The Brooklyn Rail

There’s nothing quite like watching a phalanx of theater kids pretending to be football players. When I walk into Loading Dock Theatre, the compact black box loft in downtown Brooklyn where Leegrid Stevens’s new musical The Trojans is rehearsing, the show’s fleet-footed cast is hutting and hiking, their plastic prop helmets clacking against each other. The Trojans follows a group of corporate warehouse workers in modern-day Texas who, like the Ancient Greeks, relish in retelling battle victories—except in this loose adaptation of the Iliad, the warfare takes place at a 1980s high school football stadium, and instead of lyre-bearing muses, this story is sung through synthwave. The Brooklyn Rail sat down with writer Stevens to discuss his modern myth, which explores the notion of “glory days” and the power of nostalgic narrative.

Lily Goldberg (Rail): The Trojans uses vintage analog synthesizers in its score. How’d you start playing around with these instruments and the specific ones used in the show?

Leegrid Stevens: I saw people doing these things with cassette loops on YouTube, really making instantly aged and weathered and texturized music by putting it on a cassette and then messing with the speed. From there, I started getting into these vintage analog synths. There’s this one that is used a ton in the score called the “Maestro.” It’s a Soviet era-synthesizer: all the knobs are in Russian. That thing sounds so good. It sounds like weathered VHS tape immediately out of the synthesizer.

Rail: Synthwave didn’t actually originate in the 1980s; the genre itself is kind of revisionist nostalgia. Did you choose that music based around the theme of the play, or was it a natural match-up?

Stevens: I found the music and the theme sort of came out of that. It took a while, honestly. One of the last things that was added to the script was the idea that these are warehouse workers performing their past, a version of the town myth. Once that came in the script, then I could write it completely: I knew the connection to the music was a connection to a time when you felt like your dreams were alive and possible. And I knew the subtext of that meant that your present now is not where you wanted to be.

When I read the Iliad, it felt like invincible teenagers writing these emotions—they were almost like demigods. It’s once they doubted themselves that they suddenly became mortal. And I liked that idea too, in relation to the play. I was trying to juggle these ideas, and the warehouse finally allowed me to connect those.

Rail: The Trojans is set in Texas, and I know you’re from Texas as well. I was curious how that factored into your work?

Stevens: High school football is such a big thing in Texas, and all your myths—all the stories you tell—are somehow related to football. Texas is where I also started working in theater. And I transitioned out of football into theater.

Rail: You were a football player?

Stevens: Yeah, I played for a couple years.

Rail: What was your position?

Stevens: Defensive end. I’m like, nowhere near the build that you need to have for that position. But I felt like, if I put in a year or two of football, then people would leave me alone. And that worked.

Rail: The Trojans deals with self-mythology. To what extent can self-mythologizing help keep you alive and kind of invigorate you? Or do you believe that in this play, it’s a wholly negative thing?

Stevens: To be honest, you’re talking about the question I ask in almost every play: is delusion ever useful? When is it useful, and when does it veer off into dangerous territory? I don’t actually know the answer to this. It’s a really great question I want to keep tackling, or trying to. I do feel like the lies that you tell yourself—perhaps nostalgia, a little bit of delusion—are good and necessary; it’s very human. I got really inspired by that Samuel Beckett play Happy Days where this woman is buried up to her waist in rubble, and she’s trying to find reasons to be happy. She’s going through her bag, making organizations, and doing these little exercises while being deluded about her current, actual reality. It’s a really interesting play. I know I’m deluded about some things right now, absolutely, and to strip all that away might just be too depressing.

Rail: The dangers of mythology are very apparent on a political level. I was curious how it feels to be presenting this work amidst a lot of, like, very specific American mythologizing that I think can be very alarming.

Stevens: My previous play was all about conspiracy theories—what is the seduction there? Why do you want to believe these horrible nightmares about lizard people or a cabal of baby-blood–drinking pedophiles?

To believe in the devil, it does mean that the savior exists as well, and I do feel like people want to believe Trump is a savior. There’s a lot of dangerous stuff that can happen from that. If you start mythologizing too much, then you mythologize things that never even existed—that’s what this play does, too. I mean, they are mythologizing memories that might very possibly never have happened, but you really want them to happen, and you can see them in your head, and so they did. When that starts happening, you become so delusional that, you know, there is no real connection to reality, and you can do anything you want and not feel any kind of guilt or remorse.

Rail: Loading Dock Theatre has done some very intense plays. How does it feel to be working on something with slightly more levity?

Stevens: The topics I have worked on have always been pretty dark. There’s always a fair amount of humor in those plays, but it’s normally dark, absurdist type humor. Every time I keep working on these plays, I’m like, “Why don’t I just do a comedy?” I didn’t time this production to be like, “We need something more fun.” But I am sort of glad to be working on it, because, yeah, it’s pretty rough reality right now, and it’s nice to be able to focus on something that’s enjoyable and fun.

Rail: What is the biggest thing that you’ve learned about writing music or writing lyrics?

Stevens: I come from straight plays: pretty much from the beginning, that’s all I wrote. And then I started writing straight plays with a lot of noise and a lot of background atmosphere. This ended up being the next step: just doing full on music. It’s been difficult, honestly, to, like, make music progress. I feel like synthwave is really good at setting an atmosphere, but having that move and dramatically progress to a character level where, like, they’re gearing up to make a decision or gearing up to break up with somebody or leave or fight—that’s harder to do with synthwave. There’s this stasis of feeling, as opposed to a crescendo and a decrescendo.

Rail: For somebody trying to get into synthwave, do you have a recommendation for where to start?

Stevens: Timecop1983. The album Journeys is so good. It’s some of the best this genre of music gets. The problem with synthwave is people complain that it starts to all sound the same and I can understand that. But if you want to start at the top, Timecop1983—very good.