Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

After I write a sequence, I just open the script and then sit at the piano keyboard and "play" the script. (And because I also draw and paint, sometimes I sketch out the action as well.)

I love film scores and opera, and I wanted to work in those forms. But theater was more accessible. And no one was doing this in the late 1970s, when I began working in the theater. So, I have written scores for thirteen plays, which are not musicals, but straight plays.

Jumping twenty or so years later, Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, approached me with the idea of staging Anthem. She had heard my film score to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. And she said, I want to do Anthem as an oratorio. Well, I figured what she meant was a straight play with music.

After each performance of an Austin Shakespeare production, audiences are invited to stay for a ten-minute discussion of the work. And this tradition continues in our New York run.

Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

I collaborated with a brilliant young sound designer named Anthony Mattana, who enriched the sound of the total production with vocal effects, percussive and other sounds. He also mixed the sound effects and the music, using the theater's first rate sound system to complement the theater's acoustics. This completed my score.