Playwright, screenwriter, and director David Auburn, AB’91, is the author of Proof (2000), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. His speech has been lightly edited and condensed. 

I am basically a freelance writer. I have been one for 25-plus years.

Uncertainty—about what I’ll be writing next year; how much income I’ll have; indeed, if my career in five years will look anything at all like it does now—is pretty much built into my professional life, inseparable from it. In some ways it almost defines it.

There’s a lot of joy to be had working in the theater and movies—excuse me, “the arts”—but it’s weird. It’s unstable; the industries are constantly disintegrating and reconstituting themselves; it’s, above all, uncertain. The people who find themselves drawn to it are absolutely wonderful, but they are unpredictable. Do you want to work with people with a high degree of emotional equilibrium, cool detachment, and a stable sense of self? Don’t pick the arts. (I’m excepting myself, of course.)

Even if you’re not going into a weird field like show business, a degree of uncertainty is something you will have to grapple with.

Especially now, when a lot of the formerly stable underpinnings of American society and government are under terrible stress, and with incredibly rapid changes in technology; the astonishing global energy transition that’s finally offering some hope in the race against climate change; the rise of AI.

(Don’t worry, this is not going to be a speech about AI. I hate generative AI—I don’t use it, I think people who try to convince us it’s an inevitable part of our human future are trying to sell us something and shouldn’t be trusted or believed—but that’s a different speech.)

But uncertainty is and will be a constant for all of us. This is OK. It’s not something to try to avoid. It may be something to actively embrace.

I would not have believed that when I first decided to become a writer. I remember very clearly when and where I made that decision. I made it in the spring of 1989, right over there, about where that guy is sitting. This is literally the case. I became a writer right over there.

I came to the University of Chicago in 1987 thinking I wanted to study political science. The summer before college, I worked in my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, for a charity called the Heifer Project. I found it interesting and inspiring; I’d always liked history and politics, and I began to imagine becoming some sort of aid worker or State Department … something. It was rather vague, really, but that’s OK when you’re 17.

This vision did not survive a full quarter’s contact with the University of Chicago political science department. No disrespect to the distinguished faculty and students there. They were excellent. It wasn’t them, it was me. I was a lousy political science major. I discovered I was a lot less interested in Plato and Burke and Mill and a lot more interested in Steppenwolf and Goodman and Remains and Oobleck.

I’d begun gorging myself on the Chicago theater scene. I never thought of myself as a “theater kid,” but, partially because my family moved around a bit, I found that getting involved with the local community or school theater was a good way to plug into new social situations. I’d even developed some actual professional experience. I got gigs with the Arkansas Opera Theatre—was actually paid to be a stagehand or assistant light board operator under the pros brought in from Dallas or New York to design the shows.

I loved this work. Apart from one occasion when the lead actress in a production of A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim was sitting in the wings preparing to sing “Send in the Clowns,” her big moment, the eleven o’clock number, the song everyone was there to hear.

It was my job as an assistant stagehand to listen for the cue on my headset from the stage manager and push onstage the rolling platform she was sitting on.

One night I misheard the cue and began to push her out too early, before the end of the preceding scene. What stopped me was not my presence of mind, or the stage manager screaming STOP STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING, but the look of total fear, horror, and simple rage on the face of this singer as she stared into the wing at the 16-year-old stagehand who was about to ruin her big number and the show. This look alone froze me before I yanked the platform back offstage so hard she nearly fell off. I still don’t think it’s fair that I was fired, but nevertheless I’d like to take this occasion to apologize again to that singer.

When I got to Chicago I found a sort of wonderland of storefront theaters, big institutional theaters, experimental spaces … I went to see as much as I could.

I’d also gotten involved with Off-Off Campus, which was then only in its second year. We wrote comedy sketches, rehearsed them, performed them, learned what worked and what didn’t. I found this work congenial and completely absorbing. My collection of written pieces got larger. Some also grew longer, flirting with one-act play territory. Meanwhile, Plato and Mill and Burke were going unread.

We decided one summer to take our show to Edinburgh, Scotland, to the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This was in many ways the birthplace of British sketch comedy, as Chicago was the birthplace for American. So going to Edinburgh to perform was a kind of pilgrimage, an act of reverence.

The pubs were also supposed to be great. The pubs, to be honest, figured heavily in our planning. The problem for me was that same summer, I had managed to get a prestigious internship at the Chicago office of Illinois Senator Paul Simon. A very decent man. He wore a bow tie. That was sort of his trademark.

This was a conflict. I couldn’t both work for the senator and go to Edinburgh. For a couple of days, I writhed around in an agony of indecision, thinking, What a horrible dilemma, how am I ever going to resolve this?

And then—right over there—light dawned. And I realized, No, it’s not a horrible dilemma at all. It’s a ludicrously easy choice. OF COURSE you want to go to Edinburgh and perform and drink Scottish ale in pubs for a month with your friends.

Scottish ale, I had read, is characterized by its rich dark color and smooth toasty flavor, with low hop bitterness. It’s a hearty, warming beer with 6.5 to 8.5 percent alcohol by volume that’s perfect for colder weather, often featuring notes of toffee, brown sugar, and dark fruit.

So go to Scotland. Oh, and by the way, what are you doing studying political science? You’re not enjoying it, they’re not enjoying you, you’re spending all your time doing theater anyway, who are you kidding? I decided to become a playwright.

And sure enough, only one short year later, I was a fully employed professional writer. I worked for Malco Products in Barberton, Ohio. Malco made chemicals for the automotive aftermarket. Things like brake fluid, windshield wiper fluid, and carpet shampoos. My job was to write the labels for the products, along with use and safety instructions. “If swallowed, do not induce vomiting”—that was one of mine. I was beginning to find my voice.

A few years later I moved to New York, and amidst a great deal of temping, cater waiting, and the like, I managed to get an actual arts-adjacent job. This was at VH1, the sister network of MTV. They had a bunch of shows that were extremely inexpensive to produce, because they repurposed music videos and had low-paid writers add “content,” little bits of trivia or jokes. I worked on a show called Pop-Up Video. I would research and write material like, “Did you know country-pop superstar Shania Twain is Canadian?”

I know this will sound like I was on a rocket trajectory to greatness, but at the time it didn’t feel like that. I felt like I was going … not exactly nowhere, but in random and possibly useless directions. I frequently felt frustrated and confused.

I was trying to write and self-produce plays and was bolstered by a community of like-minded friends (many of them from UChicago) but ran up against the obstacles everyone in our situation faces: intermittent failures of confidence, money woes, the world’s indifference. An indifference, by the way, which was entirely appropriate, since no one is owed an audience for one’s art at any point in their career, no matter how much they think they deserve it.

I often wondered if the decision I had made—right over there—was the wrong one. Let’s skip ahead. Maybe 10 years, give or take. After many ups and downs, I did write a play that became a success in New York and led to a sustainable career as a writer for theater and film.

I am truncating this deliberately because I do not want to give the impression of a steady progression from struggle and frustration to success and fulfillment. That is an easy and tempting narrative to impose in retrospect, but it is a false one.

Looking back objectively, I was not “struggling” when I was working odd and sometimes boring jobs and putting on plays with friends in basements. I was learning and doing. I also wasn’t becoming a playwright. I was one: I was doing the work and fully experiencing the joys and frustrations of working in the theater. They are the same joys and frustrations I experience now, today, 25 years in.

I mentioned A Little Night Music earlier—the actress I nearly yanked off the stage in Little Rock. About 20 years after that incident, I met the author of that show, Stephen Sondheim, at a party at his house. (Sorry to drop a name. Speakers at this event are allotted one per speech. That was mine.)

I can’t remember the exact context—it was a slightly out-of-body experience to be at Sondheim’s house at all—but in talking about a new work he had in progress I was startled to hear Sondheim express, very wryly but with clear emotion, some trepidation—some uncertainty—about how it was going.

He was struggling? He experienced uncertainty? That guy? Possibly the single most acclaimed and accomplished theater artist of the last half century or more? Sure he did. Of course he did. Because everybody does. And dealing with it is a lifelong discipline, and a privilege.

At multiple points along whatever journey you take after you leave this campus, you will experience struggle and exhilaration, paired. Success and frustration, simultaneously. I hope you will try to embrace this not just because it is inevitable, but because it is a good thing. Joy, fulfillment, and exhilaration are not things you defer to some later point in your life, after you’ve paid your dues and everything has worked out. You can and will have them all along the way.

Even as you achieve greater mastery in whatever field you pursue, you will never be without the gift of uncertainty. It is a gift not just because uncertainty inoculates us against complacency. It’s a gift for the simple reason that certainty is boring.

It’s boring in art: Plays and films that fulfill our narrative expectations but don’t challenge them; offer glib reassurance but don’t ask messy questions; or present characters as types and not the confounding, strange, elusive, contradictory, fascinating individuals we all are, are not works that last or ones we want to revisit.

And certainty is boring in life. It is limiting. It forecloses possibilities and opportunities that only come when we open ourselves to the possibility of spontaneity and risk. Those things are scary of course, and how one deals with the fear is a question I’ve never quite solved. Maybe that’s an appropriate place for this speech to end—on a note of uncertainty.

Or—maybe it’s better to leave you with something specific, concrete, and practical I’ve found that does help to cope with the fear: a toasty Scottish ale with low hop bitterness and 6.5 to 8.5 percent alcohol by volume featuring notes of toffee, brown sugar, and dark fruit.

Congratulations to the Class of 2026.

Watch the recording Auburn’s Class Day of the speech. 

Off-Off Campus in the archives

As a first-year Auburn joined improv comedy troupe Off-Off Campus, which had been founded only the year before. Below are selections from the Off-Off Campus archives held at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center.