Rajiv Joseph's currently running play, Archduke, is about young men who, seeing no hope in their own lives, decide to assassinate a politician. When that play went into rehearsals, right wing agitator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, giving Archduke a contemporary resonance Joseph didn't intend when he set out to write it a decade ago. Remarks the playwright: "I was kind of stunned by that story, and by the notion that there are so many disaffected young men these days who are insular and feel like they're trapped in a world that they can't change. And that they're willing to strike out violently to change it, which is precisely the story of these young men in Archduke."

Archduke runs until December 21 at Roundabout Theatre Company's Off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Theatre. It is a mostly fictional imagining of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which set off World War I. In the play, Serbian army officer Dragutin Dimitrijevic (played by Patrick Page) riles up a group of young men into carrying out the assassination—even if will result in their own deaths.

At the same time that Archduke is running, one of Joseph's early plays, Gruesome Playground Injuries, is getting a high-profile Off-Broadway revival starring two-time Tony winner Kara Young and Succession's Nicholas Braun. Plus earlier this year, Joseph's Dakar 2000 premiered Off-Broadway, while his Mr. Wolf had a run in a Chicago this past summer. And this month, Joseph is heading to London, where his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is running. "It's been the busiest few months of my career, playwriting wise," remarks Joseph.

Of the works listed, Gruesome and Bengal Tiger are revivals, Dakar was a world premiere, while Archduke and Mr. Wolf are older plays of Joseph that he did a heavy revision on. In other words, this year, Joseph has been re-encountering himself—taking a middle-aged eye to plays he wrote in his 20s, and being surprised by the discovery.

"When you're still in that place where you're not sure anything is ever going to happen, there's more bravery sometimes in writing, because you aren't working with an interior censor," Joseph says of his younger self. "You're just like, 'No one's going to read this anyhow. So I'm just going to write whatever the hell I want.' And I think one of the tricks that I face nowadays is trying to reset my brain to that kind of mode, so that I can write with that sort of abandon, which I find more difficult to do now."

Though he didn't do any revisions for Gruesome, a play that first premiered in 2009, he was very hands-on with this revival—being present in rehearsals for any questions from the actors. The play is a two-hander, following two friends over 30 years as they face multiple injuries, physical and psychological—and their connection which helps them navigate all of that pain. That play established Joseph as a hot young voice in the theatre, though the creation of it came out of a flurry of frustration: "It was about an emotional moment in my life. I was just starting out. I hadn't had any significant productions—I didn't know if I ever would." 

In the 16 years since, Gruesome has become a favorite in colleges, with young actors drawn to the challenge of playing characters from pre-teen to adulthood—and to the fun of wearing bodily injury makeup on stage. When asked about revisiting Gruesome, running at the Lucille Lortel through December 28, Joseph says he is seeing it with "fresh eyes," adding "the relationship between [the characters] Kayleen and Doug in this production is really unlike anything I've ever seen before—their affection for each other and their resentment towards each other are both so pointed. There are things that both actors [Kara and Nick] are doing that I never imagined would be done."

Though Gruesome has seen very little script changes in this revival, the same can’t be said for Archduke, which is getting its New York premiere eight years after its world premiere, in a heavily revised version. Joseph says he was inspired to revise the play after noticing it didn't get much production interest following that first production in Los Angeles. As someone who is not precious about his work, "My perspective on that is, like, if I write a play and no one's doing it, I just assumed that something must be wrong with the play."

For this revision, Joseph has cut a character and deepened the relationship between the three would-be assassins—young men stricken with tuberculosis who may have been drawn in by a father figure, or they may have wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, or they may have just needed a bite to eat. Interestingly, the real-life conspirators were also dying of TB when they carried out their plot. In his plays, Joseph tends to take a historical factoid and then create a what-if scenario to explore what aspects of humanity are revealed through these larger-than-life scenarios. His Broadway play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was inspired by a real-life incident during the Iraq War, when an American soldier got his hand bitten off by a tiger. Joseph admits that he's fascinated by the stories of "male friendship and being a young man, and being confused," adding with a dry chuckle that he grew up Catholic. "You write these stories with lots of violence and pain and people are like, 'How come you do that?' It's like, 'Well, I've never known any stories that haven't [had that].'"

The playwright admits that he doesn't have any answers for how to cure the ennui of today's disaffected young men. But he can pinpoint the cause, which is isolation. "So what do we do?" he remarks rhetorically. "We try to make art about it. We try to read about it. I don't have answers about how to fix the world, but I do feel that community and human connection are part of it. And I think that part of the reason why a lot of people feel disconnected now is that they're not social. And I think the thing I like about the theatre is that it is live and it brings people together ... It's primal, it goes back to ancient times. And I think that is a healthy thing for people to do."

So after these plays, Joseph is still staying busy. He's currently working on two new plays, both with the assistance of students at Fordham and New York University—trying to decipher the world and the humans in it through art. 

"What's wonderful about theatre is that these plays can be done so many times, and such different art can emerge from them. Unlike a movie where—once it's done, it's done, and that's what it is, and there's a beauty to that, too, because you can always go back and see it, and many, many people can see it. But the fragile temporariness of theatre is what gives it this beauty. So I'm the playwright of this play, and probably nobody knows it better than me, and I'm sitting there watching Nick Braun and Kara Young perform these parts, and seeing something totally new." Joseph then adds, with satisfaction, "It's wonderful."