By pure chance, I have known the artistic duo Ayun Halliday and Greg Kotis for most of my life. In both first and fifth grade, I was classmates with their daughter India—a playwright herself—at P.S. 261 in Boerum Hill. I remember learning, as a first grader (this must have been 2003), that India’s father had won something called a Tony, and that her mother wore vintage to the ceremony (. I understood that India was particularly creatively poised, and that her poetry surpassed mine. This, reader, is not self-flagellation: my poetic output in the first grade consisted of variations of the following construction—I like X. Do you like X? I like X!— the only difference being the object in question. I believe I wrote one about ice cream and another about chocolate.
In fifth grade, Halliday took us to MoMA for a children’s workshop as a playdate. I believe it was on the subway there that I learned what a zine was, as India explained to me some of her mother’s work. Art seemed to flow through and out of this family, but the designation of “artist” did not signify much then, in elementary school. A parent was merely a contributing entity, and their job was simply the thing they did all day before arriving home to provide.I assumed all parents probably made the same amount of money, and that the work of India’s parents was analogous to my own parents’ work as doctors. While India and I were in elementary school, Kotis worked as a location scout for Law & Order. I remember Kotis whooshing past the schoolyard on his bike.
Years later, India turned up at my college as a sophomore transfer student. Despite our shared history, we didn’t speak—such were the ways of a small school—until one day during COVID when I stumbled upon a paper she’d published on eunuchs. Reading it, I was shocked to see a particularly neoconservative professor thanked in the acknowledgements. I had studied with this professor too, but the thought of discussing anything even adjacent to the body seemed unthinkable. I was struck by the apparent ease of India’s relationship to him. I wrote to her, and then to him.
After that, India and I stayed in touch and got together from time to time. The years of separation, punctuated by occasional crossover, lent itself to an interesting type of friendship. Across distance—different life stages and institution-types—India and I assembled a re-understanding of our childhood, creating something of a collage: the experience itself overlaid with knowledge acquired by growing up. As a child, my understanding of her parents’ work did not extend beyond the title. But as an adult, with a growing familiarity of the economics of artmaking—due in no small part to writing for CULTUREBOT—it dawned on me that her parents had been artists in the working sense. In the iterative, grueling, bustling way required to exist in New York. They were doing the very thing I had begun to orient myself toward writing about as a career.
When an Encores production of Urinetown, the Tony-winning musical created by Kotis and his collaborator Mark Hollmann, came to City Center, I found myself invited by and then seated amongst the Halliday-Kotis family. Prior to this moment, I’d never seen the show. My only association was a memory of India telling our first-grade teacher that Tobi McGuire had been a fan and my confusion that the word urine could in any way be part of a title. Watching then, a remounting of this show years later, seemed to be a collision of past and present. In that moment, Kotis was both India’s father, the father of my childhood peer, and an artist being celebrated. It was bewildering.
A year ago, I sat down to interview Halliday and Kotis days before the premiere of their post-apocalyptic bluegrass musical The End of All Flesh, which was part of the 2025 New York Fringe Festival and won Best New Musical. During our conversation, I had my leg elevated in front of me. I’d, unbeknownst to me, torn my meniscus that past October and spent months walking on it dipping in and out of bouts of immobility. After our interview, surgery followed weeks later. After the procedure, life retreated, making completing projects out of reach. I took the summer to recover, and yet, even when I returned to my work that fall, at full force, some projects remained untouched. Nearly a year later, on a somewhat random day this past March, I wrote to Halliday and Kotis to say I’d like to finally publish the piece.
I now see the crossover of my injury with this interview as almost logical. Reconnecting with India made the realities of labor newly perceptible. In speaking with Halliday and Kotis—outside the frame of their daughter— material concerns surfaced nearly immediately. That ultimately a physical constraint prevented the publication of the piece feels consistent.
This interview took place in two parts: once last spring with both Halliday and Kotis, and then again, a few weeks ago in mid-March with Kotis about two new projects: I Am Nobody, Halliday and Kotis’ new musical about the perils of technology opening April 6th at Magnet Theater and his musical adaptation of Two Gentleman of Verona, which will premiere at The American Players Theater this summer. Since our first conversation, Theater of The Apes has also released a recording of The End of All Flesh‘s soundtrack available now on Spotify.
Our discussions spanned the early days of their careers, specifically their time with the Neo-Futurists, the realities of parenthood, the success and particularities of Urinetown, the formulation of their production company Theater of The Apes, and the joys of performing. It is a conversation that quite accurately portrays the realities of an artistic life, with all the truth of the job’s responsibilities, that surpass the title.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
PS: Halliday alerted me that she actually a wore $45 dress from Pearl River to The Tony’s, which, she says “At the time, it felt like a bit of a splurge.”
Eve Bromberg: I have such a funny relationship with both of you, having known your daughter for most of my life. I know the broad strokes of your careers, but not the details or origins! I wanted to start by asking how it is that you came to collaborate?
Ayun Halliday: We met in 1991 when Greg auditioned for the Neo-Futurists in Chicago. I was already a member of the ensemble. A lot of the other ensemble members knew him and said he was really good and that we should just put him in. But I thought he should have to audition like everyone else. He came through and he was indeed very good, and I probably had the additional reaction of thinking he was very cute. We put Greg into the company, and then our romantic relationship started six months later. So, I guess we’ve always been collaborating since then because even as part of the Neo-Futurists, we wrote our own material and performed our own material. The first time we performed together in a play of Greg’s was Jobey and Katherine in 1997 when I was pregnant with India. People didn’t like it when I got shot and slammed into the wall. It was too real.
Greg Kotis: We came to New York in 1995. That was a big year for us. That’s the year that we became engaged after living in sin. That’s also when I began trying to pursue playwriting seriously on my own. I had written full-length plays with ensemble members of Cardiff Giant, another theatre company I was part of in Chicago. My frequent collaborator Mark Hollmann was also a member. The “strategy” was that if I was ever going to have any hope of making a living, I better learn how to write plays as a necessary step towards being an independent writer. So Jobey and Katherine was my first attempt to do that. It was a three person play, and Ayun starred as the titular Katherine. But, in our 20s, there wasn’t much serious thought about what this was all leading to, it was just really fun. We were lucky that we could live on what we made from doing Too Much Light [longest running show of the Neo-Futurists that Ayun and Greg brought to New York] and had very cheap rent and that groceries were cheap. That was really lucky for us to be able to do that, because, you know, there was no real way to monetize your art.
EB: Are you both responsible for the Neo-Futurists presence in New York?
AH: Indirectly. When we moved to New York, there were auditions in Chicago to replace us. The company had fewer women than men at the time, so we decided our replacements should both be women. There were these two young men who auditioned in Chicago, but they weren’t going to be cast. Greg and I approached them and asked if they’d entertain the idea of moving to New York City with us and doing Too Much Light in New York, for maybe like 90 dollars a week. To our surprise, they both said yes. So the two men, Rob Neill and Bill Coelius, joined us and Spencer Kayden, who was a friend who had already moved to New York from Chicago. We were the first ensemble to do a sit down-production in New York, and we ran it for a little over two years, and then we took that summer off so we could have India. That was 1997. Rob eventually picked it back up and started the New York Neo-Futurists. They’re still going strong!
GK: The Neo-Futurists were founded in 1988 and it’s still running in Chicago, and it’s running in New York, and maybe in other places too. So it’s like one of these ensemble companies, sort of like Second City. The productions aren’t as big as Second City’s, but it’s like them, the casts come and go, and eventually move onto other things. It’s like Saturday Night Live. We’re alumni.
AH: For both of us, our time with The Neo-Futurists was pretty seminal in shaping our writing style and our performance style.
GK: What’s interesting to me about them is that they are somehow able to match comedy with drama with experiment all in the same show. It’s interesting that all those things, all those styles, can happen at the same time. The experiment is to try to remove the barrier between the audience and the people on stage. So a lot of the process and performance is about enlisting the live audience in front of you to help in storytelling and showmanship. Acknowledging the audience while performing is one of the hallmarks of the company’s approach. How to be stage worthy without being a character.
AH: It’s a very literal sense of truth on stage. You play yourself, you never play a character, and if you play a character, you must say you’re playing a character. It’s all this meta-theatricality that is totally embraced. And so that was, you know, that was an education for me. I came from Northwestern’s theater department and the improv world, where it’s all about artifice and character. Learning how to, or try to, be yourself on stage, is very challenging. That was formative for my acting and my writing too. I often write about my own life, or I’ll make comics about it. I find that the older I get I really love giving really big cartoony clownish performances,
EB: How did your theater company, Theater of the Apes, come about?
GK: It’s the name that we came up with for our production company for Urinetown at the New York International Fringe Festival 1999. The Fringe version of Urinetown was the birth of this production company and was our first production. The name was Ayun’s invention. India was born in 1997 and Urinetown was written between 1995 and 1999. What happened in the middle of all that was parenthood. As Mark and I kept pushing the boulder up the hill, my thoughts were on parenthood, obligations, responsibilities, and the physical labor of the work while trying to pursue a career in theatre. It wasn’t clear you could do both, so we just thought we’d get the show on its feet, self produce it and then get real jobs– whatever those are.
AH: If people had just really enjoyed Urinetown in the Fringe Festival, that would have been good. Somebody else coming around and saying, we want to produce this, we want to produce it Off-Broadway, with the idea that it’s going to move on to Broadway, was unexpected. It was such a Cinderella story, but it also made Theater of the Apes unnecessary at that point. Our income was taken care of by the fact that there was this successful commercial production of Urinetown that, bafflingly, became successful enough to allow us to earn a living on the life of that.
EB: Something we talk about at school a lot is changing standards of work life balance in the theater of today. Lynn Nottage, who teaches at Columbia, was on a panel discussing a current production of an opera she’s written with her daughter– This House at Opera Theatre of St. Louis– and she spoke about how interesting it was to see her daughter’s philosophy on rehearsal length, which challenged a more traditional approach. Do you see that kind of change as well, especially after this Encores run of Urinetown?
AH: I’ve always been very oriented towards saying: you clean the bathrooms, you haul the props, you don’t complain. We’re doing that actually right now with The End of All Flesh, which is Greg’s post-apocalyptic bluegrass piece. Rehearsing Off-Off-Broadway, unless you live nearby, means you’ve got to haul props on the subway to a Midtown rehearsal space. We’ve been doing that. Our set is minimal, but we have a life-sized hog! We were going to have to do lug things every day from our apartment in East Harlem, until opening, so we decided to rent a space across the street from the venue of this performance which is at The Wild Project. After our first show, our friends, who are our age, helped us bring the pieces back to space, including Spencer who was in Neo-Futurists with us. We’re all hauling together.
GK: There is definitely a generational divide in expectations, like what Lynn experienced. There are people in their 20s, perhaps not everybody, with an awareness of theater as labor and labor practices that need to be equitable with boundaries that need to be guarded. In the Encores production, it was interesting to talk to people of my generation about the challenges of navigating professional relationships with people in their 20s because of differences in expectations. When we were in our 20s, we had no sense of that. The period of doing Too Much Light in the 1980s and 1990s, and of writing plays in general, is you do everything you have to do with the resources that you have in order to make the show, because you are contending against an indifferent world that is not only indifferent, but also competitive. There’s not just competition with your peers, but competition with every other claim on the attention of potential audience members. Your only hope of getting any kind of success in life for your work is just to throw yourself, body and soul, at the project. So you know, in Jobey and Katherine, which I wrote, called for the mailman to shoot Katherine. This was before we knew you were pregnant, Ayun, so once the show was on its feet, we were still going to go through with this stage direction. That’s an example of that, perhaps older, mentality: an actor is pregnant and we’re still going to do the show. We’ve rented the space, or we’ve created the space, we’ve written the show. The show must go on.
EB: I’ve talked to India about this so many times, but, in retrospect, PS 261 taught me about the notion of a Working Artist. As an elementary school student, I’m sure I was under the impression that me and my peers were more or less of the same means, even if our parents had different jobs. But now, when I think about my classmates whose parents had creative professions, it was probably the case their compensation wasn’t commensurate with their talent and output, as is normally the case. It’s pretty remarkable to consider how much one’s art-making life is intertwined with consistent economic concerns.
I’m interested, Greg, I know you’re a musician, but why were you drawn to musicals?
GK: It began with confronting the challenge you’re mentioning. The idea, which was so broad and ridiculous and absurdist, was to heighten the absurdity of a musical to something that could be even sillier, with more potential for grandiosity. Mark Hollmann had directed a musical for Cardiff Giant called Afterstate, which was conceived and written by the whole ensemble. We had some experience in writing musicals, so with Urinetown, it just seemed like oh, here’s an epic idea and wouldn’t it be more epic if it was a musical? I pitched the idea to Mark, who had moved to New York in 1993 and was trying to figure out how to be a composer. He had his sights on Broadway. Mark is really a student of the Broadway musical. He’s incredibly accomplished as a composer, and a historian of the form. He is an unironic passionate lover of musicals. Meanwhile, I knew that musicals are that kind of thing that people do and I had been in West Side Story in high school?
EB: Who did you play?
GK: I was a random Jet named Big Deal. They probably made up the role. So that was my exposure to musicals, and seeing Mickey Rooney in a show called Sugar Babies that I somehow got tickets to while visiting the city during college. To me Broadway was like Disneyland. It was just like a kind of entertainment. I didn’t really know anything about it. It was like an American classical form of entertainment and art that appealed to a certain demographic that I was not a part of. I was more interested in things like, you know, Steppenwolf or The Wooster Group. That experimental world I wanted to be a part of. So Mark and I made up this interesting duo: a bit of a skeptic and an absolute devotee of this form. I have since really come to appreciate and love musicals as a totally legitimate art form.
EB: And have you always been a musician?
GK: I was in the band in high school, so I knew how to play guitar, and I’d written some songs in high school, but in Urinetown I wasn’t involved in the composition, really.
AH: You collaborated on some things, lyrics and, you know, some melody lines.
GK: Yes. I can point to things as my contribution. But you know, Mark, he was the composer. I really admired watching Mark work with a music director and orchestrators, and seeing performers not only act and move around, but also enlist their capacity to sing. I just thought, Geez, that looks like so much fun. I’d like to do that too. I really hesitate to call myself a musician. I’m a person with a musical practice. My practice is just going into a room with my guitar, which was the only instrument I could play at the time, and just trying to experiment with chords and develop my own way of writing simple folk tunes.
EB: Where did the specific idea for The End of Flesh come from?
GK: Every few Christmases, or birthdays, we buy each other something kind of big. In 2019, Ayun bought me a banjo and then COVID happened and I was locked inside for a year, which was perfect. I decided to devote myself to it as much as I could, and simultaneously let my hair grow because and then I decided to grow a beard because my hair was getting so weird.
Then I started to develop the mountain man look that we have in our promo shot. There was something fun with having this big, huge beard to match a burgeoning intermediate banjo playing skills. So we decided to write a show where we don’t just look weird, but there’s an actual reason behind these strange looks. Long hair is such a commitment. It’s years of your life woven into pieces of hair. I appreciated things like, you know that old line, like, I can’t go out tonight because I have to wash my hair, which I might have thought was a complete joke, but no. Having this much hair, it’s actually, this huge pain in the ass to try to wash it. Now, I appreciate what it is to have and maintain long hair. It’s not easy! Also I have this creative partner who was itching to act in something.
AH: When we talk about Broadway, one thing that I have come to admire about Broadway actors who do musicals is that they’re just a completely different creature.You can be the star of your high school musical, which I never was by the way, but you wouldn’t even make it past the first round of a Broadway audition. It’s kind of a heartbreaker. But people who are cast and work consistently in musicals on Broadway, they’re just completely different beings: they take care of their vocal instruments the way a dancer would continuously take classes. I harbored no illusions that I would ever be in Urinetown unless, like, if somebody ever makes a movie of it, I hope I get to be an extra. I want to be an old lady with blood spattered all over my face in the rebellion.
EB: Ayun, you have absolutely earned that.
AH: But I do enjoy participating. I grew up as an only child, and I think I have a little bit of a bugaboo about feeling excluded from things and it’s fun to be included. The way The End of Flesh came to be was that our old neighbor, who lived below us in Brooklyn for years, relocated to Maine, and one summer she was organizing a reading series. She got in touch with Greg to invite him to a weekend long residency in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
GK: Even though it was a reading series, we organized more of a really early version of the show, like 20 or so minutes. Then we went back the next year, but I guess the first year’s showing was the first version of The End of All Flesh.
AH: Greg was also part of a playwrights writing group that has some very well known playwrights in it. And they would meet once a week, and he would bring in drafts of The End of All Flesh. The show has a cast of four: Pa, Ma, Boy, Girl. Pa, Ma, and Boy are a family, and Girl is an outsider. The writers group would say that it was really clear to them what Pa wants and what Boy and Girl want, but they were curious about what Ma wanted. We would talk about it, because– we’re having dinner together every night during COVID– and it became very clear to me what Ma wanted. She does all this work, she’s always dragging the hog around and feeding everybody, and she wants to be left alone for 15 minutes just to be by herself. And so Greg would go talk about that with the playwrights group, and they’re like, Yeah, that’s still not strong enough, which infuriated me. So Greg would say, well, what if she had a grandchild? At some point, I’d love to be a grandmother, but I don’t want to be the middle aged actress on stage whose primary motivation is that I hope I get grandchildren. I’m not interested in that. Haven’t they seen tough female characters on stage? Greg eventually told me he had made changes to the script and I finally read it and without giving away too much, Ma has this whole fantasy of a better world, which involves polyandry, the system of mating, where a woman will have multiple partners, multiple male partners as a means to strengthen the gene pool. So basically, she should screw lots of men, because it’ll make a better baby. And I was amazed. He pivoted from grandchildren to a matriarchal polyandrous version of the world. I performed it for the first time in New Hampshire, right before the Delta variant of COVID. I was on stage and all these older women in the audience were laughing and pumping their fists in the air. And I was singing into a microphone and decided to really go for it. My husband is pretty cool. Thank you, Greg.
EB: Is there any part of the plot of The End of All Flesh that relies on environmentalism in the way Urinetown does?
GK: It kind of uses the Noah story, or a portion of the Noah story, as the jumping off point. It imagines Noah from the Bible, in the way that you know, Noah and his clan landed on a mountain top and read in the human story as the last surviving human beings on earth after the flood. So this imagines a clan of four mountain people also surviving a flood. But instead, this is in some nondescript future, they have to live on this mountain, because it is the only habitable part of Earth. It’s a parable. All the characters refer to themselves as caricatures. So it’s humans trying to start life again after an ecological catastrophe. Our audience is living in the now, and we are speaking to them from their future, a future world of their great, great, great grandchildren who come back to tell them what is going to happen.
AH: Yeah, we’re ghosts from the future with a cautionary tale to share with people of the earth of today, and as a warning. And in that way, it’s different from Urinetown, because Urinetown was sort of, well, I guess it was similar, but the chronology wasn’t so different. It was more like a parallel world.
GK: Part of the thought of Urinetown is how to write a show about what happens after it’s already too late. And just to kind of concede to that without offering a whole lot of hope and see what happens. So yes, this is more severe. There’s a part of Urinetown where Sally appeals to a man at the top asking that he listen to the musical next time, and he tells her that people don’t like to hear about their way of life being unsustainable. I think The End of All Flesh haunts the same way. We’re telling the audience that our way of life is unsustainable. It’s already very, very dire. It’s really well past the point at which we could have corrected our course like a miracle to avoid something terrible from happening. But you know, it’s good if they laugh, if they have a good time, and you know, leave singing a song. Leave saying like, Oh, that line was so funny, or those lyrics were so funny. But also say that the show is right. You know, we are wasting all our resources. We have to be more conservative with our resources. And the people who are discussing getting resources more locally, that’s just a drop in the bucket. Hopefully this show will start some conversations in the bar afterward, where people will say it was funny and that it had a very serious message underneath that we all should be talking about a lot more,
EB: Urinetown is very Brechtian, which it seems is at odds with the ethos of The Neo-Futurists,. How did you contend with those two traditions?
GK: There’re two different traditions in Urinetown. There’s a Neo-Futurist bent to Urinetown, without it being orthodoxy. If you were to ask me if it was a Neo-Furtist show, I would say no, but we’re happy to claim an association because it has roots in that form. Brecht calls attention to itself, and the artifice and manipulation of theatre. So the overtness of it, unapologetically, overtness, its point of view, while it’s not quite as ferocious– the stakes are certainly different from when Brecht was writing and there were Brown Shirts versus Bolsheviks in the street– some of those tendencies are present. When I was writing Urinetown, it was not an existential right versus left, winner takes all struggle. It was sort of a layering thing. With Cardiff Giant, the aesthetic was very much a kind of cerebral improv comedy where the characters are big and broad. With that company, there were a few rules, one was no swear words and the other was no pop culture references. Mark and implemented those rules into this show. There are no four-letter words in Urinetown. There’s one ‘bastard,’ but that’s as harsh as we get. And then the Neo-Futurist layer was the conceit for the show. The most efficient way I could sort out the setting of the scene was to have a narrator at the top stating directly to the audience that they were in this place watching this show. I just thought it was like a curtain raiser in the way of maybe Into the Woods or perhaps Our Town. I shared the script with one of my fellow Cardiff Giant ensemble members, whose name is Scott Hermes, and he noted that the way the character of Officer Lockstock was used at the top was good and that I should do it throughout the show.
AH: Oh, I never knew that about Scott.
GK: Yeah. He said he liked that and told us to do more of it. And so that’s where I realized that there’s a lot of stage value in just describing what’s happening. Then we have Little Sally who is a type of foil. The first step was creating story and characters and conceding to that world with songs. And then the second step was how to communicate that to an audience. In The End of All Flesh, Ayun has this whole relationship with the audience that she plays quite clearly.
AH: I love talking to the audience. I love it.
GK: She’s very aware of, you know, the kind of show that she’s in and how the audience is responding.
I spoke with Greg Kotis nearly a year later on March 31st. He was speaking to me from his apartment in East Harlem having just returned from a workshop of a new project in Washington, D.C. We caught up about all the projects he’d been involved in since the premiere of The End of All Flesh last spring.
EB: Hello Greg! What have you been up to since we last spoke?
GK: I’m working on two projects right now. One is a bluegrass musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona called Two Gents and the other project is a piece with Theater of the Apes called I Am Nobody. It opens this Monday, April 6th at The Magnet Theater.
EB: Is Two Gents a project with Mark Hollmann?
GK: No, this is a guy named Aaron Posner. He’s a director and playwright and all around theater guy, and he has a long list of his own plays and adaptations that he’s written. He saw The End of All Flesh last year and he liked the score. He told me he had an idea for a kind of jug band sound for a version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. So, over the past, from I guess August until now, we’ve been meeting and writing songs and cutting songs to create a score from this show.
EB: Can you tell me about the process of each project?
GK: I am Nobody is a new musical that we originally premiered in March of 2020. We had something like three public performances and then all of New York shut down. So it was a very truncated run. The performances were at The Tank, an Off-Off Broadway theater. Then it sat in a drawer for six years, or I guess five and we decided Theater of the Apes should revisit this musical l because it still felt so relevant. The show is about the perils of technology and technology running amok and driving people to madness. That’s sort of what it’s about, but it’s that as a comedy. It’s an evergreen subject that became particularly relevant in 2025 and 2024 because of AI, and everything social media is doing to our culture and minds. So we thought that now was the time to do it.
This is a show that’s close to our hearts, and as a short small cast musical, it’s a very Theater of the Apes show. This is the third musical that we’ve done. The first show was called The Truth about Santa, which was an alternative dark comedy about Christmas Eve, our Christmas Offering. And then, last spring we did The End of All Flesh.
EB: Are you considering these three works something of a trilogy?
GK: No, they’re very different. They’re all preoccupied with things like a world that’s stumbling forward and all have a sort of dystopian feeling to them. The connective tissue is our sensibility and the issues that we’re preoccupied with and also trying to be funny about it. They’re all comedies.
EB: Has the script of I Am Nobody changed since your initial run?
GK: Not much, just tweaks and sort of tightening things and but it really, it turns out, is as relevant now as it was then. I don’t really do realism, or I haven’t yet. My work has more of an allegorical feeling to it. This is the most realistic of the of these three musicals that we have produced as Theater Of the Apes. But, that being said, it’s not that realistic at all. It’s sort of a broad comedically inverted world.
EB: Are there direct references to AI, or does the idea of it hover in the background?
GK: The conceit of the show is that people periodically take out their phones and compose some underscoring for a song that they want to sing. So they tell the audience, Hey, I just, I just composed it on my phone! You can do that now! When I wrote the piece in 2020, it was a fanciful idea that you could whip out your phone and create some kind of underscoring. But now you can really do that. There are programs that can spit out a screenplay in the voice of Woody Allen or something that takes place in Ancient Greece. We live in a world where something that was once a refined and specific discipline can now be created with robots. They can’t do it as well as a human being. The arrangements in this show are all made by humans. Human beings did everything and created everything in our show. But this is what’s changed since I wrote the show. The world has caught up to the fanciful speculation of the play.
EB: This feels like such a hanging fruit question, but are you worried or concerned about the future of your field because of AI?
GK: Oh, always. Theater has been on its deathbed for hundreds of years. You know, every new technology that’s come around has pointed towards the death of theater: whether it’s talkies, radio, television, or the internet, each new technology comes with its own threats, because we’re competing for people’s attention. Looking around the theater world today, it feels more in duress and more in crisis than I can remember. This has to do with audiences staying away because it’s easier to stay home and watch Netflix than it is to go out to a play. And the cost to mount a play is rising. The patronage of the government now seems more in doubt than ever. Theater and the arts are always the first sort of sacrifice. It’s always easy to cut arts funding.
From what I can tell, theater is retracting. It’s never going to disappear, but it’s in retreat. Once upon a time you would have, for example, costume designers trained in illustration so that they could render a costume before building it. Now, from what I hear, that’s something that AI is doing. There are lots of jobs in the theater world that now are probably going to be done to some degree by AI. I do think, however, we’re offering something different. We’re selling human contact. Those are human beings in front of you, a few feet in front of you, acting and behaving and telling a story. Theater’s strength is offering the opposite of everything that technology is offering. It’s acoustic. It’s immediate. Anything can happen. A prop can fall, a door can stick, all those things can happen that are part of the thrill of seeing people do something live. In an age when so many of us, myself included, find ourselves sequestered in our homes and rooms, theater demands that you come out and sit side by side with other people. And that’s, as social animals, a perennial need. To be with each other.
EB: Ironically that may be the thing that keeps it going.
GK: Yeah, right. We have always been in a sort of a scarcity, a realm of scarcity, scarcity of attention, scarcity of resources and scarcity of support. But the thing we do have is the people who do it are pretty passionate and want to do it. That’s ultimately the big driver that keeps it going, that people want to do it. They love being on stage. They love performing for other audiences. They love the feeling of a live event.
EB: Is Two Gents your first work of adaptation?
GK: I have worked on adaptations as a librettist and a lyricist, but Two Gents is my first adaptation as a songwriter. Typically I work with my longtime writing partner Mark on stuff without underlying property that we have to honor or navigate. We just make stuff up. Then I do these other projects where I write the score, because I like to do that. It’s fun for me. I am not a sophisticated composer like you might hear in a Broadway show. What I like to do is sit with my guitar and cycle through chords and come up with melodies.
For Two Gents, Aaron approached me and said it would be great to create songs in the style of The End of All Flesh for Two Gentlemen of Verona. He asked if I’d like to do that, and I said yes because it sounded like a great challenge for me. I’m very curious about the experience of being a composer because I’ve been on the other side of that, and I know what it is like to speak to a composer about inserting songs in sections of dialogue. I suddenly found myself sitting on the other side of the proverbial table hearing a book writer suggesting where we needed a song. Given my experience, I know what kind of information to ask in contemplating what kinds of songs need to be created. Questions like is this moment euphoric or melancholic? How do we create an opening? Initially, Aaron sent me lyrics to set to music, which is a very typical way to write a musical. But, I found that I am so limited as a composer that I needed to change the lyrics to set them to the music I was writing. When you’re writing a musical theater song, you want to establish some kind of set pattern that will then repeat exactly. And there needs to be, in my mind, some precision. I had to begin by making the lyrics land on the music and melodies I was creating. And then as we were working, we found we could sort of loosen things a bit. I became free to write lyrics as well. So maybe I’ll write lyrics for a song, and I’ll send them to him. It became very organic.
We also had a very strict deadline. We had to have the score ready for rehearsals, which started in, I think January. It was a very fast process. Mark and I have projects that we’ve been working on for like, 10 years or more and they’re still not done. This was very fast, getting it on its feet. I went down to DC last weekend to see the run and now we’re preparing it for the American Players Theater in Wisconsin, which is a professional theater with a warm weather season. The interesting thing about American Players Theater is that they don’t do musicals. We are now in the process of purging the score of anything that feels too much like a musical to turn it into, and this is sort of a fuzzy distinction, a play with music. We’re leaning as much as possible into this, the feeling of a play with music. There are direct lines, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, where the characters make references to singing songs for each other, so that allows the show to not rely on moments where characters burst into song.
EB: Which is the thing everyone says they hate about musicals, alas. What is your process with Mark like?
GK: We’ve done a couple of adaptations, but it’s, you know, really, what we do is we write original work. The musicals that are completely original. So I will write something– maybe it’s an entire play– and I’ll present it to Mark. Then we will start reading and identifying songs and their locations, keeping in mind certain musical theater traditions like where a protagonist reveals their wants or discoveries.
EB: You and Ayun are both performing in I Am Nobody, correct?
GK: Yes.
EB: Is that part of The Theater of the Apes’ mission?
GK: Not necessarily. I mean, we’re cheap, and we can perform for free, but really this is something that we really love to do. Everyone, I think, in theater, begins as an actor at some point. We were actors in high school and in college and a little bit afterwards. And then, just due to where our interests and lives took us, we stepped back from performing to raise kids and learned that writing is something that we could do. So that really occupied this vast swath of time between college and our early 20s, and then now, four years later, we’re like, hey, this would be fun to act again. So, I would say, like, we’ve made this production company so that we can cast ourselves in shows. This is our idea of a good time, even if it’s just a humble Off-Off Broadway stage. That’s fine.
Tickets for I Am Nobody can be purchased here.
More information about Two Gents can be found here.
Check out the soundtrack of The End of All Flesh here.
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