James Agee’s A Death in the Family, published in 1957, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. Set primarily at Agee’s boyhood home in the Fort Sanders neighborhood of Knoxville, the book struck a chord with themes about childhood, family, community, and loss that have made the book a multi-generational favorite. The introductory portion, Knoxville: Summer, 1915 was written by Agee in 1938 and used in Samuel Barber’s 1947 piece for voice and orchestra of the same name. A recent adaptation of the story as a musical opens this week at the Clarence Brown Theatre.
I spoke with production lyricist Lynn Ahrens and music writer Stephen Flaherty about the production. The two have worked together on musicals for forty years, winning numerous awards, including a Tony for their work on the Broadway premiere of Ragtime, as well as four Grammy nominations, two academy award nominations, and two Golden Globes. She was the only female writer on the Schoolhouse Rock series. They have been actively involved in the Knoxville production.
Lynn pointed out that it’s an adaptation of an adaptation, with Ted Mozel’s All the Way Home Broadway production coming in between the novel and this effort. Mozel won his own Pulitzer for that work. For the current work, director, writer, and actor Frank Galati, who died in 2023 and with whom they had worked on Ragtime, reached out to gauge their interest in a musical adaptation of the works. They quickly agreed and set about writing the lyrics and music.
Lynn remembered that the first communication from Frank was that he sent his modernized, stream-lined version to she and Stephen and asked, “Is there music in it?” She said they read the novel and the play and “music began to well up within us, which is what tells us that it’s a good idea for a musical.” The next time they saw him, they had the music well along the way.
Galati was Artistic Associate at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, which is where the production was set to debut in early 2020. With the advent of the pandemic, everyone went home and that theatre, like so many across the country, went dark. Lynn hitched a ride home to upstate New York with Jason Daneiley who plays the lead role as an adult Agee in both the original production and the current Knoxville production.
Fortunately, the sets had been completed, costumes fitted, and all other preparations made to launch the play, making it possible for the production to finally debut in April 2022. Stephen said the pandemic pause allowed the production to be improved over time and play’s theme of overcoming a hard time echoed in the cast’s experience as the pandemic brought them closer together.
Lynn said that she and Stephen work on both the lyrics and the music, though they each have their strengths. The two of them have a musical background and each have worked as lyricists. The two of them met at a BMI Musical Theatre workshop when he approached her with the possibility of collaborating, and they’ve never stopped working together since. She said they average a new work every two years and she points out they’ve worked together longer than some of Broadway’s famous compositional teams.
The current production team got a great tour, led by Jack Neely, of important spots in the book and were delighted to learn that most of the places he pointed out have been carried over into the musical. Of the book, she said “in an instant” she was hooked, and the beautiful language seemed to call forth music. Stephen knew the intro from the Samuel Barber piece. “I picked up the book and fell in love with the language. The tricky thing for me was finding a way in with the music. A lot of the scenes were very realistic, with two or three characters and I had to find a way to find a larger musical way in.”
Given that it is set in a very specific place and time, he “didn’t want it to feel like a period piece . . . I wanted the music to reflect a lot of the thoughts the characters were having . . . in a certain way the music was sort of a subtext. I wanted to have instruments that local people might play. It’s also about a community. It features one American family at its core, but it’s also about the surrounding neighbors and people who are part of their world, so I wanted to have a lot of choral singing . . . Several of the actors pick up instruments and play them throughout the play. I kept coming back to the Walt Whitman line, ‘I hear America singing.'”
Stephen said, “We think of ourselves as musical dramatists. We’re basically story tellers and we happen to have music as a common language. We start with the character, the scene, the emotion and musically I try to put myself in the character’s shoes.” He said Lynn is rare in that she likes him to write the music first. “Basically, whoever has the idea first, starts.”
One of the interesting developments for him is that he wrote the music for a song in which he used “very short sentences and very clear phrases . . . It’s the final song before the wrap-up and it’s called ‘The Butterfly,’ about the sighting of the butterfly in the cemetery.” He wrote the melody imagining the mother talking to her son, then it was given to the uncle, and ultimately to James Agee. “It shows how a piece of music isn’t necessarily character specific, but it’s emotionally specific. The projects evolve and begin to have their own life. They tell you what you need to do, and the characters do, too.”
They both expressed their pleasure at being able to work in the place where the play is set. Stephen said the only other time he could remember doing so was working on Ragtime in New York City where a large portion of the action takes place. In some ways, there is a symmetry: They’ve come from New York for this production and Agee went to New York to write the original work. In a strange twist, Agee is buried north of New York City near where Lynn owns a home. It’s just down the street from Danieley’s home.
The production began last night at Clarence Brown Theatre, with an official opening night tomorrow. It runs through September 22 and tickets may be found here. Get them quickly. This feels very much like an event that will sell out and be talked about for long into the future.