This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:01] Joe Barros: The music of tomorrow is being written today.

[0:10] Jen Sandler: The music of tomorrow is almost ready to play.

[0:18] Joe Barros: Experience the musicals of tomorrow, today.

[0:21] Jen Sandler: Get a glimpse inside the blueprint of an original musical being developed in real time.

[0:26] Joe Barros: With New York Theatre Barn's podcast, The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[0:32] Jen Sandler: The music of tomorrow.

[0:40] Joe Barros: I'm Joe Barros.

[0:42] Jen Sandler: And I'm Jen Sandler.

[0:44] Joe Barros: And we're the hosts of The Musicals of Tomorrow.

[0:46] Jen Sandler: As the Artistic Director and Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Barn, we make space to speak in community with musical theatre writers and their creative teams.

[0:56] Joe Barros: Lifting up songs from original culture-shifting musicals in development and introducing them to a global audience has become a major part of New York Theatre Barn's evolving story.

[1:06] Jen Sandler: Each original musical's intention, content, and journey are unique and extraordinary to the storytellers who create them.

[1:14] Joe Barros: We believe that there is no formula for musical theatre except authenticity.

[1:19] Jen Sandler: We recently spoke with the writers of Our New Town, David Dabbon, Gabriel Jason Dean, and Jessie Dean, and the writers of Elektric, Emerson Mae Smith, and Murphy Taylor Smith.

[1:31] Joe Barros: Our first musical is Our New Town, which has bookend lyrics by Gabriel Jason Dean and Jessie Dean, and music and additional lyrics by David Dabbon.

[1:41] Jen Sandler: In the aftermath of the deadliest shooting on a college campus in U.S. history, surviving cast members of Thornton Wilder's Our Town put together an unauthorized show as a way to reclaim their theatre space and heal their broken community.

[1:57] Joe Barros: But when the event is stopped mid-performance, the cast and audience must decide between compliance or defiance. Our New Town is an immersive musical that puts the audience at the center of an American crisis.

[2:11] Jen Sandler: And now, here's our conversation with the writers of Our New Town, David Dabbon, Gabriel Jason Dean, and Jessie Dean.

[2:19] Howard Sherman: Thanks for having me.

[2:31] Jen Sandler: Of course! What inspired you to reexamine Our Town in your book and its contributions to the world?

[2:36] Howard Sherman: Well, I mean, for the book, I think it's a really interesting play. I actually love the play even more now than when I started working on it. And I think it transcends its time, and it transcends a sense of place. I think the metatheatricality of the play is that it's very stripped down, and it can be an awful lot of places, an awful lot of times, and it can mean an awful lot of things to people. There is a very central message to it that Wilder wanted, which simply is to appreciate the world around you and the life that you have, because it's brief. But within that, there are countless nuances that can be emphasized. And so the book tells mostly oral histories of productions in the past 20 years. And I describe it in short as talking to about 115 people who spent time living in Grover's Corners.

[3:38] Jen Sandler: And I know when you started working on this book, you took a trip to Peterborough. You made this a really special time. What happened when you went on that trip?

[3:45] Howard Sherman: Well, actually, my trip to Peterborough was when the book was finished. I only went to Peterborough, New Hampshire. For those who don't know, Peterborough, New Hampshire is where the McDowell Colony is. Thornton Wilder spent many summers at McDowell, and Peterborough is widely considered to be the template for Grover's Corners. He never flat out said it was, but you look at the descriptions in the play, and you see Grove Street and Main Street, and that's where the Town Hall is. So it's a remarkable place. For me, the great experience was I went early, and a cousin of mine went with me, and he was very insistent that we get there for sunrise. And so I actually watched the sun come up from the East Hill Cemetery, which is on a hill outside of town.

And you can see in the distance the hills, mighty blue they are, as it's said in the play. And that's sort of pretty awesome. I mean, I don't know what else to say except that you feel like you're in the place. I mean, I love 1776. When I was in second grade, I was very excited to go to the Independence Hall. But this has something larger because of what that cemetery represents in the play.

[5:08] Jen Sandler: So we're going to bring you back in a bit, but can you tell everyone how to buy your book?

[5:11] Howard Sherman: Oh, well, you can buy my book wherever fine books are sold.

[5:15] Jen Sandler: Awesome. Well, thank you, Howard. We'll see you shortly. It was really fantastic to hear more about Howard's book, and we're going to bring him back shortly. And now it's time to introduce Our New Town. Joining us from their homes are the writers of Our New Town, Gabriel Jason Dean, Jessie Dean, and David Dabbon.

[5:30] Joe Barros: Hi, everybody.

[5:31] Gabriel Jason Dean: Hi, there.

[5:32] Joe Barros: Awesome. Well, thank you all for being here. Gabriel, you've been dubbed feisty as hell by The New Yorker and a great modern American playwright by Broadway World, in case you didn't know. The play has been produced or developed at celebrated companies such as New York Theatre Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, McCarter Theatre, Cherry Lane, the Kennedy Center, Oregon Shakespeare, and Seattle's Children's Theatre. Is that all?

[5:55] Gabriel Jason Dean: Your plays include Heartland in Bloom, Terminus, Qualities of Starlight, Entangled, and The Transition of Doodle Pequeno. You've also penned book and lyrics for the young audience's musical Mario and the Comet. Your script for Television We Belong, co-written with your wife, Jessie Dean, was a finalist for the Humanitas New Television Writer Award.

[6:15] Jessie Dean: You are a writer, actor, director, and associate artistic director of Moliere in the Park, Brooklyn's first free theater in Prospect Park. You recently finished writing the full-length feature Get Gomez alongside your husband, Gabriel. You performed and developed plays at La MaMa, New York Theatre Workshop, 59 East 59th Street Theatres, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and The Alliance.

[6:38] Joe Barros: My friend David Dabbon, you are an Emmy-nominated and Grammy-nominated composer, arranger, orchestrator, and vocal coach. On Broadway, you were the dance arranger for the Tony-nominated musical Beetlejuice and the musical comedy Send Up Disaster. And you also provided orchestrations for the Broadway biomusical Sondheim on Sondheim. I always feel like when we do these that we're at someone's funeral and we're giving them eulogy. And what's so funny about it is that you've done so many other crazy things and worked with so many other people, but we're here for Our New Town, so we have to kind of get on with the show. So what led to your collaboration as storytellers and why Our Town coupled with gun violence?

[7:21] Gabriel Jason Dean: Good question. We love David Dabbon. David Dabbon has been our friend for many years. And when we had our son Wilder, he was in bed one night. He's named after Thornton Wilder.

[7:33] Jessie Dean: Who is named after Thornton Wilder and Laura Ingalls Wilder and other great ones. Gene Wilder.

[7:38] Gabriel Jason Dean: Gene Wilder. Lots of good Wilders.

[7:39] Jessie Dean: Lots of good Wilders.

[7:40] Gabriel Jason Dean: He was in bed one night sleeping and we were reading the news and there was another shooting that had happened in Oregon. And there was just a brief sentence that talked about how all of the survivors' families, all of the victims' families, had to wait at the fairground for news that their loved one was either had passed in the shooting or was killed or was alive. And that really sparked something in us. And we thought, how can we be proactive about this? Because we don't want our son growing up in this kind of environment. We want this to change. So what can we do as artists? What's our responsibility? So we quickly came up with the idea that we should write a show about it. And then we quickly came up with the idea that we should write a musical about it.

And we had no clue how to do these together. And so we applied to The Civilians, who were our major support group and friends and allies in this creation. And we worked with them for a full year in their R&D group, writing and developing various formats for what this was going to be. And sort of landed. I mean, there were crazy. I remember all of those.

[8:50] Jessie Dean: It was real.

[8:51] Gabriel Jason Dean: It was actually set in space.

[8:52] Jessie Dean: It was set in space at one point.

[8:54] Gabriel Jason Dean: It was set in space. Everybody got a gun on their 18th birthday, and we were all in space. It took us a while to get here.

[9:01] Jessie Dean: It took us a long time.

[9:02] Gabriel Jason Dean: Well, David and I had a history of collaboration together prior to this. We worked on Mario and the Comet. And we had also done a piece for an immersive youth play. I don't know what to call it. It was an immersive youth play, right, David?

[9:20] David Dabbon: It was basically like a musical play that high schools could do, where you were actually in the high school, and you would get to experience.

[9:30] Jessie Dean: It was called Hall Pass. And you would take your schedule, and you'd go from your biology to choir to different rooms. And so it was good to experience whatever was happening in the room.

[9:40] Gabriel Jason Dean: So David and I very obviously chose the chorus room and wrote some music. But we thought about what would happen or what does happen in a chorus room when there is a mass shooting going on somewhere nearby, not in the school that they're in, but somewhere nearby. And so we wrote a piece and felt like that was kind of the spark of what would become Our New Town. We knew we wanted to write something about gun violence together. But specifically for Our Town, Wilder had been a – I consider myself an acolyte of Wilder as a writer. And he's sort of – I like to think he's sitting somewhere on my shoulder. He's probably nowhere near me. I like to admit that. I think he's super close. I mean, I named my son after him.

Hopefully, you know, the homage was worth the shoulder sit. But I was teaching it at the time that we were working on the show, The Civilians. And I had always wanted to do something that was in conversation with Our Town. And it just kind of clicked. We were talking. Jess and I were talking one evening. And it was about, I'd say, two, three weeks before we were supposed to present the show publicly. We didn't set it in Our New Town, in Thornton Wilder's Our Town until two to three weeks before we were presenting it with The Civilians. So we had a lot of work to do once we discovered this. But it kind of really clicked in place. And the thought was that, you know, as Howard was describing Our Town as this celebration of life because life is so brief, what would Wilder write today?

If he were living and we were trying to create something around Grover's Corners, he would have to acknowledge gun violence. It wouldn't be possible to write that kind of play. We were thinking of what happens when Wilder's version of Our Town or Grover's Corners becomes corrupted with this sickness, this modern-day sickness of mass shootings. And then through much development, we got to the play and the script that we have now.

[11:33] Jen Sandler: And how have all of the recent school shootings, the shootings at the Capitol and the destruction there, how have that influenced the way you tell this story?

[11:40] Gabriel Jason Dean: For me, it sort of deepens my relationship with this play. There was a senator, and I cannot remember who it was that was speaking. But they said something like, I go to work every day and now I have to worry about going to work and guns being there. And while I did agree with the senator, all I kept thinking was teachers and students have been dealing with this since 1999 and nothing has been done. And I'm tired of people not taking this personally, of this being an issue on the periphery. And what we aim to create is an immersive experience where the space that is around you is haunted by this event. And that's really important to us. Give a little bit of contextualization of the moment that we're living in. There have been fewer mass shootings since the pandemic than really ever. It's just to say that we're capable of this. We don't have to have a pandemic to do it.

[12:30] Jen Sandler: Well, thanks for sharing your inspirations and how these events have affected your show. And also for sharing the development about how your journey began with, well, expanded with The Civilians R&D group. Also, I wanted to acknowledge that your show had its world premiere production in October of 2019 at Wagner College. And I'd love to bring on the director of that production, Teresa McCarthy.

[12:55] Joe Barros: We're going to bring back our flowers.

[12:58] Jessie Dean: Hello.

[12:59] Joe Barros: We're going to bring back our flowers as well. So, Teresa, thank you so much for joining us. In addition to being a director, you are an incredible performer who has brought to life the works of Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, and you were in the original production of Titanic. And we've had the great privilege of getting to work with you at New York Theatre Barn as well. I'd love to hear from you more about what it was like to bring the show to life. And also, if you could also speak to the fact that the threat of gun violence actually hit Wagner's campus on September 25th, 2019, when a professor threatened basically to shoot other students.

[13:35] Teresa McCarthy: Oh, gosh. Wow, that's exciting. I didn't know I was going to be talking about that, but I will do my best. I'm so lucky to be a part of the Wagner.

[13:45] Theresa McCarthy: College Theatre Department. It is a most wonderful community and our students are avid, beautiful seekers, artists, intellects. And so I began this new works program at Wagner a couple of years before we brought this project on and I was looking for a new project to do in workshop first. We're going to do a reading of it, a two-week rehearsal reading of it. And I called up David because David always has something good. And he said, Oh, I might have something. And he sent over the script that he and Jessie and Gabriel wrote. I glanced at it. It was about six months before we were supposed to go. And I said, It's fantastic. Let's do it. And we workshopped it. They're so responsive. They're amazing.

They came and worked with us in the room, which is a thrill for the students. And there was very little rewriting, honestly. I mean, it was really a beautifully solid, realized piece right from the beginning. And I don't know, just super lucky that we got to have a chance to embody that for these writers. I think this piece should be done at every college around the country, every college, every university. It's exquisite. It's so fun to figure out. It's meta. It feels like a documentary. There's a lot of opportunity for actors to practice different acting skills. It's really, it was really a beautiful experience for all of us. And then we did have a faculty member at our campus who kind of lost his mind one day and threatened. He didn't have a gun at school, but he was escorted off the campus.

[15:27] Howard Sherman: Wow. And Howard, you ventured all the way to Staten Island to see this show. You know, as an avid Our Town fan, how did the show resonate with you?

[15:35] Howard Sherman: It's so extraordinary once you get to know the script of Our Town as well as I did. When you watch something like this, and indeed this, as to where you recognize what's being referenced. I mean, there may be some audience members who may have once seen Our Town sometime, but it's the subtle things, the parallels, or the things that are opposite. What struck me about seeing this, and indeed there are a couple of other plays, not musicals, which bring gun violence into Grover's Corners in some way, that all of them look at Our Town. What was tragedy that would befall a young person at the turn of the 20th century? Well, for a young woman, it was to die in childbirth. Now, what is one of the leading causes of death of young people in this country?

Gun violence. So indeed, there's an incredible parallel, incredibly sad parallel. And it's, I don't know if Teresa said it or Gaber, Jesse said it, it's very meta in the sense that their play is referencing another play. The people in the audience are watching the play put on. So there's layer after layer. And what that does, in a way, it echoes exactly what Our Town tries to do, which is not to say just, here's the story I want to tell you, watch it and feel something. But in fact, wants you to become a part of the story that's being told. And that your feelings may not always come directly from what you're watching on stage, but it's what Our Town does, what Our New Town does, is it summons.

And of course, for some people, they'd say, oh, I don't want to see a show that involves gun violence. It's, and no pun intended, it's triggering. But the question is, for many people, does it become cathartic? And does it become a caution? Our Town is a caution about letting the world go by and not realizing what's happening. Our New Town is a caution about the relationship of creating art in a universe where too many people are lost too suddenly. They can decide if I, if I, if they agree with what I'm saying. It's a really great.

[18:03] Theresa McCarthy: So before we take a look at the first song, David, could you just tell us a little bit more about how the music affects this world and summons its audience?

[18:11] David Dabbon: Sure. You know, the, one of the things that we had talked about when we started writing it was that we wanted the idea of music to actually come from the cast, you know, because they're in a space that they're not supposed to be in. And they're also trying to be very secretive at the same time. Their resources as individuals being in the space is what they have to bring in there. So you have guitars, hand drums, and glockenspiel. And so I think a lot of, a lot of the music was created to be as if, you know, when I sat down to write some music, it was like, what, what do I feel wants to come out of me at this specific moment? You know, if I were at a vigil and talking about these feelings and how to express them, it came from a place of either what music I'd be listening to or things from around me, as well as also what would, what would I be able to groove to?

You know, you're dealing with such heavy material. How do we use music as a way to help further the story and also bring in different texture? The opening number is an uptempo song that feels like you're at a campfire and people singing in harmony together and it's rhythmic and it layers on. And so that was, that was something that was really important to all of us is to figure out how to bring buoyancy and light and connection. Because I think another part of the music is the chemistry between these characters making music together. It's, it's therapeutic, it's cathartic, it's, there's nothing like having harmonies. There's something of when you're singing with people, it does something different than when you're singing a solo. And that was, that was something that was really key to, to this, that it felt like an ensemble piece. What is the first one we're going to see tonight?

[19:59] Jessie Dean: Sorry, I was just going to say really quickly that there is a lot of light and a lot of humor. And there's a song that we're not going to see tonight that's sung by William Wallace that is a lot of fun and brings a lot of light to the show.

[20:10] David Dabbon: Yes, I, I wrote the lyrics for that song and I adore that. You'll have to see it in person. First song that we're going to see is Line in the Sand. And it's a real pivot point. It's a real anthem for this piece. David did such a great job of bringing the sound of youth into this song that I think is super important. When Gabriel and I sat down to sort of envision this song, I, I wrote down a list of school shootings and the dates of those shootings, not just school shootings, but I love researching stuff. So I wrote down all the shootings and all the dates. And the first thing I wrote down was Columbine in 99. And Gabriel took that and ran with it. And that is one of the first.

[21:01] ♪ Musical number: "Line in the Sand" — performed by the cast of Wagner's Our New Town ♪

[25:01] Jessie Dean: That cast has been so incredible throughout this process, and it feels very, very special to, you know, I'm glad we got to preserve it with them.

[25:07] Theresa McCarthy: Yeah, Teresa, thanks for bringing all that together.

[25:11] Howard Sherman: Oh, my gosh. Thanks for writing it.

[25:17] Jessie Dean: It's so weird. Jen was just saying on a Zoom earlier that, like, you know, she'll always remember where she was on January 6th, or just like she'll always remember where she was for 9-11 or Princess Diana. And when I hear the word Columbine, I'm like, I'm immediately sucked back to that place and that time in the 90s and that feeling. And what's so bizarre about that day is it was before the world was really connected, but I had AOL and you could go in chat rooms and you could find people who lived in that town and went to that high school. And I remember getting to talk to kids who evacuated the school that night. So what is the next song we're going to see?

[25:54] David Dabbon: The next song is called I'll Carry You, and it's from the last quarter of the show. So the conceit of the way that the kids wrote the show is that they interviewed members of the community and then brought back some of those interviews and then created these songs and scenes that we see. And they never really acknowledged who the shooter is or talk about the shooter or any of his family until this moment in the show. And the line that leads into the song, which I think is the way I want to do this, is losing a kid is every parent's worst nightmare, but having a child who becomes a killer, dot, dot, dot.

[26:33] ♪ Musical number: "I'll Carry You" — performed by Jessie Dean ♪

[27:30] ♪ Musical number: "I Carry You" — performed by Emerson Mae Smith ♪

[30:45] So amazing. The lyric is so chilling, "your mind despite what you have done." Oh, I think we want to end this discussion. We were saying when we first were speaking that, you know, Our Town is a show that isn't always said it anymore in schools, which baffled me because I did it my freshman year of high school. Do you hope that Our Town stays relevant? And do you hope your show will aid in this? You know, why do we think Our Town is a show we need to keep seeing? I mean, I just echo what Howard said. Our Town is the celebration of life and love, ultimately of death to the entire cycle. It is sort of the quintessential timeless play. I don't think we're going to see it not being done.

I don't think it'll disappear at all. I frankly think it's going to be the really the first American play that's going to go on past a century. It's already 83 years old at this point. It was remarkable to me when I was doing the book of all these people I interviewed how many said they didn't know it or they knew something about it and had decided they didn't like it. And every one of these people who did a production, of course, said it came around and it profoundly changed them. And I think if people can pull the cobwebs away, you know, David Cromer's production, certainly in Chicago and in New York and even in London, started to do that and made people see that Our Town doesn't have to be a sepia-toned postcard to a bygone era.

I hope our show, you know, does reinvigorate curiosity, certainly about Our Town. But yeah, it's certainly been a privilege to work within the themes and sharing that headspace with the author. It's been an incredible journey.

[32:46] Well, Our Town is an American staple, and we can't wait for Our New Town to be so as well as this incredible book, Another Day's Begun. So thank you all so much for being here with us tonight. We'll see you soon.

[32:59] Thank you so much.

[33:01] Our second new musical is Elektric, which has a book by Emerson Mae Smith and music and lyrics by Murphy Taylor Smith. A pair of twins, one cisgender, one transgender, are reunited after a decade by a God-sent mission: murder their mother to avenge their father. They are dual heirs to the throne of Argos, a small, militaristic city-state under the complete control of their mother, Clytemnestra. Electra, who dealt with her mother's violent transphobia for years, is ready to kill. Orestes, returning home in secret from his studies abroad, is not so sure. Argos is crumbling at the end of a years-long war, and the streets hum with violence and talk of prophets. Brimming with revolutionary fervor, Elektric is a radical, trans woman-centered retelling of the Oresteia. And now here's our conversation with the writers of Elektric, Emerson Mae Smith and Murphy Taylor Smith.

[34:00] Emerson Mae Smith: Hello. Thank you so much for having us. So nice to be here.

[34:03] Murphy Taylor Smith: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. So like we said, the two of you are identical twin sisters. Emerson, you are a writer, performer, and University of Michigan student. You were recently seen in the world premiere production of Joe Iconis' Love and Hate Nation. You've also created the one-woman play Watchdog at the University of Michigan, and you wrote the short film Radio in collaboration with Murphy, which is about to be produced by UNC Greensboro. Murphy, you are the recent graduate of Penn State University and its prestigious theater program, and were named the 2019 York Theatre Company's Neo-Writer of the Future. As I mentioned, you collaborated with Emerson on Radio, an electro-pop lesbian ghost story, which you wrote music and lyrics for. You're also the writer of Results Will Vary, which was a Penn State commission. So Emerson and Murphy, when did you decide to collaborate together? And what inspired you to want to tell this story together?

[34:52] Emerson Mae Smith: Well, really, we have been collaborating for quite a long time. Growing up in our house, we just were always a very musical and theatrical, dramatic family. And we also have a younger brother. And yeah, since we were really little, just something we always loved to do was make up random stories and songs and games that involved very complex and often villainous characters to try to create a real world within our own bedrooms and apartments. And since then, we've pretty much been writing together. I mean, nonstop. We first started writing music together when we entered high school and we started writing. She wrote the music and I wrote the lyrics. But she started to discover that she wanted to write her own lyrics.

And then right about then, she started working on our first musical together and actually asked someone else to write the book and didn't really like musicals and had no interest in musicals and knew very little about musicals. So soon after that, we kind of discovered that maybe we should start writing and collaborating together on bigger stories. And that's about the same time I started writing prose and plays of all kinds. And we just kind of stuck together and thought, oh, yeah, we should do this all the time.

[36:05] Murphy Taylor Smith: Yeah. We started writing our first musical together our sophomore year of high school. And then in our junior year of high school, Emerson came out as transgender and was faced with the reality that there are very few roles for transgender people and non-binary people in musical theater. It is not a medium that has yet really embraced the trans community. We hope to be a part of that change and that embrace. So right around that time, we really wanted to construct something for Emerson to play the lead role. And we were really obsessed with the idea of finding a trans woman-centered narrative. And I had not yet come out as trans yet, but we were both really invested in this. And we stumbled across the idea of doing a Greek tragedy as a musical.

That was kind of like in our periphery because we've grown up loving Greek theater; it's always a part of our lives. Then it was really finding Electra as the character. And we were like, yes, this person as a trans woman is a really interesting twist, because something we weren't as interested in was telling the same kind of transgender narratives that we heard a lot about, a coming out story, a coming to terms with one's own body or one's own dysphoria. We really wanted to center a trans woman in a narrative who wasn't particularly obsessed with passing or appealing to cis normative standards of beauty. We really wanted to have a trans woman who was filled with a righteous rage and a fury that allowed her to take big actions and have impact the plot in major ways.

And if you're looking for big actions that impact the plot in major ways, you cannot go wrong with Greek theater. So that's where we settled on our journey to find a role that we thought a trans woman would love to play.

[37:41] Emerson Mae Smith: And why do you think Greek theater was what you gravitated towards first? You kind of just started talking about that, but I feel like it's such a specific genre.

[37:47] Murphy Taylor Smith: Absolutely. Well, like Murphy said, we both just love Greek theater. We've always loved Greek myths and stories. I don't know if anyone else grew up with that beautiful, illustrated Greek myths edition that I just poured over as a kid. But when we both started getting into theater and started reading the Greek plays for the first time, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Oresteia especially, we were just completely struck by the gravity of these stories. They're like these huge narratives that revolve around actually only three people, three characters on stage at the same time. The rest is just chorus. But their actions have these insane ripples and impacts all over both politically and religiously, spiritually in these lands.

And really the best way to communicate those huge speeches and turning moments has always been with song. Like in the original productions of the Greek plays, there was very likely music going on. Very likely the chorus was singing. And today it's hard to find a Greek play, an adaptation of a Greek play that doesn't have rhythm, music, all of those things involved in the chorus because it's built right into the text. You can't really speak those speeches without almost like it's kind of like Shakespeare finding the rhythm and the musicality of that language. So we were very excited about that. And as we were writing this story, the world was shifting very intensely around us. And something that has always been powerful to me about Greek stories is the violence in them and the destruction of leaders, the removal of leaders in place of another.

And a lot of these themes of how do you run a country? How do you run a city? Who is best to deal with a person in power who does not have the interests of their people and their state at heart? How do you react to something like that? These are questions that were being asked by Sophocles and Euripides and Aeschylus thousands of years ago. So when we found Electra and her struggle with her mother, who her mother, Clytemnestra, this tyrant who controls Argos with an iron fist, we were really excited by that. And we thought that there was a story that we could tell that was different from Aeschylus' version and also relevant to where we are right now.

[39:54] Emerson Mae Smith: Well, with that said, we'd love to hear about your first song.

[39:57] Murphy Taylor Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So as kind of mentioned, it's definitely an adaptation of the Oresteia, but I would say we do our own different version of it. It's the plot kind of spins off from that central iconic scene in the graveyard where Orestes and Electra meet again. And then we go in our own direction with it. So to give a little bit of preamble, we're going to be doing two songs for you tonight, both solos, one from Orestes and one from Electra. And these are both early in Act 2. The events of Act 1 play out similarly-ish to the events of the original trilogy. But at that point, Orestes makes the decision to abandon Electra's plan to avenge their father by murdering their mother to try to work with her to reform Argos and its corrupt system from within.

So he decides he doesn't want to engage with violence anymore. He doesn't want to add to this endless cycle of murder that his family is engaged with. And he wants to try to reform the system, a noble goal. But he also, in doing that, abandons and betrays his sister, who he's just come into contact again with after years and years away. So that pain and that struggle is what this song is about. As he learns the ropes of political theater with his mother, he also feels that pain and shame for what he did to Electra.

[41:03] Emerson Mae Smith: And you're going to be singing this yourself.

[41:12] I will be, and it's called I Could Learn to Live Like This.

[41:15] ♪ Musical number: "Electra's Final Prayer" — performed by Emerson Mae Smith ♪

[51:50] Pauls Macs: We've got just one more question for you before we say goodbye.

[51:54] Jessie Dean: Yeah, your story we feel is inspiring and it brings a lot of hope to so many. Do you feel that your experience as trans women coming out in your youth, you think that added a lot to the story, and it shaped how the blueprint of the show and how you developed it?

[52:10] Emerson Mae Smith: Absolutely, absolutely. I think something we've always just felt a lack of is trans stories written by trans people are just different than trans stories written by cis people. Like I've just grown up and we've grown up just seeing a lot of queer stories in general kind of mandated by what society thinks transness and queerness and gayness should look and feel like. And just understanding I think that we want to tell a story that doesn't look like what we kind of grew up hearing was a really, I don't know, breaking away from that, shaking our tail feathers of some of those was so important in understanding why we wanted to tell this story and also the best way we could tell it, which is not through a coming out story, not through a story where Elektra realizes how beautiful she is and everything's okay. That for a lot of trans women, transition is way more complicated than that, and we wanted to reflect some of that complexity and that anger, and we feel it too.

[53:09] Murphy Taylor Smith: And I think that when we first, both of us when we had our individual coming out and coming to terms with that, we still wanted to make theater. And initially, I think for both of us, there was this feeling of like, well, I just can't, like, well, it's just not going to happen. And then the through line on each other and kind of building these stories together, we're able to say, actually, no, that's not it. We are going to be a part of theater. We are going to create things no matter who we are, how we identify that stories, theater stories should be for everyone and should include everyone. And that's always going to be at the heart of our stories.

[53:40] Emerson Mae Smith: We're always going to have a million trans characters in all of our shows, because why not? There aren't enough. So we're always going to have those. And I think, you know, we've learned a lot of things from this time, from this pandemic. And one of the big things I think in theater especially is we cannot go back to before. We can do some of the things we did before, but we cannot be the same. We have to be an inclusive community more than we ever have. And we have to have a space for everybody.

[54:08] Murphy Taylor Smith: Exactly.

[54:09] Emerson Mae Smith: This is not a maybe. This is a must.

[54:11] Murphy Taylor Smith: Yes, definitely.

[54:13] Emerson Mae Smith: Absolutely.

[54:14] Pauls Macs: Well, thank you for sharing your story with us and this extraordinary new musical. We can't wait to see more from it.

[54:20] Jessie Dean: Thank you both so much.

[54:21] Emerson Mae Smith: Thank you for having us.

[54:23] Pauls Macs: If you enjoy The Musicals of Tomorrow, please rate, subscribe and share. The podcast is co-produced and edited by Paul Smock and Hector Flores Jr. Our theme song, The Music of Tomorrow, was written by Lynn Shankle and Sarah Cooper for their all-female identifying musical, Perpetual Sunshine and the Ghost Girls.

[54:47] Pauls Macs: Join us next time for more of The Musicals of Tomorrow.