Abbie Goldberg & Mason McDowell

ABBIE: For better or for worse I was hooked from the moment I saw Cats at Merrill Auditorium in Portland, Maine at age 5. Sorry but it's singing and dancing cats-- what's not to love!?

MASON: My parents are both musical theatre writers, so you could say it was at birth - But my actual first memory was sitting in the audience at 5 years old, watching my parents' musical "The Wind in The WIllows", and hearing the fully realized versions of all the songs they had been working on for years... It took me while to realize it, but the emotional rush of that moment set me on an inevitable trajectory towards the stage.

ABBIE: My first plays were written for my sisters, cousins and I to perform together. My references were weirdly old school-- who's on first, Gilda Radnor as Emily Litella on SNL, Carol Burnett. Over the course of a week we would make elaborate sets, costumes, and even programs. We performed these masterpieces in a shed in my yard or, as we named it, The Golden Shedette Theater. We had so much fun and the critics loved us.

MASON: I was home-schooled along with my older brother (who is hearing impaired), all the way through to college. We often had to entertain ourselves, and would create fantastical worlds based off of our combined interests - if we were ever bored, it was only for a moment, because we could always slip into a world of our imagining if the real one wasn't doing the trick.

ABBIE: I would describe my work as socially engaged spectacle.

MASON: I'm a baffling blend of the old and the new - I admire and obsess over the structure and melodic clarity of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but my sound is really the bastard child of Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and Adam Guettel all at the same time. It's a very confusing family, no one knows who the father is.

ABBIE: My background is in community organizing and I see my theater making as an extension of that work. I want to bring people together to have a transformative experience in which they feel in their bodies that another world is possible. I want to build community and when I can do that through my writing it's so so life-affirming.

MASON: Sharing a piece of art is sharing a piece of your soul - and the conversations that I have with people that have heard my music often forge real emotional connections - where did you laugh, where did you cry? Where did it make you think of something from your past? Where did you notice I played the wrong chord? (the correct answer is you DIDN'T notice) There's something about the inexplicable understanding that we all have of this language, that makes me feel like I'm doing something to bring us all together in some small way.