[title of show] actors/writers Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen

This article is nearly a year old, and yet because of time constraints I never fully transcribed the interview. However, I did transcribe some of it, and I would like to post it here. Enjoy!

Keely Weiss: How did the four of you meet?
Hunter Bell: Jeff and I were actors and we met in Virginia Beach, Virginia, doing a production of a show called Good News about ten or eleven years ago—and then Jeff kind of got out of performing and we always remained friends and then we reconnected as writers probably five years after that.
Jeff Bowen: And then I met Heidi doing a production of Tommy in Brazil like eleven years ago, and when I left the business I started working in a management office and Susan was a client of my manager--I guess this was about 6 or 7 years ago.
H: And I met Susan through Jeff. And then Larry on keyboards I’ve known a long time.

K: So, how did you decide to bring Heidi and Susan into the project? Was it because you’d known them for so long?
J: Mostly the reason we brought them in was because I wanted—a Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass. I wanted two boys and two girls, vocally, for the music and—
H: I don’t think it was our intention to write a piece for us and for them, but as it was just kind of happening, and we kind of found ourselves in it, in this weird meta-mix, and then Jeff wanted the girls for the parts and then we also thought it was a good idea so that people didn’t have to sit and listen to us all night long, that they’d have some points of interest besides us!
J: And just what we were talking about was more interesting if we had someone else in the room to bounce it off of and then they eventually started getting written into the script until they became characters.
K: So, were they really involved in the development as well?
H: Very much so, yeah—that was the fun thing, you know, we knew them; you know, it was just great to be able to build a role on them.

K: Jeff—what was your inspiration for a lot of songs?
J: Kind of from all over the place. Most of the time, the inspiration from the song came out of conversations that we were talking about and then different people that we’ve worked with—you know, influenced different parts of it, but it was never anything—you know—
K: And Monkeys and Playbills. It’s a story about a monkey, told in the names of flop musicals—how did you come up with that?
J: Well, we were trying to come up with an idea ‘cause there was an old song that was in place there that was this cheer that we ended up cutting, where we were playing cheerleaders, and we were trying to show—we wanted to show, in an unconventional way, how we created, separately, and then came together to… mishmash what we made and collaborated on, and that is—two totally separated ideas that we made to try to function as one which is, you can write, just stream of consciousness, and then another example is to draw from the past and to really look at things and examples and be inspired by things and then the marriage of the two things together, and then we came up with Monkeys and Playbills.
H: Yeah—he creates sometimes by taking inspiration from old things and I create by taking pen to the paper and not judging it and just letting it flow.
J: We wanted to show that happening simultaneously to save on time, instead of having two separate scenes of how we each create.
H: It’s a combo platter.

K: That actually kind of answers my next question, which was: you break a lot of—whichever wall it is, the third? I don’t think it’s the fourth—
J: The fourth.
K: It is? It’s the fourth? It’s all the fourth wall? Okay.
J: Well, it’s the three around you and then the fourth one that divides you from the audience.
K: Okay—because I just wanted to know whether that was intentional or whether it happened kind of in the moment.
J: In the moment. But interestingly enough we never really break the fourth wall in [title of show]. We never really actually turn to the audience and say, “Get that?” You know, we never really do that.
K: Yeah—what I meant was the wall or whatever it is that distinguishes that you don’t really acknowledge that you’re in a show.
H: That’s right—yeah, I think that’s exactly right. We do acknowledge that we are in a show in that moment and that this is happening and comment on that, so—yeah, that’s a really precise way of putting it.

There you have it! For more information about the show and what's in its future, check out its website.