Douglas Lyons on Boldness, Craft, and Writing the World He Wants to Live In
Writer and actor Douglas Lyons, whose new musical Beau recently moved to St. Luke’s Theatre after a hit downtown run. Photo: Austin Ruffer.
What does it take to mount an original musical Off-Broadway? Douglas Lyons knows the answer.
On a gorgeous mid-September afternoon I spoke with Lyons: Broadway actor, playwright, Emmy nominated and GLAAD Award nominated television writer, Audelco Award winner, composer, lyricist, producer, teacher, and friend.
After a hit Off-Broadway run at Out of the Box Theatrics downtown on Christopher Street, Lyons’s new musical Beau has transferred to an immersive staging at the Distillery at St. Luke’s Theatre on West 46th Street, where it’s running through December 7, 2025.
Beau tells the story of Ace Baker (played by Matt Rodin), a young queer man who discovers that his supposedly deceased grandfather Beau (Jeb Brown) is alive. Set in Nashville and Memphis with a pop-country score performed by eight actor-musicians, this bow of Beau was years in the making; it was the first script Lyons ever wrote.
Lyons is a multi-hyphenate across genre and mediums: his play Chicken & Biscuits debuted on Broadway in 2021, he was a writer on Apple TV’s Fraggle Rock, and he has a full slate of projects brewing.
In our conversation, Lyons shares details of his writing process, his advice for storytellers, and how he successfully sees projects through from ideation to full production.
TYRONE L. ROBINSON: You and I first met when I was still a grad student at NYU. You were performing in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical on Broadway, followed by a run in Book of Mormon. More recently, you played Riley in Parade. Now your writer side is in the spotlight: Beau is moving uptown, and your play Table 17, which premiered at MCC Theater, is getting a West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse. How do you balance it all?
DOUGLAS LYONS: You know, iCal is a wonder. It is serious. I will not take a meeting or say yes to anything until my iCal is in front of me. I’m very organized to make sure that I can show up in a timely fashion, professionally, rested, and ready to work. I often talk about navigation as an artist of “the coin,” and how important that is to survival and reality.
I have a BFA in musical theater from the Hartt School at the University of Hartford, and acting was my primary role for the first 10 to 12 years of my career. And then I found writing when I went on the first national tour of Book of Mormon. I found writing there through music, and it was actually helping me through a heartbreak. When I got into Beautiful, it was the first time I experimented with script, and Beau was actually written before Chicken & Biscuits. It was the first script I wrote. Musicals just take so long and there was a pandemic.
But when it comes to being a multi-hyphenate, for me, it’s: “What’s the coin”? How much investment is it gonna take of my mental labor? What does the project have to say in the world? I don’t just want to take a popular title that’s gonna sell if it doesn’t feel like what we’re going to make has anything to add to the actual world. Morals are a big part of why I say yes to something.
Between yesterday (September 18th) and December 20th, I have six projects: two TV, and then the others are theater. But how I stay on my gig is that I don’t waste time. Table 17’s at the Geffen and Beau is at St. Luke’s, and I was rewriting those in July and August to make sure that when September and October arrived, I wasn’t scrambling. Being organized is the way I survive.
Certain themes I’ve noticed in your shows are boldness, bravery, and self-acceptance. How do those find their way into your work?
I think love is my language. I like to use the theater as a way to hold up a mirror for humanity—and to challenge people and to shock them and to tickle them and to love them. I feel like it’s a potato salad of emotions. But I grew up with a lot of love and comedy in my household. I think theater can take itself too seriously. I like to write the everyday comeuppance, the everyday struggle, the everyday contemplation of self, and offer my version of healing or my imploring of conversation or repair for relationships. I like to write the better world I’d like to live in.
To be a storyteller—and I say this to anyone, whether you’re an actor or writer or whatever—you should always expand your horizon. Because if you’re great at storytelling, you can do that in any medium. Sometimes theater people get locked in [to the medium], and I’m like, well, there might be some coin for you over there. While you’re trying to get a commission, [another medium] might be like, actually, come over here. That’s been the expansion for me. My stories are limitless, and I can tell them in different mediums. It helps me when I get frustrated in theater to look west.
Tell me about the history of Beau. You all created a concept album for the show and some of the songs went viral before the show even opened.
We actually shot a feature film of it in the fall of 2021 that won some festivals. And then we were under an option that didn’t go for three years. After three years, we got the option back. I had reached out to Liz Fleming at Out of the Box Theatrics to inquire about seeing [Michael John LaChiusa’s] See What I Wanna See, which they produced. While I was there, I went up to her at the popcorn stand; I was like, “I just wanna introduce myself, I’m Douglas.” She was like, “I’m such a fan.” I said, “I have this musical, can I send it to you?” I sent it to her on a Sunday, and by that Thursday she made an offer, and that was in October of last year.
There’s that boldness again.
When I believe in something, I don’t play. I don’t have time, you understand? The worst thing that can happen is someone says no.
As a creative, sometimes the hardest thing is to keep the vision and hold the passion over the long time period it can take to get a show up. How do you keep the flame going during that development period?
I take a little bit of each flame, and I start a new fire. So I have new shows. Because if you hold your s’more over that one fire and it’s not burning, you are going to burn out. You will lose your consciousness.
I try to write one new play a year. This year I will not be able to do it. I started one top of the year and I’ll hopefully finish it next year, but I think it’s very dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket in this industry merely because of timing and schedule.
If you feel like you’ve told a story that’s worth telling, you just have to keep burning fires so that you don’t burn out. Sometimes it’s so out of your control. But patience is going to be a virtue in this career. And so just keep creating new little fires.
Regarding your process, do you follow an “I write for eight hours a day” or “I write on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays” process? Or do deadlines drive your writing?
I think it’s a mixture. I try to treat it like a 10 to 6. So even if I start writing at 12, I’ll probably finish around 7. I try not to work on the weekends. That’s something [writing for] TV taught me. If it’s a new project that I’m writing, I kind of sit down and let it flow. And then sometimes if I’m getting towards the end of something new, I’ll be up at two, three o’clock in the morning because I’m so excited to finish.
But if it’s polished work or rewriting work, I’m like, “okay, Douglas, make sure you’re eating your meals.” And then at around seven, unless we’re about to finish something, I put it down.
Do you ever feel like you’re being boxed in as a creative?
I think the industry will always try. I don’t think it will often win. I think the diversity of one’s career is their decision. It’s really about what you decide. I’ve watched, I think it was Denzel Washington or Robert Townsend, talking about some early career choices and turning roles down, so they didn’t get pigeonholed. I think for me, especially because I am the creator of my original work, I don’t box myself in, so I’m not gonna let other people box me in. My three categories are: queer stories; Black stories, typically centering women; and family stories, because I think children are some of the only hope we have going forward.
I think the industry will try to box you in. But I’m actually having a bird’s-eye view of the industry right now and asking myself, “What do I want from it?” And realizing that I’m in control. It’s not in control of me.
Who’s your community? How do you move your work forward through a pipeline to know that it’s ready?
I have a community of actors, a lot of them; friends who have not popped off, and I believe in them, and I call on them and I will call them into rooms or say their names into rooms.
I’m always looking for talent and connecting because I think that’s our responsibility to pass the baton. I met this guy one time at karaoke, and he was in the Five Points musical reading the next week.
[Table 17 director] Zhailon [Levingston] and I met at a Britton & the Sting concert. That’s how our collaboration began. I was not a playwright yet. He was not a director yet, and now he’s about to direct the Jellicle Ball [on Broadway]! I’m so excited. Community is us. Community is being active about the relationships that you make.
Beau is personal to you. Talk to me about your grandfather, who was an inspiration for the show, and your summers in North Carolina.
I think Beau is in a bit of my imagination because it’s not actually a story I lived. My mother’s father, Clarence Wright Jones, was a veteran amputee in a wheelchair, smoked cigarettes—which nobody loved in that Christian home—but he had a collage of pictures of his grandchildren. He would write me letters. My mother still has some of these letters. And I wouldn’t see him that often. He passed when I was 12 or 13, but I could feel there was a love there.
Going to Oriental, North Carolina, every summer at least for a week or two with my mother and father was a cultural shift. They would go fishing during the day, catch scallop and shrimp and bring it back and fry it for dinner. I was like, what is this? You didn’t go to the grocery store. You actually went and got it. So culturally it was different. And then when I was doing Beautiful, I was really introduced to folk music a little bit more because of Carole King. Having a Carole King Spotify playlist led me to all these other sonic opportunities. As we were writing Beau, I was like, what is the music capital? It’s Nashville. So that’s how we got into the culture clash of what I call James Taylor and James Brown.
I took physical memories from visiting the South and put them into lyrics. The opening lyric is,
Who knew my best friend would be Old Beau
Now his sweet old soul lays rest in the cold
a mile from his home, but on the same dirt road.
My grandmother and grandfather are buried about a mile and a half from their house, behind the church. I’m in a way paying homage to my family, but through these musicals. I have vivid memories of just what it was to be there. And I didn’t know about my queerness yet when he was alive, and so a lot of this is a hybrid of imagination and reality, but always homage.
Matt Rodin and Jeb Brown in the immersive staging of Beau. Photo: Valerie Terranova.
I’m curious how you and Beau composer Ethan Pakchar collaborate. How do you two write together? Do you do a structure/outline/treatment first, or do you write a lyric first and then hand it off to Ethan to compose music to it? Is it true that you literally wrote Beau five pages at a time?
Beau started that way. I was in residence at the Directors Company, and I was afraid to fail, so I had never written a script before and I was like, I don’t wanna show anybody. So I’d write five pages, table read it, write another five pages.
One of the most popular songs is “By Your Side,” which is a number that Beau sings. And I remember one day [Ethan and I] were hanging out and he was just fiddling. I said, “Beau!” He was like, no. And I was like, yes, I want that! And so I just had him loop that. And I went away, and I started writing the melody. So typically how we would write the show is like, “What is the emotional moment? Is it solemn? Is it exciting?” And then we jam and see if there’s a loop or a progression.
They talk about earworms when you leave a theater. I feel like sonically it always has to soothe. And then it’s the job of a lyricist to make the story matter. But I always come from a very boppable musical entry point first.
What haven’t you done that you want to do?
Before my forties are over—we’re not there yet—I would like to have a television show or film. There’s been some film interest around Table 17, and so as the Geffen production bows, I’m trying to maximize interest because we haven’t had a really good Black rom-com in a long time—and especially one for stage.
I want a TV show that is my own, that I can also cast a lot of my friends in. I love theater. I just want to be able to tell a story without limits. With budgets, but without limits, artistically speaking. And with the model of what theater’s becoming, it’s difficult.
Beau is a celebration of queerness, family, community, joy, love, and self-acceptance. What else would you say about the show?
It’s a celebration of friendship, musicianship. And the tag we’re using is, “The music we write for those we love.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.