Ever heard the one about the Pulitzer-winning dramatist, the sassy Broadway lyricist and the rock star who walk into a room and write a musical set at a Texas truck dealership? Strange to say, but that scenario applied aptly in March when American Theatre sat down with Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife, Quills), Amanda Green (Bring It On) and Trey Anastasio (frontman and principal composer for Phish, an enduringly successful rock band with some of the most loyal fans in the business) to talk about their new musical Hands on a Hardbody, which runs at California’s La Jolla Playhouse through June 17.

Wright (whose Wife netted him a best-play Tony to go along with that Pulitzer) and Green have each worked on musicals before, but Phish’s Anastasio had never written for the stage. Hardbody’s director Neil Pepe and the show’s “dramatic stager” Benjamin Millepied (who created choreography for the film Black Swan) are also highly accomplished in their realms, but newcomers to musical theatre. Wright calls the group a “wonderfully particular” combination of talents.

The story is adapted from the 1997 documentary film by S. R. Bindler, detailing a contest wherein a colorful group of folks vie to win a brand new hardbody pickup truck by seeing who can stand and hold one hand against it the longest. (It gives nothing away to say the ordeal lasted a grueling 77 hours.) The competition was an annual event in Longview, a town two hours from the Dallas suburb where Wright grew up.

Sitting in a conference room at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York City (where Pepe is artistic director), the three collaborators display a lively, flowing rapport. After a patient development period for the La Jolla–commissioned show, including a series of workshops, the team is only two weeks from heading west to begin rehearsals for the premiere. They describe their distinctly collaborative writing process and the challenge of staging a musical in which the principal characters stay rooted in place—and speculate that this quirky story just may have something to say about the current state of the American dream.

DOUG WRIGHT: Amanda and I were looking for a project. I just happened to be at a video store one evening and I saw this film set in Texas. I was feeling a bit homesick at the time, so I took it home and was astonished by it. It brought Texas screaming back to me.

The competition has all these metaphorical implications. It’s a group of disparate people who’ve come together in search of ostensibly the same thing, which is this new truck. For each of them it symbolizes something different. So it felt like a kind of microcosm of the nation, as it were, and the competition itself felt like rich fodder to write about the whole of the human experience condensed into a single, semi-ridiculous, ultimately moving event.

JEREMY GOODWIN: In strict résumé terms, Trey seems the odd man out in this trio.

TREY ANASTASIO: But I grew up around a lot of musical theatre. My grandmother was a single mother and she raised my mom in the ’40s and ’50s, and they went to every show, and it became sort of a family tradition. So when I was growing up in New Jersey, my mom used to take my sister and me to shows almost weekly. She was editor at Sesame Street Magazine and knew a lot of creative New York people. As I grew up, I used to hear around the dinner table that the ultimate dream of creativity is to be on a team working on a Broadway show. So to be asked to be part of this team was such a thrill.

As a matter of fact, I used to get made fun of in the early years of Phish—people would say some of the music sounded kind of “Broadway.” I grew up sitting around my record player listening to West Side Story and South Pacific and Hair.

WRIGHT: When I first met Trey, he gave one of the most insightful treatises on the overture to Gypsy that I think I’d ever heard!

ANASTASIO: That was on perma-loop in my house, growing up. Musical theatre is the one place where you can find all the great elements of American music history. If you think about someone like Leonard Bernstein, and what he brought to his scores—it was popular music, but also serious composition, and development, and all those beautiful things.

AMANDA GREEN: Trey and I were working together [on songs for Phish] at the same time Doug and I were working on Hands on a Hardbody. Doug and I had looked for about a year for a composer partner, and there was nothing that was a fit. One day Trey and I were writing and I had this lyric from the show with me, and, ha!—I just wanted to slide it over. As I got to know him, I realized this might be the perfect fit.

This man just dives in headlong—there’s no testing the waters. We got into a room, I said, “Here’s the opening number. Boom—go!” This music came flying out of Trey.

ANASTASIO: I went through the process of making full-band demos of every song—sort of imitating Jesus Christ Superstar, which had an album before it became a show. There’s so much discovery I’m used to making in the studio or in the band practice room, so as a way of orchestrating, I decided to go through that extra, extra exercise. We went up to the Barn, my studio in Vermont, and had a bunch of very talented friends come in.

WRIGHT: For me, as the non-musical member of the triumvirate, it was so cool! Trey and Amanda were up there making these huge decisions about the music. They had the most amazing people, like Larry Campbell [a guitarist who has played with such artists as Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper and Emmylou Harris]. I just watched these two pound through the score; I watched these amazing musicians improvise; and they were able to orchestrate the score in the most thrilling and dynamic way.

How does that then link up with the work you’re doing, Doug?

WRIGHT: Amanda and I had our note cards and we took excruciating time to map out every beat of the story together. I’ve never worked so intimately with a lyricist to create the very fabric of the show.

Amanda’s a master at going through the text and saying [something like], “In setting up the song so responsibly, you’ve actually given it away. So be a little more enigmatic at the top.” We’ve really tried to make sure that we never repeat a beat, and everything points to a cumulative journey of these 10 people around this truck.

It’s been very intense among the three of us. Part of it may be that Amanda and I had a real bonding experience—we were so enthusiastic about the film that we went out to Los Angeles to option it. But we subsequently learned that [the filmmakers] never got the subjects in the film—the competitors in the contest, that is to say, the characters in our musical—to sign release forms. So we suddenly realized our option on the film was incomplete. That’s when Amanda had a rather remarkable suggestion.

GREEN: We hired a private investigator to find them. Then we found ourselves face to face with these people—in their homes, or in a diner in Texas.

WRIGHT: They’re certainly idiosyncratic, eccentric, deliciously funny characters. But all three of us have felt a real mission about ensuring they’re three-dimensional people and never buffoons. When you’ve sat across from your subjects and broken bread with them, it creates a new level of moral responsibility in how you choose to portray them.

GREEN: Nobody goes into this contest because it might be fun. I think that’s what attracted us to this material: The stakes are really high for everybody. The situation makes them desperate and brave and foolhardy.

WRIGHT: And I think it speaks a lot to what’s going on in the current climate. These are people that used to be the bedrock of American industry, and these same people who built the country are reduced to standing passively around a truck, in hopes that it brings them some kind of fortune. That speaks in a really broad way to a lot of what we’re facing as a country—but in an apolitical way. I don’t think the piece takes a stand on how to solve these problems, but it represents them in a way that’s painfully human and relatable.

GREEN: There are absurd things about it, and things that are very funny, but it’s very real. The core underneath it is quite desperate.

WRIGHT: For each of these people, a vehicle could signify the means to get your children to school on time, or to open your own moving company; it could be a path to an income. You could sell the truck for $22,000, and that might be tuition for two or three years at a state university. So the truck was extravagantly important to these people.

ANASTASIO: It’s very liberating to be writing for characters and not from my own voice. It makes me feel safer to explore deeper emotions in ways that, if I have to sing the song, I might be a little shy about going there.

GREEN: Trey immediately had a sense of drama. I had a lyric for a character and he said, “We keep talking about the truck—I’m tired of the truck. Who is this guy?” He pushed me to write lyrics that revealed these characters.

ANASTASIO: The biggest thrill for me is: I like feeling like a beginner. It feels very alive, to be collaborating on something where the learning curve is so steep, and out of the comfort zone. It’s been an incredible gift. And both of the people that I’m working with are obviously so phenomenally talented—

WRIGHT: We have Trey thoroughly fooled!

ANASTASIO: I’m used to songs existing for their own sake. And a lot of that is for entertaining an audience. This is different. The music is only there to serve the character and the story. And so the solution is so frequently not what I would expect it to be.

WRIGHT: Trey’s hitting on something I think is fundamental. When Amanda and I first started telling people about this project, the reaction we’d normally get would be: “Well, of course you’re going to leave the truck—and we’ll see dream sequences of what their life would be if they owned the truck. Or, we’ll flash back to before the competition to establish why they need it, so that we can get away from the infernal sight of 10 people standing around the damn truck.” And Amanda and I would sit back and glance at each other, and say: “No. They stay at the truck.” It’s a big old truck, it’s center stage, they’re standing around it, and they have their hands on it! And if we don’t embrace that as a fundamental strength and not a liability of our storytelling in this musical—we are sunk.

GREEN: It’s the tension it creates.

WRIGHT: Yeah, that’s something to maximize. And if we were frightened of that, we never should have tackled this material.

Trey, you’re used to seeing how an audience reacts to music and letting songs evolve. Have you used some of those muscles here?

ANASTASIO: Two years ago we finished the first round of song demos, and I thought they were good. Then it all gets rewritten again. And then you do a workshop and you rewrite it again. And in the process you start to fall in love with the characters. They take on a life of their own. And then it becomes a desperate search for how to bring them to life. I think it’s going to be horrifying when it opens and we can’t work on it anymore.

GREEN: I know!

ANASTASIO: It’s going to be painful. After opening, what do you do?

WRIGHT: I can’t stress enough how this was born as a real labor of love between the three of us. It’s not a Universal Pictures release that we’ve been paid to execute and are hoping it results in a big populist hit! This was really born of our own—

GREEN: Passion.

WRIGHT: La Jolla is not asking us merely to create a commercial property for their institution. They are basically supporting the whims of three artists they believe in.

We hope this has the language and texture of something new. It’s a very unconventional artistic team, and that reflects our aims for the piece, which are to make something that we hope has all of the exhilaration of a musical but the thematic and character density of a play. That’s a real aspiration for us.

If we had this kind of hands-on contest among the three of you, who would win?

[General uproar.]

WRIGHT: Oh my God, what a question!

ANASTASIO: [To Doug] I think you’d be sleeping by the time the sun came up.

WRIGHT: Yeah. They know me.

GREEN: I don’t know, you’re pretty crafty.

WRIGHT: Well, yeah. I’d cheat.

GREEN: Trey would have the best attitude.

ANASTASIO: I’m too fidgety. I can’t stand still for 15 seconds.

WRIGHT: Amanda would hire interns to do eight-hour shifts.

GREEN: That is so not true! I would be there and you’d have to pry my hands off it.

Jeremy D. Goodwin is an independent journalist based in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. Visit www.jeremydgoodwin.com.