Within the realm of popular fiction this past year, two things are consistent: reflections of the current state of the world in absurd fiction, and humor as the solution to months of solitude. Against Women & Music!, an absurdist-horror Victorian chamber musical created by Kate Douglas and Grace McLean, delivers both. “It’s a laugh from the absurdity of the situation,” Grace McLean, who wrote music and lyrics in collaboration with book writer and lyricist Kate Douglas, said of the show, “and I think that that’s what we need right now, because we’re living in such absurd times. To really be able to take a step back and be like, ‘Oh, these rules, these restriction that we place on ourselves – Yeah, sometimes we just have to break stuff wide open.’”
The musical, which follows a 19th century widow and her daughter’s newly-prescribed piano lessons in a time when music was considered dangerous for women to play or even hear, originated as a potential Freudian show that would explore women’s sexuality, but evolved after one particularly insightful lecture. “I attended a lecture at NYU about the history of music and mania,” Kate explains, “and it was very rich, going back from Victorian times all the way to Beatlemania, and how that’s been uniquely tied to women – that strange thread of medical text is very dense and lush and it was begging to be made into a musical. And Grace McLean is the only person who could possibly do that.”
Although Grace had sung some of Kate’s music in the past, this was the first time they would be sitting down to work on a project from the ground up together. The pair further developed the show in The Civilians’ R&D Group, during which they published this Extended Play piece straight out of the writing process. And now, “it’s been several years,” Kate said. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, and it’s really been revolutionized and rebirthed and reimagined with lots of blood sweat and tears several times.” In the midst of that R&D process, though, the pandemic forced the project online and the two writers to work remotely. “We write the best when we’re together,” Kate said of the writing process. “We’ve done a lot when we’re together, when we’re in the room together. It seems to click and we’re able to talk and make mistakes faster.” Luckily, in the last month, the two were able to get together to prepare for The Civilians’ upcoming online concert reading of music from the show. “We worked exponentially faster,” Grace admits.
At the core of this entire process, though, is the research. Grace described the writing of the show as “a lot of conversation and a lot of research that has led us in different areas – and that research has been everything from these Victorian-era medical texts to modern day horror films – but generally centering on female identity.” Kate adds to the breadth of research they’ve conducted: “The germ of pathology, the way women have been pathologized through history — reading those raw texts was so terrifying and strange. And watching lots of horror films. I’m really excited to be making something with Grace that feels genuinely scary. I don’t know if I’ve seen something that that’s really made me afraid, live.”
And at the center of all of that research sits the piano tuner. “That was one of the first things we looked at,” Grace says. “You know, [piano tuning] is the science of sound itself, but also the science of the way that we perceive sound. Our perception and the sound itself are not the same, and so, you know, the work of the piano tuner is to meld those things so that the perception takes precedence. You have to work with the science of the actual physical instrument to match the physiology of the ear.” Grace continues, “You know, the Victorian era is so fun to play with, because it has such rigid rules that to break them is just real fun. Our centering on the instrument itself, what it was, what it started to mean for people, sort of, domestically, then to associate that with a woman in a sort of position of power – you know, the tuner, that might be sort of, like, a working man’s job, but the instrument itself might be associated with the domestic arts, like a ‘woman’s labor.’ So just pairing that kind of anomaly always felt really like electric. We’ve been playing with that a bit throughout.”
What Kate really hopes audiences take from the show now, though, is that absurd laughter Grace mentioned earlier. “Honestly, I hope everyone has a laugh. I think that’s what I would like to offer right now. I think it also might be catharsis, a little bit. I think laughter can – for me, you laugh and it just opens a door in you and it lets a little more light into places that, maybe, if you were just having a polite conversation about it or reading a serious text, you might not be able to open that door, but laughter just kind of cracks that open in your heart and you feel like new things can be stirred up.”
A cabaret reading of Against Women and Music! presented by The Civilians will be performed at 7:30pm on May 6th. Tickets are free, and can be found here.
To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, join our email list at TheCivilians.org.
