2026 – Interview with Playwright Beth Kander

CATF: How were you introduced to Elaine May and Mike Nichols? 

BK: When I was still in my 20s, I acted in a production of “Dinner with Friends.” My stage husband, James, commented that the delivery on one of my lines was “such an Elaine May delivery.” I responded, “I don’t know who that is.” I didn’t really know. So he introduced me to Nichols and May and then made me promise to write a play about them. This play has been on my radar to write for about 18 years.

Do you identify with Elaine May on some level?

Personality-wise, we’re very different, but profile wise, we’re very similar. We both grew up in theater families, Elaine in vaudeville and touring around with her performer father. My mom is a director who ran a youth Shakespeare troupe, so I grew up doing Shakespeare. Elaine and I were both second-generation Americans. My paternal grandparents were both immigrants from the same part of the world as Elaine’s family; two Jewish families that found ourselves here. Elaine got her start in Chicago, which is where I live. The Compass Players that she and Mike Nichols helped found became Second City, where I took classes when I first got to Chicago about a decade ago. I am not a very starstruck person, but if I ran into Elaine May on the street, I would probably just pass out.

Why is this play called, “Best Line Wins”?

“Best line wins” — whoever comes up with the best idea, that wins, and we all agree on it — is a guiding principle I used being in an improv troupe. That line is actually from my own life, but I felt like it also really resonated for Nichols and May. There are moments in the play when they’re in a fight and one of them lands such a great zinger that the other can’t be mad. The best line wins, even if it isn’t mine.

Nichols and May became famous when Americans were watching, “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Lawrence Welk” – forms of conservative American entertainment. Then they came in and started to do comedy bits about topics like adultery.

They were so unapologetic. Their comedy wasn’t the norm for that era so it was groundbreaking. They’ve had such staying power because now it is the norm – to be satirical, sarcastic and caustic and to tackle taboo issues. I genuinely don’t think that we would have that so embedded into the landscape of American comedy without Nichols and May. And there was never any condescension. They wanted everyone to be in on the joke, but they didn’t dumb it down. That’s part of the magic of their comedy.

Elaine May said, “The difference between comedy and romance is that comedy is more like real life.” Is that true for you?

I do have sort of a comical life, but definitely not a rom-com. I’ve always been told, and I have come to believe, that it’s much harder to write comedy than to write drama and it’s much harder as a performer to effectively deliver comedy than to effectively deliver drama. Because that rings so true for me, and seemed to be something that Elaine carried with her, was another reason I wanted to tell this story for the stage. I wanted to drill home that to make comedy look easy is actually incredibly difficult.

Elaine May also said, “If you want to be a comedian, you can’t worry too much about being liked.”

I 1,000% agree with that, and it’s part of why I don’t do stand-up comedy, which my husband used to do. I was in some of my husband’s stand-up bits and you have to be willing to go for the throat. Even when it’s not mean, it has to be honest to be funny. If you’re worried about being liked, that makes literally anything harder, but it certainly makes telling the truth, going for the joke, being unapologetic, and just saying it very hard. You are always going to tick off someone. If you’re more concerned with being liked than doing it, well, that’s a problem.

Lily Tomlin said, “I grew up in a time when women didn’t really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid and all that. You had to play a stereotype because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny because it’s powerful. It’s a threat.”

I wish that this wasn’t still relevant. I just read both of Lena Dunham’s memoirs back to back. Hers is the story of a female comedian and performer, in the last decade, being told that she had to eat more and put on more weight because her hit show, “Girls,” would then not be funny. She needed to gain 20 pounds or her show was going to be cancelled. Even now, you can’t get too pretty or you lose your funny gig.

Wendy Wasserstein said, “The real reason for comedy is to hide the pain.”

That’s so Jewish. I would add that comedy gives us an entry point to actually explore pain without making it too horrific to get through.

You have said, “I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that fly.”

I have, at times, kept a folder on my desktop called “The Graveyard.” When a project has run its course or failed or I started and it just didn’t work out, I sometimes move it to The Graveyard. But there might be a little something I like in there. So I exhume it from The Graveyard and pull out an idea, a character or a quote from an old project and drop it into a new one. We have to learn from our failures as well as our successes. We don’t get the next one without the last one.

Why do you believe that “it’s a wild time to be human”?

I feel like I have lived at intersections where almost all of my milestones have occurred. I had my first child in 2016, right before the election that year. I found out that I was pregnant with my second child in March of 2020, right before lockdown began. I was actually at my first ever international writing residency and had to make my way home, unbeknownst to me seven weeks pregnant, from France as all borders were closing. There have been so many moments and milestones in the global societal sphere that have been intersected with my personal life that truly have drilled home for me that it’s a wild time to be human. Wild is not necessarily bad.

Why do you believe that “we should grab whatever joy we can”?

Man, it’s so easy not to. There’s so much that will pull you down if you let it. Joy does not have to be a passive experience. You can sit and “joy” someone else’s play, like it’s an active verb, “Let’s go joy it!” If you don’t grab joy, it will go by, right? Plenty of opportunities to experience something more fully and more deeply can go right by us. If we’re not looking for it and ready to grab hold and catch whatever joy we can, we’re going to miss out. I don’t want that for any of us.