How stereophony made musicians actors

About a week after rehearsals began for the Broadway premiere of David Adjmi's latest play, Stereophonic, Will Butler sent an email to casting. Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire, had a new band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, and a new self-titled album. A Brooklyn club would soon host the record release party. Butler, the composer of Stereophonic, had a proposition: the actors should open for him.

Cast member Sarah Pidgeon remembers reading the message last August during a rehearsal break. I immediately said no, she remembers. Because what if it was a failure?

She had taken piano lessons as a child, but Pidgeon did not consider herself a musician. Neither did any of the other actors. Stereophonic, which opened last week at Broadway's Golden Theater, is set in recording studios in the mid-1970s and evokes an unnamed band as dynamic, dazzling and sexy as Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. It would be intimidating enough to impersonate a band of this caliber on stage after a full rehearsal period. But playing a real show in a real club after just a few weeks. It was an invitation to public humiliation.

Juliana Canfield (Succession), another actor, was also a no. I was like, Damn, you can't listen to one song without breaking down, she said. This could be really, really embarrassing.

But the men in the fictional group insisted. (We suffered from peer pressure, Pidgeon joked.) Which explains why on September 23, the five players Will Brill on bass, Canfield on keyboards, Tom Pecinka on guitar, Pidgeon on tambourine and Chris Stack on drums were on stage at the Williamsburg club. Somewhere else, in front of hundreds of ticket holders who had no idea the band was pretending to be a band. There were no scripted lines for them that night, no characters to hide behind.

Brill described it as truly extreme exposure therapy and just plain horror. But the therapy worked. In Elsewhere, for the first time, the actors panicked, elated, feeling like a gang.

Adjmi (Stunning, Marie Antoinette) started dreaming of Stereophonic around ten years ago. He called Butler, whom he knew through friends, shortly afterward. Butler was wary of writing 1970s pastiche. So he wondered what kind of music a quintet would make if he had grown up with the Beatles. White album a decade earlier, and what Kurt Cobain would have listened to in the 80s. The compositions, he said, had to be both contemporary and timeless.

I was trying to think about it on a continuum, he said. It wasn't like we were doing something in 1976.

Butler, Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin weren't necessarily looking for musicians to perform these songs. When auditions began last spring, the focus was on finding actors who felt like a good fit.

“I figured as long as someone is a musician, any idiot can be in a band,” Butler said. I can write at any level. Later, Butler realized that perhaps this was naive.

Auditions and callbacks lasted for months. Some who auditioned were dedicated amateurs. Some couldn't play at all. It was really hard, Adjmi said.

Pecinka had taught himself the guitar over the years, but he was by no means an expert. He was asked to learn a riff for one of the songs in the play, Masquerade, a strange bayou stomp, for an encore he took the music to a teacher at a guitar store. The guitar teacher told him he would never make it. But something about the quality of his performance was enough.

Pecinka was therefore chosen, as were the other actors, whose musicality was very varied. Brill had never held a bass before. Stack had played in many bands. (An experienced drummer was needed for this role because the coordination required to play the drums takes longer to learn.) Pidgeon may be a better pianist than her character, Diana, but she had sung little. Although Canfield had taken piano lessons in elementary school, she had never performed in front of an audience. Even performing for his fellow actors was intimidating.

I was going to sweat, she said. My hands were sweaty. It felt like I was playing puddles on the keys.

Brill, who plays her husband, has found a kind of virtue in terror. It was very, very vulnerable, he said. We didn't have the same kind of protections that we usually have as actors, which was really refreshing and really lovely.

During the first month of rehearsal, more than half the day was spent rehearsing the band. Twice a week, Brill and Pecinka were set aside for bass and guitar lessons. The Elsewhere concert, a trial by fire and amplifier, gave the actors a boost of confidence and the muscular memory of what it might feel like to play in front of a crowd.

Despite this, rehearsals remained difficult. The script alone, which lasts nearly three hours and often expands on the technical details of the recording process, was daunting. The songs were maybe harder. Integrating the two characters, making the struggle invisible seemed almost impossible. When Adjmi attended rehearsals, the actors barely recognized him. They were all in a state of electrified horror, he said. They didn't even really want to talk to me. They didn't even want to talk to each other.

Yet Butler and Justin Craig, the play's musical director, were already taking the measure of the cast, reorchestrating the songs based on their quirks and strengths. Canfield, Pecinka and Pidgeon had voices that worked together beautifully. So we decided to get into vocal arrangements, Craig said.

And as Pecinka and Brill grew as musicians, Craig and Butler could add more licks, more riffs. Butler slowed down Seven Roads' longing and roots, because the actors grooved in a different way than the demo, he said. Writing for this quintet, amateur as it was, was not much different from writing for any of Butler's other groups.

It was about figuring out what people's strengths are and where the emotion comes from, and I try to intensify that emotion.

In October, during technical rehearsals and previews for the Off Broadway tour at Horizons of playwrights, something ineffable has moved. There was a point where we started communicating with each other as musicians, Stack said. The rehearsals had seemed rushed, heavy. But now on stage, there was finally time to listen to each other. The actors developed jokes, riffs, routines, just like bandmates would.

Several real musicians came to the Off Broadway run, including David Byrne. After the show, Brill asked Byrne if he had any notes on possibly becoming a band. Byrne told him: You're already a band.

Byrne confirmed this. Yes, this all rings true, he wrote in an email. They sound like a real band, a band still composing their songs in the studio.

Although there were still errors, those errors began to seem less significant. Sometimes they even added texture. In one scene, Pidgeons Diana struggles to find a note in the heartbreaking folk ballad East of Eden. Pidgeon has the same struggle. So she lent her own fear to the character. And as the actors got to know their characters and the music better, they learned to play their character, letting the emotions of the scenes guide the songs. What they end up recording, even if refracted through a commercial pop lens, inevitably expresses their grief, their betrayal and their fury, wrote Jesse Green in the New York Times for his review of the Off Broadway production.

The actors weren't rock stars yet and probably never will be, but they began to feel closer to their virtuoso characters.

The rock star charisma started to show when we started to feel like these were our songs, Pigeon said.

A few winter days spent in a real recording studio in Brooklyn, laying down tracks for a cast album, which will be released digitally on May 10, also helped. Being in the studio, Pecinka said, made me feel more confident because I was like, “I'm on an album, I'm a real musician.”

In the few months between the end of the Off Broadway run and the start of rehearsals for the Broadway transfer, most of the cast reported putting down their instruments. When they picked them up again, they found that the music was still there. None of them feel completely relaxed in front of the microphones, but this time, they are more comfortable.

I dance while I play and make eye contact, Brill said. It's a nice alternative to horror.

While they have yet to play Madison Square Garden, as the fictional band did, they have now spent about nine months playing together. They may not be a band, not really, but they feel like one.

We're all constantly hitting the wrong notes, Pidgeon said. But it still works because it's real.