In 2013, I was desperately looking for a way to quit writing plays. I’d had a terrible, scarring artistic collaboration a couple of years prior, and it broke me. And on top of that, I was actually broke, financially. So I decided to give up playwriting, move to Los Angeles and make some money writing for film and television. But just as I’d made that decision, I received a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation. It came with a significant chunk of money, so I was thrilled. Only it also came with conditions: one of which was that I needed to write a new play. “Fine,” I thought. “I’ll write a very short one-act to fulfil the requirements of the grant and then be done with theatre for ever.”
Months later, I was on an aeroplane listening to in-flight radio when Led Zeppelin’s cover of Babe I’m Gonna Leave You came on. I knew the haunting opening chords because when I was little my brother used to play them over and over to teach himself guitar. Until that moment, though, I don’t think I’d heard the actual song. What struck me most was the absolutely searing, raw vocals of Robert Plant. He was threatening a breakup, but the threat was delivered partly as a seduction, partly as a nervous breakdown. Underneath the “I’m gonna leave you” was the opposite: “I can never ever leave you and don’t you dare leave me!” Listening to his hypnotising vocals, I began to imagine what it must have felt like in that studio, the strange intimacy amid the technical weirdness of an analogue recording studio. I instantly knew it was the setting for a play.
The song was a little like a Freudian rebus: it glittered cryptically with my fraught emotions about the theatre, and my brother, and past relationships. But on that flight the only things I consciously knew were: 1. I would write a play about a band making a record; 2. It would be set in a music studio in the 1970s; and 3. The set would function almost like an art installation, with soundproofing, mics and speakers part of the theatrical apparatus to tell the story.
I wanted this play to be different from anything I’d ever written, and I wanted to find a new way of working, so I decided to write it in concentrated bursts that would culminate in brief workshops I would organise a few times every year. And I wanted to build my creative team in advance, before writing a word, just based on a premise. I first approached Daniel Aukin to direct. He roped in musical director Justin Craig and Ryan Rumery, our sound designer. I had been trying to work with David Zinn for years, and he agreed to do the set. And then a friend introduced me to Arcade Fire’s Will Butler; he had no idea who I was, but for whatever reason agreed to write the music for these snippets of songs we would hear over the course of the play.
My problem at the outset was that I knew nothing about the recording process. I mean nothing. I watched lots of documentaries and took notes and wrote down technical-sounding phrases such as “I like the tremolo effect” and “put more EQ on the amp” (which I later learned didn’t really mean anything). I constructed a few loose scenes and in 2014 did a very rough workshop, which Daniel directed. The “band” was a bunch of actor friends who played toy instruments. What I knew at this point was there were five members of this fictional Anglo-American band: Simon, the drummer; Peter, the exacting lead guitarist; Diana, the self-deprecating lead singer, who is also Peter’s girlfriend; Holly, who plays keys; and Reg, Holly’s substance-addled husband, who plays bass. The band has just started recording their sophomore LP when their first album unexpectedly climbs back up the charts, and the pressures of this new, imminent fame cause fractures in their personal and professional relationships.
Halfway through the first day I said to Daniel, “Shouldn’t there be more people in the studio?” Daniel then said that I had forgotten to put in an engineer. So in 2015, I added Grover, the engineer character, and took my increasingly bigger jumble of pages to John Kilgore, who had engineered for people such as Philip Glass in the analogue 1970s. John agreed to advise us. Daniel and I sat in his studio one afternoon as he pored through the rough draft page by page and painstakingly noted everything I’d gotten wrong. John also felt my engineer would need an assistant – a note which really opened up the play for me. Grover and Charlie, the two engineers, become a sort of comically beleaguered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – a way in for the audience. John walked me through all the phases of recording: laying down tracks, overdubbing vocals, adding in harmonies, mixing and so on. I started to realise that if I wanted to show how an album gets made in a painstaking, granular way that subverts how rock bands are traditionally depicted in dramatic works, then this was not going to be a slim one-act.
The play grew to two acts, then three and then four. I knew the length and technical demands would probably make it un-producible, but I put on my playwright blinders (deny reality and pretend everything you write is viable until further notice!) and kept going.
We continued like this for the next few years, developing the play one workshop at a time. My creative team became trusted advisers and, in some cases, my dramaturgs. I spent an entire afternoon grilling Ryan on how one might fix a drum sound, and how that fix would make the sound worse, and how one might try to fix that, and how that fix would make it even worse, and so on. From this conversation, I built a sequence that became the opening of the second act.
I dictated whole scenes to my assistant, Julia, and had her read back what I’d extemporised in character; we’d then finesse those lines for hours, and with her help I’d score everything out on the page. David made us a little model for the set and cardboard figures we could move around between the sound and control rooms to figure out who was in what room when, as the logistics were starting to make us crazy.
In the spring of 2019, four and a half years after he agreed to be part of this crazy experiment, I finally had a draft to show Will. He and I met Justin, Ryan and Daniel, and we all read the play aloud. At this point I knew precisely how many songs I needed, what they were meant to feel like, when they would recur in new arrangements and so on. Will now had something concrete to respond to, so he went away for a bit to do what he called his “Stanislavski work” (which I thought was so cute).
The process of getting the music we needed was not so easy or immediate, but Will was very invested in getting it right. His Stanislavski thing involved getting into the minds and histories of the characters as written, and imagining where their heads were at in the summer of 1976, and who their musical influences might be from the 50s and 60s. He then sent a batch of songs to Daniel and me – two of which, Masquerade and Seven Roads, made the cut. There was a great song for Holly we couldn’t use called In Your Arms but Will later ended up recording it for the cast album. Another song in that first batch was meant to be Diana’s big number in act one, but I thought the lyrics felt too angry and punishing. I loved the melody, but wanted the lyrics to have more of a feeling of uncanniness – like something is starting to surface to awareness but she’s not there yet. Somehow this led to Will speeding up the song and turning it to something akin to a moody Giorgio Moroder synth thing. I really loved it, but I knew it wouldn’t fit Diana’s arc dramaturgically. So we ended up giving that song to Holly, and Will had to write a new song for Diana, which turned out to be Bright.
It wasn’t merely character stuff Will had to deal with; there were carefully constructed problems centring on the creation of the songs themselves – though when I wrote the draft the songs didn’t exist, so Will had to reverse-engineer everything. For instance, characters in act two argue over a bass riff, one that would be debated repeatedly over the course of the play. Will’s task was to make each version of the riff make not only musical sense, but dramatic sense in a way that built the stakes. In act two, Simon can’t get a drum to sound the way Peter wants it, and I wrote detailed descriptions of Peter’s complaint (around a drum part that didn’t yet exist) in the dialogue. So Will took the details around that complaint as written and wrote a song that did all the drum stuff Peter demanded in that moment.
Justin worked his magic in a similar way, figuring out orchestrations to Will’s songs which, according to the story, are meant to go from pretty good to great in real time, sometimes over the course of a single scene. The process of collaboration was enigmatic, and none of this should have worked: I was asking too much of everyone, and I required a degree of expertise from my collaborators in areas that weren’t really anyone’s areas of expertise. But everyone loved what we were making and they rose to the challenge. Stereophonic is a play about artistic collaboration that was born from a soul-crushing collaborative process – but our collaborative process was heaven on earth. I just happened to fall in with a group of crazy geniuses who were mavericks and up for anything. I got very, very lucky.
