TINA LANDAU: There never was an intention to make a show. Sometimes you start with an outline or structure and then create things to fill certain needs or functions, but this process was really the opposite. There was preexisting material that Adam wrote in his studio. But even once we conceived of putting it together, we believed that a structure would emerge. I think of the development of the show in terms of Michelangelos stone sculptures. He believed that inside the stone was a pre-existing figure that would reveal itself if he started chipping away at the block of stone.
ADAM GUETTEL: Or you could say that instead of starting from the block, we've started with the chips. In the truest sense, this is an autobiographical piece in that we weren't constrained by a narrative form; the songs themselves were not intended for anything, and their forms are very intuitive. But the composite of those chips, if you will, may eventually make something elegant. The material was born of simple impulses—the myths and the hymns—and there were really no coordinates.
GUETTEL: The myths came naturally. I had a melody, a whole song—all the music was written, which is often the case with me. I don't know what I was trying to write about, but then this line, "Icarus was not an achiever," just occurred to me, for no apparent reason—I wasn't studying myths or anything—and I started riffing on it. The rest of the myths followed from that song.
WILEY HAUSAM: Did you feel that you were not an achiever at that point?
GUETTEL: I always feel a pressure to achieve, and the sense of having a predominating figure that you want to try to overshadow—that whole metaphor that's within Icarus—probably issomething thats working its way out of my subconscious. But I certainly didn't say, I have a famous grandfather [Richard Rodgers] so l have to write about Icarus. The question of stakes is coming up a lot for me and Tina now because were trying to find a new project. Something can have really high stakes on the surface, but not really high emotional stakes. This hymnal just immediately felt like something that I wanted to do, that I had to do. I started writing these songs when I was about to be 2CJ. My twenties had kind of worn me down, and I was beginning to reach for something and I didn't know what. Then I come across this hymnal and had an actual physical response to it, and an uncharacteristic outpouring of creativity. It meant something to me, and I didn't know why. I still don't.
HAUSAM: The material chose you. Did that happen with Floyd Collins?
LANDAU: I wanted to do something about what it is to be American in this culture at this time, and I found a paragraph in a Reader's Digest Great American Stories book that described Floyd's plight when he was trapped in the cave, and the carnival that had sprung up above ground—the "death watch carnival." That's all we had to go on in the beginning, that metaphor. When I showed it to Adam with about eight other ideas, he pushed everything to the side and pointed to it and said: That one. It was that immediate. It expressed something for us about what it feels like to be alive. Way back in the beginning of working on Saturn, I found something that I had that response to—a structure that Adam wasn't interested in because he was really committed to leaving it open. After we tried to turn it into a more dramatic theater event and the piece resisted it, I finally looked at Adam and thought, my real reason for doing this now, aside from the fact that different songs move me in different ways so l feel connected to the material, is hits. I don't think I've ever done a piece before where I haven't worked very hard to figure out what about it for me feels necessary, and in this case that for me is him.
HAUSAM: During the process of uncovering the show's form we did it as a concert in Northampton, where it worked remarkably well, I thought.
LANDAU: Most people responded to it viscerally, but there was a question that sort of blossomed and lingered in the air, which was: But what is it? That became the refrain that we heard from a lot of people, and it did haunt us. It spurred us on. We really had to think about questions of form and genre. What is a revue, what is a concert, what is musical theater? What makes a story? What do audiences expect? When we tried to stage this material, with the musicians more or less not visible and the audiences watching things performed and staged, with choreography and situations—like I tend to think of in a revue—it didn't work.
GUETTEL: When we first performed it at The Public, we took a step towards a more narrative approach. There was a joy and a lot of energy there, but the response was a little bit more confused than after the concert, and so we thought, we're going in the right direction but we haven't gone far enough. Then we did it with our full-on narrative approach and that was the least successful.
LANDAU: It was, although I maintain to this day that if we wanted to work on it for another year or two, we could turn it into something spectacular and special. But we'd be working on a dead impulse. We could take that narrative version and manipulate it through our craft into something else, but that's not what this is.
GUETTEL: "Dead impulse" is such a key phrase, because it's not in any way that we've lost interest. I'm still totally involved emotionally in this work, but there's not a lot left for me to write. I also think that the four section structure I came up with for the narrative version—Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired—comes out of my life in a strong way, but is much more on the surface than the real connections are in this piece. The connections are deeper than that for the audience. I've thought about this a lot, because people are always asking us to tell them why this material belongs in the same piece, but I feel that it belongs together on a deeper level and speaks powerfully, and we're not interested in trying to superimpose other constructs.
HAUSAM: I don't think that you could go through this creative process in the commercial theater, which is based on the audience's expectations of form and genre, like "musical comedy" and "revue."
GUETTEL: Tina and I are interested in communicating to the widest possible audience, which is how we define commercial. We have been given a great opportunity to forge forward and then return to our first impulses—we've had a lot of time to work on this and we've been supported throughout. This is the piece that I know I have to do to get to a point where my ideas will be accessible to a larger group of people. I'm learning how to communicate by getting really personal.
HAUSAM: Isn't it interesting that, in discovering that this particular musical isn't a "musical," we realized that not only does content determine form, but that in this instance the content, the form, and the creative process all reflect each other. They're all circular.
GUETTEL The whole show is framed by the song "Saturn Returns," which is about the flight from the self. The song says "I want something—I don't know what it is. I'm missing something. I feel vaguely that I had it a long time ago, but I don't remember what it is and I want it really badly." The myths and the hymns serve as attempts to reach for what is missing —the myths are our behaviors and the hymns are our prayers. At the end of the show is the "Saturn Returns" reprise called "The Return," in which the protagonist says, I am all of these thing that we've just sung about and seen. There's a sort of sunlit moment, a moment of self-acceptance. And in this hour that we've just listened to, those are the chips that will hopefully form the elegant structure.
Content belongs to Showbill, Copyright April, 1998.