Once every two years or so, I remember I wrote Hatred, a Musical. It most recently came up during a weekly bad movie night, when my friends and I were watching Lisa Azuelos's LOL, the 2012 English-language, Miley Cyrus-starring remake of Azuelos's identically-titled French hit. LOL has all the rhythms and accoutrements of a real movie—famous women, trips abroad, horny glances—but every line of dialogue has strong "space aliens write a movie about human beings" vibes. So does Hatred, a Musical.
When the credits rolled, I said, "Man, a lot of the people in that movie spoke like the characters in a musical I wrote when I was 12." Francesca then dug through her email and silently forwarded all of us the script, which I had sent her a decade ago. The title, like this director's note, was written in Comic Sans. Beneath it were two clip art hearts with thin cracks drawn down the center. I am pretty sure I drew those cracks, went, "Whoa," and then called the musical "Hatred."
"We should read this," one of us said. "Yeah, but it's too late tonight. Maybe next week or something," said someone else.
And now, here we are.
Ostensibly based on Romeo & Juliet, Hatred is really just a series of tropes I absorbed from my adventurous middle school viewing habits married to songs from the Harper-Collins Broadway piano book I made my dad buy me at Barnes and Noble. (There's also a number from Merlin, the 1983 bomb starring Chita Rivera and Christian Slater, for which no cast recording exists. I do not know for sure where I found this song, but now I know that the only surviving record of it is a performance by Rivera on Merv Griffin.) Hatred is not about anything, really, except that special brand of 7th grade delusion where you're not allowed to see a PG-13 movie without a guardian but you're also pretty sure the American theatre is hungry for your thoughts on monogamy.
I hope this "production" (big-ass air quotes) gives you all a similar sense of secondhand delusion. At this point in a director's note, I would typically mention my connection to these chararcters or this story, but to be honest I am not even totally sure where this show is set. Someone mentions a city near the end, I guess? So probably a city. It feels more worthwhile to recount an anecdote I've kept returning to in the three weeks we've been working on this (fuck me, we have been doing this for three weeks): when I wrote Hatred, I was living in a log cabin in rural Oregon. My neighbors were some of my best friends, and their father was a very masculine person.
"I'm writing a musical," I told him one day while he was stacking wood. "Oh, " he said. I told him what it was about, and to his credit, he tried his absolute best to feign interest. He kept stacking wood. I kept talking.
Here we are a dozen years later—the world is ending, and I've found myself tangled up with four other people who have just as much trouble shutting up as I do. "There's a pandemic on," we said. "Let's put on a show." The delusion lives. Lucky me.
—Conner Reed, Writer/Director
