“Here Lies Love” is a massive, multidisciplinary collaboration between a team of innovative designers, choreographers, and actors who have contributed so much of their own lives and history to the storytelling of this show and shaping its lens.

We attempted something never done before in this immersive production: involving a second patron-facing company filled with audience wranglers, house managers, ushers, front-of-house stage managers, platform-spinning carpenters, and endless tracking sheets of moving stages, floating platforms, safety protocols, fire department codes, and marshaling performers from mezzanines through quick change booths to opposite ends of the theater for a safe and timely next entrance… The complexity has been wildly dimensional and also immensely gratifying, watching every preview from a different vantage point, trying to grasp what each patron might be experiencing.

We arrived at all this through 15 years of development, involving spreadsheets tracking line-by-line what storytelling was being covered by lyrics vs. staging vs. video vs. costumes, etc., workshopping ideas in black boxes at NYU, warehouses in the Berkshires, and sitting with models, sketches, and pre-visualization tools to try to figure out how a series of impressionistic pop songs – some that contained continuous action and others that leapt forward seven years in time – could combine with all the staging and design tools theater can bring to bear to collectively tell a sprawling, emotional, and unapologetically political story that spans 30+ years of history.

— Alex Timbers