Interview: Nikole Beckwith (2012 Nicholl Winner, 2012 Black List) — Part 1

Nikole Beckwith’s original screenplay, the gripping drama “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” won a 2012 Nicholl Fellowship and a spot on the 2012 Black List.

Nikole was kind enough to agree to an interview and we had a probing conversation about her background, her award-winning screenplay, and her unique insight into the craft of screenwriting given her background as an actor, musician and playwright.

Today in Part 1, Nikole discusses her background and how she found her way into writing:

Scott: OK, I have to start with this. Is it true that at the age of 15, basically you were disinvited from high school?

Nikole: Yes, actually. I was disinvited from my high school, pretty much. I’d been suspended for a number of things a number of times, the vice principal and I had a lengthy and nuanced nemesis relationship, the stuff movies are made of, one might say, or at least “Saved by the Bell” episodes. He’d keep kicking me out and I’d keep fighting my way back in but we both knew I didn’t want to be there. And eventually he said if I left that he would keep it between us. And that he wanted me to leave. So I left.

Scott: What was the basis of your discontent at school?

Nikole: I think the public school system, unfortunately, doesn’t work for everybody. There’s people that really flourish in that environment, I have a sister who graduated at the top of her class and really, really flourished in a public school environment and learned in that way, but I don’t think everybody learns the same way. The expanding alternative school movement, I think is proof of that. So, I didn’t work in that environment and I was very vocal about it because, I felt that I was…that people are entitled to learn, and I wasn’t learning and I wasn’t being nurtured, nobody cared that I wasn’t succeeding. There wasn’t room for that. No one was thinking, “What’s the way to reach this person to get her to succeed?” Except for me, I was thinking that way. But you can only be so articulate for so long at 14 and 15. Eventually I just started to act out of anger and question people I “shouldn’t have been questioning”, and I’d incite little riots or whatever and “take on the system,” quote/unquote.

I found a school after that, Sudbury Valley School. It’s a school completely dedicated to the fact that everybody learns a different way and that you know yourself best, thusly they put you in charge of your own education. I completely flourished in that environment. All of the energy I had expended negatively in order to be heard, could then be redirected positively into learning and learning how to learn.

Based on my performance in public schools, nobody really though I was going to do anything, some local sob story, but then I found an environment that worked for me, that treated me as an individual and believed I was not only entitled to learn, but to be passionate about what I was learning and the way I was learning it. I attribute so much of who I am and what I’m doing to that mentality and that opportunity.

Scott: Had you been writing before you went there?

Nikole: I would say that I actually didn’t start doing most of my writing until 2008. I created a lot. I made shows with my friends, but never considered myself an “actual writer”, I was an actor and moved to the city as an actor, but my grandiose dreams of rolling into New York City and making a splash were a lot harder than I thought. And so I took the bull by the horns.

I was working for Eric Bogosian at the time as his assistant, and he…now looking back, that’s his narrative. He came to New York as an actor, he wasn’t getting the work he wanted so he wrote parts for himself. He wrote “Talk Radio.” He wrote those solo shows, and that’s what catapulted his career. I was around him a lot and fortunately for me absorbed his creative virtues and wrote my first play, so I could really take control of my creative energy, and like Eric I decided to write the play I most wanted to be in. I wrote this play called “Everything is Ours” but about halfway through I stopped envisioning myself as any one character, and when the play was done, it never really occurred to me to be in it.

That play got the attention of both Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Public Theater, and I ended up in both of their writer’s groups and so began my career as an actual writer.

Scott: You mention that Eric Bogosian was like a mentor figure in a way to you. Could you describe more in detail how that relationship has worked?

Nikole: Yeah, I met Eric roughly a million years ago when he was doing a residency at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. He was seeking six actors from the country to go down and workshop some plays. I was chosen as one.

I had performed in “Suburbia” a couple years before and was really into his solo stuff so I was thrilled and beside myself to be there. At the time of the residency I was running a theater company in Newburyport with a friend and was hyper organized, so as he tried to wrangle 5 writers, 6 actors and his own writing time I became his accidental assistant, and that worked out really well. He offered me a job in New York when the residency was over, and that’s how I came to move to the city. Then I moved to New York and I worked as his assistant for five years. He’s still someone that, I talk to and turn to about any major happening in my life and my work.

I feel very lucky that I had someone like him that could read my work and talk to me about it and was invested in it, and interested in it, and really encouraged me. He still reads my stuff, which is amazing. And actually his wife, Jo Bonney directed the most recent workshop of “Stockholm Pennsylvania” the play, it was a play before it was a film and a lot of our experience working on it together helped shape the film script. It was incredible. She’s brilliant. It was lovely. I’ve known her since I was 23. It was great to finally get to work together. My relationship with Eric, too, has been really great. He was definitely a mentor to me and a definite father figure when I moved to a city where I didn’t know anybody. Also to feel our relationship shift closer as I moved along in my own career and my own voice, as we become friends and peers. That’s been amazing.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Nikole talks about the genesis of “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” and the story’s key characters.

Please stop by comments to thank Nikole and ask any questions you may have.

Nikole is repped by ICM Partners and Manage-Ment.

Twitter: @nikolebeckwith.