Artist Interview: Kittson O’Neill and Robert Kaplowitz
The MINORS creators talk about their inspiration for the world premiere musical
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company May 23 through June 30, 2019, Minors is a world premiere musical by Kittson O’Neill and Robert Kaplowitz. O’Neill is well-known to Philadelphia audiences as an actor at the Lantern and on stages across the city and as a director, including the Lantern’s 2017/18 season production of Copenhagen. Kaplowitz is a Tony Award-winning sound designer and composer whose work has been heard at the Lantern, across Philadelphia, in New York City, and around the world.
Minors is O’Neill and Kaplowitz’s inaugural work as a writing team. Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon commissioned them to create the piece, sensing that were the right theater artists to entrust with his idea for a musical about the “kids for cash” scandal. “I think there is something innately exciting about the fact that — and I think Charles does this with a lot of artists — he comes to you and says ‘I see something in you that you may not see in yourself and I want to give it a place to grow,’” said O’Neill. “That was exciting, to be offered the opportunity to do something that has been nascent in my little artist heart for a long time.”
Once O’Neill and Kaplowitz began writing, the focus shifted from the political to the personal. “There are a lot of problems with our judicial system that you could highlight,” said O’Neill. “But to me the potency of this story is that this injustice was visited on kids. For me there is a really precious and magical thing that happens when you’re a teenager, which is this coming to understand the world you live in and your place in it. This kind of exploitation of kids radically disrupts that in a way that for some of these kids was very difficult to ever repair.”
An important part of their research and writing process was to visit Luzerne County, the area of northeastern Pennsylvania where the scandal — and the play — took place. “It was a really great grounding in the community there, and also the longevity of the sense of self that’s in the spot,” O’Neill said of their visit. The dangerous mining industry, which was the backbone of the economy before nearly disappearing, was a major part of that sense of self. On meeting a man with an extensive and beautiful tattoo celebrating miners — or crackers, from “coal crackers” — O’Neill thought “this is an embrace of an economic force and of a system that was really oppressive and really damaging to a lot of people, but also a source of deep pride.”
O’Neill and Kaplowitz also discovered elements of local government that contributed to a sense of fierce independence — but also to corruption and a deep class divide. “The thing that struck me was that many of the communities are incorporated as villages rather than towns or cities so that they can maintain their own government structure,” Kaplowitz said. “Every single community has as many government positions as possible. And those governments are basically the closest thing, it seems to me in America, to a monarchical descent. Those jobs go to the children of the people whose jobs they were before.”
This notion related directly to the story O’Neill and Kaplowitz set out to tell, and informs the larger community. “Every other judge on the bench except Ciavarella [the judge at the center of the scandal] were second- or third-generation judges. Ciavarella’s father was a brewer,” Kaplowitz noted. “I was thinking a lot about the vast class separation, that you are of the wealthy class — of the class that doesn’t go to jail — or you are of the class that went to jail. You are of the owners — of the mine owners — or of the workers.”
O’Neill and Kaplowitz had another important realization about the area: “It’s really beautiful,” O’Neill said. “There’s a reason people love it.” This natural beauty directly affected the play, which includes a song about Luzerne’s river: “Susquehanna, which I wrote while we were on location,” Kaplowitz said.
As writers, O’Neill and Kaplowitz’s process was flexible. “There were a few songs that got written really early,” O’Neill said. “But then we were like, we really can’t write any more songs until we know what the play is about. So I would write the book, and then I would reach the point where I was like ‘I think this should be a song. Take that, Rob, and go make something out of it!’” Other times, Kaplowitz would write a song and O’Neill would create a scene to support it. And sometimes they would pass a lyric back and forth until they were satisfied. “If we went through and counted, we could probably divide up how many songs came out of the narrative arc, how many songs came fully formed to me standing in the shower, and how many songs were a ‘we want a song here’ mutual solution,” Kaplowitz said.
One discovery that informed the writing was the storytelling possibilities of the music itself. “Sometimes there are these big dramaturgical shifts that we’re trying to make, and sometimes they would be in words, and then sometimes we figured out a way to do them in music and take all the burden off the words,” Kaplowitz said. In the final song of Act I, the characters begin separately, but end up in unison. “So that we were like, ‘We don’t need to have a scene tell that story,’” Kaplowitz said. “The musical structure of the song can take that weight. And that was a really delightful discovery.”
An important part of the process of writing the world premiere was hearing it out loud. A series of workshops informed the development of the writing and the music. “I’ve discovered I don’t really like sitting alone and writing a play,” O’Neill said. “I really like being in a room with actors and having to go home and rewrite the play for them. There are definitely some actors in the show who got involved early and then characters began to mold and change around them, and what they brought into the process.”
“The other thing we discovered in the workshop process was, especially with music like this, having a band with the actual instruments is essential. These songs couldn’t be discovered with the piano and voices,” Kaplowitz said. “As a composer, I am a musician first. So, I actually have to sort of play the music to write it. And then to be able to get the music sung the way it was played was huge, and definitely had a major influence on understanding what was happening and what worked and what didn’t.”
Knowing the Lantern’s audience also proved helpful in the writing. O’Neill noted that while the occasionally coarse language of the blue collar and traumatized characters might be a surprise, she also said “the Lantern’s audiences are educated and super informed and really interested in ideas. So, I knew in writing the play that the slightest hint about constitutional law or about the way justice works or ideas about capitalism — I needed to only hint at it and I know the audience will follow me because they are an idea-driven audience. So that liberated me to not make the play really pedantic.”
Kaplowitz’s challenge was to find the musical language to best express the heart of the characters and the story. “Fairly early on, I said ‘This is roots rock, I think. I think that’s where this is going,’” he said. And while roots rock might be unexpected for a musical, it is the right choice to tell the story of Minors. “There’s a perception about modern music or rock n’ roll or especially guitar-driven music that it’s antithetical to storytelling,” Kaplowitz said. “It’s simply about finding the way to do it. Finding that way to have the driving energy of an electrically amplified instrument that sings in the same vocal range as the human and tells story has been a really interesting adventure.”
The story and music ultimately came together to tell a story that Kaplowitz deems “a call to arms.” O’Neill agreed: “I don’t want people to leave the theater thinking ‘This is bad. I should research it.’ I want them to leave the theater feeling like ‘This is terrible. We need to save lives right now.’”
Minors is onstage at the Lantern May 23 through June 30, 2019. Visit our website for tickets and information.
