How ‘& Juliet’ writer David West Read went from grade school screenwriter to Broadway flop to Emmy winner and Tony nominee

Before the Tony Award nomination for “& Juliet,” the Emmy Award for “Schitt’s Creek,” the acclaim for “The Big Door Prize,” there was “Jurassic Pork.”

“‘Jurassic Park’ with pigs,” explained David West Read, the man behind those accolades, of the short film he scripted for a sleepover with his grade school friends, a live-action effort involving a rubber pig mask.

“I should be clear that no actual pigs were harmed in the making of ‘Jurassic Pork,’” Read added later.

Nor was it the kind of director-in-training moment you might have seen in “The Fabelmans,” in which a young Steven Spielberg stand-in makes movies with his friends. Read’s mother, a second grade teacher, was behind the camera for “Jurassic Pork” and Read’s other creations.

It was the writing that captivated Read — it’s what he daydreamed about doing while he studied English literature at the University of Toronto — and it’s what he’s known for now.

We talked by Zoom a couple of weeks before the Writers Guild of America went on strike, halting production on a number of TV shows. And also before Read was nominated for a Tony Award for writing the book of “& Juliet,” a musical that reimagines the ending of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” set to Max Martin pop tunes.

Read was in Atlanta, shooting the second season of “The Big Door Prize,” the Apple TV Plus comedy-drama he created that concludes its first season on Wednesday.

“Door Prize” is only his second TV writing credit after the Canadian megahit “Schitt’s Creek,” on which Read started as a story editor in 2016 for Season 2, and rose to executive producer for the final two seasons in 2019 and 2020, hence sharing the show’s Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. (He was nominated for writing for “Schitt’s” too, but lost that one to his boss, Daniel Levy.)

It certainly won’t be his last TV credit. Read has no intention of choosing between his twin loves of theatre and television.

He admitted it’s not easy juggling projects and genres — next up is a Woody Harrelson-Matthew McConaughey TV comedy and the stage musical “In Dreams” featuring the songs of Roy Orbison — “but I tend to compartmentalize and just switch gears in my brain from one project to the next.”

Sure, he’s “a little overwhelmed, but it’s a great problem to have.”

So how did a Canadian who grew up in Markham, just 15 minutes from Goodwood, Ont., where “Schitt’s Creek” was filmed, end up being so in demand on both sides of the border?

It started at home for Read, with parents who were “incredibly supportive of creative pursuits.”

His mother and father, an educational book publisher, both had master’s degrees in English, so Read grew up surrounded by books. His mother — who forever treasured her turn as Laurey in her high school production of “Oklahoma!” — took Read to New York when he was in high school to see the musicals “Les Misérables,” “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Cabaret.” And his extracurricular activities at U of T included writing and performing sketch comedy, one-act plays and short films.

Still, Read worked at a bank during university and might have ended up in corporate communications, but he took a risk, left the secure job and went to New York to attend the Tisch School of the Arts.

(It took him two tries to get in so he did some acting while he waited, including a couple of commercials and “then I was killed in a made-for-TV movie.”)

Even at Tisch, TV and theatre were competing for his attention. Read started out in the television stream but switched to playwriting after being inspired by a fellow Torontonian, a teacher named Daniel Goldfarb, who incidentally is also both a theatre and TV writer, having created the show “Julia.”

Read’s very first play, “The Dream of the Burning Boy,” got a well-reviewed off-Broadway production in 2011. He wrote his second, “The Performers,” while in the playwriting program at the renowned Juilliard School. Astonishingly, it went straight to Broadway in 2012, a rare honour for an unknown playwright — but it closed after just four performances.

“So it was a tremendous flop,” said Read, “which I do blame largely on Hurricane Sandy and the fact that no one could get into the city, let alone into the theatre. But that was exactly 10 years before ‘& Juliet,’ which was kind of a cool full circle moment.”

The latter, which officially opened on Broadway in November 2022 after making its North American debut in Toronto, just garnered nine Tony nominations, including Best Musical, which Read called in a followup email “surreal and unexpected.”

“I was tremendously proud of ‘The Performers,’ but to have a show that you’ve worked so hard on wiped out by a hurricane was a reminder that nothing in this business is guaranteed,” he wrote. “So to be back on Broadway, exactly 10 years later, and to be accepted and celebrated by the theatre community … it’s all incredibly meaningful to me.”

In fact, Read’s career opportunities were looking somewhat bleak after “The Performers,” but along came the “very happy accident” of “Schitt’s Creek.” After hearing from someone at his talent agency that the sitcom was looking for Canadian writers, Read submitted a sample to Levy and then-executive producer Kevin White and the rest, as they say, is history.

Read called “Schitt’s” a “once-in-a-lifetime thing” that has opened doors for everyone involved with it: in Read’s case, that meant the chance to turn the M.O. Walsh novel “The Big Door Prize” into a TV series.

“Door Prize” is about what happens to the residents of Deerfield, a fictional American “Everytown,” after a machine claiming to reveal one’s life potential suddenly and mysteriously appears in the general store.

For $2, fingerprints and a social security number, the “Morpho” machine spits out answers on blue cards: after reading them, some people in town are inspired to quit jobs and relationships; some explore new or forgotten passions; some question what they thought they knew about themselves and those around them.

“I love lightly comedic, lightly sci-fi magical stories,” Read said, and the themes of the book — of hitting the “pause button” on life, thinking about “where you are and where you thought you might be and where you could still be” — seemed even more timely during the pandemic.

“I wanted this to be a show about human connection, that the more people open up to each other the more they understand each other,” Read said.

“There’s a real sense of the collective and the community in the show. I really enjoy comedy that comes from a place of empathy where there aren’t really true villains. It’s just complicated people and trying to figure out what makes them tick.”

What makes Read tick seems to be work and lots of it.

“I keep saying I’ll sleep when I’m dead and hopefully I will,” he joked. “But it’s so rare to have a moment like this where everything is happening, everything, everywhere, all at once,” he added, riffing on the title of the Oscar-winning movie. “And so I just have to enjoy it as much as I can and use my limited brain capacity to try to do my best with all of this. But it is such a thrill and a joy to have so many projects that I’m so passionate about coming to fruition.”

He was quick to note those projects involve many collaborators, whether in TV or theatre.

“They start with you alone in a dark room and end up with hundreds of people having put their own artistic imprints on it and making it better than you could have imagined. So it’s thrilling to become less and less important in the overall picture.”

And if Read were to pull a blue card out of the Morpho machine of “The Big Door Prize,” what would it say?

“Well, I really can’t do anything except to write,” he said. “I would love to get a card that said something else because, you know, it clearly hasn’t occurred to me yet. But I do think everyone has that moment where their life could veer off in one direction or another, where two paths diverge in the wood.”

Read could have stayed in finance after university “and I took a much riskier and trickier path. But I’m very happy with where I’ve ended up and I’m very happy to have someone else do my accounting.”

Debra Yeo is a deputy editor and a contributor to the Star’s Culture section. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @realityeo

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