In 2004, I made this sketch. I was clearly Imitating Erik Satie’s calligraphy style. At first, I wanted the music in Success to be hand drawn. I was going to draw all the music from scratch. But that idea quickly evaporated after I worked on this little picture. I drew all the staff lines here myself and it took a very long time. You can imagine how long 460 pages of music and comic would have taken to hand draw. This was one of the original reasons I kept putting off working on Success. But I wasn’t only stuck on how to integrate the music and the art, I didn’t even have a story yet. It was still just a dream.
But then, in 2006, I graduated from Portland State with my undergraduate degree. I was working in a hotel during the summers, but when I graduated, I got a part-time job at a Montessori school, working their after-school program. At that time, my band Parks & Recreation had already played the Sasquatch festival twice, went on a West Coast tour, and had just released our first album. I was feeling creative.
I believe it was around this time that Chris Streng (Stratford 4), one of my oldest and dearest friends, suggested that he and I collaborate on a musical. I told him I already had an idea for a story, and ran the synopsis by him. He liked it, and suggested I switch the names of the brothers. Now Gregory became the down-and-out one, and Nicholas the smarmy socialite. I relished the idea of working with Chris on something, but I also realized I didn’t know anything about writing plays. So, I went to the book store to search for materials. After a long search, I settled on the amazing book The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri.
This book appealed to me because of its focus on character and conflict as the driving force of a play. According to Egri, when you line up two characters who are opposite in every way, place them in a situation where there is no escape, give them clear goals and desires, you end up with conflict, and as the conflict grows the characters plot their own play. I was also attracted to his ideas about every interaction in a play boiling down to thesis, synthesis, antithesis. Egri has an interesting concept of the roles of the protagonist and the antagonist, by the way. According to him, the protagonist is the character who starts the action of the play, who initiates and moves the conflict forward. In many contexts people think of that character as the villain, the antagonist. But in Egri’s concept, the antagonist is actually the hero, since he opposes the protagonist, the person driving the plot forward. The book resonated with me, and I used it to write the first draft of Success!. But first, I had to study the book. And that took some time.
But sometime after I finished the book, I began work on the first draft. I wrote many, many, many, drafts. I think there are 25 in all. At first I didn’t write the songs. I just wrote a script with a mind toward carving out space for the songs later. Many of the settings and characters in the play are based on my experiences in the music and art scene in Portland and New York.
The SHHH gallery, for example, is based on the HUSH gallery run by my friend Chad Crouch, who incidentally, is the person on whom the character Charles is loosely based. Chad, an even-tempered, gentle soul, is nothing like Charles, who is a bit of a hot head, but the two are similar in other ways. HUSH gallery was located in the Everett Station lofts in NW Portland, just north of downtown. Many local (and very hipster) artists had galleries there. In fact, during the song The Blue Rose Gallery, Inc., the name ideas that Gregory and his friends brainstorm (and my opinions of them) are all the names of galleries in the Everett Station building.
Timothy, the art critic, is based on Mark Baumgarten, who was a writer for the Willamette Week. In early drafts there was no Timothy, but a lawyer I briefly dated suggested that the people in the play needed some kind of local tastemaker who would be the authority on matters of what’s good in art. Timothy’s entourage of followers kind of satirizes the Portland hipster scene. The opening number, a kind of hipster Fugue for Tinhorns, is a direct parody of the self-importance of hipsters and art critics. I gleaned all the lyrics from that song from actual art reviews from the Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I hadn’t written the songs yet.
The warehouse and the roommates were based on a warehouse in Williamsburg where I lived in the autumn and winter of 2000. It was in the Gretsch building, just south of the Williamsburg bridge, on the corner of 7th and Broadway. I shared a huge 3rd-floor warehouse loft that had been divided up into smaller flats by the guy who rented it from the owners, and to whom we payed rent. His name was Jim Gazlay, and the character Gazlay is based on him.
I moved into the space in September, and by the first of November, the owners really had cut the power, for the very reasons they did so in the play. Even though it was an amazing space and I loved living there, I couldn’t live with cold showers and no heat or light in winter. No one could. I remember walking home from work down Bedford Ave. one day and seeing the words “HELP US!” written in duct tape on the inside of one of the Gretsch building’s top-floor windows. The real Gazlay, just like the Gazlay in the play, used to always tell us the situation with the power was going to be resolved by the end of the month, and that we should pay rent like usual.
My flat was enormous, with 20-foot ceilings and a gorgeous view of the warehouses that stretched out into Williamsburg and Dumbo. From the common bathroom we could see all the way to the Twin Towers.
The other roommates are based on people I met while living there. Many of the people, but not all of them, were artists and painters. Mikey’s art is real. There was really a white hip-hop loving guy who painted enormous pictures of black mens’ heads. And Nora’s art, the cartoon characters having sex with meat, was real as well, though the person who painted those pictures was a pasty hipster who wore skinny ties. Julie is based on a girl named Paige, who was not an artist, but who really did work on Wall Street. While many of the other renters filled their apartments with bikes, studio equipment, and art supplies, Paige’s flat was elegantly decorated with a fuzzy rug, lots of satiny cushions, and even an enormous entertainment center, with flat-screen TV and everything.
Doing the research proved to be one of the most fun aspects of working on the script. In particular, I enjoyed researching the murder. I had to come up with a believable way for Nicholas to murder someone and get away with it. At first I was going to have Nicholas get a body from a morgue or something, but I actually had email exchanges with coroners and funeral directors who told me that even if Nicholas had an in, that would have been impossible. I did lots of research about people who faked their own suicide. One early version of the play had Gregory abandoning his car on the Fremont bridge in Portland, as I had read had happened in San Francisco. A guy left his car on the Golden Gate Bridge with the doors open and a suicide note. But he was caught.
I settled on Gregory “killing himself” by burning himself up. Originally he was going to leave the oven on and that was that. The gas would leak and the place would explode. But when my friend Colin Meloy had laughed at me one night because, according to him, people leave the gas on in order to suffocate, not to blow themselves up.
In the end, I joined a Portland Police forum and started talking to real police officers and detectives. I went back and forth with a particularly amiable officer who was excited about the project and walked me through all of the possibilities. He liked the oven idea, but agreed with Colin, and said Gregory would just have to light a match or start a fire once the gas from the oven had filled the place in order to blow it up. He also said that Nicholas would have to place the body near a window, so the air circulation would cause the fire to do more damage to the body. You should have seen some of the grim websites I visited to really learn how fire damages a corpse. I used one of the pictures as a model for the drawing of the corpse in Nicholas’s flashback in Act 1, Scene 4.
The real trick was in how to pass the body off as Gregory’s. The police detective told me that it would be impossible. The only way I could get an audience to believe it would be 1) if the detective investigating the scene was lazy, or jaded, and 2) if there was some identifying trinket, like a necklace, or a ring, that Gregory always wore. That way, a lazy detective wouldn’t care to investigate beyond Nicholas pointing to the trinket. So, I went with that advice and Gregory’s backstory was changed to accommodate his mother’s necklace.
A few more thoughts about the writing. Early on I thought it would be an interesting experiment to write the play in verse. I thought that might smooth the transition between dialog and songs. I also thought it might be cool to have some characters who got along together speaking in the same rhyme scheme, so that their dialog would kind of waive together in places. And then when you had two characters who clashed, their dialog wouldn’t quite match up. Plus it would be fun.
So I gave the characters different rhyme schemes. Nicholas and Amanda speak in straight rhyming couplets. Gregory and Nora speak in slant rhymes. The roommates all speak in blank verse, with I think 8 feet per line. Timothy and Charles and the hipsters speak in blank verse also, with 4 or 5 feet per line.
The apartment on 12th and SE Stark where I wrote the script for Success.
By 2007, I had a draft ready to be cut up for the songs.