Noah Altshuler: the 18-year-old adapting Mark Twain for Broadway

The successful 18-year-old playwright is working on a Mark Twain adaptation for Broadway, but his career has left him facing up to some serious Fomo

Noah Altshuler is reading JD Salinger’s Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters. Early for the interview, the playwright, who turned 18 in June and is now the writer-in-residence at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is ensconced in a booth at the Westside Diner in Manhattan turning the pages of the 1963 novel.

Altshuler is currently adapting Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the stage, but his other current fascination is with Salinger, through whose oeuvre he is currently making his way. “I sometimes feel like I’m Holden Caulfield. I feel like Gatsby. I feel like all these characters. And God knows I feel like I’m Ahab, or Ishmael, at times. Everyone does.”

Altshuler’s first dramatic work, a high-school interpretation of the life of Cotton Mather was disastrous (“I wanted to be the seventh-grade Arthur Miller,” he said). He tried again; creating a 20-minute short comedic play, called Making the Move, about a first high school kiss. Altshuler was 16 when the play debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2014; it was later licensed by more than 50 high schools across the US.

He followed up this success with Last Call for Providence, which debuted, also in Edinburgh, this summer and, aged 17 he took up the position at the Mark Twain House to begin work on Sawyer (the same age as Twain was when he left his home town of Hannibal, Missouri).

The early fruits of this labour, three one-act plays collectively called The Sawyer Studies, open at the Etcetera theatre in London on 1 December. “It’s sort of like if Tom Sawyer is one of Twain’s children, and I’ve become this strange babysitter,” he said. “It’s a complicated, strange, daunting task.”

There are more than a few hints of loneliness in the life of the young writer. Writing, Altshuler said, was by its very nature a solitary activity of sorts; not much older than the character of Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, he has found himself in a conversation about love not with his peers, but with the long-dead Twain.

“When I’m sitting in my office writing a play, and take a quick break and see on Facebook all the pictures of red solo cups, new people and tagging new friends,” he paused. “Clearly there is one sense of what it would be like. Because I don’t see people my age, pretty much ever.”

“And I’m trying to do that more often, to get back to a normal life to one degree or another,” he continued. “It’s not that I’m off at sort of Oscar parties either. I don’t spend much time with anybody other than myself, my books, and my laptop, and Mark Twain.”

Tall, gangly, and slightly awkward in movement, Altshuler is a classic picture of a teenager. But he has a writer’s talent for self-awareness and self-study. He never fully comes out with it, but as he talks about his writing as a replacement for lost love in others you can just trace the outline of a personal experience with love as unrequited as Holden’s for Jane, or Tom’s for Becky.

“When I’m looking at those Facebook photos, it’s not at all like I wish I was doing that,” he said. “It’s actually more like: I can’t do that. I would never be invited to that party. I’m not like that. I’m not cool enough.”

“It’s not, ‘oh I’m too good for them’, by any stretch,” he adds. “I think my time on Facebook is spent going, [that] can’t be me. To one degree or another, trying to be a great writer could be trying to make yourself feel better about that.”

At times he approaches specificity, but is careful not to reveal too much. “Clearly in high school there was a girl I had a huge crush on,” he said. “I knew it would never work, or I think I knew it would never work but I felt clearly every day that it was absolutely destined to happen – it never happened – but I remember I said to myself, ‘you’re either going to get the girl, or you’re going to write a hell of a song about it’.”

“I wrote a hell of a song about it,” Altshuler grinned. “I’m either going to find and capture the beauty I long for, or I’m going to create beauty myself to take its place. And I think that the great artistic triumph is that the beauty you create will be better than what you thought you wanted.”

The experience has left him with a desire for collaboration with artists more than for acceptance among his school peers. In particular, he talks at length of his admiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton, the original cast recording of which he said he listened to twice over on the drive from Hartford to New York.

“On a surface level, someone breaks your heart, and there’s nothing you can do to repair it yourself,” he said. “To write something – to make something beautiful out of that – it’s your only chance.”

“If I were offered, would you like to find the girl of your dreams and go off into the sunset with her, or would you like to spend an hour writing a song with Lin-Manuel, or have a conversation with Fitzgerald or whatever?” he shrugs. “It’s not a question to me any more. I think art from people like that has saved me for so long that my true dream is to create something that could save someone else – or save myself.”

Catcher in the Rye ends with a bittersweet muse on the nature of writing, too. Caulfield tells the reader “don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” In telling stories, we create for ourselves a distance between people, Salinger is saying. For a young playwright, perhaps, this distance is greater still.

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