Tom
So… you have, facilitating scene changes in the show, a band –

Nic
I don’t understand people’s fascination.  It doesn’t seem-

Julie
Musical ninjas in a junk band?  Come on.

Nic
It doesn’t seem like that extravagant of an idea to me.  Seriously, I guess it really doesn’t.  It seems like a relatively pragmatic choice.

Tom
And it seems as though you took something that you had to have in the show, which were people to move things in and handle the puppets, and you just chose to make them more of an interesting part of the show.  That seems to be the most basic way of looking at it.

Nic
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, that’s what I feel is relatively pragmatic.  I mean the show has all of these theatrical overtones, so that when Truffaldino says “We made a wrong turn somewhere, maybe at the beginning of the act.” It’s not just breaking the fourth wall, it’s shattering the convention of the traditional relationship between the performer and the audience, there’s a person to person complicity that happens there and it’s written into the script and the idea of embodying that in this roving band… yes… I just like the idea that they’re some kind of bizarre hybrid between Teamsters and a house band.

Tom
Were they always musical in your original idea or was that a later idea?

Nic
No, they were pretty much always musical.  Here’s kind of what happened: I realized that this was going down and I started thinking about the idea and I started thinking of them as koken, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that term, I think you are now that I chastised you after I cast you as the Head Ninja and you asked what it was.

Tom
I dared ask a question.

Nic
So, what would you say that koken are, Tom?

Tom
The koken are-

[in the background we hear the smoldering funk of Prince come over the speakers]

Nic
Oh, at this stage of the interview “Purple Rain” comes blaring on!  Fucking A.  I definitely need another round of drinks.

Tom
I think we need another round of shots.

[Another round of shots are summarily dispatched – this time we drank to Mike Dailey.  Cheers, Mike]

Julie
Okay, so back to musical ninjas since we’ve been stalling since Tom got drinks.

Nic
Why don’t you give a more replete definition of koken?

Tom
They’re used in some types of Japanese theatre to manipulate scenery, puppets, and other parts of the show.  They aren’t considered characters, they’re simply facilitators on stage of the show action.

Nic
They’re a convention.  If this guy comes out and he’s wearing all black, he’s got a black bag on his head you just ignore him.  He’s not there.

Julie
Okay.

Nic
Knowing that we were working with puppets and knowing that we were going to dealing with some-

Julie
What kind of puppets are they dealing with?

Nic
Oh, they’re dealing with all kinds of puppets.

Julie
For example?

Nic
Chris Hainsworth is in a full body head to toe, possibly on roller-skates puppet.

Julie
[laughing] Not on roller-skates, oh my God.

Nic
He might be, in which case the ninjas would need to be pushing and pulling him all around.

Tom
I was going to say…

Nic
It would be all over but the crying.

So, we’ve got him.  We got the actual Green Bird puppet, we’ve got Serpentina and we’ve got a multitude of other miscellaneous yet devious puppets.

Since I knew that the koken (as they were then known) were going to be dealing with the puppets, I knew that I was going to be seeing them and I started thinking about koken and… it’s just so nineties.  Koken are so nineties.  You know, I’ve got fucking twenty-first century ninjas, man.  And I’m saying that this is forward looking, these are the ninjas of the future.  Because, instead of just ignoring them, we’re talking advantage of the fact that there’re people out there and I’m trying to fill up those roles with some of the cooler people that we know and the freakier people we know.  The idea, again, is to engage the audience on a different level.  As opposed to just having this thing, this person that’s basically just a thing out there holding something up in the air.

Tom
And pretending he’s not there.

Nic
Exactly.  Now we have this whole crew.  And think there’s actually some weird renegade thing happening.  I think they’re developing some secret hand signals or something like that because when I go in there every once in a while there’ll just be mysterious laughter.  I don’t know what they’re doing.

Tom
I had a question about the ninja that totally escapes me-

Nic
“Ninjas.”  “Ninjas.”  It’s “ninjas”, Tom.

Tom
Is that truly the plural of “ninja?”

Nic
In my world it certainly is and at 3829 North Broadway –

Tom
I thought it was like “antelope” –

Nic
It’s different than “antelope,” he says with a starting to get glassed over look in his eye.

Tom
I think we need another shot.

[Consulting the dictionary we discover that both “Ninja” and “Ninjas” are proper plurals]

[And another shot was actually NOT consumed at this point – what do you think we are?  A bunch of incorrigible boozehounds?]