(Photo: Marc Franklin)
Emojiland, currently running off-Broadway at The Duke on 42nd Street, is a delight of a musical, laugh-out-loud performances with an ear-worm score. It features characters based on well-known emojis, such as Skull (Lucas Steele), Princess (Lesli Margherita), Prince (Josh Lamon), and Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes (Laura Schein) while they navigate their world inside of a phone and deal with change. Do not allow it’s high entertainment value to fool you. This is a show with heart and a brain, tackling issues of gender identity, depression and xenophobia with sophistication and complexity.
After the opening number, the first song we hear is “Sad On The Inside” about the difference between who people expect us to be on the outside and our internal reality. Can you talk about what the show is saying about persona?
The issue of persona is definitely an idea that we’ve been interested in exploring from the beginning. And emojis seemed like the perfect source material for that discussion, because emojis have fixed personas and their codal identity is unchangeable. And what does that mean when you always look a certain way to the outside world? How do you wrestle with trying to be someone different than what everyone sees? I am a very smiley person. I’ve always been a people pleaser. I’ve often felt like if I am feeling sad or depressed that those are things I should just keep to myself and I shouldn’t burden anyone else with it. My job in people’s lives is to make them feel happy and I never want to feel like I’m bringing anyone down. So playing Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes is a very personal story, for sure. The other day after the show, there was a little boy at the stage door, probably like seven or eight years old. He asked me, do you really feel sad on the inside? I said, yeah, I do sometimes, but I have people to talk to about it, really good friends and family. He said, it’s really good to know that I’m not the only one. It brought tears to my eyes. So many people have expressed sentiments like that after the show, that they felt seen and that the idea of outside vs. inside was articulated in a way that really made them feel not alone.
For an emoji like Skull, their codal identity is death. From the very beginning we were really, really excited to write for Skull. That is one of the few characters that actually has remained through every version of the show that we’ve done, and we’ve done about 8 page-one rewrites. With Skull, we were always interested in what it would be like to walk around with everyone seeing you as death. How do you not feel alone and not want to delete it all?
I wonder about the backstory for Skull, how much that persona isolated that character from people over time.
Absolutely, we imagine that Skull has lived a solitary life, and has probably been burned by emojis time and time again, shunned for possessing a deathly demeanor. But the wide-eyed Nerd Face [George Abud] views Skull as just another emoji with a specific codal identity, and sees the potential for a friend. Also, Nerd Face loves solving problems. When Skull presents a problem that needs to be solved, Nerd Face is intrigued.
Skull is depressed and also having this extreme existential crisis. That is a developmental task of adolescence, grappling with life and mortality and other existential concerns. Did you write Skull with a particular age in mind?
When we first started writing, we were inspired by Thom Yorke and the music of Radiohead and what that band meant to a generation of teenagers having an existential crisis. We’ve always felt that there could definitely be an emo teenager vibe to Skull.
Another aspect of the show that is so fantastic is that there is no gender-identifying language or pronouns. Can you talk about that choice?
When we first started thinking about this alphabet of characters, we realized that most of them have no inherent race or gender. That opened up this whole world of possibilities for truly color-blind and gender-blind casting. We’re super excited for future iterations to switch it up.
Anything is possible! Is that another way that audiences have said that they feel seen by this show?
Absolutely. Everyone exists in Emojiland and we’re all represented in Emojiland. What’s really fun about the show is that everyone seems to identify with different characters. I’ve had people come up to me and say, thank you for normalizing a lesbian couple with Construction Worker [Natalie Weiss] and Police Officer [Felicia Boswell]. And others really identify with Smize’s depression, or Skull’s existential crisis.
There is a major plot about a virus in Emojiland. Did you write that with the intention to reflect our world right now?
A few years ago we were doing a reading of the show at the University of Southern California. A week before that reading, we came up with the idea of adding a contagious virus into the show. It just so happened that after we finished writing, a nasty stomach virus started going around the school and a lot of the students were getting sick. Now doing the show in 2020 in New York city with the Coronavirus spreading rapidly, so many people have asked if we wrote this thinking about the Coronavirus. Obviously not, but the parallel is very eery. The fact that it happens to resonate so strongly right now is purely coincidence.
I also saw it as an allegory for immigration. And it feels meaningful that in the show, the virus does come from “inside the house” at a time when we are still dealing with all of this xenophobia while the actual biggest threat to our safety are domestic terrorists.
Yes. Scapegoating the newcomers and not wanting to let any anyone or anything in that could “infect” what’s happening within our walls. That’s absolutely what we were hoping to convey.
While the show reflects on serious topics, it’s incredibly funny and entertaining. What role do you think humor plays in the show and in our lives during these times?
Humor is so essential to the show. The despotic leaders in Emojiland, Princess and the new Prince, and the greedy Man In Business Suit Levitating, make some really awful political calls. But they’re also hilarious. It was important to us for those to be characters that make you laugh even though the things that they’re saying and doing are kind of horrific. When we wrote the song “Firewall Ball” for the beginning of Act Two, we really wanted it to be a comical bop. But when you listen to the lyrics, it’s pretty uncomfortable. “The wall went up, so we’re gettin’ down.”
In life, even when times are darkest, I always try to find the funny because that’s just how I operate. I try to surround myself with like-minded people, because things can get very bleak without humor.
When Princess orders the firewall, Construction Worker has a moving response to that order where that character refuses to be part of building the wall and sings an incredible song, “Stand For”. What do you want the show to stand for?
I think at its deepest core, the show is about significance and deciding what matters. We’ve come to the conclusion that love is what matters, but everyone has to decide for themselves. So it’s really about looking deep within yourself and being honest. Your actions and your words speak volumes, so don’t waste them. And that at the end of the day, appreciate life, because it’s a gift.
If you would like to find out more about Laura Schein, you can visit her website https://thelillaura.com/. You can follow her on social media @thelillaura. For information on and tickets for Emojiland, which runs through March 19th, visit https://www.emojiland.com/. For more information about gender identity, visit the Human Rights Campaign website https://www.hrc.org/resources/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-terminology-and-definitions.
Best,
Dr. Drama