Photo by Connor long
5.08 | 06.14.22
This week we're featuring a conversation with Ian Coss, co-creator of Newts, a wild new six-part musical audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. The show is inspired by the writings of the Czech journalist and science fiction pioneer Karel Čapek. He’s best known for coining the word "robot" in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots, or R.U.R—but his less famous 1936 novel The War with the Newts is actually a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century. It's also a sprawling, jumbled, irreverent story that turns out to be perfect material for an adaptation like Newts.
In the show, Ian and his collaborator Sam Jay Gold have taken Čapek's speculative story about how humanity might deal with the appearance of a second intelligent, speaking, tool-using species on Earth and added a wealth of new layers—not the least of which is a catchy Beach-Boys-inspired musical score. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but if you listen to the series (and our interview with Ian), you might just come away with a new perspective on the nature of our relationships with other animals; on the human species' alternately tender and warlike instincts; and on Karel Čapek's underappreciated contributions to 20th-century literature.
Newts launched on June 7, and you can hear it at newtspod.com wherever you get your podcasts.
Resources Related to This Episode
Newts from PRX and The Truth
The Great God of Depression from New England Public Media
Over the Road from PRX’s Radiotopia Showcase and Overdrive
Forever Is a Long Time on Apple Podcasts
Finn and the Bell from Rumble Strip
Rumble Strip’s “Finn and the Bell” Wins a Peabody Award - Hub & Spoke
When the People Decide from LWC Studios
Karel Čapek, The War with the Newts, paperback on Amazon
Dennis Drabelle, Karel Čapek’s Legacy, The Washington Post, May 6, 1990
Notes
A special thank you to Ian Coss for spending time with Soonish and providing all of the music and sound effects files used in the episode.
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
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Pacific newt photograph by Connor Long, shared under a CC BY-SA license.
Full Transcript
Wade Roush: Warning! This episode contains mild spoilers for Newts, the new audio drama from PRX and The Truth. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want to know anything about a story before you experience it, you should wait until all six part of Newts are out and then come back and listen to this podcast. Okay. You’ve been warned.
Hub & Spoke Sonic ID: Hub and Spoke Audio Collective.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
Ian Coss: There's a good number of people who are just going to be confused about, like, what? Like surf rock, musical podcast adaptation, Czech novel, newts , 1930s? Like, it's kind of deliciously overstuffed, conceptually.
Wade Roush: This is my friend Ian Coss.
Ian Coss: There's a certain number of people out there who are just who just don't get it, and that's fine. But then there's this certain slice of people who are like, you say the word Newt, and they're like, ‘You had me at Newt.’
Wade Roush: Ian is a composer, producer, and sound designer based here in Boston, and his latest delicious creation, or co-creation, is Newts.
[Newts sound effects]
It’s a six-part audio drama from PRX and the fiction podcast The Truth. And it’s a little hard to describe. But that’s exactly what appeals to me about it, and it’s the reason I wanted to have Ian on the show.
Newts is inspired by the writings of a journalist and novelist named Karel Čapek, who lived in the nation then known as Czechoslovakia.
The one factoid you may already know about Čapek is that he and his brother coined the word “robot,” in a play they wrote together in 1920 called Rossum’s Universal Robots, or R.U.R.
The robots in R.U.R. are actually synthetic people grown in a lab. Today we might call them androids or replicants.
And in the play they rise up against their creators and ultimately wipe out humanity,
So if you’re looking for early science fiction stories where technology runs amok and the creators are destroyed by their creations, R.U.R. is probably the second most famous example, right after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
But 16 years after R.U.R., Čapek wrote another science fiction story.
This one is a lot less well known than R.U.R.
But in its own way it’s a funnier, weirder, and more biting reflection of politics and social affairs in the first half of the twentieth century.
It’s called The War with the Newts.
[Music: “That Ain’t No Devil” from Newts]
And as you’re about to hear in my interview with Ian, it’s a sprawling, jumbled, irreverent story that, to me, is the perfect example of bricolage. That’s a word literary scholars borrowed from French, and it means something like “a work improvised from the resources at hand.”
And I think the bricolage of The War with the Newts what makes it such great material for an adaption like this one, where Ian and his co-creator Sam Jay Gold have taken Čapek’s story about the sudden appearance of a species of talking newts and added a bunch of new layers, not the least of which is a musical score growing out of Beach Boys-style surf rock.
That may sound unexpected, but it’s no more unexpected than the rest of the story. And what makes it all work for the podcast version is that Ian and Sam and the cast they assembled are so damn good at what they do.
Sam Jay Gold is a television writer, filmmaker, theater artist, and puppet designer based in New York. A few years back he created a theatrical version of The War with the Newts using puppets to represent the newts, and in some ways the new audio version grows out of that production. You hear Sam in the podcast as the host and introducer, and he also performs a few of the parts/
As for Ian. Well, I’ve known Ian for a number of years now, because we both travel in the same audio circles here in Boston. And he is the very definition of multi-talented. He did the music and sound design for a podcast series I absolutely loved called The Great God of Depression. He produced another PRX podcast called Over The Road that explored the world of long-haul trucking. And in 2021 he released his own limited-run podcast series called Forever Is A Long Time that asked why divorce seems to run in families. The New York Times named it one of the top 10 podcasts of 2021.
On top of all that, Ian has a PhD in ethnomusicology. And that’s just scratching the surface. I literally can’t keep up with everything Ian is doing.
But Newts is a real departure for him. It’s the first extended fictional piece Ian has made, and I’m pretty sure it’s the world’s first musical drama about intelligent amphibians.
Newts launched on June 7, and you can hear it at newtspod.com wherever you get your podcasts. Now let’s get to the interview.
Wade Roush: Ian Coss, it's so good to see you on Zoom and it's so good to be talking with you about Newts.
Ian Coss: Likewise. Good to be here.
Wade Roush: Okay, so, Ian, how would you describe this project to somebody who's brand new to it and maybe hasn't even listened to the first couple of episodes yet?
Ian Coss: Okay. I often describe it as a surf rock audio drama inspired by a 1936 Czech novel in which humanity encounters a highly intelligent species of amphibians. And it changes the course of everything. And it's called Newts.
Wade Roush: Right. It's based on a 1936 book by the Czech journalist and author Karel Čapek. And the book is called The War with the Newts. You've shortened to just Newts. And it's kind of crazy.
Ian Coss: Both are crazy.
Wade Roush: If you had to summarize the plot a little bit, it's almost impossible to summarize. But yeah, without giving away any gigantic spoilers, how would you describe the arc of this story?
Ian Coss: Okay. Yeah, and it is really difficult to summarize because both the book and our audio version of it have this there's this quality of the story where it just expands in scope constantly. You know, it starts off, you think it's one thing, but then it's, you know, it becomes about nations and religions and philosophy. It just sort of grows and grows and grows. So it is hard to capture, but I would describe it this way. The story begins with a sea captain who is looking for pearls, and he goes to the small island in what was then called the Dutch East Indies. What is now, you know, the islands of the South Pacific. And he encounters, on one of these islands, a newt.
[Newts audio clip:
Captain Van Toch: What was that? Show yourself!
Toby: Eh ohhh.
Captain Van Toch: Well. That ain’t no devil. That’s a newt.
Toby: Eh ohhh.]
Ian Coss: And it's about three or four feet tall and kind of slimy. And he learns pretty quickly that this Newt is capable of all kinds of things, that it can use a knife and it can hunt for oysters and fetch pearls. And he kind of has this little light bulb moment of feeling, both a kinship with this creature, feeling kind of paternal towards them and also seeing an opportunity in them. And as the story unfolds, it turns out these newts are capable of more and more things. Not only can they work, but it turns out they can also talk and write and think and act and sing and dance. And pretty soon, you know, as you asked, I won't get too far into the story. But pretty soon we arrive at a world where humans are sharing the planet with another intelligent species that is in many ways just as intellectually capable as we are. And I think what the book really tries as it goes along, what it really tries to grapple with is that, you know, the what if of that, you know what? How would we, you know, manage ourselves and engage with another species of intelligent life right here on our own planet? Not an alien species, not an artificial intelligence, but an animal that's living here in our midst that is every bit as intelligent as we are.
Wade Roush: Yeah, you used the phrase “sharing the planet.” And I think that's a little bit generous because that's not….
Ian Coss: There's not a lot of sharing that goes on.
Wade Roush: Yeah, precisely.
Ian Coss: So I think that's where Karel Čapek’s sort of critique of humanity comes out, is really in in the way that we, it's ultimately a failure in many ways, a failure of collective action, a failure of possibility and opportunity to, you know, commune and engage with this intelligent life. And as the story goes along, it's not too much of a spoiler to say that things go pretty poorly.
Wade Roush: What called out to you about this story and said “This needs to be made as a musical?”
Ian Coss: Well, I think to understand this version of the story, I should give you maybe a little bit of a story of the story.
Wade Roush: Absolutely. I was going to ask about that anyway.
Ian Coss: So this. The I let me say this. So this book was introduced to me, I want to say seven or eight years ago now by a dear friend and my collaborator on the podcast who's a theater and television writer named Sam Jay Gold. He had been living in Prague and had encountered this book. In fact, he had been reading one of Čapek's early books. The book he's probably most famous for called Rossum's Universal Robots, which is, as sci fi and technology fans will know, is the origin of the term robot. So my friend Sam was reading this book about robots, and one of his teachers there in Prague said, okay, that's nice, but if you really want to get into the world of Čapek, you should read this other book called War with the Newts. Sometime later, Sam introduces me to this book. I also have some kind of some ties to the Czech Republic in that area. My family comes from there. I've also traveled there a couple of times. And so it's, I think, drawn to the source material. Read it. And as soon as I finished the book and I'm not entirely sure why I don't recall, but I wrote a song about it and it's actually a song that's in the show. It's the very last song that closes Episode 6. And I sent that song to Sam, and somewhere around there we just started talking about things we could do with the show. Sam had already been thinking about a theatrical adaptation, and one of his sort of conceptual reference points for the show was always surf rock, Beach Boys.
[Music from Newts: “That Ain’t No Devil” instrumental track]
Ian Coss: And I think in some ways the connection is as literal and as absurd as it sounds like. Aquatic newts, water, surf. You know, in some ways it is that that direct. But I think as we got into it, there are there are other elements of this sound world that that kind of made sense. I'm sorry. I just hit my microphone. They kind of made sense and connected with the world of the show. One of the things that I love about the book is that it's it's an alternate history, but in some ways, as it goes along, a deviates so thoroughly from our own chronology of world history that it kind of made sense in attempting to adapt it to almost be deliberately anachronistic and to, you know, even though the book is set in the 1930s, we kind of like this idea that it's really it's not the 1930s that you or I know from history class or film reels. It's this other kind of 1930s and somehow couching it or presenting it in this sort of like psychedelic surf rock mode. For me, at least, kind of helps, you know, disrupt expectations about, you know, Oh, this is the 1930s of big band jazz or something. It sort of puts the whole show in this other sound world. That, to me, goes along with the kind of the spirit of the book.
Wade Roush: It definitely calls out for a treatment. That's just as weird as the book itself. what I mean is that it's kind of a mishmash, a jumble. It's it's a fun ride if you sit down and read this book, but it doesn't have a traditional throughline. There are almost no characters who survive all the way through.
Ian Coss: Exactly.
Wade Roush: There are chapters that are completely kind of exposition in, you know, fake news kind of science papers, quotes inserted into the mouths of real celebrities. You guys make all this clear and you adapt it in various ways in the show. But in a way, it's the kind of book that you would you would think a a playwright or an adapter of any kind would look at it and say, I have no I have no idea how I'm going to turn this into something coherent that lasts six episodes, that has characters that the audience can relate to, and that has themes that we can draw on to turn it into music. So I'm curious how you and Sam basically got your heads around, how you would even turn this into a six episode piece with some continuity to it?
Ian Coss: Yeah, I'll just add one note about, you know, the the style and feel of the book itself. Čapek was apparently really inspired by cubism, the art movement. And for him and I think for maybe other intellectuals of the time, it was not just, you know, an artistic aesthetic. It was sort of like a way of thinking, sort of a philosophical or movement. And so I've heard the book described as sort of a cubist novel that, yeah, there are all these pieces that kind of fit together, but there's not that straight through line of character action, outcome, tension, resolution, climax. You know, it does not follow that typical kind of storytelling form. And I think that that was deliberate on his part. And I would say in terms of our process of adapting it, we have it. There are moments, there are parts of the show that lean into that and attempt to, I think, honor the style and feel of the original book. And in some ways, I think, like you said, music is that it's like how do we capture the like the insanity of this book in audio? You know, because like you said, the book is kind of overstuffed with these primary source materials, untranslated documents, exchanges that go nowhere, characters that appear for one scene and then die, and in some ways, turning the whole show into a musical felt sort of in the spirit of that constantly expanding, shifting world.
Ian Coss: But at the same time, we wanted to present it in a way that that did draw listeners through and did give enough of a narrative handhold that that audiences would be would hang on with us through the detours and and asides and everything else that comes with it. So. One of the things that we decided early on is that. First of all, we're going to change the name and that we're not going to call it War with the Newts. And now we're just going to call it Newts. And I think for us, that was a little bit of it, granted us a little bit more freedom to think of this as a an original work inspired by Karel Čapek's book and not a direct adaptation of it, because we did want to take some liberties with the plot and with the characters. And you know, if you read the book and listen to the show side by side, I'm sure you'll you'll notice them. There are many. I think the most significant changes we've made are in the second half of the story topics. Original book is basically divided into two parts. The first part is all about how humanity first encounters the species of Newt, and it's actually a fairly grounded story that revolves around a few central characters and how those characters kind of work together to to bring the Newts into the world, you know, to the marketplace, to popular culture, to commerce.
Ian Coss: And then the second half of the book, everything kind of spirals. And suddenly it's more about conflict between nations, between species. There's asides about philosophy and, you know, whether humans are, which species is, you know, perhaps more deserving of dominion over Earth. There's a whole section where the the author talks to himself about the book and how it should end. It really spirals outward and inward and every which way. So one of the choices we made early on was that we wanted to give that second half a little bit more grounding in characters with, you know, names and emotional stakes and things that a listener might be able to hold on to a little bit more easily. So what we've done in the second half is kind of personify some of the events and, you know, trends that are happening in the story into individual characters. A lot of the most of the big plot points are still drawn directly from the book, but as I said, we've kind of distilled them into characters in a way that the book doesn't.
Wade Roush: There are two characters, Richard Drake and Frances Drake, the successive prime ministers of Great Britain, who are just not there in the book. And you've very much made Francis Drake into a super important point of view character in the second half. She's the Prime Minister by the end.
[Newts audio clip:
Richard Drake: It’s late, darling. Come to bed.
Frances Drake: I’m afraid I have more reports to go through. You weren’t kidding about that part of the job. Don’t wait up. Oh, and Richie?
Richard Drake: Mm hmm?
Frances Drake: Enough of this ‘darling’ business. From now on, do refer to me as Madam Prime Minister.]
Wade Roush: And she's trying to do her best but kind of fumbling. And it would have been hard to relate to that story of the War with the Newts without some kind of central character like that.
Ian Coss: Yeah. Yeah. And I think with her character is definitely the most important of the original characters you've created for the show. And I think, you know, as we inserted these characters, we were always sort of trying to balance. You know, the desire to and I think this is especially important for an audio adaptation where having voices, recognizable voices of people who we know and care about to kind of carry us through the story felt especially important to the format. We wanted, as I said, to kind of ground the story and characters. But there is also part of the quality of Čapek is that you're…sorry. Part of the quality of Čapek is that the characters don't always have a lot of agency. It's not a story about, you know, either evil or, you know, well-meaning characters having a vision and executing it and and creating the world. It's so much a story about kind of happenstance and circumstance and the way that, you know, small individual actions, you know, made in isolation that were maybe shortsighted or self-centered in and of themselves. But the way all of these small, tiny actions kind of accumulate into calamity, that's part of what I find so nuanced and interesting about this book, is that it's not about an evil character causing evil or a good character saving the day. It's about just sort of people doing their own thing and collectively producing this disastrous, this disastrous outcome. So I think even as we we inserted characters where there weren't any before, we've tried to in some ways. You know, not make it too character driven because ultimately no character is in control of this story.
Wade Roush: Right. Since we're on this theme of happenstance and small decisions that have huge consequences, we might as well talk about another huge change you made. Well, maybe it's not so huge. There are hints of it in the story from the beginning. We're introduced to a narrator character who's not there in the book. There is a character, the doorman, G.H. Bondy's doorman. Mr. Povondra, a male character in the book who makes a fateful decision to open the door and let Captain Van Toch into Bondy's office, where they start plotting how they're going to help and exploit the Newts.
[Newts audio clip
Narrator: So he knocked on that door. Where he met, working the day shift.
Narrator: Can I help you?
Captain Van Toch: I’m here to see Mr. Bondy.
Narrator: And you are?
Captain Van Toch: I’m a sea captain, see? And I’ve got a…
Narrator: Mr. Bondy sees visitors by appointment only.
Captain Van Toch: Oh, well, sure. I’ve got one of those.
Toby: Rraawwrrr.
Captain Van Toch: Toby, not yet.]
Wade Roush: So that character is incidental to the plot. He winds up, Povondra winds up being kind of a Newt aficionado and winds up collecting newspaper clippings and such that become material for the novel. Yeah. In the show, it's unclear how they kind of transcended their role as the doorman and became this omniscient overseer of all events. But you get the kind of sense that they're looking back at this history from some perch. Kind of after the story happens, maybe they're at the top of a mountain, sort of in the last available refuge from the rising seas or something.
Ian Coss: That's exactly the mental image that we have. Yeah.
Wade Roush: Okay, cool. So that was a pretty big change. Yeah. This unnamed narrator, who is a female character in the show and wonderfully played by Lindsey Nicole Chambers. Did I get that right?
Ian Coss: Yes.
Wade Roush: It's an incredible character who finally kind of gets the spotlight at the very end and gets a song and and gets to argue with herself about where the plot's going in a very breaking the fourth wall kind of way. But that was also a major editorial kind of decision you guys had to make. And I'm just curious, what else can you say about that?
Ian Coss: This felt like a really important decision we made again early in the process. So I mentioned that a few years ago, Sam and I collaborated on a a theatrical adaptation of War with the Newts, which is really Sam was really the writer of that one. I composed music for it and performed as part of it. And in that original version, he started playing around with the idea of Mr. Povondra being a little more than just the doorman. And when we then turn to this podcast adaptation in thinking about the medium of audio, where the narrator, where the voice in your ear is, is such a, or certainly can be such an important part of the medium. And this way of storytelling, it kind of felt natural to make the character Mr. Povondra in the book at least into a kind of narrator in the book, as you noted. Povondra is not a major character, you know, he does not drive the major actions of the story other than, as you said, opening the door for fantasy. But in this weird way, he does function as a kind of archivist for the story and also a kind of conscience, I think, for the story. And so Sam and I saw in that character a kind of the seed of something larger. I think the other thing we're noticing in the book and responding to is that the narrator of the book, even though they're not named, we don't know who they are or what perspective they're telling the story from, they're not the sort of traditional, omniscient, removed, impartial narrator of, you know, much of a lot of fiction. The narrator is kind of involved in the story in a way, and especially as the book goes along at the very end, the narrator, who presumably is Čapek or to some extent reflects Čapek, does feel kind of emotionally involved in the story. And so we're we're kind of responding to that aspect of the book and this character who feels like they are kind of the heart of the story, even though they are a small part in the action of it. And we basically brought those things together and said, What if we took the doorman, you know, that that character who plays this tiny, tiny role and turn them into the through line of the whole story.
[Newts audio clip
Narrator: I’m still here.
Humans fighting humans. Humans fighting newts. Newts fighting newts. Maybe it ends there. If we’re lucky.
And then? What happens then? I….um…. Maybe I should just sing that song. Okay. Okay. That is a nice ending.
All the cliffs of Dover, fallen over to the sea
Colonies and elevators rise from the debris
Fall into the sea
The only enemy you’ll see is me….]
Ian Coss: And it's, again, partly responding to the fact that there are no characters that actually last from chapter one to the end of the book. Every single character, you know, no matter how important they are in any, you know, one part of the story, they're not there for the whole thing. They die. They disappear. They arrive halfway through. And so we wanted to give at least one voice that is continuous through the whole thing. But we thought that it it might help kind of draw out some of the contrasts between, you know, the characters and the story, to have a female narrator who, like Mr. Povondra, serves as a kind of archivist who is trying to piece together the facts of what happened, and as a kind of conscience to to try and make sense of what happened and where humanity went wrong and what her own culpability in that is, if anything.
Wade Roush: I have a whole bunch of questions I want to get to, but this is another thing that I think is so fun for people who haven't read the book and don't know the story and are likely to be coming across it for the first time in the form of Newts, the audio version. You're going to be listening through and thinking, okay, I get episode one pretty conventional story. Oh, and now episode two seems to be about these these Hollywood starlets in the South Pacific making a film. And then episode three seems to be even weirder and more out there. And then episode four is like all about science and reproduction. And so I was thinking, okay, this is just crazy. They must have like decided to throw out the book and just gone off on their own, right? Because this script is getting so nuts. But then I went back and finished the book and I realized that no, the book is exactly that nuts.
Ian Coss: Exactly. Yeah. And yeah, it was a really fun challenge to try to evoke, evoke that quality of the book, but not by simply like one for one telling the words of the book. And I mean, I think it's so important to keep in mind this book was written and, you know, 1935, 1936. You know, this is before Orwell, before Animal Farm or 1984. This is this is crazy stuff written, you know, in Prague, in Czechoslovakia, just a couple of years before that country was annexed by Nazi Germany before the start of World War Two. It's just like to me to try and put myself in that in the mind of Čapek. You know, in that time in place, when he sat down and thought, what if I, you know, told this alternate version of history that's all about newts? And what if it goes just bonkers, crazy? I don't know. It's just amazing to me that that he had that creative instinct in that moment. And yeah, to me the book is just is is timeless in that way and and endlessly fascinating.
Wade Roush: I love that you brought up the cubism parallel earlier, because when I try to figure out what genre this book fits into, I have a lot of trouble, you know? It's yeah, it's science fiction in a sense. And Čapek is known as one of the first authors in the science fiction genre. Science fiction wasn't really called that until the twenties anyway, and Čapek was around right at that time, starting to write things like R.U.R. and inventing words like robot. And so we think of him as one of the early pioneers of science fiction. But this book isn't straight science fiction by any means. It's yeah, I would call it, you've brought up parallels like Animal Farm and 1984, and I think of the book more as social commentary or satire, I guess with a science element to it. There's certainly long, long sections kind of speculating on what might happen if another intelligent, speaking, tool-using species evolved on Earth. And, you know, he does his homework in that way. And so in that sense, it's it's science fiction. And then it takes a science or technology premise, twists it a little, puts it back into our world, and uses that to make us think harder about things. But it's really it's really more it's in my mind, it's the story is much more about the humans and how they're dealing with this new reality and how that can become a mirror of the real world that Čapek was living in. So he's living through this time of incredible tumult when it's quite clear what kind of totalitarian, racist culture has taken over Europe. Yeah. And that comes through in the book in multiple ways. I mean, there's a whole section about German uber newts, super newts, which is a not very veiled jab at Nazi Germany. And one can understand, one can see in retrospect why Čapek became public enemy number two and the Nazis went looking for him as soon as they rolled into the country, only to find he had already died. I guess what I'm getting at is that the story doesn't feel like science fiction to me in the classic sense. It's yeah, it's much deeper and messier than that.
Ian Coss: I totally agree. Something I've read about the book that I agree with is that in some ways the title is is really misleading. Like you hear that title of War with the Newts and you imagine, I don't know, War with the Worlds or something, you know, this like monstrous species of newts comes crawling out of the ocean and it's a battle for the planet. And it's just not that at all. There's very little fighting in the book at all, and there's very little fighting in our our audio series. It's really a much as you said, it's much more just about human society and how we how we engage with this this situation. Part of, part of what I find so smart and fascinating about the book is that even though it has, as you said, these kind of you can find these little historical references to fascism or other events at the time, kind of tucked into the text. It also doesn't function as a kind of neat allegory. You know, it's not as simple as, you know, the newts represent fascism or represent Nazis. And this whole book is just sort of like a retelling or critique of, you know, the 1930s, but replaced with newts. It's really it begins from that thought experiment of like, what if there were an animal on earth that evolved parallel to humans that were it was every bit as smart as we were and what would happen. And it’s one of Čapek’s gifts, I think as a writer of speculative fiction is his ability to just take a premise and truly run with it and truly follow the internal logic of the world he's created rather than try to, you know, force it back into the world that we live in. So it's it is both like he's such a shrewd observer of humanity and human events, but he also is so able to kind of set that aside and create something totally, totally original.
[Newts audio clip: news montage]
Ian Coss: And I do think in there, you know, the like the science fiction piece of it that grounds it is is just that that kind of radical question of and it's really like a science question and a social question of like. Is is this world we've created that humans have created, is this the only outcome, the possible outcome of evolution, of life, you know? And Čapek writes about this in some of his journals and his own writings about the book that, you know, looking around at the political, social, economic circumstances, he just had to start it to wonder, you know? If another animal, you know, developed the same intellectual capacities as humans, would they make the same mistakes and fight the same wars and, you know, lead to the same destructiveness that we do? Is is there another alternative vision of intelligent life and like highly organized, structured, literate society, you know, can can we imagine, are we capable of imagining that alternative? And what if that alternative existed in our midst? To me, that's a really striking question. You know, that is both a scientific question and a kind of social question that he's trying to answer in this book.
Wade Roush: Mm hmm. Given all that, it's striking to me, though, that there are no point of view Newt characters in the story. You know, there is there are newt characters. They have names like Andy and Pondsworth and the Chief Salamander. Right. But you don't get inside the head of any of the newts. You don't get to hear them thinking you don't get to see the world through their eyes, which is interesting.
Ian Coss: Yeah. That was something that Sam and I talked and thought a lot about in adapting the show, and I mentioned the earlier theatrical adaptation that we collaborated on. One of the choices that Sam made in that version was that all the Newts were puppets and all the human characters were played by actors. So there was this sort of divide between, you know, the material nature of the newts and the humans on stage. And one of the things we talked about in that version, which is kind of in some ways true of puppetry in general, is that the newts in the story function as mirrors in some way. They reflect the, you know, the qualities and aspirations of the different human characters they encounter. But they don't actually, as you said, in the book, have a lot of sort of individual agency or perspective of their own. And so I think in a lot of ways topic uses them, as I said, to kind of reflect back on humanity. And ultimately, by the end of the book, when humans and newts do come into conflict, in many ways they are simply acting on the same instincts and priorities that were modeled to them by humans. You know, if they are evil in this story, they are only as evil as we are.
Ian Coss: Right? So. Yeah, it. In some ways, I think the book would have been even more radical if it did attempt to actually take us inside the head of a newt. And we made one creative choice about partway through the story. We added a newt character. This was actually one of Sam's ideas. There's a a newt butler who works in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Drake, the Prime Minister of the UK. And we added a newt to that scene and there's sort of a brief moment where one of the human characters actually asks, you know, Madam Frances Drake, the Prime Minister, actually asks the newt, like, what do you think? What should we do? Like, what do you want out of all this?
[Newts audio clip
Pondsworth: Your tea, madam.
Frances Drake: Thank you, Pondsworth. That will be all.
Pondsworth: Certainly, madam.
Frances Drake: Wait. Pondsworth. What do you think?
Pondsworth: What do I think?
Frances Drake: Seeing as you’re the only newt I know. This issue of guns and the like. Where does your species stand on the matter?
Pondsworth: I…we…. ]
Ian Coss: And we don't really get an answer to that question. We sort of leave it unanswered. But we wanted to, at least in the show, maybe draw attention to that silence in a way that the book doesn't and kind of help clue listeners into the fact that the Newts are actors in this story. But in some ways, we they are a little opaque to us. Um. And that's. Yeah, and that very much comes from the book.
Wade Roush: I imagine it was very important to you to find the right sound for the Newts. And I love the way it came out, the kind of the early croaking noises of the pre-verbal newts.
[Newt sounds]
Wade Roush: And then as Andy develops the, you know, ability to speak kind of cockney English.
Andy: Disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting. Disgusting!
Wade Roush: How hard was it for you to find or locate kind of the right, the right sound, the right accent, the right timbre for the new voices?
Ian Coss: Yeah. I mean, on of the challenges of telling the story in sound, of course, is that we don't have visuals. And so we realized early on that we needed to make the Newts recognizable and distinctly newty-sounding, just so that you can tell when it's a newt talking and when it's a human talking, and ideally create enough continuity among the newts. You know, that that when a new Newt character enters, you can immediately tell that it is a Newt. And we want to do all that while also creating, as you describe, this sort of progression of their their verbal abilities as they learn human languages and engage more fluently with human society.
[Newts audio clip
Andy, reading from the newspaper: The north triumphed in the Derby for the first time in 50 years, when Outsider, a horse with 50-to-1 chance, won from behind in Newmarket.
Mr. Griggs: Well isn’t that marvelous, Andy?
Andy: Yes, Mr. Griggs. What’s a horse? ]
Ian Coss: So it was kind of a challenge that and to be honest, now that we've produced the whole thing and like, you know, seeing it through to the end, probably if we went back to the very beginning and recorded it all over again, we would probably even make different choices now to kind of make the continuity and development even more clear. But the way it actually happened, and I think it worked out all right, is. Early on, we had a session with a wonderful, talented actor named John Michael Reese, who plays Andy, the first talking Newt and who also plays King Triton. Who is the film dramatized version of a Newt that we meet early in the show and who also plays a couple of other Newt characters later in the show. John Michael is just one of these performers who you just set up a microphone and just, you know, offer a prompt, like, could you just try out some different, you know, maybe somewhat nasally or guttural voices and like and here's a line and just see what happens.
Ian Coss: And he'll just kind of, you know, compose himself and clear his throat, roll back his shoulders, and then he'll just go. And he he just gave us minutes of, you know, trying different voices. And some were kind of cartoony and some were kind of subtle. High pitched, low pitched, gravelly, nasally. And we just went back and forth and back and forth and kind of like, try it like this. Can you put it, you know, a little a little bit more in this nasally part? Or can we get a little more gravel out of your throat? And it was this really delightful process. And really, I think Sam and I will give a lot of credit to John Michael for helping us create the the template for the new sound, because Andy is the first character who learns to speak. And we kind of we get to experience this whole process of experimenting with kind of pre-verbal sounds and then forming words and ultimately sentences and complete thoughts. So it was really through that session with with John Michael, who I know is making his Broadway debut this year in A Strange Loop is the show. And basically, we took from that session some ideas and kind of instructions that we could then give to all the other performers who played Newts.
Wade Roush: Yeah, I hope that everybody feels like this is a flattering comparison, but I feel like John Michael Reese was sort of your Andy Serkis. I mean, he yeah, it's very clear that there's a kind of etymology. There's a there's a link between Gollum and the Newts. Yeah. I mean, and that's Gollum is a character we all have in our heads after endless years of Lord of the Rings movies. Right, right. And Gollum isn't exactly a Newt, but he's sort of amphibious and has a strange, wet, gravelly voice. And and it works. It's like instantly recognizable, I think, because we do have that cultural precedent. So yeah. And John Michael Reese is channeling that a little bit, I think.
Ian Coss: Yeah, it's interesting. I don't recall ever using that as a reference point or a direction, but I think you're absolutely right that that voice is ingrained and iconic enough that I think it's probably somewhere there in the background here.
[Newts music: “That Ain’t No Devil” instrumental track]
Wade Roush: Musically. I wanted to ask you about this this surf rock choice, this genre that you're working in. It makes the whole piece more relatable, I think, in that that's a style of music that Americans and people all over the world instantly recognize. It makes us feel comfortable. It places the story in the 20th century, I guess, although not quite in the ‘30s. But there's lots of anachronism throughout your version, which is fine. But I want to zero in on the song “I See A Little Me In You,” which gets sung by several different characters with different words, different meanings.
[Newts music:
Captain Van Toch: My child
My truth
My pride
My proof
I can see a little me in you
See a little me in you
My dream
Come true
My confidence
Come through… ]
Wade Roush: But that song is tender and heartfelt in a way that I just don't think is reflected in the book. And I think that I wanted to ask you whether you felt like you needed to write some songs that were just, like, sweeter than anything that Čapek actually ever wrote.
Ian Coss: Hmm. You're right. And I'll be candid here that you've read the book more recently than I have, and in some ways I am at this point a little confused about what is the book and what is the show. So forgive me if you know, if I misremembering, but. I think. For us, it felt important to us that, you know, there are elements in all these characters that are kind of cartoonish in ways, and many of them are caricatured in their voices, their accents. You know, like Captain Van Toch is kind of like a hardy-har-har pirate sailor voice. And Mr. Bondy is sort of like a, you know, Mr. Burns from The Simpsons conniving businessman and so on and so forth. But it felt important to us that that we take these characters seriously and that each of them is sincere in their own motivations, whatever they are, no matter how selfish or shortsighted they may be. And we really saw in Van Toch in particular this, you know, the way we we often talk about is like every every character who encounters the newts want something different from them and projects something different onto them, you know. And and for Mr. Bondy, they are a business opportunity. You plain and simple. But for Van Toch, they're really more like his children. And what he wants from them is is more emotional. He he wants to be paternal to protect them and to feel like he's needed and and wanted by them.
Ian Coss: And so we wanted to bring that out in a way that that felt sincere. And I think the the song does that, you know, there's and in a way you can step back from the song and kind of laugh at it. I mean, it's essentially like a love song, but between this kind of gruff sea captain and this slimy, three foot tall newt. But, it’s, once you accept that premise, it's deeply sincere in that.
Newts music: “See a Little Me in You” instrumental track]
Ian Coss: That that is one of the songs that that is that definitely a nod to the Beach Boys. And I think their their body of work and the Beach Boys were kind of a constant reference point to us when you were thinking about the show and the feeling of the show that play between lighthearted kind of fun in the sun, tongue in cheek, and really kind of sincere earnestness. I think the Beach Boys move along that they kind of move between those really interestingly in their work, especially over different time periods. And that was one song. It's very much, “I See a Little Me in You,” as a I was definitely thinking about some tunes on Pet Sounds if you ever if you've ever listened to that record and and the ability to take that that sort of fun in the sun aesthetic and really turn it towards something more introspective and really heartfelt. So I think, yeah, that song felt very important to us.
Wade Roush: This production feels to me as someone who's, you know, deeply immersed in and listens to, you know, so many podcasts, it all feels like a big sort of family affair, just like you went out to all your favorite people in theater and radio. Voices like Glynn Washington, you know, and Marco Werman jump out at me immediately as people who inhabit my audio galaxy. How did you pull that off? Like, did everyone just like say yes the instant you called them up?
Ian Coss: Yeah. What you're describing was yeah, it was a really fun, fun aspect of the show that has a ton of characters in it. One of the qualities of the book, as we've discussed, is that it's not about two or three characters who develop over time. It's really this globetrotting story where characters come and go. And that just created opportunities to yeah, to create all these small roles with really, really fun and interesting characters. I think there's maybe 40 or 50 people in the show. It has a big cast and we were working with and just practically speaking, we were working with a fixed budget. And so one of the ways to get, you know, talented people on a budget is to go to people that that, you know, we've worked with in the past and also people who we really respect and admire and love working with. Basically what we did is we after the script was done, we had this big spreadsheet and we kind of went down the list of like, who could we get? Like, who do we know? Who would, who would be right for this role? Who would also bring a kind of unique character of their own to the to the role? And we just went down the list. And yeah, I mean, my personal connections happened to be largely in the radio and podcasting world, which is why, you know, we have as, as you mentioned, Glynn Washington. Marco Werman. Avery Trufelman from 99pi and Articles of Interest shows up. Mo Rocca, who many people know from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, shows up but and many other voices too. And. And then Sam, my co-creator. He is much more tied in in the the Broadway film world. So we, you know, ended up getting cast members from all these different Broadway shows we ultimately and were able to cast. Sorry. Oh, yeah. We were able to cast Chris Barron, lead singer of the band Spin Doctors, who you may remember as the voice of one of the catchiest songs of the nineties as Captain Van Toch. That was, you know, sort of a friend of a friend connection to Sam. So it was all just us kind of figuring out who we knew. And the fun thing about this project, and this is true from pitching it to casting it to promoting it, is. You know, when I tell people about it and I think Sam has had the same experience, there's a good number of people who are just going to be confused about like what? Like surf rock, musical podcast adaptation, Czech novel, newts , 1930. Like, it's kind of over like deliciously overstuffed conceptually. And, you know, there's a certain number of people out there who are just who just don't get it, and that's fine. But then there's this certain slice of people who are like, you say the word Newt, and they're like, You had me at Newt. Like, when are you recording? You know, we got a number of those emails.
Wade Roush: Awesome. Ian, it's been so fun to kind of fanboy with you about this production, which I was super impressed by all the way through. Thank you for reaching out to me to have a dialogue about it. To close. I want to just ask you to reflect a little bit on what this project meant to you. I mean, did it change the way you think about Čapek or about science fiction or about surf rock or about the narrative possibilities of audio drama? So what do you take away from it?
Ian Coss: Yeah. First of all, let me just say thank you, Wade. This has been such a pleasure. And, you know and you know this, any time when you create something and other people engage really closely with that work, it is really gratifying and it's really a pleasure to be able to talk with you, you know, after, you know, you've listened to the whole show and and to have this really thoughtful conversation about the production and its source material. So thank you. Yeah. I mean, this show was. Such a big learning experience for me in many ways. I've done a little bit of audio fiction, some one-off episodes or projects, but never undertaken anything of this scale. So really on many levels, I mean, on a technical level, I learned so much about just like how to record and mix and edit dialogue and create scenes and doing sound design for this style of production. On the musical side, I feel like I learned I did so much listening going into a lot of the, you know, the songs and even the instrumental beds within the show. Are there little nods to kind of classic surf rock tunes that I listen to in the process? So I think it was just a wonderful chance to kind of dive into that genre, that world of music. One of the things that both Sam and I kind of undertook over the last few months, partly in preparation for the launch and sort of doing interviews like this, is that we both. Read a bunch of other Čapek works. So I've I recently read this other book that Čapek wrote called The Gardener's Year, which is all it's a collection of essays about home gardening.
Ian Coss: I've been reading a collection of his short stories that are mostly detective stories. Read some of his non-fiction columns and newspaper pieces that have been collected and translated, and that's just been such a a wonderful gift to kind of at the tail end of this this process, this sort of love letter to Čapek to also kind of open up, you know, our view and appreciation of him and all that he did. And I think that's maybe what I would just close with that I've, you know, in both making the show and now in kind of sharing the show with others, I just I'm I keep coming back to just how just how striking Karel Čapek's body of work is the time that he made it, the circumstances he made it under, the breadth of it, the perceptiveness, the empathy, the optimism, the really deep, deep kind of like belief in the in the goodness and capacity of people, even in the midst of, you know, you know, these kind of crazy dystopian tales and this truly dystopian life, you know, circumstances he was living in. That's really something I keep coming back to. And I one of my many hopes for the show is that anyone who listens to it or some people who listen to it will feel intrigued to pick up a Karel Čapek book, any book, and experience his writing, at least in the English translations, because there's a there's so much there's so much there. It's such a rich, rich world that is not nearly as well known as I think it should be.
Wade Roush: Very well said. I feel the same way. You guys are doing a great service, turning people on to Čapek. But my hope for you is that Netflix comes calling, or somebody who wants to take this to the next level and put it on film.
Ian Coss: Our DMs are open.
Wade Roush: All right. Thank you, Ian. This was so fun.
Ian Coss: Yeah. Thank you so much, Wade.
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush.
Our opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, and all of the other music you heard in this episode came straight from Newts and was composed by Ian himself.
You can find Newts at newtspod.com or in the same app where you’re listening right now. The first three episodes are out already and the next three are coming between now and the fifth of July.
At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find a transcript of this episode and links to more information about Newts.
You can find me on Twitter at wroush and you can follow the show at soonishpodcast.
Before we go I have two big items to share.
First. As you know, Soonish is part of a remarkable collective of independent podcasters called Hub & Spoke.
And this week I want to send out a huge note of congratulations to my fellow Hub & Spoke producer Erica Heilman, the creator of the podcast Rumble Strip.
Last week Erica won a Peabody Award for her episode “Finn and the Bell.”
The Peabody is the broadcasting and podcasting world’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize and it’s the ultimate career honor for an audio producer.
“Finn and the Bell” is an incredible story about a young man from the small Vermont town of Hardwick whose death by suicide in 2020 shook the community to its core and left an unexpected legacy.
Erica’s award is so richly deserved.
So if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll subscribe to Rumble Strip and listen to “Finn and the Bell” and all of Erica’s other deeply perceptive and surprising stories about life in rural Vermont.
Second, there’s another important podcast coming out soon that I think you’ll enjoy.
It’s called When the People Decide.
It’s a show about ballot initiatives, the people who organize them, and how they’ve shaped American politics.
Conversations about democracy in the U.S. typically focus on political parties and candidates. But there’s a whole other world of everyday people who are taking issues they care about directly to their fellow voters using ballot initiatives.
Like Katie Fahey in Michigan.
Katie Fahey: Hey. I want to end gerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let me know. Smile-face.
Wade Roush: Or Zakiya Prince in California.
Zakiya Prince: That’s when I ultimately started trying to figure out what I can do to change the law.
Wade Roush: When the People Decide launches on the Fourth of July.
It’s supported the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and produced by LWC Studios.
And you can subscribe wherever you’re listening right now.
That’s all for now.
Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back with a new episode….Soonish.
