Katherine was living in a cabin in the Catskill woods (where coincidentally Spaulding Grey had also stayed, years before). It was a dreary late November afternoon, rainy and chilly. She wanted something to read which fit the pathetic fallacy of the mood. Something otherworldly in an eldritch kind of way, something a bit old fashioned and Anglophilic, and possibly something funny. There was no such book in the cabin’s meagre shelves, so she sat down at her computer and started typing. The setting which came to her was an English manor house library on a full moon night. A crusty English lord asked “Have you seen Bodger?” and his wife Anthea replied “I don’t think your dog came home last night” – and from that exchange a story of an ancient wer beast curse began to unspool.
The Origin Story
Having recently decided not to complete his PhD in Music Theory & Composition which he had been pursuing at Brandeis and instead move from Boston to New York where some friends had generously offered to rent him their dining room, Roland was keen to turn away from Music and focus the bulk of his creative energy on his script writing. His feature film, All the Rage, had just been released theatrically and one of his plays was being produced in a small theater in the village. When he attended the first public reading of a new play by one of his new friends he wasn’t even sure of the title. Something about Batavia? he thought as he took his seat at the Medicine Show theater on W. 52nd Street.
Roland made his way to the A Train and back to that dining room in Washington Heights still laughing at some of the ridiculously silly dialogue and even sillier stage craft in what he now knew to be a play about an ancient curse, wild ravenous beasts and the made-up vaguely-Eastern-European-sounding long lost land of Batvia.
The next morning he awoke still thinking about that reading and he knew he had to pick up the phone and call Katherine to tell her two things he wanted her to know.
First, he hoped she wouldn’t be offended but he felt quite certain that The Curse of Batvia wanted to be a musical. And as if that wasn’t nervy enough, he knew just the composer for the job.
And the rest as they say is… well, you know.