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STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the theatre for young audiences industry. Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional to hear their stories about the audition, rehearsal, and development process of theatre for young audiences. Each of them have bridged the path from youth to adulthood while living in worlds created for children. My guests have mounted shows small enough to fit in a minivan to productions so big they travel by caravan. You can join the conversation by emailing PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or messaging @PipeAndDrapeStories on Instagram.
This is Episode 7 of Pipe and Drape. This pipe and drape story focuses on the challenge of adapting short stories for children into an hour long, small cast musical. My guest directed and co-wrote a massive collaboration between some of his favorite writers for a new TYA show to tour out of New York City. You’ll find out all about the writing and creating process for TYA in this episode! Thank you for listening with me today.
S: Today's guest is writer/actor/director, Marcus Stevens. Marcus embodied Mandy Patinkin and other legends in recent Off-Broadway versions of Forbidden Broadway (both Alive and Kickin’ and Comes Out Swingin’), performances that received praise of “sheer genius” and comparison to Hirschfeld’s caricature brilliance from the Associated Press and New York Times, respectively. You've also seen Marcus onstage with York Theater Company, Pittsburgh CLO and all the other theaters in Pittsburgh, Walnut Street Theatre, and Mandy many more. In addition to singing sweet Mandy nothings into your earbuds, Marcus provided the lyrics and stories to a number of musicals, including Mythic, which premiered in London in 2019, the Richard Rogers Award-winning musical RED, Yo, Vikings!, and Live and Let Spy (created and recorded begin zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic.) He directed and developed the tour ofDragons Love Tacos and Other Stories, concerts, musicals, and (on top of all of this) he shares his creative gifts as a teacher and coach. Marcus is a director and educator with Upper Darby Summer Stage, which is how he and I met. Marcus shared the stage with fellow New York personalities Bree Lowdermilk and Josh young at Strath Haven High School, which is also my alma mater. For years I had seen his face in posters on the walls of my high school's arts wing, and I finally had the opportunity to work with him after I graduated (first as a coach, then a director.) And today Marcus is joining me from his New York apartment to discuss his work adapting and directing Dragons Love Tacos and Other Stories. Marcus, welcome.
MARCUS STEVENS: Thank you for that amazing intro. It makes me..it makes me feel so, so good about myself. [Laughter.] It’s so great to be here.
S: I'm very glad to have you because you are actually the first director/writer that I am interviewing for this.
M: That's exciting! That's cool.
S: Yeah! So when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
M: When I started out thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was like in elementary school, I wanted to be an animator. Like, I wanted to basically be like the next Walt Disney. I used to like draw things. Now that I look back at that it's like I wanted to tell stories essentially. And then I discovered theatre and there was really like no turning back. And I was interested in a lot of things at a very young age. I was performing all the time in middle school shows and Young People's Theatre Workshop (which was a program in the area) and Upper Darby Summer Stage. But I was also really interested in writing. I used to pour over these Sondheim coffee table books that I got from my bar mitzvah and like stuff like that. And I was interested in set design. I was just interested in theatre in general. I think when I got to high school I sort of narrowed my view and said, ‘I want to be an actor,’ but I got to college and I couldn't stop writing while I was studying acting. So I've now come to this place where I'm like…I'm really glad that I didn't pigeonhole myself. I just kind of wanted to be a storyteller. I tell stories in a lot of different ways.
S: Strath Haven now has a class (Advanced Studio Theatre) which is student-run productions. And so that actually started with your independent study when you were in high school and you had directed/put together a production of The Fantasticks. Was that your first experience running the show?
M: Yeah, I think so. I remember being really, really interested in sort of creating something from the ground up and collaborating with all of my friends to make something. I had a student choreographer and a student music director and a student orchestra pit. And it was so amazing that John Shankweiler (who ran the program over there), it was so amazing that he actually was like, ‘Yeah, sure. You can do that,’ and I feel so honored that that turned into a class and is now a staple at the school.
S: Yeah. I took that class every year in high school. That was an additional two shows I did every year just because I was taking this class where we had eighty minutes a day to work on something, which was really cool because I found as a kid growing up, theatre was my escape. Do you remember seeing theatre in your elementary school growing up?
M: Oh sure! Yeah. I remember a couple of touring groups coming through, and I remember sitting in the main room (whatever that is) the cafegymnatorium and watching these things. And I remember being so fascinated by the people performing. And I remember I was so excited in third grade because we did a musical (our third grade class) and I remember thinking like, ‘Oh, I'm going to be like those people that come to our school and do these plays.’
S: How did you get involved with adapting and directing Dragons Love Tacos and Other Storieswith TheaterWorks in the city?
M: You had mentioned in your introduction I had written RED with Bree Lowdermilk when she was in…she was a senior in high school when I was in college. And essentially, as you said, theatre is an escape, and I did not want to go to college parties. And so I stayed home and wrote a musical! It was a good excuse to be like, ‘I can't come out tonight. I'm I'm writing.’ Really it was like, it was just something to keep me occupied, and we were very lucky that Point Park produced the first production of that show. And we just happened to…we submitted to a bunch of things, and we won the Richard Rogers Award, which was like, I didn't even know what the Richard Rogers Award was when we won it. And that really sort of catapulted my interest in like, ‘Oh, well maybe I can do this professionally too. Like maybe I can be a writer.’ Bree and I had also written a show for Summer Stage that was a TYA show called Elliot and the Magic Bed, which was a totally original thing. It was an amazing opportunity that Harry Dietzler at Upper Darby Summer Stage gave us to commission a show of ours. And the thing that got me to the city finally was that I got into the BMI workshop, which is basically a workshop for writers who are interested in writing musicals. That's where I met one of my other collaborators, Sam Willmott, who I wrote this show Yo, Vikings! with for Summer Stage also. But essentially we were like, ‘Oh, well we should take Yo, Vikings! and get some professional theatre to do it. And so that was my first introduction to TheaterWorksUSA. We had a meeting with Barbara Pasternak over there to present to her Yo, Vikings! and Barbara really liked Yo, Vikings!, but she was like, ‘It's not a known title. It's not a show that is going to sell as well.’ But she and I kept in touch over the years. She saw a piece that I directed in the New York Fringe Festival, and she was like, ‘I think you'd be really good to direct this new thing that I'm developing.’ And she brought me in to have a meeting about that, and it ended up that she was like, ‘It's this anthology piece that's like a bunch of children's books.’ I think she had like one or two of those books already adapted into like these like ten/fifteen minute pieces. And then she was like, ‘But the other ones haven't been written yet and I haven't been able to find somebody to write it.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I could write it.’ And she remembered that I had written Yo, Vikings! and she was like, 'Oh! I loved that piece! Yeah! Yeah, why don't you write it?’ So I ended up sort of being a multihyphenate on that production, which was that I wrote and directed. So I sort of wrote two thirds of the show and directed the piece.
S: This show had a lot of people involved. It it looks like a massive collaboration. Some [all] of the other writers: Brendon Milburn, Janet Allard, Sam Salmond, Mark Sonnenblick, Ben Wexler, Joe Kinosian, and Bree Lowdermilk (teaming up again!) Were all of these writers in the room with you when you were working on this or was it all just kind of everyone divides and conquers a little bit to the show?
M: There was maybe one or two times throughout the process where all the writers were there. This show was four or five different books. And so each writing team was sort of given a book. I was asked to write Dragons Love Tacos, which I got my friend Joe Kinosian to write with me who I met at BMI. (Joe also wrote Murder for Two.) We couldn't figure out how we were going to connect the stories. A lot of times when they do these anthology shows for TheaterWorks, they just sort of do an opening number and it feels sort of review like, and I really didn't want it to feel that way. And we came across this other New York Times bestselling book called Interrupting Chicken, which is basically about this little chicken whose dad is reading her bedtime stories to go to bed, but she keeps interrupting the stories ‘cause she knows what's going to happen. And we were like, ‘Oh, well, what if that's like the opening sequence, and then the rest of the show is them reading these other stories?’ And so they’re these two characters that sort of have an arc and go through the whole thing. And so Barbara was like, ‘I love that. That's a great idea. Let's have you write that sort of arc.’ And because we were having different writers write different pieces to give…so that each story had its own sound and its own sort of vernacular, we didn't want me and Joe to write the opening sequence and Dragons Love Tacos because we wanted the opening to have its own The Opening and the sort of like connective tissue to have its own sound and its own feeling. And I was like, ‘Well, I'll call Bree!’ The beginning of it was…we did a developmental workshop where we sort of spent a couple of…we would spend like a couple of days on each individual sort of chunk/individual story, and we'd work on that story with those writers. And we brought in a bunch of actors and sort of developed each individual story, and then we eventually started piecing the whole thing together. And then we did a sort of a workshop slash mini tour in New York City later that year. I believe that there were like maybe two times throughout that where like everyone was there.
S: Is it writing a show where you know, ‘Okay, I have fifteen minutes to tell this story or these five stories, I have this many actors, and I know that the show has to fit in a van.’ Given those parameters, did that have a big effect on how you chose to build this piece?
M: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I love about the theatre is that there are certain things that you can get away with on stage that you can't get away with in any other medium. And that is that theatre is the only is the only place where you can…you know the example that you can always point to is Peter and the Starcatcherwhere you can hold up a piece of rope and say, ‘This is a door,’ and the audience will fill in the rest of the…they will use their imagination and fill in the rest. I love that sort of sense of play and that sort of scrappiness about TYA. And it's probably because I grew up doing things like Summer Stage and creating The Fantasticks with no budget, with my friends. It’s that theatre is the most fun for me when it is scrappy, when it is like, ‘Let's figure this out, how do we make magic out of this cardboard box that we have?’ My son is almost four now, and that's literally what he does, is that he will find a cardboard box and it becomes like seven different things. And you know, it is such a great lesson to us as theater makers, because it's like (especially when you're making a show for kids), it’s that if their imaginations can do that with the cardboard box, it's like we have to put ourselves in that place and say, ‘How do I make these five locations out of this one set and make it so that it feels magical?’ I was really into this idea of it really feeling like just five actors running around and playing with various found objects to sort of make magic, with us using our imagination as an audience, and then sort of being the facilitators of that. So the whole thing was created with that in mind because we knew what the limitations were, but those limitations often are what makes the show the best that it can be. I think the fun of it was figuring out how can we make this feel cohesive but also feel like we're surprising you at every turn. And we're taking something very small and making something very big out of it.
S: So as a director, what did you do to get your actors to tap into that imagination/creative world to get on board with that? There's a lot of times at TheaterWorks where the actors are fresh out of college and they've just studied Meisner or Chekhov or whatever, and then they're jumping into this world where everything's moving like this [Snaps around.] and there's a lot of endowing (set wise) to make things work. So what was your approach to that with these actors, with those young adults?
M: One thing that I was very careful to do in auditions was sort of try and create a very sort of warm environment where they felt free to play and where it didn't feel like I was judging them on anything. That it was literally just like, ‘Hey! Let's experiment with some stuff. What could this police officer who loves to eat toast talk like? What does this character like? What is this, you know?’ And we would play in the room. I really tried to sort of create that environment and the people that were willing to sort of really play with me were the people that we ended up using, because we felt like that was the atmosphere that we wanted to set up. And I did remind them (because I think you're right, that especially with young actors who have just studied
S: What kind of discoveries did you and your team make during the process, either workshopping the show, working on your mini tour or with the first cast?
M: When you get it in front of an audience of kids, you can tell when they are getting restless. You know when you've stayed too long at the farm and you need to tighten it up. You learn the pacing that is needed. You sort of learn that from an audience of kids. You don't ever need to talk down to kids at all, because sometimes you think like, ‘Oh, they're going to love this. This is so funny!’ and they are like… and they get restless, and you're like, ‘We've got to shorten that.’ And then you think, ‘Oh, this is…this is like…really like sincere and weighted and they're not gonna…they're not gonna pay attention.’ I think that's always a learning curve with kids. I think you never know what they're going to get out of those things. And the best TYA theater is when adults write a story that they think they…what I was trying to do with Dragons Love Tacosis make something that I would want to watch. When I was a kid I grew up watching the Muppets, and the Muppets aren't for kids. But what I got out of it was whatever I got out of it. I had one version of the story in my head, but missed all of the grownup jokes that were in there, I'm sure. It's always a good idea to write something that you would want to see in the world, and it happens to be okay for kids to see as well. I think that that makes for good TYA theatre.
S: So what are some things that you have taken away from your experience writing and directing material for kids. How has all of this changed your life as an artist or a dad?
M: I think, well, I've always been attracted to theatre for young audiences and stories for kids because I think it's the purest form of storytelling. I think it is (I don't want to use the word “simple” because it's not simple), but it is the most profound sometimes because there are hardly ever any subplots. You're really focused in on the thematic element of the story that you're telling. With Dragons Love Tacos the arc that we decided to go with was that this kid wanted to throw this party for dragons because he wanted friends, but his little sister who was tagging along the whole time he was sort of like ignoring. And then she ends up like saving the day and helping him figure it out, ad then he like realizes that she was there all along. Which is very, very simple, but in essence, if you really focus in on that and really dig deep into what that is about, that relationship—it's just the most human thing. It's not talking about weighty ideas, it's just talking about very pure, deep human emotions, which is the most relatable storytelling you can… It's why adults love Disney movies. It's why we're all still so deeply connected to the shows that we did as kids, because those stories resonate because they are just so universal. I always gravitate back to that because I'll write something a little bit more “adult” that isn't necessarily for a children's audience, and then I'll always want to like go back and like refresh and write another kid's show. Sometimes when I write adult pieces…so Mythic is an adult piece, but it's based on Greek mythology, which is in essence, folk tales (which are what a lot of TYA shows are) and oftentimes when I would get stuck with Mythic I would go back and say, ‘What is the TYA version of this?’ and that would often reveal to me the most important part of what the scene is supposed to be, because what you're trying to do when you're reaching kids is hit them on this deeply human, emotional level with lots of heart. You’re just trying to get straight to the point of what is important about what's happening. And so I would always (when I would get stuck with Mythic), I'd be like, ‘What's the TYA version of this?’ And oftentimes (like nine times out of ten) that was the right way to go. And being a dad, it's just like, I mean, I'm just fascinated by my son's imagination. We play these imaginary games and I think to myself, ‘Gosh, I got to remember this the next time I'm writing,’ because this is so much more creative than I ever allow myself to be. [Laughter.] He's just…there's no filter. He's just…wild abandon. He just comes up with stuff. ‘You know what? This, this ship does this thing, and this ship does this thing.’Hhe doesn't edit himself. And I think that's a great thing for an artist to think about. That's exactly what we want to be able to do.
S: How can our listeners find out what you're up to; see more of your work?
M: They can go to my website, they can go to marcus-stevens.com. They can look, they can look me up on the Instagram! My handle is @marcusstevensny.
S: Be sure to check out Marcus’s work online and in person! One of his newest shows Wake Up Daisy written with collaborator Sam Willmott will play at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre in Central Park in 2022! Wake Up Daisy is a modern take on Sleeping Beauty and it’s set in New York City. It’s a fantasy with marionetted characters from all five boroughs of New York, original music, and flying tacos.
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You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. Artwork for Pipe and Drape was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today.
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