Before “Fleabag” was making audiences laugh, cry, and squirm via the screen, it was doing so on the stage. The BBC Three/Amazon Prime series is based on series creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s play of the same name. That play is making its New York debut later this month at Soho Playhouse, and reuniting the same team behind the original production, including director Vicky Jones.

“Fleabag” made its highly acclaimed Edinburgh Festival Fringe premiere in 2013 before three sold out Soho Theatre runs, a UK national tour, and an international run in South Korea. Then the stage play became a six-part comedy series. “Fleabag’s” second season premieres on BBC Three March 4 and hits Amazon Prime May 17.

With DryWrite, Jones has commissioned and directed plays from some of the UK’s leading new writing talent, including Chloe Moss, Lucy Kirkwood, and Ella Hickson. An award-winning playwright herself, Jones’ plays include “The One” and “Touch.” “Killing Eve” and “Snatches: Moments from Women’s Lives” are among her TV credits.

Jones is presently the National Theatre’s Playwright in Residence and has a new show, “Run,” in development with Waller-Bridge. We talked to her what it’s like telling stories about sex and relationships post-#MeToo, her history with Waller-Bridge, and what it’s like revisiting “Fleabag” onstage.

“Fleabag” begins previews February 27 at Soho Playhouse and will continue through April 14.

W&H: Can you talk a little bit about your collaboration with Phoebe Waller-Bridge? 

VJ: Phoebe and I met 11 years ago, and we started our company DryWhite pretty soon after we met. I had asked her to be involved in a play. She had just graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The play turned out to be a disaster. I fell out with the producer and was fired, and Phoebe marched out with me. That was my glorious introduction to her and the beginning of our very close friendship.

We realized that we both had the same taste in new writing and that we were both in awe of playwrights and the capacity of capturing drama and speaking to the world about how we live.

We were both interested in finding opportunities for writers, so we came up with these free one-off nights where no one was paid or charged for entry. They were all based on ideas about developing writing skills.

We’d come up with a list of really grizzly headlines of true crimes that we found in the media and we’d give them to writers and get them to write about a character who committed a crime. The actor would have to justify themselves to the audience and make up a list of reasons why they did it. Then the audience would vote in the end of whether they were guilty or not guilty. There were 10-15 writers involved, and the pieces were written anonymously. We knew the writers were under a lot of pressure and we wanted to protect them.

The shows had a huge effect on the audience. We got them to heckle and speak out loud while watching. Phoebe did one piece about a woman who had cheated on her boyfriend with a guy who had a bigger penis. The audience was standing up and laughing. These were very raucous nights and were very satisfying to all of us.

W&H: Is that when you started as a writer?

VJ: Yes. At the time, Phoebe kept telling me I was a writer. She was very sure about that, and I hadn’t admitted to her that being a writer was all I ever wanted to be. So, I started to write. I wrote a play, which she helped me with, “The One.” She was incredibly encouraging.

W&H: And along came “Fleabag.”

VJ: In the meantime, Phoebe wrote a short piece for stand-up which was the beginning of “Fleabag.” It blew my socks off when she showed it to me. It came across not exactly like stand-up but storytelling stand-up and it brought the house down. People were very encouraging. We found an experienced producer, who is still our producer, and she set up in Edinburgh.

It was a very really intense, exciting, and painful experience for Phoebe to write that. It was the first time that all her ideas came together with all the things she wanted to do. She was getting ahead of her audience and surprising them. She was holding back on emotions and allowing the audience to feel the emotion rather than see it; that kind of sucker punch she has when she makes people laugh and laugh and then she would bring in something very devastating.

These were strong themes in her work and she was doing the kind of work she was meant to create. Phoebe was so self-critical and hard on herself and we wrestled with that on the other side. She was very passionate about what she was writing and she literally wrote the last line on the way up to Edinburgh. We rehearsed it as she performed it with an audience every night and really honed it with that very honest feedback.

Then she won a load of awards and was getting five-star reviews. People were queuing around the block! It was an amazing time for all of us. The show was seen by a BBC executive and he commissioned the pilot which became a TV show. Before the show came out, she was commissioned to write “Killing Eve” and I very proudly became a part of that writers’ room.

W&H: Why bring “Fleabag” back to New York now?

VJ: When we first put it on, we felt kind of lost. Women younger than us were lost. They were growing up with messed up, overwhelming attitudes towards women which made them miserable and undervalued in terms of their sexual availability to men.

Phoebe remembers it as a time when she wanted to talk about that feeling of confusion. She’s moving onto new conversations now and doesn’t want to pretend she’s younger than she is — [the character is 26, and Phoebe is 32].

I think that she felt it was her last chance to celebrate that play, that time, that urgency to talk about those things. We all wanted to do it because it was a chance to do it again. It’s something we love so much. It’s a very precious piece to this tiny company that brought it to Edinburgh, and it’s all the same people. The same company manager, the same designers, and so on.

The play is different than the TV show. It focuses on a girl who overvalues herself as a sexual commodity, who self-objectifies and objectifies other people, and has a messed up relationship with porn. She wants to call herself a feminist but doesn’t. We wanted to talk about all that again. It felt like a time when things are really changing and women are really talking about feminism more and the complexities of the movement. Then #MeToo happened, and it’s a massive part of the conversation that every woman in the world is having.

W&H: “Fleabag” is very much about today’s woman. How important is it to you to work on plays about women specifically in light of the #MeToo movement? You brought back your plays “The One” and “Touch” as a response to the movement. Both plays explore sex and relationships in a very honest, real way.

VJ: Yes, I wrote “The One” for Phoebe. It’s about a woman who’s very aggressive and very unhappy in her relationship but can’t leave. I desperately wanted her to play a character as complicated and wonderful and funny as she is and give her something she’d get excited about playing, always staying ahead of the audience.

W&H: With the success of “Fleabag,” your professional life changed. Are you now able to write and produce more of the kind of work you want to do?

VJ: It’s wonderful. It’s a very exciting time to celebrate female characters who are flawed and to tell lots of new women’s stories that don’t necessarily follow the same path that female roles previously followed. The woman doesn’t have to be right all the time.