For the Spring 2025 edition of the Center for the Literary Arts faculty spotlight, we caught up with assistant professor of performing arts Zachariah Ezer. 

Ezer is currently wrapping up his first full academic year at WashU. He is a playwright whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include “The Freedom Industry,” “Address the Body!,” and “Legitime,” among others. His work has been published by Concord Theatricals/Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, American Blues Theater, and New World Theatre. ​​He is a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow, the winner of Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Hawai’i Prize, and a member of The Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency. Ezer earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow.

Tell me about your first year at WashU. How’s it going?

It's going well! I am thoroughly enjoying teaching; the students here are wonderful. I was working as the literary manager of a theater in Manhattan before this year, so there's been a bit of an academic learning curve, but I'm getting a lot of support at a number of levels right now. And the regular schedule has been great for my writing! 

Have you been able to engage much in the creative community in St. Louis? What do you like about the performing arts scene here?

I'm starting to make my way around town. The community here has been so welcoming! I've seen a few shows at The Rep and The Black Rep, and I went to a reading St. Louis Shakes was doing. I'm looking forward to experiencing a summer in St. Louis, which I've been told is huge for musicals and opera, and I am excited to check out more independent productions. I've been to a few concerts, and that's been great. I also hear that St. Louis has a robust poetry scene, so I'm trying to get out to a reading in the near future. 

You’ve said that you’re interested in finding theatrical forms for theoretical questions. Tell me about some of the questions that animate your work and the formal traditions or experiments you’ve used to explore them.

I got my bachelor's in philosophy, which I often say has made me a huge philosophy fan. My interests have always been in aesthetics and questions of Black ontology (most notably Afropessimism and Black nihilism). So, when I'm writing plays, they are all deeply influenced by my readings of people like Frank B. Wilderson III, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, and people like that. I begin writing my plays basically assuming the Afropessimistic worldview and exploring different parts of the philosophy through drama.

I've found this approach pairs best with genre experiments. So, I'll want to write a story about bureaucratic obfuscation as a tool of antiblack violence, and the container becomes a conspiracy thriller where the protagonists are unraveling that obfuscation as a mystery. Or I'll be interested in the way new technologies are pioneered without regard to, or even in service of, antiblackness, and that becomes a time-travel story. I like to disturb well-established genres and tropes by adding this philosophical angle and seeing what breaks and where. 

What are you working on now? How does your current work speak to work you’ve done in the past?

Right now, I'm working on that time-travel story I mentioned before. It's about a future where we've invented time-travel, but the best/most profitable thing we can think of to do with it is to use it like a polygraph in criminal investigations. As a result, because people think they're so sure, the death penalty is given way more often. So, it's about a public defender and a time-travel technician who find a glitch in the system and try to keep someone from being executed while trying to protect the timestream.

I'm also working on a period piece about a Shabbos Goy strike in Louisville, KY, in 1905. For those that don't know, some religious Jews refrain from doing work on the sabbath, or Shabbos, and they hire Shabbos goys to make sure anything that actually needs to get done still gets done. And Shabbos goys are often young Black men. So, it's a play about this strike they go on for higher wages in Louisville, and it looks at all these racial tensions, and religious differences, and gender roles over 120 years ago, and illustrates how some of those things are still resonant now. 

These plays fit pretty neatly into my oeuvre as different explorations of antiblackness found in places that aren't necessarily top of mind. Both of these plays are actually stories that don't employ discrete scenes. That's a mode I enjoy working in about half the time these days, and it's fun to see what different genres can be held by that structure.

You’re in a band! How does performing inform your work on the page? On the stage?

I am! I've actually been making music longer than I've been making theater, so in some ways, it's my first mode of artistic expression, and I'm always going to look at anything creative I do through that lens. When it comes to writing, I was always influenced by story-songs. Bands like Pain, Say Anything, Soul Coughing, and They Might Be Giants would often structure songs as vignettes, and that has influenced the way I understand what an audience needs to know to get emotionally invested in a character. When it comes to putting up plays, being in a band taught me a lot about collaboration. The band never moves forward without full consensus, and the four of us are coming from such different places. When I am in rehearsal for plays, it reminds me to always consider everyone's opinion and to remember that it takes so many people's hard work to make a piece of art with any meaningful level of complexity come to life. 

What most interests you about contemporary theatre? What new plays are you drawn to and why?

I've always been a theme guy. I like when plays have something to say, and I enjoy learning about the various ways that people can be, especially in the ways that I have no familiarity with. But lately, alternative forms and structures have been capturing my attention. These plays are both from the 2023-2024 theatrical season, but I'm still thinking about them.

Jeremy Tiang's Salesman之死 (Pronounced "Salesman Zishi" and roughly translating to "Death of a Salesman"). It's about the true story of Arthur Miller going to China to direct a production of Death of a Salesman during the Cultural Revolution, despite not speaking a word of Chinese! The way that play uses projection design, both to express the different languages being spoken and to do some shadowcasting with the actual production Miller directed, is amazing, and it's one of the best things I've seen in a long time.

The other one is The Refuge Plays by Nathan Alan Davis. It's a three-hour show about a Black family who go and live out in the woods, but what makes it really special is the format. It's three one-hour plays that go in reverse-chronological order. So, we start with the latest generation and go back all the way to the first. There are two intermissions, between each generation, and it felt like watching a show on streaming, in the best possible way. It was like an in-person version of being asked if I wanted to watch the next episode, and I always did!