Don't know why absorb incredulity only to justify it in the blog... but here goes. The audio part of this play is for some reason locked up in my head, and Cat (the director) and I agreed that it needed to come out from there.
Already about 8 weeks before opening I started working on a string quartet (well Richard Schechner said theatre was becoming the string quartet, so now the string quartet is becoming theatre). The quartet would incorporate two movements roughly similar to the structure of the play, whose acts already had the subtitles I - Duets and Trios II - Grosse Fuga. So the quartet would be a two-movement work that featured thematic play between dual instruments in the first movement and a great fugue of all elements building in canons, inversions, rondos until all voices came together as one voice.
So that went pretty well (have only one final canon to complete before the quartet is done) and then it became clear the entire play had a very large soundscape - there are something like 170 sound cues in the production script, stemming from a catalog of hundreds of blended sounds. And all these sounds were still very specifically in my head. So I did some farming and recording and collating and then began assembling them all. Good thing the script is done!
The final sound canvas should be a lot of fun... evocative at times, spooky at others.
Often I say that I write a play thinking of music in the structure, and now I'm actually bringing sound into the fabric of the play. Maybe this will be the first non-musical comedy with a cast recording? Hmmm...
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