A strange thing happens to time during Stereophonic, playwright David Adjmi and director Daniel Aukin’s sensational play at the John Golden Theatre in New York. The show’s three hours and 10 minutes collapse a full year, from June 1976 to June 1977, that a band—made up of vocalist Diana (Sarah Pidgeon), lead guitarist Peter (Tom Pecinka), keys player Holly (Juliana Canfield), bassist Reg (Will Brill), and drummer Simon (Chris Stack)—spends recording their new album, with engineers Grover (Eli Gelb) and Charlie (Andrew R. Butler) manning the board. And, to be clear, those three hours and 10 minutes don’t fly by. This is a play that revels in silences—whether tense, shocked, or sad—as much as it does in rollicking sound. (Will Butler of Arcade Fire composed the songs, which the actors play on real instruments.) The meticulously rendered recording-studio set, by David Zinn, also never changes, so you’d be forgiven for having little sense of how much time has passed by the end of Act I (a month), or for missing that in Act IV, they’re no longer in Sausalito, but Los Angeles.
Yet the action, such as it is—rooted in the sometimes fraught, frequently tedious, occasionally revelatory process of making art—casts a heady spell. Stereophonic enjoyed a sold-out run off-Broadway last fall, at Playwrights Horizons, before transferring to Broadway this April, where it’s received still more acclaim (and four Drama League Award nominations). And both Sarah Pidgeon, 27, and Juliana Canfield, 32, invoke sweeping, unknowable forces (“the universe”; “a great deal of mysticism”) when asked to describe what first attracted them to the piece.
Before Pidgeon—best known until now for her roles in Prime Video’s The Wilds and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things—auditioned for the show last May, she’d read for it in March 2020. (The pandemic scuttled plans for a spring 2021 production.) Those intervening years would prove essential to her interpretation of the searching, slightly neurotic Diana; emotional notes that she could only approximate at 23 had new resonance in her later 20s. “There were things that she was talking about that I could see in my own life more clearly,” Pidgeon reflects one Tuesday morning during previews. Not only did the fracturing love story between Diana and Peter—who talk, and then fight, about ambition and professional pressures and having children—seem a lot less abstract to her than it used to, but Pidgeon’s perspective on her own career as an artist had also evolved in important ways. Diana, who reckons more explicitly with her image as a rockstar than anyone else in the band, “doesn’t necessarily understand her agency and the power that she has [as a songwriter], because she relies so much on her boyfriend to help her make it happen,” Pidgeon explains. As an actor, she could recognize that self-consciousness. “There’s so much rejection in this industry,” she says. “I think it can open up a lot of self-doubt and second-guessing, this feeling that you can’t do this job unless multiple people say that they want to hire you and give you the opportunity.”
The show’s postponement worked in Canfield’s favor, too. “David Adjmi has been developing this play for nearly a decade, and because there are so many great roles for young actors, it became something of a legendary piece of theater in the New York scene,” she says. (While many will know her as Jess, Kendall Roy’s dutiful assistant in Succession, Canfield—like other members of that cast—is a creature of the stage, having appeared in four off-Broadway plays between 2018 and 2019.) She didn’t audition in 2020, but when she started to hear “whispers from some friends“ about a new production of Stereophonic in 2023, “I called my agent and I said, ‘Listen, there are very few projects that involve singing and musicianship that I feel qualified to do, but I think this is one of them.’” While she wasn’t a musical theater actor, she had played a little piano growing up, and could certainly carry a tune.
Canfield’s character, Holly, was rather more loosely drawn than Diana. “Between my reading the play for the first time and putting it on its feet in front of an audience, we did very little table work, and there was very little concrete discussion about who Holly was or what her backstory was,” Canfield says. There were hints—we learn that she played the organ in church, and that her mother was a teacher—but surrendering to the piece’s mysteries yielded some extraordinary surprises, including moments of powerful emotion that Canfield still can’t fully explain. She points to a scene between Holly and Grover in Act III, “where they’re talking about movies from the ’70s, and how men behave and women respond”—Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, being the primary example. “It was the first time I was hearing it out loud,” she says, “and as I was reading that scene I broke down sobbing.”
The play, Canfield quickly understood, was reaching her “on a subconscious level rather than on an intellectual one,” and she welcomed that—especially given her part’s highly technical demands in other respects. Take, for instance, the task of finding Holly’s voice: Canfield pored over footage of British rock and folk singers from the 1970s, less interested in latching on to a specific accent (though she was drawn to Sandy Denny’s) than in “hearing how women in that time placed their voices and the rhythm and pace at which they spoke.” She adds, “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so in need of all of the tools that I learned in drama school for any job. It took a lot of energy, but it’s the kind of energy you hope to expend when you plan to be a professional actor.”
Similarly, for Pidgeon, a decent part the work was bound up in just “trying to get my mouth around the words” in this very talky play—that, and fiercely protecting her voice, the one instrument Diana relies on absolutely. “It’s a lot of steaming and it’s a lot of water,” she says. “All other aspects of life have sort of faded away.”
Sitting somewhere between the intuitive and more deliberate creative processes undergirding Stereophonic was forging the intimacy of a longtime band as new cast mates. From the jump, it helped that the actors aboard the production were “a very friendly group,” per Canfield: “There were no lone wolves or closet assholes.” But long rehearsal days, coupled with the tall order of learning Butler’s music, bonded the core five players together fairly quickly. “The ego sort of drops away as soon as you play that first wrong note and everything suddenly sounds terrible,” Pidgeon says.
At this point—some six months after Stereophonic opened at Playwrights Horizons—the company’s closeness is more authentic than ever “There is something that we’ve earned in this run that we didn’t have before, and that’s just time together,” Canfield says. “The intimacy among us is really different. It feels lighter and truer.” (At the same time, because of how the Golden’s stage is lit, the audience feels somewhat more abstract now than it did at Playwrights: “It sort of becomes this black void past the sixth row,” Pidgeon says. “It’s easy to forget that they’re there, which I think is helpful in this hyperrealistic world that we’re trying to create.”)
Indeed, Diana’s relationship with Holly—one of a precious few in the show spared the strains of competition or sexual tension—and Pidgeon’s with Canfield have begun to feel especially blurry, and wonderfully so. Eager as she is to avoid comparing the band in Stereophonic to Fleetwood Mac—it’s simply too easy—during her research, Canfield couldn’t help earmarking an interview that Stevie Nicks gave after Christine McVie’s death in 2022. “She didn’t see a reason to do anything as Fleetwood Mac anymore, because she was like, This band without this friend, it doesn’t make sense. It’s impossible,” she says. “I took very little from the archives of that band, but that comment really rang clearly out to me, and felt very useful.” Likewise, in their show, Holly and Diana’s “camaraderie and their two-step within the chaos of the band feels like a glue that holds everyone together.”
Andrew R. Butler (as Charlie), Pidgeon (as Diana), Canfield (as Holly), and Will Brill (as Reg) on Stereophonic’s opening night.Photo: Andy Henderson
By now, that dynamic is exactly as warm and supportive in real life as it looks from afar. “Juliana and I are very close, and there is just that knowing and understanding and trust that we don’t have to play at—that’s just there,” Pidgeon says.
“I knew her a little bit before we did the show, and we were always friendly,” adds Canfield. “But I remember when we moved into the theater at Playwrights, and we were in the same dressing room, all of a sudden our whole friendship and the way that we played our friendship onstage took on this whole other dimension. Suddenly we had this shared space where we could, as Sarah and Juliana, go and vent or tell secrets or commiserate or celebrate, and it felt like we could just bring that with us and put it into the soup of the play.”
The fact that six of show’s seven actors are making their Broadway debuts in this production (all but Will Brill, who last appeared as Ali Hakim in that rousing revival of Oklahoma! five years ago), has only made an already profound experience all the more moving. “I never thought that I would be originating a role on Broadway,” says Canfield. “It just feels like we built this house from the ground up and we still get to live in it. And it’s a pleasure every night.”
Pidgeon feels just the same. “I guess I always hoped that I would be on Broadway, just because this is what I want to do with my life,” she says. “I didn’t have a character or project in mind because I didn’t know this play existed. It’s like kismet. It feels like the universe just went a perfect little way for a second, and here we are, doing this project.”
