Creating The Logic Pit

Channeling millennial frustrations with a post-recession labor market, the abundance of low-benefit and high-hour contractor positions, and the replacement of a career with a series of “gigs”, I was inspired to write a musical celebrating the love of work while also questioning why we do it in the first place. Started in 2019 and finished in early 2022, I was interested in artificial intelligence and how it would change our relationships to our work and to each other, and how as jobs become more scarce, people will make whatever sacrifices they need to cling to the scraps that they already have. 

I was also writing the show for a theater camp of 80 elementary and middle schoolers. Started in the summer of 2019, the script was written while cooped up in a house in Wisconsin during the first COVID-19 lockdown in April of 2019. I composed the songs, inspired by the punk music I’ve enjoyed since middle-school, to be easily sung by the students of the theater camp, with rousing anthems and an in-your-face delivery and esthetic. The show was workshopped with a group of 14 graduates of the camp who did long readings over Zoom during the pandemic. Three summers after its inception, The Logic Pit premiered with Twin Cities Theater Camp in July, 2022. ChatGPT debuted 4 months later.

Inspiration

The Logic Pit was conceived out of a desire to write an original show for Twin Cities Theater Camp, an education summer theater program that I had been working for 15 years. Sensing a hole in the musical theater repertoire for modern shows that can be produced with a cast of over 70 kids, I wanted to write a show that would feature a large number of actors, a powerful vocal range, have high-intensity fun numbers that would motivate young students, and fit the sophisticated style that our organization works in. In the summer of 2019, after producing Newsies with TCTC, inspired by the popularity and tumult of Silicon Valley tech culture, and no longer charmed by my mostly freelance career, I began the outlines and songwriting for The Logic Pit.

Building the Crown

Holed up in a house in Wisconsin during the early spring of 2020, I wrote most of what would be the rough draft of The Logic Pit over the course of a week. The script would be completed over the course of the next year along with scratch recordings of all of the songs, except for “Work is Never Work” which would be added just before the first table-read.

The Pitch

Although I had been writing the show for Twin Cities Theater Camp, I didn’t actually pitch the idea to the group until summer of 2021, a full two years after I’d started. At this point the script had gone through multiple drafts and demo tracks were being assembled, but it would take another 6 months of editing and revisions, cutting paragraphs of dialogue, a number of extra verses and bridges, and even an entire song before the show was ready to share.

The Work

In early 2022, with the help of TCTC and a team of friends and graduates of the program, The Logic Pit received two online table reads followed by an open floor for feedback and suggestions. Those suggestions shaped a large part of what would ultimately be the final draft.

We built This Machine

In summer of 2022, Twin Cities Theater Camp produced The Logic Pit with a cast of almost 80 students. It was the first time the organization had done an original show, and our first show back indoors since 2019. The first names of all of the students who participated in the premiere are written on first few pages of every copy of the script.

Used with permission of Twin Cities Theater Camp. Photos by Alyssa Kristine Photography.

Since the premiere…

Despite all of my research, my multi-year obsession with artificial intelligence, and even knowing about the company OpenAI, I did not see the release of ChatGPT on the horizon. I knew that AI would arrive and would be a disruptive force in the labor market, but I didn’t know it would be so soon. We premiered the show in July of 2022 and by the end of the year we were having discussions at my school about the effect that generative AI would have on our mid-term exams. While some of the concepts in The Logic Pit are still in the realm of science fiction, the reality of life in the tech industry is more relevant than ever. Employees are feeling squeezed, benefits that were assurances just a generation ago are only a memory, and money continues to be the most prominent marker of a company’s value.