I almost gave up.

That’s where this story started.  It was the fall of 2014, and I was two years out of grad school (the NYU/Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program).  I’d gotten lucky a couple months after graduation — the York Theatre Company off-Broadway had offered me a slot in their Developmental Reading Series for my musical Leni Riefenstahl Is Going To Tell You The Truth, which was thrilling.  My show!  An off-Broadway theatre!  Things were happening!

But they weren’t, really.  While the rehearsal process had been fantastic, the reading itself was a let-down — it rained that day, so almost all of the industry people invited were no-shows, and nobody expressed any ongoing interest in the show.  (Usually important people send their assistants to things like this, and even assistants don’t want to go out in the rain on a Friday afternoon. Fair!)  In retrospect, it was very cocky of me to put a rough first draft in front of an audience I didn’t know, and I learned it the hard way.  A weird old man came up to me afterwards and said, “I missed the first 15 minutes of the show, but I didn’t catch any repeating melodies.  Do you have any shows that have repeating melodies in them?”  Oof.

The feedback that I’d gotten on Leni was that it was an exciting idea and that there was gold to be mined in the work I’d already done, but that it was a long way from “ready”.  More to the point, in 2012, nobody understood why I would want to tackle propaganda, fascism, antisemitism and Hollywood’s treatment of women in a musical.  It’s dangerous material — even though the world’s caught up with it, people are still afraid of it.  I get it.  But it was disappointing to me that nobody wanted to give the show — or me — a chance.

I wasn't daunted, though. I kept writing. I started tackling another big, ambitious project — an adaptation of the Salomé story set at the 1964 World’s Fair — and started realizing as I got into the thick of it that it was too big to be the thing that got me “in the door”, so to speak.  The scope of it was enormous, and though I was very proud of the work I’d done on it, I knew it was too big of a project for where I was in my career, which felt like nowhere.  Like every other “emerging” writer in the industry, I was dutifully applying for every grant, fellowship and developmental opportunity in sight, and at a certain point, I felt like I was just getting the same ten doors slammed in my face over and over, just as the Muppets had in the harrowing musical theatre documentary The Muppets Take Manhattan:

And like so many aspiring artists in NYC, I was up against the harsh economic reality of surviving in one of the world’s most expensive cities.  I’d gotten a decent job working in a skyscraper in Times Square as a legal assistant for a giant corporate law firm, but the catch of it was that I had to work overnight — 11:30 PM to 6:30 AM.  

So here I was, living in a strange vampire reality, barely seeing my friends, barely staying afloat, and nobody seemed to care about anything I was doing creatively.  All I wanted was to be making theatre, and there didn’t seem to be a way forward.  The odds were against me — I was one of hundreds of people in the same position.  I spent hours sitting in diners moping to Danny Mefford, my best friend from high school and my closest collaborator, that I didn’t know how to make anyone care enough to give me a chance.  Danny very gently suggested that I write something small — something that would be cheap and easy to produce — to help make my case to the world.  “Then you can come back to the big scary things,” he said.

I didn’t have any ideas for a “small” show.  I didn’t have any ideas at all, really.  And I was tired.  (Literally.  You don’t realize just how important sleep is until you fully upend your circadian rhythms for years at a time.)  I remember crying on the phone with my mom, telling her that I was considering giving it all up and moving back home to Louisville, and she said to me, “Listen.  Nobody wants you to move home more than I do, but I know in my heart that it’s not actually what you want.  Please don’t give up.  Not yet.”

She must have told my brother how I was feeling, because he called me out of the blue and said, “Hey, I just heard a thing on NPR that I think you should listen to.  The book critic from Fresh Air wrote a book about the history of The Great Gatsby and how it came to be such an important thing, and… it just made me think of you.”

So as I settled in to do some wee hours proofreading in a midtown Manhattan cubicle, I pulled out my headphones and Googled this NPR piece.  It’s still online, right here.  

I’d fallen in love with The Great Gatsby as a seventh grader.  I’d asked my English teacher Mrs. Wilborn to recommend a favorite book to me, and that’s what she suggested, but added, “Promise me you’ll read it again when you’re a little older, too.”  At the time, I was indignant — "joke's on you, lady, pretty sure I’m going to understand it the first time!” — but as an adult, I now know what she meant.  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote beautifully about disappointment and regret as the flip side of being idealistic and ambitious, and I had yet to see the flip side at 13.  That said, I revisited Gatsby multiple times over the years, not because I didn’t get it, but because of the joy of reading it.  It’s my favorite novel of all time, and I know a lot of people feel that way about it, too.

But at 30, I had seen the flip side, and so to hear Maureen Corrigan (in discussing her excellent book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures) recount how Scott Fitzgerald died thinking he was a failure — with Gatsby out of print no less — moved me deeply.  “In a small way, I was an original,” he said in a letter to his editor begging to get the book back in print and asking to borrow money not long before he died.  I was ugly crying at my desk at 2 AM, dumbstruck that he’d felt the same kind of despair I was feeling in that moment.

So I fell down a rabbit hole.  I mentioned to my friend and coworker Hilda Daniel on one of my overnight shifts that I’d taken an interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald and she lent me her well-loved copy of The Crack-Up, and so much of what I read on the page not only mirrored how I was feeling, but sang on the page.  As I read more about Scott, I naturally started reading more about Zelda, and suddenly I was off to the races.

A few weeks later, my friend Rick Cekovsky found me on one of our shared graveyard shifts and asked if I’d be willing to present some songs in a month at an informal event hosted by his theatre company, The TRUF, at Jimmy’s No. 43, a bar in the East Village.  I hadn’t written anything new in months, and my first instinct was to say no.  But by this point Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were taking up prime real estate in my head, and I’d always wanted to write songs in the styles native to their lifetime.  So I said, “Sure, I can throw something together!”  And I reached out and asked a couple of friends to sing (my NYU classmate Nikko Benson and Tiffany Topol, one of my favorite singers full-stop) and set out as an experiment to write a song for Scott, a song for Zelda, and a song for them both.  

The songs that came out of this experiment were “Pacific Time”, “I’ll Be Here”, and “Dry” — all of which are still in the show.

Writing these songs felt like nothing I’d ever written before.  Because I’d reached a point where I assumed that the New York theatre didn’t give a shit about me, and probably never would, I wrote these songs for an audience of one:  me.  I felt like a mad scientist putting “Dry” together — there’s an essay called “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—“ written by both of them (well, written by her and copyedited by him, I later learned) that suggested a song to me that would be witty, bawdy and wild.  The entire time I wrote, I thought, “Nobody will ever let me get away with this.”

Well, they did.  The audience reaction at that first performance of songs at Jimmy’s No. 43 was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.  I basically said to the crowd beforehand, “I just wrote these songs, I don’t know if this adds up to anything, but maybe there’s a show here?”  And afterwards, almost every single person in the audience said, “There’s a show here.  And you have to write it.”

The problem was, in my research, I’d found that I wasn’t the first person who’d tried to make the Fitzgeralds sing.  There were other musicals about them already — hell, I’d already seen a really provocative and interesting short one at NYU, as the aforementioned Nikko Benson and John Dietrich had written a piece about Scott, Zelda and Ernest Hemingway for their 20-minute triangle exercise.  But even during that excellent piece, I found myself thinking that Hemingway was sucking up all the air in the room, like most of history’s greatest assholes tend to do.  No, what I wanted to see was just the interior world of Scott and Zelda, the weird fragile bubble of their relationship, and everything that threatened that bubble.

So I thought, huh.  Nobody gives a shit what you’re doing, and who knows if anyone will ever see it, anyway?  So do what you want to do.  Write the show you want to see. And so I started writing…