Ahrens and Flaherty Take a Trip to Knoxville, Confronting Great Loss Along the Way

“It’s a story about a small family and an extended community,” the lyricist Lynn Ahrens begins, “and what happens when somebody integral to everyone dies, and how everybody processes it.”

On the surface, Ahrens is describing the plot of her latest show, Knoxville, written with her long-time partner in all things musical, Stephen Flaherty. But deep down, Ahrens could also be talking about the circumstances of Knoxville‘s ongoing development: just eight months after the show premiered at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida, Frank Galati, who not just conceived the show but also penned the book and directed, died of cancer at the age of 79.

And so, for this new iteration of the show, at the Clarence Brown Theatre in the actual Knoxville, Tennessee, Ahrens and Flaherty are confronting the ghosts outside their story at the same time as they contend with the ghosts within it.

Knoxville is loosely based on two pieces of source material: James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family, and Ted Mosel’s dramatic adaptation, All the Way Home. A semi-autobiographical story, it tells of Agee’s experiences as a child, when his father went out of town to see his sickly own father, only for Agee’s father to die on the way in a car accident. Galati’s adaptation puts the adult Agee centerstage as he struggles to write the book, which comes to life around him.

“It was Frank Galati’s idea,” Flaherty explains. “He had adapted the novel as a play, and he thought it might want to have some music. We didn’t know what that meant: was it a folk song or two, or was it a musical? We explored it, and we found that that the music seemed to reside in what the people were feeling, but not necessarily saying in their scenes. It was about internal life. And then music started pouring out.”

The Asolo production in 2022 led to a cast recording, but it didn’t stop the further reworking of the material, even after Galati passed. “One of the things we learned was that it needed some pruning,” Ahrens says of the first iteration. “I don’t know if other songwriters do it, but we tend to want to give everybody a song and their moment in the sun. We gave too many moments in the sun to too many secondary characters. That, for me, was the biggest lesson. We’ve made judicious changes, all of which have to do with structure and who sings what.” Flaherty considers it to be like sculpting. “We’re taking this material and bringing it down to what is necessary to tell the story. It’s a one-acter with no break, and it’s 90 minutes.”

Both Ahrens and Flaherty are keenly aware of the life imitating art. “We’ve lost the heartbeat of the show,” Ahrens says of Galati’s death in January 2023. “But we feel him hovering. His every joyous moment is informing this whole production.” Flaherty remembers their last preview at the Asolo in Sarasota. “He had tears in his eyes, and he said to me ‘I think everything that I’ve done in the theater has been leading to this piece.’ We really feel the honor of taking it to the next level of development.” (This new staging is directed by Josh Rhodes, who choreographed the Asolo mounting.)

There are other spiritual presences hovering, as well. Galati directed Ahrens and Flaherty’s musical Ragtime, which starred the late, great Marin Mazzie; Mazzie’s widower, Jason Danieley, has played James Agee in Knoxville since its early days of development.

“We all loved Marin so much, and Jason became part of our circle during Ragtime,” Ahrens explains. “We were close friends, and our relationship with him has continued.” Notes Flaherty, “As we were developing the first draft of Knoxville, we thought it might be a really good fit for him, and since Marin had passed so recently, we thought it would either be very cathartic and healing for him, or it would be the worst idea and he wouldn’t want to get near it. He welcomed the opportunity to do a piece that was about all these emotions. He threw himself into it and he’s been with us since the very first reading.”

“I don’t want to speak for him,” Ahrens adds, “but I think it’s been healing in some ways. Sometimes, life and art intertwine in this crazy business, all the tragedies and joys and weddings and babies and shows, and they make a community of people who are supportive and care about one another. We try to tell stories that sum up our common humanity, and I think that’s what Knoxville is about.”

Knoxville isn’t the only project Ahrens and Flaherty have in the pipeline. Just prior to our conversation, they were watching audition videos for the New York City Center gala concert edition of Ragtime, which Lear deBessonet is staging in October. There are ghosts around this one, too: in addition to Galati watching over them, it’s the first major New York production of the show since book writer Terrence McNally died in the first Covid wave of 2020.

“Life has brought us together on our projects with geniuses, and they’re gone,” Ahrens reflects. “To feel their loss and hold the shows close make us remember all the quibbling over commas and the late-night stories and personal memories.” Galati and McNally might not be around anymore, but their husbands, Peter Amster and Tom Kirdahy, respectively, are part of this extended family “that we just keep gathering from these shows.”

For Ragtime, the star-studded cast that is led by Caissie Levy, Joshua Henry, Joy Woods, and Brandon Uranowitz, will be backed by a nearly 30-member orchestra playing William David Brohn’s original orchestrations, the first time they’ve been heard in New York in their glory in more than a decade. “I wish Bill were with us too,” Flaherty says of Brohn, whose work on Ragtime won the second-ever Tony for Best Orchestrations, and who died at 84 in 2017.

But the Ahrens and Flaherty family of artists and music keeps expanding. They’re still at work on a film version of Once on This Island for Disney — it’s got a long way to go, they say, but they’re working on demos for new songs. Ahrens recently and unexpectedly received a glowing report from a colleague about a production of the show in Barbados. Flaherty just saw Seussical at the Pittsburgh CLO, and it brought him great joy to see “these young people in the audience scream like it was a rock concert for Seuss characters.” Adds Ahrens, “We follow Our Girl — Terrence always called Anastasia ‘Our Girl’ — all over the world.” And Ahrens and Flaherty’s Boy, Rocky, is being done as far as Brazil and Italy, with a new production in development for the United Kingdom.

“It’s occurred to me,” Ahrens concludes, “That just as we have one show coming back into a big New York production, we’re out of town with a new show that is small in terms of size and scope. We have this quiet, intimate, emotional little jewel, and then this giant necklace. It’s the full scope of our work, both happening at the same time.”

It just goes to show that the road doesn’t always start or end in New York City. Sometimes, you just have to take a trip through Knoxville.