Just over 10 years ago, David Adjmi was on a plane, listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Babe I’m Gonna Go Away You” and imagining Robert Plant recording the vocals.
“It’s talking about need, pain, anguish, torture and lust,” says Adjmi of the song. “I was excited by all these conflicting feelings and imagining him singing the raw vocal in a studio – the state he must have been in to sing it.”
Adjmi then began to visualize the room – what it would look like – in her thoughts. He was captivated by the idea of using a recording studio as a dramatic setting. “It seemed like an excessive idea in a way that my ideas often aren’t,” says Adjmi, who is known for “The Masterminds” and “Marie Antoinette.”
More than a decade later, on April 19, he makes his Broadway debut in “Stereophonic,” an epic and seemingly impossible production that chronicles a rock band releasing its second album in 1976.
Set entirely in the studio, “Stereophonic” examines the evolution of relationships between musicians in a battle of egos and inventive management. There are standout performances and Tony-worthy songs, but the most intriguing aspect of the show is the way it works with sound, routing audio through a permeable glass barrier that separates the control room and living room.
“The idea seemed fraught with theatrical risk,” says director Daniel Aukin, who was approached by Adjmi in 2014 and signed on before there was even a script.
For most of the three-hour show, the band members are isolated with their devices in the soundproof, aquarium-like living room on stage. On the other side of the glass, studio engineers operate a mixing console that controls the movement of the audio. Engineers often mute the sound in the living room so the musicians can’t hear their gossip. On different occasions, the spectator is left out of the band’s conversations behind the glass.
Sound designer Ryan Rumery calls “Stereophonic” the “toughest” assignment he’s worked on. “This is the first show I’ve done where everything is real,” he says. Nothing is pre-programmed, none of the devices are modified, and the audio is transmitted to viewers via a real console — the centerpiece of David Zinn’s beautiful set.
“What’s scary about this play is that until we got into the playwriting course, we didn’t know if it would work,” adds Rumery. “The rehearsal process did not even remotely reflect what the performance process would be.”
Starring Sarah Pidgeon, Chris Stack, Tom Pecinka, Juliana Canfield, Will Brill, Andrew R. Butler and Eli Gelb, the play calls for more than just chemistry between its featured players. The actors needed to develop the musical talent and roots-rock harmony to promote Will Butler’s songs – which speed up the story and heighten the emotion from beginning to end – as well as perform tightly choreographed messes and repetitions to be convincing as sparring partners, band members who snort cocaine.
Butler, a Grammy-winning artist and former member of Arcade Hearth, helped the actors change to a band, persuading them to open for him in Brooklyn last fall. “They’ve seen shows, but they’ve never stood on stage and felt the power that comes from you,” he says. “We were able to include a little of that history for them.”
And while the play inevitably draws comparisons to Fleetwood Mac and the tumultuous creation of “Rumors,” Adjmi is perplexed by the need to find the “real” story in a piece of fiction.
“I keep getting the question, ‘Is this Fleetwood Mac? Is it this and that? Why do people want to know this? he asks. “There It is no real story. The whole thing was made up.”
With its traditional rock soundtrack and California vibe, “Stereophonic” has an immersive hangout vibe accentuated by hypernaturalistic dialogue. The characters are always talking to each other in a way that seems spontaneous, but the script – full of double slashes and written in two columns that demarcate the separate rooms – is something different. “Timing is everything,” writes Adjmi in an introductory note. “Nothing is prejudiced.”
“My writing is extraordinarily demanding to a degree that is unnatural in American theater,” says Adjmi. “And I’m a little embarrassed about it because I don’t know why I demand so much from everyone.”
But Aukin compensates for the author’s tight control over sentences with a style of freedom and flexibility. “The push between us really served the play and created a combustible and fascinating power,” says Adjmi.
At a technical rehearsal just days before the show’s premiere, Aukin is still completely reshaping scenes and tweaking dialogue, while Adjmi nervously watches from the orchestra. “We’re going to do this badly several times,” Aukin tells the actors as they play around with Act II. “We’ll find out.”
5 lines again, Adjmi whispers, “This is all new. …It is scary.”
Even after the show opens on Broadway, Aukin is despite that settings. “Sometimes you can have problems that seem completely important and then think, ‘Maybe that was just scaffolding,’” he says.
However, Adjmi and Aukin fully recognize the irony of writing a play in relation to the sacrifice and commitment required for creative collaboration – while also struggling with it behind the scenes.
“Because of the wildness of the components of this piece, we talked shamelessly about having very clear lines of communication between everyone,” says Aukin.
Adjmi is extremely sincere.
“Sometimes people feel like I’m taking them to a level that’s not quite human, and I think they’re right,” he says. “I know I have to let go, and I will let go. But my job as an artist is to try to get as close as possible to what I want and then let it go, because it will never be exactly the way I want it.”
Having arrived on Broadway more than a decade after her flash of aerial inspiration, could Adjmi finally be happy?
“I really respect what’s happening now and I feel overwhelmed by it all,” he says. “However, I am not someone who will be proud of something I do. I’m ruthless with myself and I have to be that way.”
He takes a deep breath. “At the same time, I know that I will never achieve perfection. That does not exist.”
5 Touchstones for ‘Stereophonic’
Metallic: Adjmi watched hundreds of hours of documentaries while writing “Stereophonic” and was fascinated by 2004’s “Metallica: Some Sort of Monster,” which follows the band as the musicians work out their issues with a group therapist. So much so that he even lent some lines of dialogue to “Stereophonic”.
The Beatles: Butler cites the Beatles as central to his own music and its “stereophonic” soundtrack, while Adjmi pored over producer George Martin’s diary entries and studio notes to get into the details of recording an album. Although the play’s setting and conversational pattern evoke “The Beatles: Get Again,” Adjmi says she avoided watching the 2021 Peter Jackson documentary: “People kept saying, ‘It’s identical to your play!’ and I thought, ‘I don’t want to watch it because I’m going to have a nervous breakdown because my play might never happen because of this pandemic!’”
Robert Altman and Maurice Pialat: Two filmmakers inspired Aukin’s approach to “stereophonic.” “It’s like when you take a Robert Altman film and transcribe the text, including where and how people overlap in conversations,” he says, referencing Altman’s 1975 musical comedy-drama “Nashville.” Of French director Pialat, Aukin says: “There’s something so refreshing and raw about a lot of his films. He works a lot with actors and non-actors, often in the same scene, and achieves an extremely unusual and strange quality.”
“Sound Metropolis”: David Zinn knew nothing about sound when he was tasked with building a set designed around a mixing console. So he turned to Dave Grohl’s 2013 film “Sound City,” a story of the famous recording studio in Van Nuys. “Dave Grohl made this beautiful documentary about the Neve board he bought,” says Zinn. “And I just studied That.” Next, he wanted to convince someone to mortgage the production of a “$500,000 kit to sit on stage.”
Arcade Fireplace: Among all the musical sources at his disposal, it would be a waste if Adjmi didn’t call Butler. While writing and tuning “Stereophonic,” Adjmi picked the composer’s mind on everything from how to tune a snare drum to how a band might envision a track. A conversation between them inspired a scene that portrayed the frustration of discarding songs. “I told David about how you’re working on a doc, and there’s a song that sounds like what you’re doing the doc for. And then eventually, either because you didn’t get it exactly right or because your brain can no longer understand how good it is, you start to reject it,” says Butler.