Five Questions with John DeVore (BFA ’96/Arts)

I recently had the opportunity to sit down over breakfast in the East Village with John Devore (BFA ‘96, Arts). DeVore is a two-time James Beard Award–winning writer and editor who has worked for The New York Post, SiriusXM and Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco. He’s also written for Esquire, Vanity Fair and Marvel Comics, among many others. His book, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway, was published in June 2024.
What led you to study theater at VCU?
I was always state school bound — it fit in my budget, and my grades weren’t remarkable by any means. I knew I wanted to study theater, and I guess I got lucky. VCU’s theater department offered a BFA (which sounded pretty fancy to me) and the program was known in Virginia.
Looking back, neither my family nor I were wise to how competitive college could be. I took my SATs once. I went to an excellent school in Fairfax Country; I’m still friends with many of my graduating class and some of them went off to celebrated schools and the Ivy League. I remember one of them not hanging out because they had an SAT tutor and I remember thinking: “Is that cheating?” I didn’t know you could game the system a little. I didn’t even know there was a system.
I remember my old man suggesting I sign up for ROTC. He had gone into the army as a young man and didn’t get a college degree until he was in his thirties, and he had a career as a broadcast journalist in El Paso, Texas. I remember asking him if the Marines had a Drama Department.
I auditioned to get into VCU, and my audition and interview cinched my acceptance. I really felt like the professors and students who talked to me during that process really took the time to get to know me. They were professional from day one and I was less so.
Tell me a little about the Theatre program and VCU at that time:
Richmond, in the mid-90s, was a wild place. I used to explain Richmond to family and friends this way: It was once the capital of a defeated nation and defeat sort of hung over the whole city like an unhappy cloud. But there was also a gritty, post-punk energy, at least in the Fan. I saw Fugzai, Avail, Four Walls Falling, Gwar. I was obsessed with the local drag queen Dirt Woman.
The campus and surrounding areas were more feral than I imagine they are now, but I haven’t been to Richmond in many years. I am 14 years sober now. Richmond in the 1990s was sort of a toxic combination of a city in shambles and a post-hippie culture that still prized the life of a rock star. I got caught up in it.
At VCU I met a lot of flamboyant grad students and have wonderful memories of really well-done productions. The professors were working artists and I think about one of them all the time. His name was Gary Hopper and he had the energy of ten kangaroos. He used to pluck cigarettes out of the mouths of actors — remember, Richmond is also the home of Philip Morris and during those years, cigarettes were cheaper than vegetables. He acted like he was on a mission from the theater gods to train working actors.
As a director, though, he was exceptional…. for a university or professionally. In 1993, he directed a production of Stephen Sondheim’s controversial 1990 flop Assassins — a dark, sometimes comedic, collection of songs and sketches about the men and women driven to kill and try to kill various U.S. presidents. I think it’s a masterpiece of American political theater, and still vital. The original production was famously loose and Gary made the show a little tighter, and darker, in my opinion, setting the show at a sort of carnival from hell. I’ve seen multiple productions of Assassins since then on and off-Broadway but Gary’s version, starring Ben Hersey, Len Rowe, and Jen Miller, among others, still burns in my memory.
I write in the book how I looked down on my professors as sell-outs and phonies, but I now realize that kind of attitude or worldview is the default setting of angry, scared, young men. I look back on Gary and his wife Liz, who taught costume design and whose costumes, from various periods, were one of the highlights of Assassins, and Janet and Maury and Dr. Parker and I see the truth, they were all artists who were also paid to watch over baby artists and to play and create, too. What a great gig.
I received a well-rounded artistic education at Theatre VCU that was sometimes a little unorthodox and countercultural. I understand that today’s program is a bit more sophisticated and even more career-oriented.
How did you make the switch to writing?
I’ve always been a writer. I do have an origin story, though. I had to write a “What I Did During My Christmas Vacation” essay in 5th grade and I had gone to the Grand Canyon. Now, I was not a strong student and in those days, anyone who had trouble reading or writing was consigned to the back of the class and it was in the back of the class where I wrote an essay about the Grand Canyon that stole liberally from a brochure I had read at the visitors center in Flagstaff. The prose was purple and I ripped it off: “The Grand Canyon looks like it was carved by the Hand of God.”
Upon reading my work my teacher, Mrs. Crawford, decided I was a writer and moved me closer to the front of the class.
My father had worked as a journalist early in his career, and he then spent the next few years teaching me how to be edited. I would do a writing assignment for school and give it to my dad. He would take a red pen and mark it up with edits.
I actually came to VCU with the intention of being a playwright. The decision to study acting was because I would be writing for actors and I felt I needed to experience acting. I wasn’t the best student and, eventually, the theatre department really sort of kicked me out and into creative writing.
I became a journalist by accident after moving to NYC in 1996. A temp gig as a receptionist for a small trade magazine became an opportunity to learn fact-checking — I learned journalism as an apprentice, almost.
I’d spend my nights in small spaces downtown with New York’s avant-garde, making weird experimental theater. One thing VCU taught me was that working was good and that one shouldn’t be too precious when it came to being paid for their talents. I became a journalist because it was writing, and in my view, even if you’re a playwright, all writing is good writing. The professors at VCU really hammered home that getting cast in Hamlet and booking a tuna fish commercial were of equal value. I had artistic standards but I was also a professional, and my first full paycheck as a writer was for a magazine about how small businesses could leverage new technologies.
Tell me a little about your view on the balance between art and profit:
I have made a living as a writer for almost 25 years; I’ve had lean and fat years. I’ve been laid off multiple times by the biggest media companies in the world. It’s been a ride and it’s still not over. The past year has been wildly tumultuous in the media and in the arts — talk to any artistic director of any non-profit theater in any city in the world. I believe in hustling and adapting and being creative.
That said, you don’t have to make money to be an artist. I have worked for free many times, and most of those times I gave my time and sweat for productions that I believed in, working for and with people I respected and sometimes loved. We live in an age where Big Tech wants to colonize the entire creative process and build anemic monetization systems into every aspect of artistic expression, and those systems benefit mostly Big Tech.
I write a lot about Off-Off-Broadway in my book, an artistic scene with roots in 1960s NYC downtown cafe culture, as well as the city’s pre-Stonewall queer community. The artists who founded Off-Broadway were drag queens and gay men and women of color, all of whom were shunned by mainstream Broadway. Those early plays and musicals were sloppy, passionate explosions of brilliance that didn’t make money but warmed and comforted so many while also challenging the status quo.
Eventually, Off-Off talent trickled uptown.
I like to think of Off-Off as early YouTube – the cost of entry was low and freewheeling personalities could make art that was true to themselves and their friends, and that was what was important. Connections, not cash. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of companies that want to exploit artists — that is a very real truth. But I also think, sometimes, making art for some reason other than money is slightly subversive. Capitalism demands profit but some of my most cherished theater memories are this: applause, laughter, and long talks about revolution at the bar afterward.
What’s next?
I’m sort of recovering from the book launch. Selling and marketing a book is almost a full-time job. Last month, actually, I held what I jokingly referred to as a “marketing stunt.” I read the entirety of my new book — all 216 pages — from cover to cover in a small basement micro-theater in Brooklyn. It took 7 1/2 hours! It was an intense experience.
I’m also working on some new book proposals currently. One is based on my parent’s relationship and is a creative non-fiction book romance set in El Paso in the early 1960’s — she was a Mexican-American Catholic and he was the white son of a Baptist preacher who moonlit as a pro wrestling announcer in Juarez, Mexico. This is a book about the border, culture, and history of Texas. Another is an honest and cheeky book of advice for men, specifically cisgender heterosexual men. I have written for many men’s magazines in my career, and there’s a real lack of funny, openhearted writing for regular dudes on topics like drinking and loneliness and mental health in general.
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