Like so many of the myths and legends that pervade his work, there is an origin story for Steve Yockey that involves finding one’s strength through adversity. For the playwright and screenwriter whose work is often distinguished by an intensely dark sense of humor, it was his formative years as a gay teen navigating the wilds of conservative Cobb County in the early ‘90s that gave him his superpower.
Yockey recalls his adolescence as a time when he began to “put trauma and comedy side-by-side” as a way of framing the world. That sensibility would turn into an exceptional skill he would eventually showcase for millions of viewers as the lead writer and showrunner for the suspenseful, violent and hilarious HBO Max series “The Flight Attendant,” which earned him an Emmy nomination.
Drawing upon Hitchcock influences, the dark comedy thriller follows Cassie, an alcoholic airline employee who wakes up one morning in a Bangkok hotel room next to an apparently murdered man. The suspenseful mystery goes in all kinds of unexpected directions from there. Cuoco’s production company optioned the rights to the bestselling novel by Chris Bohjalian and was responsible for assembling the creative team.
“I’m lucky that she trusted me and went on that limb with me, because she was taking her career in her hands in a lot of ways and so she was really calling the shots,” said Yockey. “Getting to see my version of spectacle and storytelling on TV is still a trip.”
Now, Yockey has embarked upon the project of his dreams — a new HBO Max adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “Dead Boy Detectives,” a series set to debut later this year. As the title implies, it follows a pair of deceased British kids, Charles Rowland and Edwin Pain, as they solve supernatural crimes. Yockey pitched the project to Warner Brothers as “the Hardy Boys on acid.” It’s his second go-round writing for the expired sleuths, having penned a 2021 episode of DC’s “Doom Patrol” that featured the crossover characters.
Yockey still finds it surreal that, as part of this venture, he gets to “casually Zoom” with a literary giant like Gaiman, who wrote “Coraline,” “Good Omens” and countless other modern classics and is directly involved with the series. Another out-of-body moment? Attending the Emmys, sitting right behind the “Ted Lasso” table and casually pretending to have normal conversations with stars he idolizes, like Allison Janney.
In fact, Yockey felt so awkward having to walk the red carpet on the night of the ceremony that he and his boyfriend tried to sneak behind the row of reporters and make a beeline to their seats. “All my friends have these images of Jennifer Coolidge being interviewed with Jake and I going by in the background at top speed,” he said.
Credit: Steve Yockey
Credit: Steve Yockey
It’s only recently that Yockey, 46, has begun to accept, even partially, that he genuinely belongs where he’s landed — as a showrunner for a story he’s loved since it debuted in the 1990s. Like many artists, imposter syndrome has traipsed behind him almost every step of his ascent, despite a slew of credits on shows like the CW’s “Supernatural” and MTV’s “Scream: The TV Series.”
“I think I’ve shifted to caring much more about the execution of the idea than how it’s received because I know what I’m writing and why I’m writing it now,” he said. “That’s not how I was early in my career. I was writing things to be different or shocking.”
Indeed, that incendiary quality to his boundary-pushing plays is something that Yockey’s fans tend to relish. Longtime friend Liz Lapidus first met Yockey when they were marketing Dad’s Garage Theatre in the early aughts. She recalls that he was a delight to work with — smart, sweet and the kind of colleague who brought her iced coffees to help them power through meetings.
“Then you go to one of his plays and (expletive),” she said. “His plays were so brilliant and out there and weird. The endings made people gasp and jump out of their seats. And you’re like, ‘Whoa, how is this by the same person?’ I don’t think I’ve missed a play since.”
Yockey was midway through his undergraduate years studying international business at the University of Georgia when he realized he couldn’t “suppress this idea about being a storyteller anymore.” Though he had no idea what a future in writing might look like, Yockey took a deep breath and decided to make theater his home. He still remembers calling his vacationing parents to tell them he was changing his major to theater.
“There was silence at the other end, and my dad’s like, ‘We’ll talk about this when we’re home.’”
After college, he landed an unpaid, year-long internship at Actor’s Express in 2001. It allowed Yockey to participate in every aspect of theatrical production, from stringing lights to changing sets and even acting, the latter of which he was adamantly not keen to do.
That experience “gave me a real understanding of what I’m asking artists to do in the theatrically ambitious stuff I write, in terms of spectacle,” he said. “Because lights and sound and all the technical elements are a huge part of storytelling in my plays.”
He also learned how much non-profit theater demands from its creatives: “You’re not going to be adequately paid and you’re not going to be given the resources and tools that you need to best do your job, so you become a little bit of a theatrical MacGyver, and that’s just the way it is.”
After the internship, Yockey collaborated with Out of Hand Theater Company for his first professional production, “Help!” about a self-help seminar that takes a turn. From there, he saw his writing take the stage at Actor’s Express and Dad’s Garage, where he regularly contributed dark, visceral work to its annual production of short plays, “8 ½ x 11.” Among them was the memorable “Swallow” about autoerotic asphyxiation.
Yockey earned an MFA in dramatic writing from Tisch School for the Arts at NYU in 2008, and then moved to the Bay Area. His plays were produced across the country and in Australia. In 2015, he was cited as one of America’s top 20 most produced playwrights by American Theatre magazine.
One of his most frequent partners is Actor’s Express. Between 2012-2019, six of Yockey’s plays have graced the Westside space: “Wolves,” “Pluto,” “Octopus,” “The Thrush and the Woodpecker,” “Blackberry Winter” and “Reykjavík.”
Yockey’s plays run the gamut subject-wise. “Pluto” is about the relationship between a mother and son in the wake of a gun violence incident. “Reykjavik” mixes a series of vignettes about tourists interacting with locals in Iceland. What you can usually anticipate is that something startling will happen, possibly knocking the wind out of you. Yockey likes to play with audience expectations and the boundaries of live theater. There’s often an element of the supernatural.
But Actor’s Express Artistic Director Freddie Ashley says it would be a disservice to reduce Yockey’s entire body of work to just those few essential qualities.
“He has this freewheeling, gonzo imagination, but he’s also the most disciplined writer,” said Ashley. “He’s so meticulous and has such terrific control over the story he’s telling and how he’s telling it.”
In 2010, about a decade into his prolific playwriting career, Yockey decided to make a gambit on film and TV and moved to Los Angeles. He had just finished a year-long residency at Marin Theatre Company and “could no longer afford to live in San Francisco,” he said.
He gave himself six months to land a gig before reassessing. Lo and behold, he sold a pilot called “Teeth” to Sony Pictures Studios, though sadly, the dark comedy about a dental practice in Inman Park never got made. But the scrapped project piqued the attention of MTV, which led him to his first official writing credit on “Awkward.”
Despite his continued success in TV, Yockey plans to continue writing plays. “I walk through the world, see things that I don’t understand, see things I wrestle with, and think, ‘Maybe that could be a play.’”
As for Yockey’s parents, they quickly recovered from the initial shock of his change of major in college, followed by some concern about how he was holding up when they watched a few of those bleaker shorts at Dad’s Garage. Ultimately, “they believed in me without faltering,” said Yockey. “They’re very happy.”
