Behind the Scenes with Michael Kraskin and David Terry, producers of Catalogue of Ships
Interview conducted by Roman Mars and Delaney Hall

Michael Kraskin graduated from Northwestern in 2000 with a BS in Performance Studies, and again in 2005 with a MM in Music Technology. He has been working professionally as a theatre sound designer and composer since 1999 all over the country. His work includes Orpheus Descending and The Hairy Ape (Joseph Jefferson Award nomination) at the American Theatre Company, The Chosen, Orange Flower Water, and Lesson Before Dying at the Steppenwolf Theatre, and many others. He helped create Room Tone with Elevator Repair Service in New York which toured the U.S. His one person show "Superhero! the operetta: a non-fiction piece," was selected as one of the Best Of the 2002 American Living Room Festival at HERE in New York.




David Terry is a scholar/artist currently working toward a PhD in Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He holds an M.A. from Louisiana State University and a B.S. from Northwestern University. Research interests include the performance of personal narrative, oral history, performance ethnography, genre theory and the process of adaptation, the intersections of scholarly and creative writing. He has worked extensively, if not lucratively, as both a performer and director in New York, Chicago, Austin, New Orleans/Baton Rouge.

> Why did you name the podcast Catalogue of Ships and what’s the concept behind the show?

Michael Kraskin: The name comes from one of David’s stories. It refers to a very infamous passage from Book 2 of Homer’s Iliad in which the author uses over 300 lines to simply list the ships in this fleet. David’s story (the first one in our series) is about a college literature professor who uses this list to make a point about writing narrative in the post-modern condition. It’s a funny story, and it sort of acts as a framing device for the entire project, in our minds.

David Terry: In ways that we go into in greater detail in the first episode, the list is something that we feel a lot of us feel stuck in one way or another (resumes, myspace or match.com profiles) and are trying to find our way out of.  Among other things, CoS is about the human attempt to find meaning in events that in many ways seem to happen to us without a dynamic plot, like a list.  Within each episode and across the episodes we attempt to find ways to find meaning not somehow outside of the catalogue, but rather by teasing out the possibilities within it. Some episodes are more successful than others, but this too is a very important part of the whole experiment.

> How did the collaboration come about? And what’s it like to produce the show collaboratively?

MK: The show started in 2001 as a performance piece at this incredible theatre in New York called HERE. The artistic director, Kristin Marting, was good enough to give us a shot in her summer festival, The American Living Room.  The original piece consisted of David telling the audience dreams he had recorded on a dictaphone. I had written some music, but I also had his recordings on a sampler, and as he told the stories on stage and lucid, I would play them back.

DT: A very important component of the show, from the beginning, has been the collaboration between the two of us. Put as simply as possible, part of what gets people stuck in some of the more boring possibilities of cataloguing is the assumption of individuality.  The two of us are collaborators through and through and the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. We both feel much more creative freedom together than we do alone.  Having Michael as an editor makes it a lot easier to take risks with some of the episodes because I know that he will help me out if I start to over-romanticize some aspect of a story, or downplay an interesting part. Furthermore, knowing that I can depend on his sound design frees me from the need to protect myself with the layer of irony that plagues so much contemporary autobiographical work: his music allows for that level of distancing so I don’t have to...Working with Michael makes me able to be honest without being precious or self involved. The stories have an everyday quality that I like; they feel overheard, sometimes understated, so when they mean something it surprises you a little. I’ve tried to do this without Michael’s editing and sound mixing and I just can’t do it.

> Is it difficult to produce the show when you live in different parts of the country? What’s your production process like?

MK: It’s not at all difficult. In fact, David and I did our first episode in the same city a few weeks back (Episode 32) and it wasn’t until after we had finished that we realized we hadn’t even seen each other since we started doing the project! Communication is so fast and simple now, that it is extremely easy to do a project like CoS from different parts of the county. Every week (Thursday or Friday usually) David sends me a story he has recorded. I usually listen to it once while I’m doing something else (cleaning or doing dishes). Then I edit out all of his ums and ahs (In David’s case he says “And Uh” a lot!) and do some tweaking to help the narrative flow more effectively. After this initial pass, I’ve become fairly comfortable with the story, and I usually have an idea for how I am going to treat it stylistically. I spend anywhere from 2-12 hours scoring it after that. I upload it to David to make sure he is ok with it or if he has any ideas. He usually does, so I make a few changes and then have it posted by Monday morning (usually).

DT: We don’t really know what to expect from week to week. There are certain stories and concepts that we know we want to cover before the year is up, but I sort of run with whatever story hits me as most urgent on a given week. I stay clear of most very recent events because I haven’t had time to process them into coherent narratives yet and, well, to not embarrass those people kind enough to be in my life right now. We have been committed to making the show ongoing, putting out episodes even during weeks when both of us had major life traumas and would rather have skipped. Though it has been very difficult, I’m very glad we’ve done it.  It gives us a much more dynamic relationship with the work and our audience.  It makes the show a much more constant part of our lives. 

> Describe your approach to sound design. How does theatre sound design differ from what you do for radio or podcast? What lessons do you take from your theatre background?

MK: What is odd about theatre sound is that it is still a rather new discipline, and since it is largely practiced by people who developed a different skill before they started doing theatre sound; people have very different approaches to it. Most sound designers I know are composers or musicians, some are lighting designers who picked up a second skill. I started out as a theatre director and I still approach theatre projects, as well as CoS, as a director. My job is to help tell the story in a clear and entertaining way. In CoS, I get to have a lot more control because the entire style and aesthetic are up to me, as opposed to theatre which is guided by the director’s concept.

> Can you compare the sort of reaction you get from a podcast versus the reaction you’ve received from your work in radio (or theatre)?

MK: One major difference between theatre and podcasting or radio is the context in which it is experienced. In a theatre production, the audience is sharing the experience with a large group of other theatre goers. If I am in the audience, I can sense and even be a part of the audience’s reaction to the production. I think most people experience radio and podcasts in a very private way. They are either in their car or listening over headphones. It is very intimate, and I have no way of directly gauging their reaction. We get lots of nice e-mails from fans and some of them are extremely personal. After seeing a play people rarely write the sound designer!

> What are the benefits of CoS being an ongoing podcast?

DT: A big part of what we gain from the podcast, as opposed to theatre or radio work, is that our audience listens to us at their pleasure rather than ours. One of the things I hate most about doing live theatre is the sense that people I care about have come to see me perform out of a sense of obligation.  With the podcast, people pick it up and listen to twenty episodes back to back, others listen once a week at specific times, still others just go to the website and start randomly clicking around whenever they think about it. This gives us the freedom to do things that don’t work and, I think, allows the audience to feel like they are part of the experiment. Because we are ongoing we get a lot of feedback in-between episodes and are frequently able to incorporate that feedback into future episodes. Although we’ve never seen most of our listeners, many of them are integral parts of the show.

MK: David sums up most of my thoughts on this one, but [having an ongoing podcast] allows us to tell stories from different perspectives without freaking out our audience too much. I think at this point, they pretty much know where we’re coming from. For instance, if you hear Episode 31: Going it Alone, out of context, it might sound like we are trying to convert people to Christianity, but since it is part of a larger framework, people can see that this is a story from the perspective of a much younger David. In future episodes we will see his relationship to religion change drastically.

> Soon Catalogue of Ships will become a participatory project, with your audience members contributing stories, music, and sound design. Why’d you decide to make this format switch? How do you anticipate the sound of CoS will change?

MK: I think we’ve created something really unique with the collaboration of sound and narrative, but our biggest hurdle is that we are limited by our own aesthetics and creativity. We are very excited to see how other people take this idea and run with it. For instance, there is a young electronica composer from Colorado who wants to do an episode for us. His stuff is really interesting, but not something I would EVER have come up with. So we know when he does an episode, it will sound completely different from anything we have done before. Personally, I would love to see a full length program, maybe an hour long, that was entirely work submitted by other people, amateurs and professionals alike. We’ll see. It is quite exhausting to do our 6-12 minutes every week.

DT: We are hoping that the year 2 project will be able to learn from our mistakes and take us in new directions, of course, but we are also confident that we’ve hit on a particular relationship between designer/musician and spoken word artist that we’d like to see other people try their hand at. Doing a show a week for no money is, frankly, exhausting. Without the end date of one year, we likely would have already put down our microphones.