It is so great to catch up with Playwright Leegrid Stevens, who is also the Co-Artistic Director of Loading Dock Theatre Company.

Leegrid and I first got to chat in 2018 when his show Spaceman was getting ready to premiere Off-Broadway.

Now Leegrid is getting ready for his new show, The Trojans, to premiere this March!

In this NEW interview, Leegrid once again answered my call, but this time around he shares:

• What audiences will resonate most with about The Trojans
•  His creative process for writing plays
• Survival jobs he has held
• A youthful dream that has clashed with reality
• So much more

Connect with Leegrid via Loading Dock Theatre Company: Website, Facebook, Instagram

The Trojans is an original synthwave musical in which warehouse workers re-enact the legendary tales of their home town’s high school glory days, loosely following the mythic heroes and demi-gods of The Iliad. The Trojans use cassette tape loops and vintage analog synths to create a weathered soundtrack of neon-drenched nostalgia.

Set in the shadow of a corporate warehouse, reminiscent of today’s labor giants like Amazon, the story delves into the financial realities faced by workers who take these grueling jobs to stay afloat. For Heather and her coworkers, the warehouse becomes both a prison and a stage—a place where youthful dreams and artistic aspirations clash with the harsh demands of adulthood.

The Trojans will play at the Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre from March 19, 2025-April 19, 2025. Click here for tickets!

1. It's so great to catch up with you Leegrid as you get ready for your new show The Trojans to begin performances this March. What excites you about this new show? Getting to play around with synthwave music in the context of the Trojan war, baby! Synthwave/chillwave/vaporware has been a guilty pleasure of mine for several years now. It gets little attention from the wider music scene, but has a dedicated and passionate following online.

The genre feels like revisionist history, where we imagine what the best parts of youth must have been like, without any of the irritating reality. It’s all palm trees, night drives, sunsets, and neon race lines cause we were awesome and free and everything was gonna be great.

2. You have set the show in the 80s, but doubly against the backdrop of The Iliad. What made you want to have this duality in the show? When I read The Iliad all the characters feel like supremely talented teenagers. They are all in the heat of their greatness, full of passion, intelligence, and most of all, certainty. Achilles never waivers in his rage against Agamemnon. Agamemnon never waivers in his belief that Achilles should yield to his authority. The characters feel like demigods, paragons of pure states like vengeance, sensuality, strength, and authority.

It was only after each one accumulated various defeats and wounds that their shining stars begin to fall from the sky and they become mortal, afraid of death, of loss, and uncertain of the future. This has echoes of my high school experience in the 80s and early 90s. We were all thinking about our own greatness as we built up unrealistic expectations for our lives. Then came the defeats, the indifference, and the rent. It’s a coming of mortality.

3. What do you feel audiences will resonate most with about the show? It’s incredibly fun to imagine ourselves as demigods, with abilities no one else has. You don’t live with a constant filter, you can say what you want, you don’t care about the judgements of others. Cause when the music starts thumping, all you care about are the moves… and the moves are killer. That’s what this play is. It’s an unabashed escape until it suddenly isn’t any more.

 Workshop Cast of The Trojans
Photo Courtesy of Loading Dock Theatre Company 

4. In writing the show, what scene just flowed out of you and why do you feel this scene was so easy to write? There is a scene later in the play where one of the characters (Johnny) suffers a serious car accident and his fellow football teammates mythologize him to the local news. They talk about how generous he was, what a good student he was, what a great leader he was when he was literally none of those things.

That scene just flew out of me and it’s one of my favorites in the play. It’s a microcosm of the play, how we remake the past as soon as it becomes the past.

5. In addition to writing the book for The Trojans, you also wrote the music for the show. Did you write the book and music at the same time or did one come before the other? Sometimes a song would come first and sometimes a scene. Most of the plays I write originate one way or another through music. I find that music is great at removing the inner critic from my mind. It allows me to believe, follow a rhythm or a thought and not worry about how it is viewed (yet).

I had written a version of Trojans and wasn’t happy with it and planned on abandoning the whole project, but every so often I would listen to some of the songs and I’d get back into trying to fix the scenes! So to answer your question, for this play, I think the music led the charge.

6. How do you feel having a play with music helps push the story forward? I’m not sure if music, at least synthwave music, inherently pushes the story forward! In fact, that is an element I struggled with. Pop and electronic songs have a very different structure to typical “musical” songs. What synthwave music does is immediately transport you to a specific “feeling” or “atmosphere.” It instantly gives you an inside track to the emotional and subtextual state of a character. I also feel like it’s an entirely additional design element similar to lighting or scenery that puts the audience into the world of the play.

I love music for this reason, I feel like it transports an audience to a unique and fantastical world in a very immersive way. You could do an all dragon play set in the clouds on a thin budget if you had great music.

Workshop Cast of The Trojans
Photo Courtesy of Loading Dock Theatre Company 

7. In The Trojans, warehouse workers re-enact the legendary tales of their home town’s high school glory days. What is one legendary tale from your high school days you'd like to relive? I used to have an off-road motorcycle in Texas when I was in 9^th grade and I rode it all over the hill country outside of Austin. One day I found this giant hill and built up the courage to really push it over that hill and when I hit the top my stomach dropped and I just flew. I was so proud of myself that I brought a tape measure with me the next time and measured how far I had jumped. The result: 40 feet. It might as well have been a mile. I told everyone. Even managed to get a witness or two and recreate the feat. My status enjoyed a big bump after that! Most of the stories from high school revolve around risky behavior that paid off. I have several of those!

8. The story also talks about the financial realities faced by workers who take grueling jobs to stay afloat. What are some survival jobs, if any, you've had to take to help you stay afloat? 

• Delivering urine and stool samples to various labs at Memorial Sloan Kettering. 
• Construction jobs. One such job: drilling holes into the underside of a concrete bridge in Yellowstone National park that was “retaining water.” Let me tell you, when I finally broke through, that wasn’t exactly water that came pouring down on top of my head. It was thick, black, and smelled like a corpse. It shocked me so much that I fell off the platform into the freezing river. 
• Kmart
• I put my acting degree to use by dressing up as a giant bunny for a theme park. I thought it would be fun, but most of the kids just cried when I approached. And those suits are unbearably hot.
• A lot of offices answering phones, emails, booking travel, and pretending to know about stocks.

Workshop Cast of The Trojans
Photo Courtesy of Loading Dock Theatre Company 

9. The Trojans also discuss how these warehouses are a place where youthful dreams and artistic aspirations clash with the harsh demands of adulthood. How do you feel your youthful dreams of becoming a playwright have clashed with the harsh realities of the profession? Oof. Playwriting as a profession is nearly a myth. Playwriting as a practice is doable. Sometimes you have success, most times you don’t. But if I tried to make a full time living as a playwright I think I would be dead. There are, of course, always a few superstars that keep the dream alive for the rest of us. But sometimes I feel like it’s the dream that’s crushing.

We live in such a lottery culture. Some a select few win it huge, most don’t at all. We’re taught to sacrifice, not give up, to always keep fighting for our big dreams, but I mostly don’t believe that’s a good approach any more. I believe that you just need to find a sustainable way of living that allows you to also do what you love without burning out or getting so downtrodden that you never want to write another play ever again.

Creating art can fill a life and give it meaning. But it struggles to put food on the table… snacks, though, yes.

10. In our 2018 interview, you had converted your Brooklyn loft into a black box theatre, while keeping it your place of residence. Do you still have it as a black box theatre and did you develop this show there like you had developed your previous show, Spaceman? Oh yes, we still have that space and we have done three workshops of The Trojans in there! We love our little space. We’ve developed four of my plays in our space, presenting them for trial audiences. Currently, we’re a venue for a couple of amazing plays from the Exponential Festival.

11. What is something we didn't get to talk about in this interview that you'd like my audience to know about you? I can’t actually read music.

More Leegrid Stevens Interviews:

2018 (Read Here): Going Out of this World with Spaceman

Leegrid Stevens

More on Leegrid Stevens:

Leegrid Stevens is a Texas raised, Brooklyn based playwright, composer, and sound designer. Leegrid’s recent productions include War Dreamer (2023 @ wild project, Henry Hewes Sound Design nomination), A Peregrine Falls (2020 @ wild project), Spaceman (2x Drama Desk nominations 2019, 2x Henry Hewes design nominations), The Dudleys! (8x B. Iden Payne Awards), Mesquite, NV (Workshop Theater), and The Twelfth Labor (4x NYIT Award nominations).

Leegrid is the co-founder of Loading Dock Theatre with Erin Treadway. Leegrid is also an award-winning sound designer (B. Iden Payne Award & NYIT Award for The Dudleys, NYIT Sound Design for Spaceman).

Many of his plays are written simultaneously with the sound design including his next project which explores occult ritual magic used in treasure hunting in upstate New York in the early 19th century.

Leegrid is also the co-author of a fantasy novel series, FALL, with Craig Bridger.