Wylie Anderson and Julie Dretzin in Echo Theater Company’s 2022 production of “Babe” (Photo by Cooper Bates)

My Mom, the Playwright

Jessica Goldberg Sits Down to be Interviewed by Her Teenage Daughter

By Lucinda Linklater

Lucinda Linklater and her mother, playwright Jessica Goldberg (photo courtesy of Lucinda Linklater)

This article is part of the Stage Raw/Unusual Suspects Youth Journalism Fellowship

Jessica Goldberg is a playwright and screenwriter. She is also my mother. Jessica grew up in Woodstock, New York.

Many of you have likely heard of Woodstock for two reasons: Woodstock music festival 1969 and Woodstock music festival 1999. Growing up, I was incredibly confused why Jessica harbored such complicated feelings towards growing up there. I pictured Woodstock as a village filled with colorful headbands and bell bottom jeans, rockstars on LSD and so much tie dye (I was really into tie dye then.) But, last summer when I, at last, visited her hometown, I discovered that my romanticization was completely wrong (aside from the tie dye part, there was so much tie dye.)

My mom never tells me much about her childhood. She’s very quiet. To my surprise, my mother took on a new very talkative form, sitting across from me in bed, my phone microphone recording our conversation. I heard pieces of her life I never had before, like how she spent most of her nights in high school aimlessly driving around and smoking cigarettes since it seemed that “it was only in the summer when the town had life.”

“When I was growing up it was very rural, very quiet” Jessica told me, “A lot of my friends didn’t leave town. I was one of the lucky ones.” I asked why she described herself as “lucky.” The word suggested a passive character, someone whose success relied on random forces beyond their control. “It was a little bit of luck, a little bit of drive, a little bit of good parenting,” she responded.

Jessica always knew she wanted to be a writer. She excelled in her English classes and believed she would be a novelist. Jessica knew she wanted to go to NYU ever since she was 12. Leaning against her bed frame my mom smiled as she began the story I’ve heard a few times, but frequently forget the details, “My parents drove to New York to buy a futon and left us in the car.” Chinatown is very close to NYU, and that is where Jessica and her two siblings, Matty and Kate, sat and waited for their return. She remembers watching the students walking with their bags and thinking, “I have to get there, somehow I have to get there.” She enrolled in the Dramatic Writing program and after her four years, went on to study playwrighting at Juilliard.

Feeling stuck is a running theme in many of Jessica’s earlier plays (Refuge, Stuck, Good Thing). Now she is moving on to more, as she would describe them, “mature themes.” Jessica had the idea for her latest play Babe before quarantine while she was working on a TV show in Canada. And, like many of us, when the pandemic hit she found herself having the time to focus on the play.

Babe is an emotional and insightful play about a woman who’s been the right hand of a famous record executive for 30 years. It explores the dynamic shifts in the workplace when the new young Gen Z hire challenges the ways they’ve been conducting business.

I wondered if Jessica had been scared to write Babe. Having seen it twice, I know the play is a deeply nuanced exploration of women and feminism, far from cookie-cutter. It doesn’t spell out its message like many of the popular feminism blockbusters in theaters. Although I anticipated her answer before she said it, my mom has never struck me as someone who lets fear dictate her writing. “I’m always scared,” she began, “but I don’t really think about what people are going to think when I’m writing . . .  Instead the fear comes in the moments before the show opens each night and the terror that comes with knowing it is out of my hands.”

I wondered what she would say to the people who might not get her play? “I think it’s fine not to get things. It’s not my job to tell anybody what my play is about. That’s the fun and joy of seeing art, different people will see different things based on their own experience.”

Babe first premiered at The Echo Theater in Los Angeles, a place Jessica describes as an “artistic home” for her. She has been a longtime collaborator with Chris Fields, the founding Artistic Director of The Echo, since she was “in [her] 20s — oh, really young.”

Jessica shared the play with Fields in 2020 and after a reading on Zoom, he agreed to produce it. “I hadn’t done a play in years, and the production was really beautiful,” she remarked. Chris directed the Los Angeles run of Babe, starring Wylie Anderson, Julie Dretzin, and Sal Viscuso. The play ran for a very successful two months. She adds that Chris Fields and the Echo have been an “incredible home for so many playwrights, so big shout out to him.”

I ask Jessica if she feels more comfortable in the LA theater scene. “You do feel like you’re doing something more badass and behind the scenes making plays out here,” she answered. “It’s not that it feels more comfortable. You feel like you can take more chances out here, theaters and audiences are more open to it, especially when you’re working on something new.”

Marisa Tomei in “Babe,” directed by Scott Elliott off-Broadway by The New Group (Monique Carboni/Playbill) The production opened in November, 2024

Babe recently opened in New York at The New Group, with Scott Elliott directing and a cast that includes Marisa Tomei, Arliss Howard, and Gracie McGraw. This is Jessica’s first play in New York in quite some time.

Finally, I asked Jessica a question that many artists must hold close and often refer back to during their processes: “Why is this story so important to tell now?”

“It’s so rare to see stories about women’s lives at a certain age,” she explained, “We don’t see them a lot in films or TV and we don’t see them a lot on stage and I think it is interesting in light of well . . .  so many things– like our recent election. We should investigate women’s lives and try to tell deeply complicated stories about them.”

I ended the recording and we remained seated in the interview room, a.k.a. her bedroom. I wondered if I would ever be able to ask my mom such detailed questions again and in return, receive such detailed honest answers. It was funny, I felt that my disguise as a journalist obscured who I really was and enabled my mom to tell all of her truths. It was sad now that it was over.

“Why do you want to tell stories Lucinda?” she asked me.

I wondered if she asked me because she wanted to prolong this rare candid moment between us. I started to formulate my answer. I am not ready to commit what I said to this interview because it feels like such a big question and I’m not sure I’m ready to answer it, maybe because I’m young. But my mom listened and we talked for a while longer.