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[0:41] Teresa Attridge: Hello, everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome to another fantastic episode of Backstage Pass.

[0:49] Pauls Macs: We're so happy to have you here with us. Barnacles, everyone, we hope you're all falling into fall very nicely.

[0:55] Pauls Macs: Our last show was Falling Forward, and we have another show that's all about falling, perhaps dealing with a falling apple. We have the team from Gravity here.

[1:01] Guests: Hello.

[1:05] Guests: Hi.

[1:06] Pauls Macs: One of our fun episodes where we have a huge team. There are five of us. It's another podcast party in here today. Thank you all for being here. We had a great time reviewing your piece.

[1:15] Pauls Macs: There's so many of you here, so we're not going to do our bio segment. We have Ken Savage, Jessia Hoffman, Matt Herrero, Weston Gaylord, and Joel Chapman.

[1:24] Pauls Macs: And I love how many collaborators there are on this piece. And I'm excited to talk with you about that collaborative process, because collaborating with five people, that must be wild.

[1:33] Matt Herrero: It's a regular royal society up in here.

[1:36] Joel Chapman: Whoa.

[1:37] Ken Savage: Oh, yeah.

[1:38] Jessia Hoffman: That's how you know we really read it, right?

[1:41] Matt Herrero: Yeah, we always do.

[1:43] Weston Gaylord: But we like to prove it.

[1:45] Ken Savage: Just like scientists in the royal society.

[1:47] Jessia Hoffman: Oh, hey.

[1:48] Ken Savage: Okay.

[1:49] Pauls Macs: Absolutely. Before we really dive into it, I'd like to read a synopsis of the show, just so everybody knows what we're talking about.

[1:56] Pauls Macs: So, Gravity, a Newtonian musical. When modern-day Cambridge physicist Sophie travels back in time to 1666 England, her chance encounter with guitar-strumming 23-year-old Isaac Newton prevents him from seeing the mythic apple falling and discovering his famous theory of universal gravity.

[2:12] Pauls Macs: To return home, Sophie must restore history and navigate the world of 1666, where natural philosophers are the pop stars of their day, emerging enlightenment thinkers have one chance at fame, and radical women struggle to leave their mark.

[2:23] Pauls Macs: But along the way, she encounters historical luminaries such as Isaac's rival, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, enthusiastic up-and-comer Edmund Halley, and the fearless Duchess Margaret Cavendish, who is embroiled in her own quest for fame and scientific recognition.

[2:37] Pauls Macs: Gravity is a madcap romp through scientific history where young ambitious thinkers ask, what does it take to leave your mark?

[2:43] Teresa Attridge: I love that synopsis, and I love historical musicals. There's a show that we've had on our podcast called Lewis Loves Clark, which did something somewhat similar. Your show goes about it in such a fresh, fun way, with such engaging music.

[2:57] Teresa Attridge: I'd love to know, we'd love to know, how did you all meet and come to write this story?

[3:01] Ken Savage: The five of us met as undergrads at Stanford University. Weston, Joel, Matt, and I sang in an all-male comedy original music a cappella group called Fleet Street.

[3:13] Jessia Hoffman: Which, to my chagrin, by the way, that I was not allowed to audition, though now women are, I believe, allowed to audition.

[3:21] Ken Savage: I love that you just said that, because there's a feminist aspect to this piece that I love.

[3:26] Jessia Hoffman: We love progress.

[3:27] Ken Savage: That is so fitting that you would say that as part of the origin story of this musical.

[3:30] Jessia Hoffman: We love it.

[3:31] Ken Savage: We do, we love it. All because I wanted to be in Fleet Street with my friends.

[3:35] Jessia Hoffman: The demon woman of Fleet Street.

[3:37] Ken Savage: The five of us met because we all did musicals together while we were in college. Whether we were actors, or music directors, or directors, or improvisers, composers, we loved creating together.

[3:50] Ken Savage: We stumbled upon this idea while we decided to enter a 72-hour musical writing competition at school.

[3:59] Ken Savage: Where we were given the prompt, re-imagine a famous myth. Being the science nerds that we are, we thought, well what if Isaac Newton never saw his famous apple fall?

[4:10] Ken Savage: And we knew we were interested in a female protagonist and championing women in science. And decided to create this scene, this five-minute song, a little dance to it.

[4:24] Ken Savage: Jessia and Matt were the original Sophie and Isaac, our protagonists. There's a fun video of us over ten years ago doing this somewhere on the internet.

[4:34] Ken Savage: And Weston played Leibniz in that very first pass. So we had 72 hours to write one song, one scene, a dance, and a description of what the musical would be.

[4:46] Ken Savage: This was all we thought it was going to be. We came together, we were like, this is a fun idea, we'll hatch this out for the weekend.

[4:52] Ken Savage: We wrote one song, and then we ended up winning that competition and got more funding and more time to actually flesh out and create an entire draft of the musical for a stage reading the next year.

[5:04] Ken Savage: Oh, I guess people love this idea and want to see more. This was the first musical that any of us had ever written.

[5:11] Ken Savage: We thought, well I guess we're stuck together and we're writing a musical.

[5:15] Jessia Hoffman: And fast forward ten plus years.

[5:17] Matt Herrero: Isn't that part of the root of science as well, is this idea of the unanswered question?

[5:21] Jessia Hoffman: What would it be like if the five of you wrote a musical?

[5:24] Ken Savage: And here we are.

[5:25] Matt Herrero: Ten years later, we're on a podcast.

[5:27] Jessia Hoffman: Yeah, you know what? The dream, truly.

[5:29] Ken Savage: This is what you dreamt of when you started writing the show back in Stanford.

[5:33] Jessia Hoffman: It's a long con, but it's paying off.

[5:35] Ken Savage: It took us three or four years to even learn how to write a musical.

[5:39] Weston Gaylord: Learn how to be musical theater writers.

[5:41] Ken Savage: We had been songwriters before. We wrote original songs for Fleet Street.

[5:45] Joel Chapman: Joel and I had worked on an original musical at Stanford called Gaieties. You know, we hadn't really sunk our teeth into a full-length thing like this before.

[5:54] Ken Savage: So I think there were years of just figuring out how to write a musical, how to work together, how to do it at the level that we wanted to do it.

[6:00] Jessia Hoffman: Yeah, and in terms of resources for kind of figuring out how to do that, did you just look to musicals that you already loved? Were there like classes or workshops?

[6:08] Weston Gaylord: When you're like, OK, how do you write a show? Is it we just keep experimenting and seeing where the apple falls?

[6:13] Ken Savage: Many of our guests, for example, go to like the BMI Lehman Engel Institute. So this question that Teresa is asking is really interesting.

[6:20] Ken Savage: How do you teach yourself to write one if you're like a singer-songwriter and haven't done that before?

[6:24] Matt Herrero: I mean, I'll take a first pass by saying we experimented a lot. I think all of us come from a deep love of musical theater.

[6:33] Matt Herrero: And so we have that kind of innate sense of what we personally love in musicals. And then we're bringing all of our brains and minds and hearts to bear into that question of like, what are the pieces of musical theater that we love and how can we emulate?

[6:49] Ken Savage: Yeah, some of the greats like we're big lovers of like Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown.

[6:54] Jessia Hoffman: And you'd keep naming people.

[6:56] Ken Savage: But we essentially took that little bit of prize money and went to Ashland.

[7:02] Weston Gaylord: Right. That was the first.

[7:04] Ken Savage: Yeah, we went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

[7:06] Jessia Hoffman: Ashland.

[7:07] Ken Savage: We got an Airbnb and the first version of Gravity in a matter of days without delineated roles.

[7:16] Ken Savage: We were all kind of like pitching in on book and lyrics and melody in some way, even for those of us who don't play the instrument.

[7:24] Jessia Hoffman: And it was really just a deep, fun, exploratory, collaborative process, even from the beginning.

[7:30] Pauls Macs: That makes complete sense to me based on the score, because as I'm listening to the score, this song is like a guitar-driven singer-songwriter song.

[7:38] Pauls Macs: And then there's a completely different voice on this number. This is more of like a musical theater ballad.

[7:41] Pauls Macs: This song is very upbeat. You know, I'm almost feeling like Lin-Manuel Miranda vibes here.

[7:47] Pauls Macs: It's like a tapestry of different creative voices, but they're all melded together in such an interesting way.

[7:53] Pauls Macs: So the fact that you all just without clear roles were just like, let's make something is something that I find really exciting about the musical.

[7:59] Jessia Hoffman: Yeah. There's also something so fun about the fact that writing a musical really is just the scientific theory.

[8:05] Ken Savage: Wait, wait, explain that. I don't think you've ever said that.

[8:08] Jessia Hoffman: You know, it really is just like confirming because the basic idea of like scientific theory, right, is the idea of like confirming something through observation and then experimentation.

[8:18] Jessia Hoffman: Right. Being able to be like, OK, we're going to try this. We're going to see what works, see what doesn't work.

[8:22] Jessia Hoffman: And then we have to try it again and fine-tune it. Right. And that's all that, you know, writing a musical is really.

[8:27] Ken Savage: But it's the factors of needing other people to see it, I think, is what's really interesting, like a scientific experiment.

[8:34] Ken Savage: A lot of times, unless there's like control groups and stuff with people, you know, you can kind of do an isolation.

[8:39] Ken Savage: But at a certain point, a musical does involve sort of the chaotic aspect of what are people going to say and think and the variable of audience.

[8:46] Jessia Hoffman: In that respect, I think there's something so very cool about getting like a bunch of like science nerds who are also musical nerds together to write a musical about science.

[8:55] Jessia Hoffman: And the way that that really is kind of a marriage of things that support each other in a really unexpected but really symbiotic way.

[9:02] Ken Savage: That was beautifully said. I love that. I totally think that's right.

[9:05] Jessia Hoffman: I think experimentation and knowing when to say like, OK, this is what this song is going to be.

[9:10] Jessia Hoffman: And I'm totally confident in it and we're going to do it versus like I can see these three options and I really honestly can't tell which one is going to be the right one.

[9:19] Ken Savage: So like, let me try to sketch each one up just enough so that I can like they can kind of stand on their own and see which one appeals and works in the experiment.

[9:27] Ken Savage: Right. I think learning that having the sophistication and like having the experience to know when to do what is definitely been a huge part of our learning process as we've learned to collaborate with each other.

[9:40] Jessia Hoffman: Because quite honestly, it's very expensive both in time and resource to bring an audience together and put them in front of your piece and then get the full, honest, true feedback that you might want of where do they laugh, where do they cry, where do they cheer.

[9:55] Ken Savage: Right. Especially in the eras where we've been collaborating on this piece over Zoom when it feels like really it's just in our heads.

[10:02] Jessia Hoffman: So much of trying to learn how to write this piece has been trying to figure out, okay, what sort of feedback do I really need from myself, from this group or from other people in order to know what the right choice is in any moment of the show.

[10:16] Ken Savage: I think like maybe the most clear case study for that in our piece is, and I'm sure this is true for a lot of musicals, but like maybe the most clear case study for that is our opening number which has been through so many iterations and so many different drafts has really run the range of like there are things that we just cut down before we even gave them to an audience or gave them to each other versus like things that we tried full out in a reading for everybody and said, oh, this doesn't work and we need to like do something else.

[10:45] Jessia Hoffman: It's certainly been an iterative process. I was just talking to my mom and I was like, hey, we're putting up Gravity in New York for the first time. It's really exciting. She was like, you're still writing that show?

[10:55] Ken Savage: I was like, yeah, we're still writing it. We have more than a full album of cut material. We probably have 25 songs that we have completely cut from the show.

[11:04] Jessia Hoffman: Yeah, we've talked about putting on a concert of all the songs we've cut from the show and it would start with three openings and end with three finales.

[11:12] Ken Savage: Yeah, I mean, as it should, honestly. And I mean, what a testament you guys said in your own show, you've got to build it, break it, make it something better, improve it, move it, make it right.

[11:21] Teresa Attridge: Way to quote those lyrics, Teresa.

[11:23] Pauls Macs: We do. We review the pieces. We promise. One of the things that comes up on the show all the time is that musicals aren't written, they're rewritten.

[11:34] Teresa Attridge: I told the story about how Stephen Sondheim wrote three numbers to A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the forum 12 times on this podcast.

[11:40] Pauls Macs: But, you know, especially as you're learning to form, you know, and there's five collaborative voices, which makes it even harder in a lot of ways, I would argue.

[11:48] Ken Savage: It's just inspiring that you still are going for it because musical theater development is a true labor of love.

[11:54] Jessia Hoffman: And there's a clear love for this material, for this piece that bonded you. There's also like a trust I can just sense amongst you, which is really fun to witness.

[12:03] Ken Savage: That's a very nice reflection to hear. So thank you.

[12:12] Jessia Hoffman: This is making me think a lot about the way that our team is very improvisational. The fact that we have been able to experiment and pivot so much over the years is I'm like tooting our own horn.

[12:18] Jessia Hoffman: But I think that's what I love about collaborating with these four is the willingness to, like, take risks and try new things.

[12:25] Ken Savage: And even the original scene from that contest that we won, we improvised a lot of it. That spirit has kind of like carried us, carried us through.

[12:34] Ken Savage: And even as the show has gotten a little more structured and as our individual roles have gotten more clearly delineated, I think that spirit is still completely there.

[12:46] Jessia Hoffman: Totally. I think also the fact that we've been working on the show for so long and we've tried so many things, a majority of the DNA of the show that either is currently there or has been in some version of the past, like a majority of that, we are the only five people that will really ever know.

[13:01] Ken Savage: And I think because of that, we've kind of learned that we have to, much like improv, we have to enjoy the process of making it.

[13:13] Jessia Hoffman: Something we've been saying as we've been heading into, like, bigger productions or bigger opportunities here is just having our priorities straight.

[13:20] Ken Savage: We've been saying, like, friends first, bodies second, show third.

[13:25] Jessia Hoffman: I think that means...

[13:26] Ken Savage: It's reversed.

[13:27] Jessia Hoffman: Is it reversed? Actually, I don't know.

[13:28] Ken Savage: Maybe bodies first.

[13:29] Jessia Hoffman: You can say it again.

[13:31] Ken Savage: No, you can say it again.

[13:33] Jessia Hoffman: Oh, no, we're sorry. It's a discourse.

[13:35] Ken Savage: Sorry. I totally said it wrong.

[13:37] Jessia Hoffman: No, this is great. We can keep this in.

[13:39] Ken Savage: Money first. That's what I meant.

[13:41] Ken Savage: My ownership of it.

[13:42] Jessia Hoffman: Fame second.

[13:43] Ken Savage: Fame third. General health sixth or seventh. That's, hey, that's my advice.

[13:49] Jessia Hoffman: It is fun also how much our show has grown with us. We say this as a joke, but it is true that, like, our protagonist, Sophie, started as a 22-year-old new grad.

[14:00] Ken Savage: And she is now around 30-plus, which most of us are into our 30s at this point.

[14:07] Jessia Hoffman: Her fears and hopes and dreams have also continued to evolve.

[14:11] Ken Savage: With us, which is just kind of a delightful thing to see, to be able to look back on really like former versions of ourselves in our past scripts. Speaking of experimentation and improvisation, I think we want the audience to hear the first song, Can You Please Set Up, I Wanna Be Mad.

[14:27] Matt Herrero: Who's gonna do it? I can take it. I can take it. I believe in you.

[14:34] Ken Savage: Thank you. I hope I do. I do. I do believe in myself as well. Thank you.

[14:41] Joel Chapman: Good. This is a nice group. I believe in all of you.

[14:48] Matt Herrero: They're usually mean. Do you need us meaner? Honestly? No, no. What do I know?

[14:52] Ken Savage: Okay, great. Let me take it because I'll say it better than any of these schmucks. Okay, the song I Wanna Be Mad is our introduction to Isaac Newton. It finds him in the apple orchard experimenting, thinking through logical proofs by himself, and it looks a lot less like sitting down and writing things out, and a lot more like a singer-songwriter looking up at the heavens, wondering, speaking his thoughts out loud, and strumming a guitar and singing. This is our second song in the show, and it is a zoom-in on Isaac Newton, a young Isaac Newton.

[15:21] Matt Herrero: Fantastic. Matt, you are performing this song, is that correct?

[15:26] Matt Herrero: Yes, this recording is me, yeah.

[15:29] Ken Savage: All right. Well, here's I Wanna Be Mad performed by Matt Herrero.

[15:29] ♪ Musical number: "I Wanna Be Mad" — performed by Matt Herrero ♪

[19:54] Ken Savage: I feel like this is the opposite of the guitar scene in Barbie, where it's like just a bunch of guys singing about nothing. I learned so much listening to this song, but I was also like, ooh, Isaac's kind of dreamy. Look at that. I was like, we're really establishing him as both a handsome and intelligent sort of like love interest, even though we don't even know that yet. Spoilers, I can also not say that.

[20:20] Teresa Attridge: Teresa, what you said is absolutely correct. I'm assuming it's historical fact that Isaac Newton was obsessed with color before he moved on to gravity. I'm guessing that was in the history books. Great. Well, that was such a clear illustration of that. I love it when I'm learning by watching a musical. It's like, oh, I didn't know that. That's very interesting. Also, I just love that he's kind of like a Jason Mraz, wordsmith. He's got that guitar going. It gives him such an interesting flavor, which is something that I'll probably mention throughout the podcast. The way that you take history and then kind of recontextualize it into a modern day equivalent so we can relate to it, provide a connection to it, is really exciting. And I think that's very clear in this song.

[20:57] Ken Savage: I just want to shout out, since you mentioned the real history part, James Gleick's biography of Isaac Newton, called Isaac Newton, which was an early reference point for us and got into the fact that it's so crazy. In this actual year of 1666, Isaac Newton was sent home from Cambridge where he had been studying because of the plague, something that bears absolutely no modern relevance whatsoever. He went home to his family home in Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, about an hour from London, and spent the year there working on his own stuff. And in that year, as far as we understand, he worked on color theory and optics and the origins of his theory of gravity, the origins of what later became calculus.

All of this stuff happened during this kind of miraculous year in which he was home from school. All of that is true, and it all happened in 1666. That was the jumping off point for this entire story. In our world, the world of 1666 is a kind of historical fantasy that has a foot in reality, but a foot in fantasy or in modern day as well. All of that is true.

[22:01] Joel Chapman: Yeah, it was so fun to do the research, and the show is peppered with real little facts and historical characters of who were around at that time. I think one thing that we were really excited about doing our research was that the term science was not coined yet. Scientists at this time were called natural philosophers, and that term was just so beautifully poetic to all of us. The thought that you saw the world through poetry, you saw the world through philosophy, you saw the world through art. For us, obviously, we all love seeing the world through music, and natural philosophers were the polymaths of their day. It made a lot of sense to us to create this world where all of these scientists or natural philosophers were all musicians in their own right, all trying to understand the world through beautiful art and music. That was something very early on that the five of us latched onto emotionally, that we related to as nerdy creatives that we wanted to share with audiences.

[23:07] Ken Savage: I think that's fantastic, and I think that illustrates one of the fundamental tensions in your piece, which is, of course, the past and the present. Because as scientists yourselves, many of the things in our world are known, but to imagine, and it's clear in the piece that these people are just trying to look around and understand the nature of their world. Why does an apple fall instead of just hanging there in the midst of the air? What is the fundamental nature of the universe? What is the most important ordering of the universe? The fact that they're looking around and trying to understand things is very clear. Talking about the modern and the past, we'd love to know more about the character of Sophie, who is not a historical figure.

[23:42] Ken Savage: I would just say we can't disprove that Isaac Newton didn't interact with a time traveler.

[23:48] Joel Chapman: That's true. That's well said. Sophie, our character, Sophie Burke, is named for one of our musical theater collaborators, an incredible stage manager who we all worked with.

[24:00] Matt Herrero: Oh my god, that is amazing.

[24:05] Ken Savage: Go Sophie. Excellent stage managers need more recognition.

[24:08] Weston Gaylord: Teens in general, backstage in general, this is the first big shout we've gotten for it. I'm so hyped. We decided to make her our protagonist just to honor how awesome she is. That's our number one tip for young theater writers is name your characters after your stage creative team and stage management team. Good things happen.

[24:29] Joel Chapman: I find this character to be so interesting. We listened to Isaac Newton's I Want song, but Sophie's first number, This Is What It Takes. She's at Cambridge and she's trying to build a time machine. You know that feeling when you're tired, but you're wired and you're sweaty and you're hungry and your time machine won't work? She's obsessed with making a name for herself and getting out there. And then the arguments or the debates that she has with Isaac Newton, again, the tension of that modern versus the past is really expressed as you have been developing that character. What was important to you about Sophie in the role of the piece?

[24:59] Ken Savage: Yeah, I'll take a first pass and others can add. I think as mentioned, as she's grown with us when we first, when we first set out, we were like, okay, we want like a badass woman in STEM as our protagonist. And the show was pretty, we were pretty obvious about gender issues, for lack of better words. Like this was 2015. We were like, this is a feminist musical. We really painted the struggle of women. And of course, that comes in strongly with Margaret Cavendish, who maybe we'll get to her, who's the only known philosopher of that time period. I'm kind of embarrassed to say, this is something I learned through your piece. Dutchess Margaret Cavendish wrote this amazing book, wrote many amazing books under her own name.

But the one mentioned in your piece is called The Blazing World. And it's considered one of the mothers of science fiction, like Mary Shelley credited her as an inspiration. And I didn't know that until I saw your musical. One of the goals of our show is to spread the word and to kind of change history in a way. We like to talk about Margaret Cavendish as the mother of science fiction, Isaac Newton as the father of modern physics, and that science fiction and physics come together to create time travel. And Sophie is the inventor of time travel. So there's a lot of scientific lineage happening in this show.

[26:13] Joel Chapman: Yeah. Our Sophie now is somebody who, like many of us, is anxious about the future. Like she wants to know what is going to happen in my life. And that fear of not knowing has driven her to sacrifice everything to create a time machine in order to go to the future. Now, what she doesn't know is that the moment she makes the time machine work, she's actually going to be sent to the past. And there's an interesting, you've used the word tension, but tension between her wanting to know everything and actually going to the past to learn what it is that she actually needs to learn. Who would have thought that Sophie Burke, this brilliant physicist, brilliant human, would need to go backwards in order to kind of like move forward in her progression as a human?

[27:57] Ken Savage: Yeah, but that tension is very clear because in the midst of that opening number, we see that Sophie is so driven that she's also neglecting relationships. Like, for example, she forgets her mom's birthday or she talks about how she can't go out with friends because she's so driven. She does get fundamentally changed by going to the past. And that's very clear. And yet Isaac Newton is also fundamentally changed by their interactions. And in fact, this might be a perfect moment to play En Route. This is a song called En Route. As the title suggests, it takes place as Sophie and Isaac, who are kind of new friends, are walking to the tavern on their way to have a drink and relax after the events of their meeting.

They're kind of swapping life stories and starting to get to know each other and talking about their different POVs on the world. Isaac brings up, again, drawn from real history, the fact that while he was working on optics and trying to figure out where color came from, he started to think maybe it was created inside his eye and started to do some really insane experiments on himself to try and get to the root of that question. And so this song is the conversation that arises between Sophie and Isaac as he starts to tell her about this experiment. But something pretty incredible has just happened. Something potentially catastrophic has just happened, if I'm correct, in their meeting.

[28:16] Jessia Hoffman: Yes. Sophie, would you like to explain? Oh, gosh. Yes. Crucially, in their meeting.

[28:22] Ken Savage: It's a total Me Cute.

[28:23] Jessia Hoffman: It's cute as hell.

[28:24] Matt Herrero: It is a Me Cute, that's a fact.

[28:27] Ken Savage: In their Me Cute, Isaac misses the apple falling. Essentially, Sophie's presence causes him to miss the apple fall, which sets history dangerously off course. Sophie's time machine is no longer working because Isaac Newton has not had the idea for gravity. And so Sophie is on a quest now to essentially get Isaac Newton to discover gravity, while also maybe, maybe not, starting to have some feelings for him.

[28:48] Joel Chapman: So she's trying to save history, while also kind of being into this Isaac Newton person, and they're on the way to the bar, and then that's when the song happens.

[29:01] Weston Gaylord: Maybe on the way to a romance as well.

[29:03] Ken Savage: And maybe on the way to a romance, across time. And who is performing this song?

[29:07] Jessia Hoffman: This is Broadway star Taylor Iman Jones.

[29:10] Matt Herrero: Taylor, friend of the pod, and our very own Matt Herrero.

[29:15] Ken Savage: And Taylor's been on the show with us before. We've been lucky to have her voice grace our podcast before, so really happy to have her again. She's so fantastic, and was really fantastic in that reading. Here is "En Route," performed by Taylor Iman Jones and Matt Herrero.

[29:28] ♪ Musical number: "En Route" — performed by Taylor Iman Jones and Matt Herrero ♪

[30:05] Ken Savage: So if you knew back then it wouldn't be a breakthrough, would you do it differently?

[30:16] Jessia Hoffman: I never had a choice. It had to happen.

[30:20] Ken Savage: So what if I was wrong, it got me here.

[30:24] Jessia Hoffman: It takes a little pain to make the answer loud and clear.

[30:30] Ken Savage: So stick the needle in.

[30:33] Jessia Hoffman: Let the song begin.

[30:35] Ken Savage: Let the madness spin me round and around.

[30:38] Jessia Hoffman: I'll see whatever's meant to be.

[30:42] Ken Savage: Ideas heaven sent to me.

[30:45] Jessia Hoffman: And hope I'm there when lightning strikes the ground.

[30:53] Ken Savage: You just had crazy eyes.

[30:55] Jessia Hoffman: Really?

[30:56] Ken Savage: Yeah.

[30:57] Jessia Hoffman: I didn't realize.

[30:59] Ken Savage: It's just like this thing.

[31:01] Jessia Hoffman: And don't you think it's lazy leaving everything to fate?

[31:06] Ken Savage: I don't understand.

[31:08] Jessia Hoffman: You can't afford to wait.

[31:10] Ken Savage: But I have to listen for...

[31:12] Jessia Hoffman: You underestimate how you can blaze your path with the momentum that you lose.

[31:18] Ken Savage: While you listen for the muse and you wonder what you're meant to do.

[31:23] Jessia Hoffman: You could prevent a few mistakes.

[31:26] Ken Savage: You always have a choice.

[31:28] Jessia Hoffman: You choose what happens.

[31:30] Ken Savage: No time to get it wrong.

[31:32] Jessia Hoffman: There's work to do.

[31:34] Ken Savage: It doesn't come from lightning in the sky.

[31:37] Jessia Hoffman: It comes from you.

[31:40] Ken Savage: Stick a needle in the storm.

[31:42] Jessia Hoffman: Or let the music know.

[31:44] Ken Savage: Let the madness spin me round and around.

[31:48] Jessia Hoffman: We'll agree someday.

[31:50] Ken Savage: Or we're gonna cancel.

[31:52] Jessia Hoffman: That they will be around and around.

[31:55] Ken Savage: But if you think that things are meant to be.

[31:59] Jessia Hoffman: Me and you are not random but designed.

[32:03] Ken Savage: We're the reason we'll have to wait and see.

[32:07] Jessia Hoffman: If you are somehow intertwined.

[32:12] Ken Savage: Then I guess I don't mind.

[32:37] Weston Gaylord: Because they're coming from different eras of science, I think.

[32:40] Joel Chapman: I think it's also... It's reflected really well in both of their I Want songs that they each have.

[32:45] Ken Savage: And our introduction to them, right? Is that Sophie is like constantly chasing this goal and is unable to observe anything else except for the goal.

[32:54] Jessia Hoffman: Versus Isaac is like, no. You have to have everything opened up around you. Or you'll miss the big thing that happens.

[33:01] Ken Savage: Ironically, it misses the really big thing that happens. It's actually just really helpful to know what sticks with the audience. We are always experimenting and taking feedback.

[33:09] Jessia Hoffman: Is that true that Isaac Newton stuck a needle in his eye? Is that invented?

[33:16] Ken Savage: That's true. Well, he was trying to make a point, pals. Learning.

[33:21] Joel Chapman: Something else I think is interesting. It just lends itself, right? The innate poetry of science. Is that we have this theme about the apple, right? Because, yes, like the story about Isaac Newton discovering gravity. Because the apple falls. But also the idea that Sophie prohibits that. When the apple in mythology is like representation of like beauty. It's often used for like goddesses in mythology. To represent like their beauty, their fertility. But also like if we look at it biblically. Like even the apple and this idea of sin. So the fact that it's like a man, a woman, and an apple. Is like a tale as old as time, right? But it's so funny that this is like a really fresh spin on that trope. Was that coincidental? Or were you guys like, guys, we're really cooking with this apple. We're making apple tarts.

[34:03] Ken Savage: Well, speaking of cooking with apples. That is something that in this last reading we played with. When Isaac is thrown off track from his goal of discovering gravity. He comes to believe that what he will contribute to the world is being a star baker. Specifically inventor of the Fig Newton and other apple related pastries.

[34:21] Jessia Hoffman: I don't think I've ever taken a biblical lens to our show. And that is honestly really fascinating to think about. Because, yeah, you're right. There is something about when it comes to apples specifically. Like knowledge and temptation. There are probably definitely parallels. Therefore, yeah, totally.

[34:40] Ken Savage: To draw it back to the process of making this show. Especially as a large group. I think that all of us are still kind of surprised by certain pieces of this show. When you're one of five writers, there's only so much ownership you can have over any specific piece. A lot of what we've had to learn is how to make sure that what we really care about is there. And we'll fight for it. But also learning how to let go. And trust that the show that will be will be. And that the Socratic middle of what we're aiming for will kind of reveal itself.

[35:12] Joel Chapman: When I think about things that are surprises. Like, oh, I'd never taken that lens on that scene or that symbol. I do feel like there are in jokes too. Where it's like, oh, man, I totally forgot that that was in there. And I feel delighted when I get to visit it again. I think that's a pretty common experience for me as a writer on this piece. Which is like a gift, I think, honestly.

[35:32] Ken Savage: I agree. The other piece of that collaboration for me is that we've developed over time a sort of gravity language. Which is distinct from our individual languages and idioms and lexicons that we use when we write other music. Like, I write other music. And it's very different. Like, it doesn't necessarily sound like the music of gravity. But over the past 10 years, we have all figured out what we are looking for when we are writing something that we're holding up to the lens of gravity. Which I find to be a really interesting long-term method.

[35:58] Jessia Hoffman: Absolutely. I think what's interesting about this piece is it's actually, to me, such a classic musical theater construction. The two people who are like singing counterpoint. And then all of a sudden, they start to sing together. And then by the end of the song, they realize, oh, we're intertwined. And I don't mind. They realize that there's something going on here. The chemistry is working.

[36:18] Ken Savage: One thing I really find interesting about your piece is the way that we drop into 1666. Sophie's there. She's time-traveled, but she doesn't really realize she has. And all of a sudden, the piece starts with a librarian who is giving like a modern-day speech. And then suddenly, there's like the same actor as playing the librarian in 1666. But suddenly, when she realizes she's in 1666, she starts to pull out every little bit of Shakespeare language that she knows. She says, um, good morrow, gentle maidenhead. The library's closed. I'm a Shakespeare nut. Maidenhead means not a hello, maiden. She's even doing the—she's putting like the extra E.D.s on things. Alas, tis closed. Such a shame-eth-ed.

[37:05] Jessia Hoffman: And then from that point, you know, you kind of dropped us into like, oh, we're in the world of Shakespeare for like 20 seconds. And then once that's done, we're out. And suddenly, like Isaac Newton is baking Fig Newtons or, you know, there's just so many modern parallels happening.

[37:11] Ken Savage: This is a vision into the future, but in our upcoming reading, that scene is a bit different.

[37:17] Jessia Hoffman: Oh, tell us about it.

[37:19] Ken Savage: Yeah, there's stuff hot off the presses. Sophie and Isaac actually collide right after the show.

[37:25] Jessia Hoffman: You heard it here first.

[37:26] Ken Savage: So you cut my favorite part of the show.

[37:28] Jessia Hoffman: Mm-hmm.

[37:29] Ken Savage: Well, we're still keeping—

[37:31] Jessia Hoffman: We're still there.

[37:33] Ken Savage: We're still keeping the idea that Sophie believes that she has to speak in this way and then immediately realizes like—

[37:40] Jessia Hoffman: These people all speak my language.

[37:42] Ken Savage: This is like, I don't have to put this on.

[37:44] Jessia Hoffman: No, but that approach is so refreshing, I would say, because when you go back—

[37:48] Ken Savage: About to be played for a pair of stainless materials, am I right?

[37:52] Jessia Hoffman: I don't know if you had those conversations, but like, how do we get out of it? And I felt that that convention worked so well. Like, as soon as it was there and then out of it, it's like, OK, I love it. We're here. I'm for it.

[38:04] Ken Savage: There's so much science and history and these things in the show, but we really try hard not to make it feel like there is context the audience has to bring in or they have to get on Wikipedia before in order to understand the show or anything like that. We really try as much as we can to have the show signal to the audience that they can relax, that they can sit back, that a certain amount of knowledge is not expected of them.

[38:30] Jessia Hoffman: And I think part of that blip that we realized that people in 1666 aren't speaking in a heightened dialect is a breath of relief. Like, OK, we can enter this world. We already know what we need to know to be in this world. And hopefully it puts the audience at ease.

[38:45] Ken Savage: Well, I mean, if it makes you feel better, that's absolutely true. I failed chemistry three times in high school. Science is my worst subject. It always was. For whatever reason, I could never grasp it. So I remember when this came across, like, we're going to get to gravity. I was like, oh, no, I'm not going to say anything smart. I don't know anything about this. I'm terrified. And in reading the show, I was like, this is making me feel better because I am understanding certain scientific revelations and ideas in a way I never did when I was in school. I think that you guys definitely made it not only accessible, but done so in a way where I don't feel like it was dumbed down for me. I feel it was made accessible to me. And so I really appreciated that as someone who read the script.

[39:26] Jessia Hoffman: Well, tell us what's on the docket for your workshop. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals?

[39:30] Ken Savage: Yes. How are you educating the masses like me who don't know anything about science?

[39:36] Joel Chapman: I think one of the main things that we're trying to do in this next reading, which I think has been an eternal effort of ours as long as this piece has been alive, is continuing to clarify and really hone in on Sophie's trajectory and why she goes on this journey and what there is to learn and how she is changed by the characters we meet. I think we're in a really exciting place there.

[39:57] Jessia Hoffman: And kind of as we've said at the top too, that question I think has taken us so long to narrow in on and really clarify because Sophie in so many ways has been kind of a channel for the five of us to express what we've been feeling as we have been going from college students when we started writing this show to early 30 professionals in creative and non-creative spaces. I think we've needed that time to try and figure out what exactly about this life where we have these big ambitions, but we also want to enjoy the moment and we want to go somewhere, but we can't lose sight of where we are right now. What is the point and how do we feel about that? What's our takeaway on that? Over the years of writing that show, I think we've honed in on the story we want to tell there for Sophie and into other people. And I think that is the thing that me personally, I'll speak for myself, I am most excited to be representing in this next reading.

[40:56] Ken Savage: Which is happening.

[40:58] Jessia Hoffman: Can I say, can?

[41:02] Ken Savage: So Gravity has only ever been seen on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area. Shout out to the Bay Area. We are taking Gravity to New York City, baby! On November 6th and 7th, we are going to be doing two industry reads. We are extremely excited to introduce this piece to some New York producers and theater makers in hopes of finding some champions and maybe even an EP for the project.

[41:30] Matt Herrero: I'm obsessed. As Matt said, we're working on just fine-tuning the overall story. We did a staged reading in San Francisco last November and got a bunch of good learnings from that. We're trying to fold those in. We're still working on our opening numbers. We always are. We're doing major revisions of a couple other songs in the show and then lots of little tweaks and trims throughout. We're excited about the new stuff. We just had a show-and-tell Zoom this morning of a bunch of new stuff that was written in the last week. We're on a bit of a creative sprint right now between now and November.

[42:01] Ken Savage: Incredible. Thanks for joining us on New York Theater Barn's Backstage Pass, hosted by Teresa Attridge and Pauls Macs. Join us next time as we continue our conversation with the creators of Gravity, a Newtonian musical. Get your Backstage Pass.