INTERVIEW: Emily King’s podcast could languish in the drawer no more
Photo: Grace Under Pressure was written and directed by Emily King, and stars the vocal talents of her cousin, Alice King. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Kampfire PR with permission.
PasticheNYC is in the midst of releasing weekly episodes of the new podcast called Grace Under Pressure, which comes from Emily King, who created, wrote and directed the audio piece, billed as an eight-part audio comedy radio drama musical podcast miniseries. That’s a lot of words to fit into a singular project.
Emily’s creation centers on the character of Grace, voiced by Emily’s cousin, the late Alice King. The story centers on Grace’s struggles living and working in the 1990s in New York City. Listeners can expect everything from pyramid scheme fraud to cynical art-world pay-to-play to “inappropriate” affairs. Much of the plot comes off as screwball comedy, according to press notes, but there’s a real anguish at the center of the narrative as well. Grace continually loses her job at the end of each episode and falls down the socio-economic ladder, but perhaps she can find true love on her descent — plus, some piano ballads that wouldn’t be out of place in a New York City bar.
Emily’s résumé is extensive, including more than 20 off-off-Broadway plays as director, plus several years in the recording industry for RCA Victor and Sony Classics. She also wrote or adapted Bridie Now and Then, The Hero of the Slocum, Paris Malice and High Tor, according to her biography. She founded PasticheNYC in order to bring “the classics to a new generation in a new century.”
Recently Emily exchanged emails with Hollywood Soapbox about Grace Under Pressure. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
When did the idea for Grace Under Pressure first come to you?
After six years working in the theater in London and Europe, I returned to New York in the early ‘90s to find no paying work but much creativity in small groups of writers, actors and directors. In many of these, my closest cousin (and other self in a parallel theater universe), Alice King, was playing many parts.
Alice was the perfect company member: hard-working, kind, supportive, ironic and gently teasing. She offered me my first short play to direct, and I never looked back. What made Alice so special? So irreplaceable? She had sexiness and class, fun, seriousness and common sense, looks and brains and joie de vivre. She could do anything, and she made me think I could too.
One morning I awoke from a dream with a theatre project fully formed in my head. For Alice. Grace Under Pressure. Eight-part radio series. Loses her job in every episode. And finds her life’s work and true love. Theme song, choral commentary piano bar songs, radio theater live on stage. So I wrote it. We did the first few episodes as part of a Women’s Work short-play festival. And that’s as far as we got. Grace Under Pressure took its place in my fully-packed file cabinet drawer of semi-produced plays.
But, as one of the most complex and satisfying pieces I’d ever written, it was too good to let it languish in a drawer forever. So it was reborn last year, while we still had Alice King with us to bring it to life. Recording it was something that gave her enormous pleasure, surrounded by a company of actors who adored her, playing her part in a piece that would outlast all of us.
Do you feel the project works best as a podcast? Was there a hope for the stage or another medium?
Grace Under Pressure was originally written in the ’90s for the stage, as a live radio drama recording, with sound effects man, announcer and theme song, piano player and everything, when there really wasn’t such a thing as radio drama on the air anymore.
So, in resurrecting it in the 2020s, I was delighted to find that technology had caught up with audio theater. We could put it out in the world as a podcast, a popular medium with a built-in audience base. But even better and more complex than the stage version, we could paint our love letter to NYC in sound. For posterity, as they say. I think they should put it in a time-capsule representing New York in the ’90s and shoot it into space. I guess a podcast is the next best thing.
How is the piece inspired by New York City working women?
One thing about being an aspiring actor in New York, she usually has to support herself some other way between acting jobs. So we worked as proofreaders, receptionists, waitresses, in art galleries and laundromats, as dominatrixes, dogwalkers and stuffing envelopes at home. Ours was not a rarefied atmosphere of glamor. But it was a broad swath of working women’s experiences, entered into with the understanding that at any moment we would drop everything for an audition, a callback or just an interview with an agent. While staying one step ahead and one desk apart from the office manager, the casting director or the acting coach with their own ideas of privilege. Of course, that could never happen now.
The news release says that the 1990s was an age of diminished expectations. Could you further explain why this decade was chosen for the story?
Frankly, that’s when it was written. To us, it was just a portrait of modern life. Now it’s a period piece. In the ’80s we’d been in our 20s, with all sorts of arts flourishing, and us with them. By the time we turned into the ’90s, and the AIDS crisis began to destroy our friends, fellow artists, teachers, life was something darker, more desperate, harder to face. Things we had taken for granted just weren’t there anymore. Humor became more grim, but still just as necessary, if not more so. We had pledged ourselves to our wildest dreams, now we had to learn to expect much less.
How did you record authentic soundscapes from the city?
For my COVID era recorded streaming video song cycles, Persuasion and House of Mirth, I took pictures wherever I went with my phone-camera. For Grace Under Pressure, I got a small field-recorder called a Tascam and just walked though NYC listening. Sometimes I knew I’d have to create an entire episode’s ambient background, like the sweatshop sewing machines or the laundromat washers and dryers. (Their clink-chunk of quarters was my punctuation percussion.) I recorded ambulances, garbage trucks, subway cars, cash registers, elevator music, pickup jazz quartets in the park and a clopping carriage horse. I became an avid audio collector. I think I was most proud to have discovered one of New York’s last actual payphones in the basement of a bar on Irving Place. I don’t identify the audio postcards at the end of every episode, but they are worth waiting for, especially the last one, a sort of New Orleans-funeral farewell to Alice, “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
What do you hope is the ultimate takeaway after spending eight episodes with this story?
I think Grace Under Pressure is about finding out who you really are, which you do when the life you’ve come to expect comes apart. And that happens in every decade. All my work seems to be about bridging the gap between great writing of the past and a new generation that is perceived as just skimming the surface of memes and soundbites. It’s infectious — and habit-forming — just to ride the waves of distracting neural input. I’d like to encourage folks to take that deeper dive, especially into great works by women, past, present and future.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Grace Under Pressure, created, written and directed by Emily King, and starring the voice talents of Alice King, is currently being released as a podcast, with new episodes every week. Click here for more information.
