In the summer of 2007, I was approached by a Los Angeles theater company to construct a musical for five
of its resident actors which, upon a successful workshop on their home stage in LA could be logistically easy
to reconstruct and relocate. I’d been working on two larger scale shows at the time so the notion of writing a
producer-friendly musical for a party of five was a welcome one. The only questions left were “when was I going
to find the time to write this” and “where was I going to find the room in my tiny, tiny skull to house a third as yet
untold narrative?”

A song cycle seemed the only elegant solution. I could work on the two story pieces in chunks and, for an amuse bouche work on a song for the cycle whenever the mood struck. This way no crucial memory would be taken up
by plot and character and I wouldn’t have to retrace my steps every time I jumped back in.

The idea for LINES came one night when I found myself re-visiting Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
In it Kingston describes a ‘bottle imp dancing with a skirt made of light’ and how due to her perception being
defined by her imagination being defined by her upbringing she’d never know for sure if it was truly that or “just
a nameless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking.” As I slept, this dancer paid me a visit. In my dream
she danced an adagio in exquisite turns, precise balance and flawless technique. I saw a girl who longed to be understood, who through no fault of her own would never, ever be. Her form was unparalleled, her line was perfect.

When I woke up I was keenly aware of two things: the first was that lines are everywhere- in our bodies and in our brains, in our world and in our words. The second was that they all had power. Power to edify, power to destroy,
power to change. I was intrigued.

Two friends stand in line to buy tickets to a boxing match. They get into a fight. Irony ensues. Elsewhere, a soldier
stands on the front line of a foreign battlefield and considers why his life should be worth more than his enemy’s. Elsewhere still a dancer (perhaps Kingston’s) finds herself subject to an audition for a wholly exploitive piece of
theater and wonders if being a part of its chorus line is just suffering for her art or if she’s some kind of cultural
traitor for perpetuating an aging stereotype.

All of these lines crossing over one another created a mosaic which, when viewed from afar yielded something altogether different: While every line drew a character that wanted something, what they wanted wasn’t always
what they needed. And further, the things they needed sometimes meant they had to forego ease just a little bit
longer.

Freud called it the Principle of Reality, but I call it LINES.





Timothy Huang
Composer/Lyricist/Bookwriter