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[0:00] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Mo Brady.

[0:20] Mo Brady: In this exploration of the history of musical theater through one of its most effective devices, I wanted to bring along one of our art form's most knowledgeable and personable historians. Jennifer Ashley Tepper is a theatrical icon of her own, most notably for authoring the book series The Untold Stories of Broadway. But she's also a proverbial vault of theater history, recognizing the connective tissues of musical theater in ways that others may not have seen before her. Jen is joining me for this aural exploration of The Line to tell us how the device is used. So first off, I asked her to explain how she remembers The Line in Soft Power.

[0:58] Jennifer Ashley Tepper: I think that what's interesting about Soft Power and the idea of forming The Line at the end in the moment where they're coming towards you as themselves is it's how do we get as close to the audience as possible so that we can engage with them directly and show them that we are equal to them in that way. And I think that with musicals that are historic like Soft Power, where you're watching something that is tied into politics and is tied into all of this real life stuff, just the idea that there are moments where the people on stage are addressing you more directly, that makes a lot of sense why The Line would be employed in that way.

[1:32] Mo Brady: Jen's statement about The Line as a political function intrigued me. Sure, Soft Power is a musical about politics, but is The Line itself a political act? So I went to the source, the woman who staged The Line into Soft Power herself, Leigh Silverman. Leigh's an accomplished director who has helmed five Broadway shows, Well, Chinglish, Violet, The Lifespan of a Fact, and Grand Horizons, as well as being the director of Soft Power from its world premiere in California to its New York premiere at the Public Theater.

[2:07] Mo Brady: You are, among other things, a director, a very well-loved theater director. Can you briefly tell us some of your recent projects?

[2:24] Leigh Silverman: About a year ago, actually, exactly. I started rehearsal for the amazing musical Soft Power, which had premiered at CTG in LA and then had gone to the Kern in San Francisco and then came in and played the Public Theater last fall.

[2:37] Mo Brady: Yes, and that production of Soft Power, and specifically one moment in it, was the reason that I had reached out to you. It's this theatrical device. I've been calling it The Line. Is that what you would call it?

[2:50] Leigh Silverman: There is a moment in Soft Power where we see the entire assembly of a company, all of whom, except for one, are Asian American. We had saved the impact of that moment, really, until the very, very end of the show. There's a moment in the number I'm With Her, which is the Hillary Clinton campaign rally that takes place in McDonald's, where everybody lines up in a kick-line style. But really, in terms of direct address to the audience, there's just an undeniable power of seeing, and particularly under the language, under the text in that moment that's being delivered by the character of David Henry Wong, played by the amazing Francis Joo, where he talks about having written this show so that he could see all of these faces.

And just in that moment, that line comes together. It's something that even over the years and years of development of the show, that we return to again and again, and hope that the show earned that moment, that it earned the right to bring everyone from the company, that it compelled them to come together and stand in formation like that, and then address the audience in song.

[4:03] Mo Brady: So many things about what you just said I want to unpack. Can you briefly describe when that moment takes place in the show, the nouns about that moment?

[4:13] Leigh Silverman: The character of David Wong says, this is the show that I imagined in the moment where I thought I was going to die after being stabbed in a hate crime, right after the 2016 election, that I was thrust into a fever dream and imagined what would happen to the country. Janine talks about this moment as the moment where we realized that David was stabbed in the neck and that the country was stabbed in the neck. And that in that moment, the country and David's hate crime, violence, comes together, as he says, and I imagine a show that has all faces that look like mine. And just in that moment, the whole cast comes forward, all the Asian American actors in the company, and they sing a reprise of a song that we've heard the character of Hillary Clinton sing earlier, which is a love letter to democracy.

Putting that song into their mouths in that moment, it's a reclaiming, it's a reappropriation. It is really a song about how hard it is to love democracy and also how it is, in fact, all we have. And so what we're hoping to communicate in that moment is a sense of truly speaking to the audience. And in fact, we worked very, very hard in rehearsal, really asking the actors to deliver it to the audience in a way that wasn't performative, which is that we would circle up and I would have the actors actually just sing it to each other so that they could look into each other's eyes to feel the honesty of the moment, the authenticity of the moment. And so that what they were communicating wasn't an approximation or a performance of feeling. It was, in fact, a delivery of who they were and letting us see them and feel the anguish that democracy brings us and them, but also the aspirational hope for it.

[6:10] Mo Brady: So what you're saying is that in that moment, these actors are not playing characters, but you've asked them to be themselves, having a real dialogue with the audience in front of them.

[6:25] Leigh Silverman: We've asked them to be in real dialogue, to be authentically themselves. They come out for the first time. They're wearing the kind of costumes that we first met them in at the opening, but they've adjusted them. We actually let the actors choose. The idea is that it's an expression of who they are as individuals. And in the script in that moment, their actual names are used, not their character names. It's a moment where they greet and meet the audience as themselves.

[7:00] Mo Brady: I have to tell you that my response to that moment in Soft Power was that it made me uncomfortable because of how little device there was. I felt like I was being seen as an audience member for a really long time.

[7:10] Leigh Silverman: The point, I think, is for us to really feel like we're in community and in communion with each other as we ask ourselves and the audience to think about what democracy means. And the show is nothing but artifice and framing devices, and then it all kind of falls away in that moment. And I think the discomfort is both intentional and sought after in that moment. It was part of the intention for sure.

[7:37] Mo Brady: Was there a time where you had a more complex staging idea for that moment or a busier idea? From the moment you read it, was that moment always still?

[7:48] Leigh Silverman: Well, it's interesting because we actually didn't have an ending to the show when we started rehearsal at CTG. We knew where the fever dream slash nightmare ended inside of the show within the show, the show that David's imagining as he's clinging onto his life in the hospital. We knew sort of where that idea ended, but we didn't know what would happen next. And the idea of reprising democracy came actually while we were in rehearsal. We didn't exactly know how to execute it and we didn't know what it meant, but it felt like that reclaiming was actually a move away from complexity and towards simplicity and away from artifice and towards authenticity was where the show wanted to end. As David came into consciousness, as he came back to reality, as he was able to shed the horrible vision that he had just created and that we knew that there should be a sense of hope for this country, that it was a vision he saw of this musical was the worst case scenario of what could happen and that we needed to fight against the vision of America that he had just seen. And so somehow bringing democracy back felt like the way to us to do that.

[9:07] Leigh Silverman: After we did the production in California, then we went back to work on the script. The great idea that then came forward was that we should mash up an earlier song from the show, which was sung also with some dark satirical undertones called Welcome to America by Janine, combining those two songs, Democracy and Welcome to America, sung without irony, without artifice from a place of honesty and a place of we are all Americans. Look at this line of faces. Look around this space. Let's turn on the light. Let's talk to each other. We are Americans. We are all Americans. And we in this moment have to love our democracy as broken as it is, because if we don't respect it, if we don't nourish it, then the terrible fever dream that David just had would become true.

I mean, I think of another great line, which is in Rent when they come out at the top of Act Two and the thing that you're expecting there is a big Act Two number. Usually the opening number of Act Two in a musical is a big dance. And the thing about Seasons of Love is that it's an imploring, honest interaction with the audience that in its simplicity, in the line, in the moment of asking you to consider your life in minutes, it's subverting your expectation. And I think it's quite powerful in the theater when the thing that you're expecting to happen, just like at the end of a show, if you're sort of expecting a big number, and instead people come out, they're kind of wearing their street clothes, no one's wearing a wig, I think can be quite powerful to deploy that subversion for effect.

[10:52] Mo Brady: Special thanks to Lee Silverman and Jennifer Ashley Tepper for sharing their stories with us today. The Ensemblist was produced today by Anna Altide, Jackson Klein, and me, Mo Brady. There are two great ways you can be helping The Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and the other is by becoming a Patreon member at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Please follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or at bpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. You can also follow us on Instagram. Thanks for listening. Until next time.