Energie grew out of the two events I was thinking about over the last year or so. The first was Anthony Bordain’s suicide, and how he seemed to have touched so many people so deeply. He was unpretentious and had his faults and wrestled with his demons, which he fully acknowledged without apology. On one hand we were mad at him for giving up on himself when we didn’t. On the other hand, I think we all kind of understood and wished him well wherever we think he was headed.
The other event was a story an old college friend told me in an email about his autistic son. When the boy was about 13, he started to go into a dark shell. Craig and Donna were out of their minds trying to get their son back. One day Craig was fussing with a guitar that I left with him nearly 40 years ago when I finished architecture school and moved east. Though Craig can’t really play, the sound he was making broke through to Alan and he “came back.”
After I stopped crying from reading Craig’s e-mail about that guitar and its impact on his son and reflecting as well about the impact Bordain’s suicide was having on people, I thought about how we are all transformers. We take energy and convert it into something else. (J.B. Jackson wrote eloquently about this in his essay “The Westward Moving House,” and for some reason that essay came back to me 30 years after I first read it.) A dusty bunch of sticks, wires and plywood in the form of a musical instrument come out of a corner and make noise and lives are profoundly changed – including mine, and everyone who comes in contact with me. And everyone who know or enjoyed watching Anthony Bordain. That energy doesn’t dissipate.
I always thought energy was an electromagnetic phenomenon, but it’s not. It is metaphysical and in its purest form – love — it is that thing that drives us all even though we don’t understand it. I think people know this even if they can’t bring themselves to say it.
Energie takes this idea and weaves it through a story line that shows how people’s actions, intentional and otherwise, affect others in ways that are profound.
– Why this play now?
In our Twitter, Instagram, obsessively politicized world it’s hard for us to tell the posers and entertainers from those with real genius and insight. Unfortunately, the former seem to be running the world. But these latter people exist, are essential and most of us intellectual civilians neither know or understand them. What counts as academic rigor these days is mostly garbage hiding behind slogans. Now is an excellent time for real critical thinking.
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– What story are you telling in the performance?
Nikolai is a theoretical physicist who discovers a way to create energy virtually from air with little cost and no waste. His Platonic companion Larkin is also a physicist who seemingly has Tourette’s Syndrome as she talks from one side of her brain (the math side). She is quietly trying to solve the riddle of String Theory where multiple dimensions coexist and we can only perceive 4 of them. During Energie she realizes she is actually living in 2 universes at once and discovers how to solve the String Theory problem and get her whole self into one of the places she occupies.
Vijay is another physicist who wants to be the poet that Nikolai is: the kind of scientist who leaps over the formulas to have astonishing insights. And there are bad people out there -some weak, some sinister – who want all these ideas to be buried. An electric guitar is the lynchpin to solving all of these physics proofs. There is a climactic scene where Nikolai’s theory gets tested and Larkin attempts to move to one dimension, and we only learn at the last moment who prevails.
Oh, and there’s a love story, too.
– What have you been learning about yourself during rehearsals?
These things I write – songs, plays, rock operas – they take on their own lives and become meaningful to people in ways I never imagined. My responsibilities moved from self-expression to supporting those that have taken these works to heart. I don’t want to hang out with an author or composer who isn’t humbled by this phenomenon. I know I am.
– If you won a Tony for this show, who would you thank?
I am not particularly religious, but I do thank God for giving me whatever gifts I have and the chance to share them. I thank my wife Laura for her quiet, effective and unwavering support, DC Dogs’ Jonathan Zuck, Director Christine Asero, this inspiring cast and crew, and friends too numerous to list for encouraging me unequivocally even when they maybe thought I was not up to this.
– When the performance is over, what do you want the audience feeling or thinking about?
I want them to know the joy of breaking through and having inspired thoughts that they never thought they were capable of.
– What’s your favorite song in the show?
Now that I’ve finished writing them, I have to say that the title song “Energie” (which comes at the very end of the play) puts a big lump in my throat. I never feel that way about things I create – once they’re done they’re done. But I first wrote this song about Anthony Bordain and my own personal struggles and it eventually evolved into this play. So when I hear it now, especially that first crack and the drums drive into the intro, I feel all the emotions of all the songs, all the soul-searching behind them, all the things that happened to me personally while I was writing them, all the things we had to do to bring the show to this point and all the energy that everyone has brought to it. I feel overwhelmed, but in a good way.
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