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[0:00] Teresa Attridge: Ever wonder what it takes to make a new musical sing? Our mission is to make the exclusive.

[0:28] Pauls Macs: We're interviewing the creatives who are changing musical theater one 11 o'clock number at a time. This is your Backstage Pass.

[0:34] Pauls Macs: Get your Backstage Pass. Get your Backstage Pass.

[0:43] Teresa Attridge: Hello, hello, and welcome to Backstage Pass. My name is Teresa.

[0:47] Pauls Macs: And I'm Powles.

[0:48] Pauls Macs: Welcome, welcome. We're so excited today. This is our inaugural episode. Can you believe it?

[0:52] Teresa Attridge: So a little bit of background on us, your hosts. My name is Teresa yet again, she, her pronouns. I'm an actor, puppeteer, dramaturg, and all around good time.

[1:01] Pauls Macs: You are all around good time. That's for sure.

[1:03] Pauls Macs: My name is Powles, Powles Mox. For anyone who's been reading our marketing materials and thinking it's like Paul's Max, it's pronounced Powles Mox, but that's okay.

[1:10] Pauls Macs: It's a very common issue. I use he, him pronouns. I am a director, and I'm also the artistic associate at New York Theater Barn.

[1:17] Pauls Macs: And we have one of my all time faves here today. As our very, very first guest, please welcome Greg Kotis.

[1:25] Teresa Attridge: Applause, applause, applause.

[1:27] Greg Kotis: I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me with you.

[1:30] Teresa Attridge: Oh my God, this is thrilling. I will admit. So Greg and I have met before. We've actually worked together on Yeast Nation, which is another one of Greg's beautiful musicals that I very much love.

[1:41] Pauls Macs: And Powles, I feel like you have some history as well.

[1:44] Pauls Macs: It's funny. I feel like I'm kind of the new kid in this conversation, which is really funny because it's the first episode of our podcast.

[1:50] Pauls Macs: But yeah, I've let Greg know this. So this is no surprise. And in the bio segment we're going to do later, we talk about all your accomplishments, Greg.

[1:56] Teresa Attridge: I was going to say something like, and Greg's work has been produced at many notable theaters in the United States and internationally.

[2:03] Pauls Macs: I was going to jump in and say, including the Undergraduate Theater Society at the University of Washington in Seattle, which is where I directed You're in Town.

[2:10] Pauls Macs: It was my very first musical I ever directed in the year 2011. And that basically set me on my path to be a musical theater director.

[2:16] Pauls Macs: So you changed my life. Sorry to drop that in the first three minutes of the podcast, but it's so exciting to be here with you.

[2:21] Greg Kotis: Amazing. Well, thanks for doing the show. How did it go?

[2:23] Pauls Macs: It went really, really well. It's so funny you say that, because people often talk to me about my directing journey, especially when I'm mentoring young folks who want to be a director.

[2:31] Pauls Macs: I tell them that when I was in college at the UW, I was an actor primarily, as many of us have been, right? We're actors.

[2:37] Teresa Attridge: You're still acting and doing it amazingly. But when I was an actor, I think I did fine work.

[2:42] Pauls Macs: And then after I directed You're in Town as the last thing I did, my faculty kind of came up to me and said, hey, you know, you're a fine actor, but we really think you should give this directing thing a shot.

[2:52] Pauls Macs: And that really kind of launched me on my path. And, you know, I believe in listening to the universe.

[2:57] Pauls Macs: I started directing more musicals and now here I am. Would you say that you followed your heart?

[3:01] Greg Kotis: Absolutely. Well, the other thing that's great about You're in Town, I feel so funny saying this to you, Greg, but this is my feeling about my experience.

[3:07] Greg Kotis: You're in Town was perfect for someone who I wouldn't say was a musical theater kid.

[3:11] Greg Kotis: I actually didn't know very much about musicals at the time I directed, except for the musicals that are extremely iconic.

[3:17] Greg Kotis: Like, for example, Les Miserables or Fiddler on the Roof. I'd seen those. I'd seen that movie.

[3:21] Greg Kotis: But the other thing that You're in Town has is its really own quirky internal logic with the world that you've created that allows really quirky people like myself to have like a really fun canvas to play on.

[3:32] Greg Kotis: Like, for example, the idea that there's characters who go, what? All at the same time.

[3:36] Pauls Macs: Oh, my gosh. That was just.

[3:38] Greg Kotis: Yeah.

[3:39] Greg Kotis: I tell people I tell cast to this day, I say those moments, you know, where everyone's speaking at the same time.

[3:45] Greg Kotis: Like, those are my favorite moments on stage because they're so theatrical.

[3:48] Greg Kotis: And so I felt that that allowed me to feel like I could access the musical.

[3:51] Greg Kotis: If I directed, for example, Oklahoma, I wouldn't have felt at home in a way that I felt at home when I directed You're in Town.

[3:57] Pauls Macs: Hopefully that's interesting to you.

[3:58] Greg Kotis: No, I think, you know, Mark and I, Mark Holman, who's my writing partner, the composer and co-lyricist, along with me on most of the musicals that I've been involved with.

[4:07] Greg Kotis: The one that we'll talk about set aside.

[4:09] Greg Kotis: So our partnership, our writing partnership is really one of a musical theater student, which is Mark.

[4:15] Greg Kotis: He knows all this stuff.

[4:16] Greg Kotis: And so he's really imbued with it with somebody who didn't really come from a musical theater background, which is me.

[4:21] Greg Kotis: I think it somehow is able to marry points of view that are both steeped in musical theater.

[4:26] Greg Kotis: And that is a part.

[4:28] Pauls Macs: So that makes sense that it would appeal to you as a non at one point, a non musical theater person, because that's who I was, too.

[4:34] Pauls Macs: Yeah, absolutely.

[4:35] Pauls Macs: And then, of course, I spent the next 10 years immersing myself into the musical theater.

[4:38] Pauls Macs: I try to know every musical now, but without you're in town, that wouldn't have happened.

[4:42] Pauls Macs: So thanks, Greg.

[4:43] Greg Kotis: Thanks for doing that for me.

[4:45] Pauls Macs: I appreciate it.

[4:46] Pauls Macs: Bring it to Washington.

[4:47] Greg Kotis: Yeah.

[4:48] Greg Kotis: Well, and also it was a big hit.

[4:49] Greg Kotis: Just, you know, people loved it.

[4:50] Greg Kotis: It sold out.

[4:51] Greg Kotis: People ate it up.

[4:52] Pauls Macs: Well, enough about me.

[4:53] Teresa Attridge: Do you want to, like, introduce our guest?

[4:55] Teresa Attridge: I absolutely would.

[4:57] Teresa Attridge: You know, what's funny when you're talking to someone, you're like, let me give a little bio about you.

[5:01] Teresa Attridge: I'm like, can you confirm the rumors are true?

[5:03] Teresa Attridge: Most of them are from your website.

[5:05] Teresa Attridge: So we'll see.

[5:06] Teresa Attridge: But, Greg, is it true you were born in Wellfleet, Massachusetts?

[5:10] Greg Kotis: I grew up in Wellfleet.

[5:11] Greg Kotis: I was born in Queens, New York.

[5:13] Teresa Attridge: Okay.

[5:14] Teresa Attridge: There we go.

[5:15] Teresa Attridge: See, we're already learning together.

[5:16] Teresa Attridge: I love this.

[5:17] Greg Kotis: Yeah.

[5:18] Greg Kotis: I come from a family of Eastern European Jews who settled in New York at the turn of the century,

[5:23] Greg Kotis: the turn of the last century, and then my parents moved out somewhere around the 60s.

[5:27] Greg Kotis: And then I came back in 1995 to New York City.

[5:30] Teresa Attridge: A homecoming.

[5:31] Teresa Attridge: Yeah.

[5:32] Teresa Attridge: So you came back.

[5:33] Teresa Attridge: You came back to New York City after you went to Chicago, University of Chicago,

[5:36] Teresa Attridge: and you were actually studying political science, correct?

[5:39] Greg Kotis: Correct.

[5:40] Teresa Attridge: Amazing.

[5:41] Teresa Attridge: And then from there you were also doing improvisational and sketch comedy with Off Off Campus.

[5:45] Greg Kotis: Right, yeah.

[5:46] Greg Kotis: Off Off Campus, and it's still producing, is the University of Chicago comedy troupe.

[5:50] Greg Kotis: Yeah, I was part of that group.

[5:52] Greg Kotis: And then after college I was a part of a company called Cardiff Giant, which Mark was a founding member of that company.

[5:59] Greg Kotis: So I joined that company that he founded along with some other actors and writers and improvisers.

[6:04] Teresa Attridge: Yeah, and that's where you met, correct?

[6:05] Greg Kotis: Yes, essentially.

[6:06] Greg Kotis: He's a few years older than me, so I knew about him in college in the way that underclassmen know about older classmen.

[6:13] Teresa Attridge: Totally.

[6:14] Teresa Attridge: But, yeah, we essentially got to know each other in this company called Cardiff Giant.

[6:17] Greg Kotis: Very cool.

[6:18] Greg Kotis: And then later on you were a member of the Neo Futurists.

[6:22] Greg Kotis: Correct, yes.

[6:23] Teresa Attridge: Yes, where you met your wife.

[6:24] Greg Kotis: That's right, yes.

[6:25] Greg Kotis: And Ann Halliday, who is a cast member of The End of All Flesh, who you would have seen.

[6:30] Teresa Attridge: Yes.

[6:31] Teresa Attridge: Who was really fantastic, by the way, who played Ma and you played Pa in the presentation.

[6:35] Greg Kotis: Oh my gosh.

[6:36] Greg Kotis: And you were both amazing.

[6:37] Teresa Attridge: Thank you very much.

[6:38] Teresa Attridge: We love to see it.

[6:39] Greg Kotis: Yeah, so yes.

[6:40] Greg Kotis: So I joined that company in 1991, and then that's where Ann and I met, and we've been together ever since.

[6:45] Teresa Attridge: Yeah, and it was your first thing there.

[6:47] Teresa Attridge: You did Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.

[6:49] Greg Kotis: Correct.

[6:51] Teresa Attridge: And from there you guys actually, when you came to New York in 1995, you started the branch of Neo Futurists in New York City.

[6:56] Greg Kotis: Correct?

[6:57] Greg Kotis: Yeah, we started a branch that lived for, let's see, maybe three or four years, and then closed, and then it was reborn with different people.

[7:06] Greg Kotis: We started having kids.

[7:07] Greg Kotis: We found that the nocturnal life of a theater person didn't fit us with the diurnal morning life of a parent of young kids.

[7:16] Greg Kotis: So we had to kind of retreat from being performers and focus on being parents.

[7:21] Greg Kotis: But tomorrow, I'm actually flying to Chicago for my son's college graduation.

[7:26] Teresa Attridge: Oh, no way.

[7:27] Teresa Attridge: Oh, congratulations.

[7:28] Greg Kotis: Thank you very much.

[7:29] Greg Kotis: And so we're at a stage where we're like, can we, like you were talking about starting out as actors.

[7:34] Greg Kotis: I think probably everybody, almost everybody in theater starts out as an actor.

[7:38] Greg Kotis: So now we're at this stage where it's like, huh, maybe we can sort of be actors again, maybe, or at least the actors the way that we used to be in our 20s.

[7:46] Greg Kotis: So Animal Flesh is an experiment to see whether or not we can do that or not.

[7:50] Teresa Attridge: Yeah, I love that.

[7:51] Teresa Attridge: You know, I was researching the Neo Futurists to get ready for this podcast.

[7:55] Teresa Attridge: I was wondering, you know, for those who don't know, can you just talk a little bit about the performance philosophies of the Neo Futurists?

[8:01] Teresa Attridge: Because I find them to be just so fascinating.

[8:03] Teresa Attridge: I'd also be curious to know, how do you think that's influenced your work going forward?

[8:07] Teresa Attridge: Kind of like A Year in Town, for example, or The End of All Flesh?

[8:10] Greg Kotis: Yeah, the Neo Futurists is a theater company founded by Greg Allen in 1988 in Chicago.

[8:16] Greg Kotis: And the signature show of that company is called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which has since been sort of transformed in New York and other places, maybe just in New York, to a show called The Infinite Wrench.

[8:27] Greg Kotis: So both Too Much Light and The Infinite Wrench, they are both in production, The Infinite Wrench in New York and Too Much Light in other places.

[8:33] Greg Kotis: The aesthetic, which is what they call it, of the company is based on a very literal notion of how to tell the truth on stage.

[8:42] Greg Kotis: So the material that you tell comes from your own life.

[8:45] Greg Kotis: The stories that you tell are all true, unless otherwise stated.

[8:49] Greg Kotis: The Neo Futurists are writer-performers.

[8:51] Greg Kotis: We write and perform the work that we write.

[8:53] Greg Kotis: You never try to be someone other than yourself on stage.

[8:56] Greg Kotis: So it's this really heightened notion of how to be yourself and how to be absolutely transparent and true on stage.

[9:03] Greg Kotis: So it dispenses with traditional notions of character and performance and narrative and those things.

[9:08] Greg Kotis: It's also about in an effort of that, notions of the fourth wall are dismissed.

[9:14] Greg Kotis: So you never pretend that you're not just people in a room with the audience.

[9:18] Greg Kotis: So something like that.

[9:19] Greg Kotis: It's been a while since it's been sort of an active part of the company, but I think that's one interpretation of what it is.

[9:25] Greg Kotis: And it's been a huge influence on me because in Urinetown, in Yeast Nation, in The End of All Flesh,

[9:31] Greg Kotis: I try to enlist the showmanship principles that I learned with the Neo Futurists,

[9:36] Greg Kotis: which is how powerful it can be to acknowledge the audience in the theater space.

[9:42] Greg Kotis: Because unlike film and podcasts and other media, you're not all together in a room.

[9:48] Greg Kotis: So theater is different in that regard that you can actually see them.

[9:51] Greg Kotis: They can see you.

[9:52] Greg Kotis: You can see them seeing you and vice versa.

[9:54] Greg Kotis: And if you can figure out how to enlist that energy, there's a lot of theatrical power that you can unleash.

[10:00] Greg Kotis: So, yeah, that was certainly true for Urinetown.

[10:02] Greg Kotis: I mean, Urinetown is not an orthodox application of Neo Futurist principles.

[10:07] Greg Kotis: I mean, as you can tell, it gets very specific and orthodox.

[10:11] Greg Kotis: But there were some just some ideas of how you can relate to an audience as a performer and as a playwright.

[10:18] Greg Kotis: That's definitely been a huge influence on me for sure.

[10:21] Teresa Attridge: Oh, yeah. I just wanted to jump in and to say that I very closely bonded with Urinetown, but also now The End of All Flesh.

[10:26] Teresa Attridge: The direct address, the narration of Officer Lockstock and Little Sally and then Ma and Pa to the audience.

[10:31] Teresa Attridge: That's such a powerful moment of connection.

[10:33] Teresa Attridge: We're immediately talking with you. We're engaging with you.

[10:36] Teresa Attridge: And it's not just at the start. It's throughout the entire play.

[10:39] Teresa Attridge: So really fantastic. And I was going to ask you, actually, where did that come from?

[10:43] Teresa Attridge: And so it's really good to know that the Neo Futurists, that DNA is still within your work.

[10:47] Greg Kotis: Yeah. And my other sort of, I guess, creative parent is this company that Mark and I were a part of called Cardiff Giant.

[10:54] Greg Kotis: They also had their own sort of idea of character monologues and direct address to the audience that also sort of informed it.

[11:02] Greg Kotis: So it's sort of an amalgam of those two sources, Cardiff Giant on the one hand and the Neo Futurists on the other.

[11:08] Greg Kotis: There are the sirens. Maybe you can hear them.

[11:10] Pauls Macs: Yeah.

[11:11] Teresa Attridge: Greg, did I derail your bio? I just hope I didn't do that.

[11:14] Greg Kotis: No! A biography is a living thing while you're still alive, right?

[11:17] Teresa Attridge: Yeah.

[11:18] Teresa Attridge: You and your wife also have Theater of the Apes as well that you started while you were here.

[11:25] Teresa Attridge: Do you want to talk a little more about that?

[11:26] Greg Kotis: I love the tagline that is on your site, which is human see, human do.

[11:30] Greg Kotis: Yeah.

[11:31] Greg Kotis: With a little emoji of a girl and a heart, which I just think is really nice.

[11:33] Greg Kotis: But what was sort of the philosophy behind starting that together as well?

[11:37] Greg Kotis: We wanted to create, I guess, essentially a production company that we could enlist to do whatever work we wanted to do.

[11:45] Greg Kotis: Playwrights, like actors, have to audition their material all the time.

[11:49] Greg Kotis: For us, it's pretty rare that our work actually gets picked up by a commercial producer or a professional theater and references.

[11:58] Greg Kotis: Do you know who Spalding Gray is?

[11:59] Teresa Attridge: No.

[12:00] Greg Kotis: Spalding Gray was part of the Wooster Group and did pieces like Swimming to Cambodia, which are basically these autobiographical monologue pieces.

[12:07] Greg Kotis: Is that correct, Gray?

[12:08] Teresa Attridge: For sure.

[12:09] Greg Kotis: It's going on my list. That sounds very cool.

[12:11] Greg Kotis: The Wooster Group is this famous experimental theater company that was based in New York City.

[12:15] Greg Kotis: I think they're still active.

[12:16] Greg Kotis: Spalding Gray was an important member of theirs.

[12:20] Greg Kotis: Maybe Willem Dafoe might be the most famous member.

[12:22] Greg Kotis: Perhaps.

[12:23] Greg Kotis: Anyway, Anne references this quote from Spalding Gray where he said he was, I'm going to paraphrase this,

[12:30] Greg Kotis: something like he was tired of waiting for the machine to make up their mind about him.

[12:34] Greg Kotis: And so he just started to do his own thing.

[12:37] Greg Kotis: I think he was an actor like everybody is, or everyone who starts out in theater.

[12:40] Greg Kotis: So we started a production company because we didn't want to have to wait for someone else to give us permission to do our shows,

[12:48] Greg Kotis: the things that we wrote and that we were passionate about.

[12:50] Greg Kotis: It's a production company that exists to do the work that we write and that we want to put on.

[12:55] Greg Kotis: So we have produced, I don't know, five or six shows through that company, usually off-off-Broadway, sometimes non-equity, sometimes equity showcase.

[13:04] Greg Kotis: So sort of, you know, short run, limited run kind of thing so far.

[13:09] Greg Kotis: But we are hoping to build the company show by show, production by production and make it bigger and able to do bigger shows as time goes on.

[13:17] Teresa Attridge: I love that.

[13:18] Teresa Attridge: Fantastic.

[13:19] Pauls Macs: Just going to throw in there, the Wooster Group is still going strong.

[13:22] Pauls Macs: They're still out there performing Garage in lower Manhattan.

[13:24] Pauls Macs: In my final year of grad school, I actually wrote a play.

[13:27] Pauls Macs: We got to put it, put it on there.

[13:29] Pauls Macs: And when you walk into that space, you can still feel the energy from all the performances, all the legendary performances that took place there.

[13:36] Pauls Macs: There's still something in those walls.

[13:38] Greg Kotis: Yeah.

[13:39] Pauls Macs: So it's really a remarkable group and a really remarkable place.

[13:41] Greg Kotis: Elizabeth LeCompte, is that right?

[13:43] Greg Kotis: She's kind of the head.

[13:45] Greg Kotis: Elizabeth LeCompte kind of leads everything.

[13:47] Greg Kotis: Willem Dafoe, I don't think, does that much there anymore.

[13:49] Greg Kotis: But I agree with you that he's probably the most famous alumni.

[13:52] Pauls Macs: That was pretty much everything I had except for like a little blurb about you're in town.

[13:57] Pauls Macs: Famously, you wrote that.

[13:59] Pauls Macs: Oh, yeah, you did.

[14:00] Pauls Macs: Two-time Tony Award winning writer, Gray Kodes wrote your play.

[14:02] Greg Kotis: It was three Tony Awards, three Critics Circle Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, and two Obie Awards. Yeah, she's highly decorated here in town. Yeah, yeah. I'm knocking wood here. The show had a really charmed life and continues. So I feel very lucky that it's had the life and continues to have the life that it had and it has.

[14:22] Teresa Attridge: Yeah. I mean, it also, obviously, it means a lot to a lot of people, right? Like for Powles, obviously, who directed it. Because I was in high school after the Tony Awards performance where everyone was like, Oh, my God, it was the show that you would talk to people about if you were trying to sound cool. You know, so people would be like, Oh, yeah, you know, Wicked and this and that. And I'm gonna be like, I'm actually my favorite show is Urinetown. I don't know if you know about it. It's about not being allowed to go to the bathroom. It's very referential. It was the piece that made you look cool as an uncool theater person.

[14:56] Greg Kotis: That's so true. I remember trying to make that happen in high school being like, Oh, yeah, you like Into the Woods or Sweeney Todd. I like Assassins. That's like the cool, edgy Sondheim musical. Tracy, you're from San Francisco. Is that right?

[15:09] Tracy: Yeah, I'm from San Francisco. And Powell, you're from...

[15:12] Greg Kotis: I grew up in a small town called Olympia, Washington, the capital of Washington. I grew up in Olympia. I went to the University of Washington in Seattle, where I directed Urinetown. And I kind of hung out in Seattle for like five years. I was working like the Fifth Avenue Theater. And then I moved to New York for school. And then the pandemic happened. The last thing I did in school was I staged a production of Richard III on Zoom. That was an adventure. But then a lot of things were happening in that moment. Again, I don't want to go into too much detail. But a lot of things led me and also some mentors really advised me to come back to Seattle for a lot of reasons. So this is where I am. Although I am an active company member with New York Theater Barn, and I try to be in New York as much as I possibly can.

I try to live that bi-coastal lifestyle, because I just learned about myself that New York is vital to my artistry. There's just an energy there talking with people like you and Teresa. It influences me and helps me bring better work to Seattle. So I try to co-exist in both places.

[16:02] Teresa Attridge: Yeah. I mean, New York is singular, sort of a singular place in that regard. Well, maybe now's a good time. There's so much that we could talk with you about, Greg. But now to officially start talking with you about your show, The End of All Flesh. I absolutely loved your presentation. I want to read the full summary of the show, just so people can get a sense of what it's about. So here we go. The End of All Flesh is a rollicking post-apocalyptic fable unfolding on a remote mountaintop sometime in America's distant future. Having made it through the end times, Ma and Pa fight to keep themselves and their son Boy alive by hunting, gathering, and maintaining a healthy distrust of strangers. But Boy's near grown now, and his new friend Girl is putting some mighty funny ideas in his head about familial hierarchies and the patriarchy.

This new dark comedy explores environmental collapse, gender norms, generation gaps, survivalist practices, and the creative potential of a pandemic beard in song. Which has to be one of the best summaries of a theater piece I've ever read in my entire life, just so you know. But should we start, Teresa, just by asking, you talked about this a little bit before, so forgive if any information is redundant. But you know, for example, I know that the genesis of Urinetown, I think you were on a trip in Europe, and you saw in one of those pay toilets, and that was kind of the inspiration that led to the idea. But could you talk a little bit more about the genesis of The End of All Flesh came about?

[17:17] Greg Kotis: Sure. A few years ago, I want to say maybe 2021 or 2020, and my wife, who plays Ma, she bought me a banjo. Just every few Christmases, we buy each other something kind of fancy. So that's the fancy thing that she bought me. And apparently, I mentioned that, oh, it'd be fun to learn the banjo. And I don't even remember saying this, but she sort of clocked that. And then on Christmas, she got me this banjo, which I didn't play for a year. And then she got me a subscription to a teaching website called ArtistWorks, where I began learning the banjo. So for the past few years, I've been trying to learn the banjo. Meanwhile, because of lockdown and the pandemic, my hair started to grow and then I started to grow a beard. So while I'm learning the banjo, I'm starting to physically transform into this sort of mountain man look that I'm wearing today.

[18:03] Teresa Attridge: You wear it well.

[18:04] Greg Kotis: Thank you very much. It looks very good on you. I was really hoping the pandemic beard would still be here when we talked today.

[18:09] Greg Kotis: Yeah, it's been so long. It's hard for me to remember what it's like not to have it. So anyway, learning these songs and becoming like, I didn't know anything about bluegrass. It was just like that country music that I kind of knew over the past few years of just becoming exposed to this amazing American musical genre and then transforming into a mountain man. I started to think, oh, is there something that I can do with this? Is there something fun that can be a show that I might belong in? And also I have a preoccupation with dystopia and the end of the world. That was the inspiration. What do you do with a banjo and a lot of hair and a newly discovered love for this musical genre? And so that was the spark.

[18:50] Teresa Attridge: That's fantastic. I just really resonate with the idea of creating something that you can see yourself being a part of. I guess I would just want to talk with you more about your fascination about dystopia, the end of the world. There's just a lot of really profound political commentary in The End of All Flesh, especially in terms of the war between the patriarchy versus progressive values, especially in terms of gender norms. And I guess I would just be curious to know, where did that come from? Were you watching the news every day or is that just something you're particularly passionate about or perhaps your wife is passionate about? I'd just be curious to know about that. One of my very favorite aspects of Urinetown is the fact that it teaches you without feeling like you're being taught.

I look at the world differently because of the show, and especially about water conservation after directing the piece. But there are so many shows that come to you at such a political point of view. And those shows, don't get me wrong, are fantastic, too. We have space for those 100%. But the way that Urinetown and pieces like The End of All Flesh kind of trick you into being educated about something without actually explicitly telling you that's what's going to happen has been always amazing to me.

[19:51] Greg Kotis: Sure. I mean, I studied political science at the University of Chicago. That was also a huge influence on me. And political science, it's about history, it's about philosophy, political philosophy, looking at the world at a pretty broad perspective, I would say. I think our moment now, and maybe always, but it's easy to have your own lens confined to the few years behind and in front of us without taking in the broader sweep of history. That's something that's always there for me as a context that just having spent those years studying it and focusing on it. So things like Urinetown and The End of All Flesh are really informed by that background as well. Things like the way that revolutions, in Urinetown, there's a revolution. In The End of All Flesh, there's a kind of revolution. I guess revolutions may be an ongoing theme, certainly in Yeast Nation, Teresa, which you were a part of.

[20:43] Teresa Attridge: Oh my gosh, that was one of my favorite shows I've ever done, I have to say. And the only time I've played a villain, it just feels wrong.

[20:48] Greg Kotis: You're great as the show's villain. You're fantastic. It was a joy, really. Anyone who doesn't know anything about Yeast Nation, go be a nerd. Go look at it. The shows are preoccupied with social transformation, violent social transformation. We live in a time when that all kind of feels really close to the surface. The musical is a form that is so naturally in line with romanticism, romantic notions, romantic notions of the hero, romantic notions of justice and liberation and all the things that we want. But because it's romance, and because of my own background in political science, I can't help but look at that with a lot of skepticism. Because what begins with romance and optimism often ends in a bloodbath.

Those kinds of lessons of history I keep. So that's sort of my perspective. I think I am simultaneously progressive and conservative. I think I keep these two perspectives. They're in constant war with each other, in my own mind, and I can never tell which one is right. Writing these shows is a way of giving characters full voice, where you have Bobby Strong, who's going to be the voice of idealism, versus Cladwell, who's the voice of realism. And in The End of All Flesh, you know, Pa is the voice of, he's a reactionary, unreconstructed, patriarchal tyrant. And so I want to give that character full voice. Because there's a part of me which is like, tradition is pretty good. There's a lot of wealth and power and strength to be mined from the past, because we wouldn't be here without it.

Simultaneously, you have Girl, who is the voice of revolutionary idealism, who wants to destroy all of that, rip it all down, and build something better. The End of All Flesh is also about generational conflict, which I think we're in the midst of, where now, you know, I'm 57 years old. So now I find myself, and a lot of people my age find ourselves, strangely, like, oh, no, now we're on the other side of this. Now we're the old, that has to contend with idealism, and the impatience of youth. And it's an ancient story. It's going back to the Greeks, they were talking about this too. So it's just having lived this long. Now I'm starting to sort of see the worm is turning for me. The End of All Flesh is a way to sort of unpack that and explore that and hopefully do that in a funny way.

[23:12] Teresa Attridge: That was actually one of my favorite things about the piece, since I got to read it. Looking at the text is not only the idea of you have the young lovers who are trying to literally make a new world, and you have the older couple, specifically Pa, but Ma in her way, that really value what got them where they are, because I think that's the nature of progress, right? At one point, we're all the young idealists and what we push for to become, like the new standard will become an old standard, it will have to evolve. At a certain point, what Pa and Ma were doing, whether he's regressive or traditional or whatever word people want to assign to him, he got that far. And there's nothing more revolutionary than the act of surviving the impulse.

[24:00] Greg Kotis: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, for sure. To him, even though he talked about, he was like, well, the way things are, and the way this is, and the way that is, he had to fight in his own way for that. And my favorite character is actually Ma, because Ma walks that line between wanting something different and wanting things to be the same, and seeing all of the perspectives and sort of sitting in it. When I was reading it, I sort of interpreted it as Pa's the past and Boy and Girl are the future, but Ma is the present.

[24:39] Teresa Attridge: Yeah, one of the questions that I had had is that, do you see Ma as any sort of allegory for either the present or the audience itself? Because most of the narration done towards the audience is from her. Or was it more so the fact that in the style of writing that you have, because it is more self-aware and referential, is that just kind of the natural thing that happens as a writer? Is that your ability to see everything ended up manifesting in the person telling the story?

[25:00] Greg Kotis: Yeah, I think that's a great way of, I love how you put that, that Pa's the past, the kids are the future, and Ma's the present. I mean, she lives in a place of compromise. And I think that's the reality for a lot of us, where we have our ideals, but we have just the reality of how we have to live. So that Ma sits most sort of immediately within that, and is the most, sort of the most vulnerable. I think she is the necessary ambassador of the fable to the audience. And also she's, above all, she is about survival. Whatever is necessary for that to happen, she will do. I'm glad that that came off just from reading it. Thank you for reading it and for getting that.

[25:34] Teresa Attridge: Oh, yeah. Imagine if I came in here and didn't. That'd be wild of me. And I just want to chime in and say that that makes great sense. And I'm not going to spoil the ending of the play. But within the ending of the play, the lens that you've just interpreted it through, Teresa. Teresa's a brilliant dramaturg, everyone, I just have to say that. Clearly, that makes great sense. And it's so fascinating to me, Greg, that you say that this war between conservatism and progressive values is within you, because that's clearly manifested in the play. These two sides go to war against each other, and then someone has to find the compromise, right? The other thing I want to just feed back to you, it's so interesting to me what you're saying, because at one point you could go see Urinetown like, oh, that was such a fun play.

It made fun of musicals. But the way in which your work kind of encompasses, or not kind of, actually encompasses the entire scope of human history is really fascinating to me, because this war between the new ways, the young versus the old ways is something that's been happening since the dawn of time. In fact, I remember from the presentation, our brilliant artistic director, Joe Barrows, came out and said, it feels like Urinetown, Three-Penny Opera, and Bright Star all had a baby. And I agree with that, absolutely. But the other one that was giving me strong vibes was Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which is all about how humanity continues to survive over and over again. So the way that that's all manifested within your work is just really, really fascinating.

[26:50] Greg Kotis: Yeah, I love what Joe had to say, and I'm blushing being mentioned in the same breath as Thornton Wilder. There are life events, such as parenthood, marriage, college, death, death of parents, and God forbid, death of friends and children, even, that all are transformative to you. And yeah, I mean, the idea of, in my 20s, I was, I think, much more idealistic than I am now. These shows are all written with that distrust of idealism, because with time breeds the experience of being betrayed by idealism, and also being betrayed by conservative intransigence. Both of those things betray what feels like where we should be and where we should be going, and et cetera. So it's all in there.

[27:36] Teresa Attridge: Thanks for joining us for New York Theatre Barn's Backstage Pass. Join us next time for more discussion about Greg Kotis's new work, The End of All Flesh, and we play a game we like to call Survival the Musical.