keys and Diaz immediately connected over the music, hip-hop fashion, and city life they listened to growing up. "We shared a lot of cultural references," he says. "We talked a lot about mid- to late-90s hip-hop music and other music."

More than a decade later, the musical Hell's Kitchen received its world premiere at the Public Theater. Before the fall run ended, it announced it would move to Broadway. With a creative team that includes director Michael Greif (Rent, Dear Evan Hansen), choreographer Camille A. Brown, and music including "Girl on Fire" and "Empire State of Mind," the show begins previews at the Shubert Theatre March 28, and officially opens April 20. It will be Diaz's Broadway debut.

"There's work to be done, but there's always work to be done," Diaz said during an interview in his Gallatin office a few weeks before rehearsals for the Broadway production began. "It's a rare opportunity to know you're going to Broadway while the show is still running. That makes it so much easier."

Raised in Yonkers, Diaz first came to NYU in 1995, to study at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He returned for an MFA in dramatic writing, which he earned from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2002. (He has a second MFA, in arts administration, from Brooklyn College.) He began teaching at NYU in 2015.

The playwright, screenwriter, and educator gained national acclaim in 2010, when his play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was produced in Chicago and New York and then named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His work has been developed and performed at the Goodman Theatre, Dallas Theater Center, Geffen Playhouse, Second Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and New York Shakespeare Festival's Delacorte Theater. He adapted Rent for television and wrote for the Netflix series GLOW. His newest play, Reggie Hoops, is about a female executive in the NBA. It will receive its world premiere in August at Profile Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

NYU News sat down with Diaz to talk about Hell's Kitchen, the significance of Timberland boots, and how he juggles playwriting while teaching the next generation of dramatic artists.

How did you come to join the Hell's Kitchen creative team?

Alicia had an idea that she wanted to develop, a story that used her music, but it wasn't a biopic kind of musical. She didn't want to do the story of her life. She wanted the story inspired by a particular moment in her life when she was a 17-year-old kid. She was meeting with a few people, and I went and met with her and we hit it off.

I'm wearing the Timberland boots that I bought for opening night [he puts his foot on the desk to show them off]. These are so essential to 1990s hip-hop. Part of how I got the job was that we had those kinds of conversations quickly. The boots are our cultural markers, like Nas and Wu-Tang Clan and all those cultural references. You don't find a ton of people in theater who speak that language. We connected on that vibe.

So from the beginning, the idea was not to write her life story, but to use her experiences as the foundation for a fictional work?

Yeah, basically she said this is a time period in my life that feels really fertile. She said we don't have to stick to the facts, it was the emotional part we were after. So, for example, we decided to have our character discover the piano as a teenager, rather than as a young child. We could play with these facts because we were not trying to tell a documentary-style story. Our fictional Ali could learn to play at whatever age worked best for us.

The score includes some of her biggest hits, as well as new material she created for the production. How did the team work together to decide which songs to use and how to use them?

It was kind of like I was collaborating with a person and also with her catalog, which has some of the greatest songs ever written. You know at some point someone is going to stop doing what they're doing and sing "Fallin'," which is legitimately one of the greatest songs ever written.

In addition to writing your own plays, you've worked on adaptations-including a theatrical version of Disney's Hercules and the TV version of Rent-and you wrote the Netflix series GLOW. This project seems like a hybrid of those, a combination of original and adaptation.

When I adapted the Disney film Hercules, it was really clear from Disney's point of view that there was no messing around with the story. So we went moment to moment to moment to moment. You could change things inside, but the story was the story, which is its own freeing kind of thing. The difference with this project was the markers could go anywhere. It's like you're doing a puzzle and you look for the borders first, and then fill in. And the collaboration was not just with Alicia but with Michael Greif, the director, and Camille A. Brown, the choreographer, and the cast. We all had a sort of permission to play. I think it ended up being more liberating than limiting.

I have to ask: What was it like collaborating with an artist of this level of renown? She has written so many big hits, has won 16 Grammy Awards, and has been named to every list of cultural giants.

Eighty percent of the time, she's my buddy, and when we get together, we sit in a room and talk about kids or whatever. And then 20 percent of the time I'm like, oh, right, you are the most famous person I know by an order of magnitude that's not comparable. And the other thing is, she's not just famous-she's a genius. In addition to writing songs, she would come into rehearsal and teach the songs, teach the harmonies there on the spot. She would sit down and write things in front of us, create harmonies. That collaboration was incredible.

Hell's Kitchen has been described as a love letter to the city and its creative community. How important is setting the story in the housing complex known for its artists?

Alicia grew up in Manhattan Plaza, and she wanted it to be part of this moment in her life, when she was surrounded by music, by artists. That was central to the idea, that the building and its community were a character. It was foundational to who she became.

Kristoffer Diaz outside the Shubert Theatre, where 'Hell's Kitchen' opens April 20. Photo by Tracey Friedman.

You chose NYU for college, earning your undergraduate degree from Gallatin, where you now teach. What's that like?

Oh my God, I say 'you're such a Gallatin student' all the time. Because they're like, 'I want to do this, I want to do this, and I also want to do this.' They are thinking about so many things. The exciting part is getting a student like that when they're 18, and then over time they figure out what the connective tissue is. You just have to ask the right questions, and they find their path.

There's an assumption sometimes at NYU that Gallatin students just can't decide but it's not that. It's a very driven, very focused, very self interrogating process, which is very similar to the artistic process.

Your joint appointment means you teach at Gallatin and in the Dramatic Writing department at the Tisch School of the Arts, where you earned your MFA. Why is it important to have a professional writing career?

The dramatic writing program is really built around that idea of a working artist. Theater is this three dimensional collaborative art form to begin with, and one of the hardest things to get across to undergraduates especially is the idea that you are not writing the finished product. It's not a novel where you write the thing and then the audience consumes the thing. In theater, you write a thing, and you bring it to interpretive artists who make it into the thing. We can teach some of that in the classroom, but you really learn that by doing it and you learn it by being around people or by sitting and watching other people do it.

Does your writing career benefit at all from your teaching? And if so, how?

I think younger people-college students, even grad students-they're just so different. Technology moves so fast, social awareness moves really fast, and the way that they talk about gender and politics and all those kinds of things-it's good to be around it. That's a big part of it. There's also something about how you have to slow down to teach. So many of my processes are automatic in my head, in terms of thinking about why I need to make this change, or would this line work better if I put it two lines earlier? I don't have to ask myself that question if I'm doing it myself, but I have to understand it if I'm going to give that note to a student. As a dramatic writer, you have to interact with your actors and your director, so there are similar things you need to be able to say. If an actor says, 'I can't get from this moment to this moment.' How do you go back and break that down? The creative process is all muscle. So the more you're exercising in different ways, the better.