Code
Music and lyrics by Brandon Jackson Baird
Code is a contemporary musical that follows the brief, brilliant life of Ben, a young doctor whose future is stolen by a catastrophic complication during a biopsy for terminal cancer. At its heart is Jane—Ben’s closest friend and a perfectionist physician-in-training—who freezes at the moment he needs her most.
Code confronts the emotional terrain of mortality, duty, and guilt, urging audiences to face the conversations we so often avoid: how we want to live at the end of our lives—and how we want to be remembered. Its pop-infused score is underscored by a continuous, orchestrated heartbeat—a sonic embodiment of the body that lies motionless on stage, pulling the audience into Ben’s lived memories, his fading sensations, and his quiet, urgent desires.
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The immediate questions we focused on for this one month workshop were:
Who is the central character of this story?
Does each character have a clear arc? And,
How do we balance the tragedy of lives irrevocably altered with some of the funnier and more mundane parts of being in medical residency?
We cut songs, rewrote scenes, and moved plot points around with these questions in mind. Being able to hear everything brought to life by our incredible actors allowed Brandon and the team to hear what was working and what we still had questions about. Using notes from the actors and creative team, Brandon delivered incredibly thoughtful revisions (even with his demanding schedule as an ACTUAL doctor, he managed to write a brand-new song), and we culminated in a review of audience feedback.
Maddy dramaturged this play in the following iterations: