Yesterday, the show cracked open for me.

Some backstory – when we first read Touch as a company, it was a show that I *heard*. All plays have elements – puzzle pieces that get translated and fit back together by the production team into a unified whole. Touch was a play where those elements rocketed off the page like rogue asteroids caught up in their own dangerously beautiful velocity.

Seriously. They did all that.

It is hard to communicate the vastness of a single human experience, but in Toni Press-Coffman’s telling of the story of Kyle, Bennie, Serena, Kathleen and Zoe, she somehow fits this incredible understanding of gravity – the attraction between two bodies – that somehow fits this supernova of energy and a vast, cold void into the world of the play.

As a designer reading a play like that, it’s a unique call for me to bring my best work.

So I’m sitting in front of the computer yesterday, a concept crunching along through the text of the play looking for some idea to hang on to, and snippets of audio research rolling through my monitors, and I’m stuck, overwhelmed by this energy spinning in my mind from watching the design run and the deadline that I face to translate all that energy, texture and motion into a sonic world by tech week.

At New Leaf, our aesthetic often involves revelation through simplicity. So I know I don’t need to ornament and underscore this story with a soundtrack… I’m creating the frame, the periphery, the stuff at the edges that should every moment of the play draw focus back to the center and propel the story forward. It needs to sound as large as the cosmos and not be so overwhelming that our wonderfully human-sized performers get lost in it.

So I start with that core idea – that force that is at work on all large objects and small – gravity. Luckily, sound is really about physics, so this is can be one of those really great intersections between crisp aesthetics and cool science. These are all the tools a sound designer needs.

I think of lonely particles of gas, collecting, gathering together around a central mass, colliding and pulling into itself.

Small particles of gas vibrate quickly, which means a high pitched sound – a glass or a metal. I open up a synthesizer and begin playing with different textures until I find something that sounds like grainy bits of glass-sand, pinging and bouncing off each other. The sound sounds too active, too conscious, and so I reverse the sound so that the attack is a slow crescendo of glass-sand-bounce! that ends with an abrupt hit – the particles gathering in and hitting each other as they connect at the center.

I zoom out. This is one particle… I need billions. I add delay and convolution reverb to create layers of space, three dimensional groups of particles that bounce and collect and collide at the center.

I think of the play… I think of how Dan – as Kyle – stands, almost frozen, in this one moment in act one. I remember the rhythm of his movement in that moment – four and a half seconds, slowly standing from his chair, repeating a phrase like a mantra. I remember the rhythm of the way he says that mantra. Ba-Dum, Ba-Dum, Ba-Dum. Three seconds standing, and then Bennie bursts in with reality again. My sound needs to match Kyle’s shape here – so I stretch and layer the sound to crescendo and gather for four and a half seconds, and then I add a stereo motion and oscillation as the velocity increases for three seconds and then…

Silence. The world of the play has bent, shifted, but we haven’t left our actors for a deep-space nebula. They have led us on this journey, and they have a story to tell. We’re on that comet with them, out of control, and our job is to draw focus to the energy in their performances, not to distract from it. Hang on to the comet, hang on to the comet.

One cue done. One hundred and Thirty to go. Most of these ideas will be cut and reworked three or four times as the blocking changes, as the energy of the room changes. I get to work on another sound… a deep rumble beat that in a vaguely heart rhythm… but that will actually sync with another piece of music that I want to use for a specific moment in the play.

Every artist working on this play right now is going through this process right now – deep, intuitive text analysis, working through our intellectual understanding of the play to an emotional and subconscious understanding. We pull out chunks of revelation, one at a time, and bring them to rehearsal to share – and to see what changes in the room as we add something new to the boiling stew that is our play in rehearsal. It’s messy. We fail. And then we rally, bursting through our failures to keep pulling out new ideas and capturing our most brilliant accidents.

At the space, before the second run, I set up the computer to play back a few samples so the cast can start hearing where Jess, the company and I have been going with the design, and what we’ve meant all this time by phrases like “Ice Breath Transition” and “the sound of the deep void of space”. These are all just phrases we made up together, often in frustration like “Ice… Breath… Transition!,” creating a common vocabulary as we create something new and then we need to name it. They are literal meanings and they are figurative. They come from beyond my conscious mind most of the time, and I wish I could control them and articulate them on command but I know that might kill them.

I play the heartbeat. The speakers are focused down, hitting our wooden walls and resonating them at certain frequencies between 300 and 1000 kilohertz – low frequencies. That may cause me some problems later when I play certain pieces of music through them, but for now I’m enjoying this low-end effect. I am a lucky designer today. I play the heartbeat, and the walls rumble steadily, almost imperceptibly, with a building Ba-Dum, Ba-Dum, Ba-Dum. I bring the level from silence up until it’s just a little too loud, and then back it down until it’s just right – so that I’ve heard how the sound reacts and bounces around the space at every volume in between. Kristina looks up, eyes wide, and asks “Are you playing that through the walls?”

Success.

On that cue anyway.

Kristina had the last laugh. I tend to be pretty surgical in my approach to design – in and out, do what is necessary, with all the passion and immediacy as I can muster, certainly, but my own sentiment is not to be trusted. On a good day, anyway. Tonight, during another run, I finished the notes for my cue list through my own tears. Of joy, of grief, I couldn’t tell anymore. I couldn’t help it. This cast knocked me on my ass with the detail and ferocity and life that they are imbuing into these words. I will be talking about this show for years. I can’t say that my cue lists have ever been born from my tears before tonight.

We are going to have a show.