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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to Creating Characters from The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Mo Brady.

[0:25] Mo Brady: From Nellie Forbush to Evan Hansen, the librettos of Broadway musicals have been filled with complex characters for almost a century. And while those roles were originated and revived by astonishing actors, much of what made those characters so fascinating is on the page, meaning written into the script itself. That's what makes the work of our guests for this miniseries so remarkable. They've taken small supporting parts and turned them into fully realized characters, ones that feel just as developed and grounded as their leading counterparts. The Lightning Thief employs a cast of seven actors to bring the story of Percy Jackson on stage. Much of that show's small cast is tasked with creating multiple characters, none more than actor Ryan Knowles. Using a versatile facility of voice and movement, he creates strikingly specific characters over and over again in the show, including Chiron, Hades, and many, many more. Here's our conversation.

[1:25] Mo Brady: Can you introduce yourself and tell us what neighborhood of New York City you live in?

[1:45] Ryan Knowles: Yes. My name is Ryan Knowles, and I live up in the Hudson Heights area.

[1:50] Mo Brady: Do you know all of the characters you play in The Lightning Thief?

[1:53] Ryan Knowles: I would hope so.

[1:55] Mo Brady: Yeah, but to list them might be hard. Okay, so who are all the characters you play?

[1:59] Ryan Knowles: Okay, so let's see if I can get them all. There are nine. So there's Chiron, who's also Mr. Brunner, prior to being revealed as Chiron. There's Hades, there's Poseidon, Medusa, bus passenger, farmer, train conductor, Kronos, and Kurt Cobain.

[2:16] Mo Brady: When was the first time The Lightning Thief came into your life?

[2:19] Ryan Knowles: Oh, this is a great question, because it was one year, four days ago, to the hour, nearly.

[2:25] Mo Brady: And what happened?

[2:26] Ryan Knowles: I didn't know much about The Lightning Thief before. I knew it existed. But I hadn't seen the show, and so the night before the audition, I went on YouTube and listened to the original cast album, and then took a look at the sides. And some were obvious, like Medusa. So working from just that basic knowledge, I made some—my mantra is always go bold or go home, you know? And so I made some big choices for the first audition, and it went really well. It was Stephen Brackett, our incredible director, was in the room, and Duncan Stewart.

[3:01] Mo Brady: Do you remember which characters you auditioned for?

[3:01] Ryan Knowles: Yes. I auditioned—it was with Medusa sides, and I think some Chiron sides in there somewhere.

[3:08] Mo Brady: And how many auditions?

[3:10] Ryan Knowles: Only two. Me and—myself and Jalen Steele were the last two cast. So we only had that first audition, a callback, a fight audition, and then that was it.

[3:22] Mo Brady: And this was to join the tour?

[3:24] Ryan Knowles: The national tour, yes.

[3:25] Mo Brady: Did you launch the tour?

[3:26] Ryan Knowles: I did. I did.

[3:28] Mo Brady: So talk a little bit about that process of taking a two-line description of a character in a side and making it into a fully fleshed person.

[3:36] Ryan Knowles: Okay. First, because it's obviously a comedy, which was readily apparent from the sides, and you're dealing with a monster, like, say, Medusa, so that's already going to be a pretty dynamic character. You know, that's a given. I mean, you're playing a woman with snakes for hair that can turn you into stone. So I looked at it, and I saw the flow of the language, and Joe Trace wrote the book for our show and does such a good job at writing in a tone of a character's voice to where it becomes very easy—well, not easy, but it becomes accessible in an audition situation to latch on to that cadence of speech and help it inform the character you try to create in those first few minutes. For me, one of the big breakthroughs sitting outside of the room is I was reading over the—of course, I could unfortunately hear everyone else auditioning before me, but the one thing I realized when I was reading along was the line—there was a line, I had a boyfriend once and sisters two, with no punctuation breaking it up.

And I just thought, well, there's a joke. He's sticking ellipses between I had a boyfriend and once. You know, she only had one boyfriend. And that got Stephen to laugh. And so after that, I went, all right, I'm onto something with this character. This is a bitter, Miss Havisham-like old woman cloistered away in her garden emporium.

[4:49] Mo Brady: So when you were brought onto the production, it had already had a mounting off-Broadway, correct?

[4:55] Ryan Knowles: Yes, yes. Multiple iterations.

[4:58] Mo Brady: Did the roles change at all with you?

[5:01] Ryan Knowles: Not since I've been in it, but there were various versions of the show. There were songs that were cut. There were scenes that were added, characters that were changed. But since I joined the show a year ago and started the national tour, what's playing at the Long Acre on Broadway right now is the same show as far as script and character and songs go, as we began in January of this year.

[5:24] Mo Brady: So what are those rehearsals like if all but two people in the show have done it before and you're playing catch-up?

[5:32] Ryan Knowles: Yeah, there's three of us and then six, if you count swings, that hadn't done the show. So it was all pros. There were no cons. But going into it, it had the benefit of already having immediate intimacy and chemistry amongst the people who had done this prior. But also, you sort of worry, it's like being the new kid in school, you know? Everybody knows so much about each other already and they know how to work with each other. Gosh, I hope we fit in. The upshot is that everyone, literally everyone in this creative team and cast are so sweet and so warm and so welcoming. So it took us all of five minutes of awkwardness in the first rehearsal and it had been like we'd been together all along.

[6:15] Mo Brady: Can you dive into one of these characters? Maybe, is it Mr. Brunner?

[6:19] Ryan Knowles: Mr. Brunner, yeah.

[6:20] Mo Brady: Mr. Brunner and Chiron. How do you use your voice and your body to create such a distinct person that is immediately recognizable?

[6:31] Ryan Knowles: Well, Mr. Brunner slash Chiron, I love him as a character. He was my favorite from the books because if you're ever going to have an adventure story, usually with a younger person going on an adventure with high stakes, they're always going to have a Mr. Miyagi or a Dumbledore or a Chiron. The reason Chiron exists is because in mythology there was a centaur teacher named Chiron who would train demigods to fight. He taught Achilles, he taught Hercules, everybody. That guiding hand, I always think, is a wonderful archetype. Then you take somebody like Mr. Brunner who is masquerading as a Latin teacher. I saw the sketches for the costumes, corduroy jacket, tweed vest, bow tie, and I said, okay, I'm getting buttoned up, he's proper.

I decided to make him slightly English and he speaks with authority. He's literally been training the fiercest mythological fighters for millennia. This guy would probably never lose control of a situation. That tells me immediately, authority, control, we're going to stick this mother in the basement. Make him as deep and resonant as possible. Simply because, by their nature, deep voices are authoritative. That's how we hear them initially. I knew he'd have a deep voice, I knew he'd have some sort of English accent, basically RP. Very proper, chooses his words correctly, he doesn't use slang or contractions. That informs the specificity with which you speak. He's not going to slur his words, he's not going to be less than precise.

That really does all the work for you, once you decide where you want that voice to sit. I'm a speech coach, have been for 20 years, and work with high school students. Whenever I tell them, I always say, you need to build your tree, then you can hang your ornaments. The ornament hanging is the most fun of creating a character, just the little things. Oh, here's a good example. Certain words are repeated throughout the show. Zeus, lightning. I decided that Chiron would have to pronounce those words slightly differently than everyone else. Because these are all American kids. By their nature, will speak differently about these newly found out mythological subjects than Chiron would. Who's been living with it forever.

So he says Zeus with a liquid U. Zeus, almost adds a syllable to it. And he doesn't say Poseidon, he says Poseidon. And so, little, slight little differences help, for me anyway, separate him from just another character. Or another person in this universe.

[9:06] Mo Brady: Are you getting feedback about these choices? Like, what's the dialogue that's happening between you and the director?

[9:11] Ryan Knowles: That was the best part. I came home every day exhausted from rehearsal. But I'd come home and tell my wife, oh my God, it was so much fun. We did this scene today, and we did that scene today, and we worked on this. It was like going to a playground every day. That's the environment that Steven creates in the room. Not only is it a completely safe place to experiment, he's got a great answer for everything. And his answer is inevitably, gorgeous. And that's his attitude. Everything is awesome until it isn't, which is great. When I was going through character ideas, Hades was really hard to settle upon. We went through three or four different versions. And I'd say, can I try something out? And I'd try it. And he'd laugh and be supportive, and he'd say, gorgeous, but no. We'd all laugh and then move on and create something.

[10:03] Ryan Knowles: But when something's that safe, when it's okay to screw up, that's why I love bad ideas. Because the more bad ideas you go through, the closer you're getting to the good idea, the right idea. That's what rehearsal was. It was never, you know, do it this way. It was some really provocative question he'd ask or pose that would make me consider the role in a different light. And it's that back and forth that really never stopped until we opened the show. Even the few days of rehearsal we had before reopening on Broadway, we changed Poseidon's character significantly. Significantly to us. I'm not sure anyone else would notice, but we started playing a lot of different things in the subtext than we were aiming for before, which was great because it gave me something new to focus on and try to bring something new to the character that I hadn't brought in the previous nine months of touring.

I want to ask you about each of those, but let's start with Hades. Hades is, maybe it's just the Hercules reference, but the Hades is someone that we know is sort of in popular culture. How did you find your own Hades, particularly through the process when you were saying that things weren't settling?

[11:11] Ryan Knowles: Oh yeah. Well, I remember the first day of rehearsal, I showed up, you know, I like to prepare. I don't necessarily like to memorize too early just because I don't want to get locked down in the way I say things. I want there to be as much possibility as possible. I came up with some ideas and I'd come in and I initially was just going a little too on the nose villain for Hades. And he quickly steered me away from that and said, just start coming with ideas, no matter how stupid they are, just start experimenting. And I pretty much locked every other character down and I still was looking for Hades. And one day I was so frustrated and I fell down a YouTube hole when I was just exhausted lying on the couch after rehearsal.

And I came across old Hollywood Squares videos and they had Paul Linde, the center square. And what was the joke? The joke was Peter Marshall says to him, when a man falls off of a ship, they shout man overboard. What do they shout when a woman falls off? Full speed ahead. And it just made me laugh out loud. And I thought, oh my gosh, he's so petty and catty and what a great king of the underworld. Everything made sense in that moment. It was resentful of everyone who's above him, who doesn't have to be in the underworld for eternity. He resents his brother. He's spiteful. He's catty. And so I brought it in and told Steven, hey, this is going to sound weird, but let me try something. And the minute I started just was like, oh, this is his voice. And everyone laughed and he's all, all right, good. We can finally stop searching.

[12:40] Ryan Knowles: So let's talk about Poseidon or Poseidon. That's a rather small character in terms of time on stage, but a very important character for the plot. Yeah. Yeah. He's sort of the deus ex machina of Percy's adventure. He shows up just when he needs to. For the second time. For the second time. Exactly. The first time he shows up is in a dream where he ends up giving him a very important object. Are you thinking about leaving an impression in the audience's mind of who this character is versus bus passenger? How do you endow a character with the sort of gravitas that we need to remember them 90 minutes later?

[13:11] Ryan Knowles: It's a good question. I think the work is mainly done for me through the staging and the script. He comes waltzing on during this weird dream sequence. He's moving slowly. There's a lot of visual attention directed at him. Nothing else is happening on stage. He presents him with this object that seems to be of great importance, and he says one really cryptic line and takes a good length of time to say it. So I think already there it's sticking out, as you should probably remember this. This might come into play later on. So I think they've done the work for me, but Poseidon is one of the big three gods, as we say in the show. So this guy, talk about gravitas and authority. If you are a god, and on top of that, one of the big ones, you don't really have to try.

Poseidon's not the type of guy who's going to tell you how big, smart, great, powerful, rich he is. He is all of those things, so he doesn't have anything to prove. So he's very laid back, and he's a god of the sea, so he's a surfer stoner guy. Chills out all day long until he's got to, you know, start a flurry over here, and a squall over there.

[14:28] Ryan Knowles: The last specific character moment I want to ask you about is Chiron and Chiron's walk, or trot. Yeah. Describe it for someone who hasn't seen the show. Chiron is a centaur, who is the bottom half of a horse and the top half of a human man. So obviously I'm not wearing a horse's body with four legs. Instead, we're simply representing it with brown leather pants and a harness apparatus that is a tail coming out the back of those pants. Immediately we knew that it would probably become incumbent upon us to show the centaur nature of Chiron through physicality and movement. So our wonderful choreographer Patrick McCollum and I worked on numerous things. There are times when he is proud at the end of the show.

He gallops, and he says, I galloped here once I heard. Then there are other times where that would be inappropriate, or at a more somber moment of the show. So we were very attentive to how big or small the horse features were at any given moment. I watched a lot of YouTube videos of horses and dressage horses, and when we first meet him as the centaur, he's obviously going to be a little bit more preenie than normal. On top of that, it's got to be very uncomfortable for a horse body to sit in a wheelchair. So when he gets up, he's going to stretch his limbs a bit and take a saunter. And so obviously we watched some dressage horses and how they preen and operate their legs and pose when they are at rest and whatnot, and tried to bring that into the character.

[16:01] Ryan Knowles: You said you play nine characters. Are you consciously trying to make them different from each other in order to be distinct, or are you just trying to find the truth of each one? I think it'd be a lie for me to say that. No, I only try to find the truth in each one. The simple fact is when you play that many, you have to make them different. They have to be distinct. Not necessarily this one talks high and this one talks low tones and all of that, but if I'm going to look at one guy playing nine roles, I need to know that from the minute I look at him in the new role, I'll know that it's somebody different. I'll know who it is. It'll be instantly identifiable. So with Chiron speaking like this, I think it would be a mistake to give Poseidon an English accent as well for no good reason.

But on the flip side of that, it's like Medusa. I am conscious to use a bit more higher tones specifically because before she switches into the monster, she is much more dainty and talks up here, but then when she switches, she becomes monstrous. So you've got to keep in mind the picture you're painting for the audience and make sure that they can follow it. But then you don't want to make any choices that aren't speaking to the truth of the character. Every choice you make should come from the material somehow. If you make your choice, and this is what Stephen understands so well, if you make your choices based on the material that they organically spring forth from the source material, whether it's the player or the book, they can't be wrong. They'll inevitably read as correct because you're basing them in some truth.

[17:56] Ryan Knowles: One thing I find most interesting, we've got a lot of very dedicated fans, half-bloods we call them, and they come to the stage door and share with me their impressions of the books or the show or whatnot. A lot of them always say like, they'll say, I never knew he sounded like that until I heard you say it. And then it's, yeah, that's what he sounds like. It's like, yeah, because we're both fans of the book. He didn't sound like this in your head when you were reading it, but you can see that I've read it too, you know, and I love the books too. So I think if it comes from a place of informed love, it's going to have a hard time not working out. There's lots of Easter eggs in the show, I'm sure, but do you have a moment that you look forward to every performance?

[18:44] Ryan Knowles: Okay, I'll give you one Easter egg that I don't think anybody would even spot if they were looking for it is, I just do it for myself. Because Chiron is a centaur sitting in that wheelchair covered by a blanket in the first number, I always make him conscious that there's a tail behind him, even though I'm not particularly wearing it at that moment in the show. So he'll reach behind him and adjust something every now and then. I just thought, if you got that tail under there, it's uncomfortable. You're going to be adjusting, you know? So when we look into the future, and there are high schools and community theaters doing...

[19:05] Ryan Knowles: Oh, everybody's going to be doing this. Yes. One piece of advice for someone playing one of your roles. I'd say, no matter how many characters you're playing, no matter which characters those are, keep yourself open to ideas. Collaborate. The great thing about this show is that there's a handful of people that embody over 55 characters. You've got to work together if you want to pull that off. There has to be a spirit of collaboration and a spirit of good cheer when you're working on it. So keep an open mind and really try anything. Let your imagination be your guide. And with a good director and a good team and good co-stars, you'll get there.