Urinetown: The Musical - Softcover

Mark Hollmann; Greg Kotis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571211828 ISBN 13: 9780571211821

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Synopsis

Winner of three Tony Awards, including Best Book, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's Urinetown: The Musical is a tale of greed, corruption, love, and revolution in a time when water is worth its weight in gold.

After a twenty-year drought made water a scarce commodity, private toilets became outlawed. Now, all restroom necessaries are controlled by the Urine Good Company (UGC), a megacorporation that charges fees for using public toilets. Anyone unable to pay fees--or who dares to relieve themselves outside the commode--are arrested and banished to "Urinetown".

When UGC employee Bobby Strong's father falls victim to this tyranny, he spearheads a revolution, inspiring the people to rise up and reclaim their own restroom duties--unaware of the realities and consequences of his actions...

With a preface by David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Proof
And an introduction by the authors

About this title

About the Author:

Greg Kotis is a veteran of the Neo-Futurists, creators of the long-running attempt to perform thirty plays in sixty minutes. Jobey and Katherine, his play about fish, toast, and a love stronger and grimmer than death, enjoyed runs in New York and Chicago. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Mark Hollmann attended the Making Tuners Workshop at New Tuners Threatre in Chicago and the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York. A member of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP, he lives in Manhattan with his wife.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

1

JUNE 2

On June 2, 2002, Urinetown won three Tony Awards (one for book, one for score, and a third for direction), an event that -- as of this writing -- still feels quite warm and wonderful and difficult to believe. Throughout the evening of the Tony broadcast, people would approach me and ask, "Did you ever think the show would get this far?" to which I would answer, "Well, no, I didn't." An obvious answer to an obvious question. Urinetown, as they knew, and as you may know, arrived on Broadway as a ludicrous, harebrained transfer from Off-Broadway, itself an even more ludicrous transfer from Off-Off-Broadway. The show, apparently, was this absurdist musical about a world where people had to pay to pee, appropriate, perhaps, for some fringe festival on the Lower East Side of New York City, but not for Broadway, and certainly not as a nominee for a bevy of Tony Awards. At each leg of Urinetown's journey from Stanton Street (Off-Off- Broadway) to Forty-third Street (Broadway), the conventional wisdom seemed to mutter, "This must not happen." And yet, at each leg, it did happen -- the show survived, flourished even, and eventually snuck its way forward toward that Broadway night of nights. By the end of the evening's festivities, these "Did you ever think?" exchanges became something of a ritual, the asker knowing the answer, the answerer welcoming the basically rhetorical question. They took on the verbal equivalent of pinching yourself to see if you're awake -- "Am I dreaming? Apparently not." The question, to be sure, is still welcome, because the journey isn't over yet. As of this writing, Urinetown is planning a national tour, as well as a flurry of international productions, including Seoul, Tokyo, London, and more. Urinetown has its very own original cast recording, produced by a large, monopolizing corporation like RCA/Victor, no less. And now the text of the play has been published by a not quite monopolizing, but at least respected, mid-sized publishing outfit like Faber & Faber, complete with an introduction engaging enough to keep the reader reading until this very sentence. Given the origins and original intentions of the play, it all still feels quite difficult to believe, as well as warm and wonderful.

THE IDEA FOR URINETOWN

The idea for Urinetown first came to me during what might generously be described as a poorly planned trip to Europe during the late winter/early spring of 1995. At the time, I was performing with the Neo-Futurists, a Chicago-based experimental theater company that was taking part in a theater festival in a small Transylvanian (believe it or not) town called Sibiu. On our return flight, I decided to extend an overnight layover in Paris to spend two weeks bumming around Western Europe by myself, to see the sights, and also to try and decide whether I would propose to my girlfriend and fellow Neo-Futurist, Ayun Halliday. For some reason I thought $300 would cover my expenses, and as you might expect, I ran out of money almost immediately. What I had intended to be a meditative, economy-style back-packer excursion through the capitals of France, Germany, England, and Spain quickly devolved into a grim test of endurance, where the defining questions changed from "Am I getting enough culture?" and "How do I really feel about Ayun?" to simply "How can I not spend any money until I can reclaim my ticket to the States and go home?" For me, the answer involved sleeping in train stations, eating cheap but belly-filling foods, and, strangely enough, avoiding going to the bathroom as much as possible. Public bathrooms in Europe are pay-per-use. Some are old buildings in parks complete with towel-distributing attendants; some are state-of-the-art, self-cleaning toilet-pods set proudly near city crossroads. Each involves a fee of some kind, some more expensive than others, all at the time prohibitive to me. I have never been able to just pee in the bushes (or between parked cars, as is often done in New York), nor do I do well under the hostile gaze of restaurateurs who know a bathroom free-loader when they see one. For me, the pay-per-use amenities were it. And so it was that on one particularly cold and rainy afternoon in Paris, while I was making my way past the Luxembourg Gardens, trying to determine how badly I needed to go to the bathroom and whether I should splurge and use one of the toilet-pods I could see looming in the distance (or wait until just before dinner when I could combine two trips into one), that the notion of a city where all public amenities in town were con- trolled by a single malevolent, monopolizing corporation came to me. And not only would the corporation control all the public bathrooms but, being malevolent and monopolizing, it would somehow ensure the prohibition of private toilets, thus guaranteeing a steady flow of customers to its overpriced comfort stations. With its wealth and influence on the rise, it would pay off politicians and the police, outlaw going in the bushes (and between parked cars), and generally employ all available tools of persuasion to maintain its hammerlock on power. At its head would be an evil capitalist genius controlling the world from behind his corporate desk. But would he really be so evil? For the world he was controlling was suffering from a nearly uncontrollable ecological disaster -- a drought that, at the beginning of our story, had already entered its twentieth year.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0571211828
• ISBN 13: 9780571211821
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 103