An interview with CHAS libretto and Jason landon marcus
They’ve turned shipwrecks, whispered legends, and a notorious pirate romance into a sweeping new work for the stage. Pulitzer-nominated writer–composer duo Chas and Jason dive into the intoxicating real history behind The Royal Pyrate — a tale of witchcraft, rebellion, and a love fierce enough to defy the law and the sea.
STEPHANIE: Tell me about the show! What inspired the story?
CHAS: The story is, it's all there. It's really all there.
JASON: You didn't really need to make anything up. It was so incredible, and there's such a wealth of various sources of information on the time period and that story specifically, that it was kind of fun to hunt down all the sort of local folklore around the story, which we did pretty extensively, and just get into the spirit of it.
STEPHANIE: What was the gateway drug here? Would you say there was any one thing that you learned that made you want to uncover more? What separates it from another story of the same time period?
JASON: It's almost like a ghost story, in a way, because it's based on this local legend. This woman who became a witch, and she was cast out of society, and she would call sailors to drown on the cliffs out of spite for what happened. But then she fell in love with this pirate. It's a sweeping kind of love story, and very dramatic. It kind of existed locally, as a local legend, for a long time, until they found the actual ship, the shipwreck, right off the coast of Marconi Beach. It kind of filled in a lot of gaps in the story, and made it real. We spent a lot of time on the Cape, sort of trying to inhabit those spaces. We sat on the beach right off by the wreck, and then there's a few, like, taverns and stuff, where, supposedly, Mary Hallet's ghost haunts them. There's the dunes where she was exiled, and this big, bramble-y kind of forest, and it's very spooky, and evocative.
CHAS: Yeah, that's the thing about their story. Neither of them were kings or queens, so a lot of their their tale is wrapped up in folklore. There's not a lot of written record about what happened. It's just sort of reportage over generations. The site of where they met, and the site of where where Sam and his friends would hang out prior to becoming pirates is known. Like Jay said, they found the wrecks in 1980. But it's such an interesting way history works, because they know a lot about the ships Sam took when, when he became a pirate, and started operating down in the Caribbean. They took meticulous records, not the pirates, but the people getting attacked took meticulous records of which ships got taken, which ships got robbed, and who did it. So, a lot of Sam's record as a pirate is very well articulated and written down. But oddly enough, Mary's story, and she stayed local to Cape Cod, her story is wrapped up so much in folklore. She was accused of witchcraft. There was almost a second witch hysteria in Cape Cod at that time, so, you know, it's one of those tales that everyone in Cape Cod seems to know a different version of because it’s tale that was sort of told by their aunts, and grandparents, and great-grandparents over 300 years.
JASON: Each of their stories completes each other, you know, like Sam Bellamy's pirate story, and her kind of witch tale in the Cape. They're both kind of disparate without parts, but when you put them together it comes alive.
CHAS: Yeah, they motivate each other somehow. Their lives fed into each other.
STEPHANIE: In your general sense, right, not even according to historical record, but just based on everything you've learned, who do you think Sam Bellamy was? What kind of person do you think he would have been? Would you want to go out drinking with him? Tell me all about him. What's the vibe that you guys get?
JASON: Well, he has a reputation. He was actually described as very fashionable. Which I find interesting. He favored rich velvets, and it was kind of really the classic pirate look and the aesthetic that we think of. He's also, like, so emo, and such a romantic and an idealist. And we have one of his speeches actually recorded, and it is so, like, eloquently cunty. Can I say that?
STEPHANIE: Yes, of course.
JASON: It really is beautiful, and you get a sense of him and his style and his aesthetic and his worldview. So, yeah, of course, I would, I would join his crew. Absolutely. I mean, how could you not? I would take up the black flag and go on the account and throw it all away for Black Santa Belenite.
CHAS: I think he was, like, really charismatic. He also had a chip on his shoulder, a deep chip on his shoulder about where he came from. I think he was really angry about his station in life. He was a veteran of the War of Spanish Succession, which was a war that a lot of sailors of his generation fought in. And it ended and basically created this mass unemployment crisis in the early 18th century. Sailors had been employed, essentially, by all the governments of the world. Suddenly the war was over, and suddenly they were just cast away and had no way to work. So a lot of them turned to crime, turned to smuggling or piracy. And I think he made it a real attempt at honest work. I think the cards were just not in his favor in that regard. But he was really good at being a pirate and a firebrand, too. The only recorded speech by a pirate is one of Sam's.
JASON: Can I read you some of it?
STEPHANIE: Yes, please.
JASON: I mean, if you want to know Black Sam, we have his own words, which were recorded by a captain whose ship he took. And he was debating whether to give him the ship back, but the crew voted to burn it. So they ended up dropping him off on Block Island. But he wrote down the speech that he gave after he, while he was taking his ship, basically. Okay, Captain Bellamy's speech to Captain Beard.
“Damn thee, blood, says he. I am sorry. They won't let you have your sloop. Again, for I scorn to do anyone a mischief when it is not for my advantage. Damn the sloop. We must sink her. And she might have been used to you. Though, damn you. You are a sneaking puppy. And so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security. For the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn you all together. Damn them for a pack of crafty rascals and you, who serve them a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls.”
I mean, the pirate language is so beautiful and operatic. So we have used those words to basically put music to them. The language itself is so beautiful and musical.
STEPHANIE: So how do you think he gets together with Mary? How do you think they become an item? What do they see in each other?
CHAS: Well, as the story goes, they met in an apple orchard in Cape Cod. He was not yet a pirate. She was a young woman from town. He was trying to make an honest living at that time. And she was of a slightly higher station. Her family was sort of well-to-do. And he felt he needed to get rich or needed to improve himself in some way in order for her father to accept him as a potential suitor. Our sense of them is that I don't think any of that stuff mattered to Mary. I think Mary herself was a bit of an outcast in her own town. She was outspoken and intelligent and a reader and, you know, articulate about exciting new ideas that were arriving in the new world at that time. And so I think they just excited each other. I think she fueled his political awakening. He was just sort of this handsome, roguish adventurer. And I think they just instantly fell in love under that apple tree.
STEPHANIE: So, you guys are both insanely creative. I was reading about all your successes and what you've done, and, man, it's just so intimidating.
CHAS: Really?
STEPHANIE: Oh, my God. I was like, Chas studied under Lynn Nottage? And then I was reading about, like, the Merman Band that Jason’s in...I'm in awe of you guys. So, obviously, you’re storytellers in addition to so many other things. What made you realize that this is something you wanted to pursue professionally, that you wanted it to be a bigger part of your life more so than just the average person?
JASON: Well, it was, I don't know, about a decade ago in Los Angeles. Maybe more now.
CHAS: Yeah, it was, like, 15 years ago.
JASON: Shit, okay. A decade and a half ago. It was 15 years ago. I just moved to L.A., and I kind of knew Chas from high school. He asked me if I wanted to write music for a rock opera based on Cyclops from the Odyssey. We wrote Cyclops: A Rock Opera. You want to jump in, Chas?
CHAS: So, basically, I moved out to L.A. that same year. I wanted to be an actor. I didn't really have any aspirations to do anything beyond that. But very quickly into being out in L.A., I was, like, being an actor really sucks. And it's just a tedious and depressing process. So, I started a theater company out there. Our second show was sort of, not a commission, but it was basically a theater being, like, hey, do you want to come do something in our space during these dates? It can be anything. Coincidentally, I had just come to this place out in Malibu called the Getty Villa, which was this museum of classical antiquity stuff. I had sat in on this symposium about Greek theater vases. A theater vase depicts a theatrical performance from ancient Greece. One of the topics that came up during the symposium was, what are these weird things called satyr plays? And satyr plays are neither comedy nor tragedy. They're this lost genre where the chorus are made up of these goat men...half man, half goat satyrs. They’re bawdy and horny and drunk and just anarchistic, strange creatures.
I'd been reunited with Jay, who is a musician, and our friend Ben, as well, who is also a musician. And I was, like, fucking satyrs are musicians. They are rock stars, you know, just getting up at noon.
Anyway, so, I pitched Jay on the idea. And coincidentally, Jay had just finished reading the Odyssey. And he said, let's fucking do it. So we’d teach ourselves how to write a musical just based on this dumb idea we had. And we opened it, like, four months later, three months later, maybe.
JASON: Yeah. I had just moved to L.A. in my truck and kind of cruising around California and stuff, living all over. I was kind of on an Odyssey myself. And I read the Odyssey. And then Chas asked me, are you familiar with the Odyssey? You know, Cyclops? He gave me a passage from the Percy Shelley translation of the Euripides play Cyclops, which is the only Seder play that we have fully intact. It just kind of happened.
CHAS: I'd always really been into fake worlds and storytelling and stuff like that. But I never really thought about writing as anything that I could do. But then, we did Cyclops, and it kind of went really well. Just so much fun. Next we had decided that we should bring it to New York. Then, like, a few months later, we got this email from Columbia University. It's like, hey, you guys got nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
STEPHANIE: What!
CHAS: We were not serious people. We're still not serious people. But was like... maybe we should start taking this a little more seriously. Or, pursue it at least. At which I started thinking about actually study playwriting. Because I don't know anything about it. I knew plays from being an actor and stuff. But I felt that I should learn a little more about writing plays. It was just kind of an accident in some ways. But it certainly changed the direction of our lives. The Pulitzer thing was the last thing I ever expected for that show.
STEPHANIE: If you're writing history, there tends to be, you know, this feeling that maybe you should sanitize history to make it more palatable for an audience. So would you say there're any aspects of this play that you refuse to sanitize?
JASON: Yes. Definitely. I mean, just the glaring one is that The Widow is a slave ship. That presents all kinds of challenges for just the approach to the subject matter. That's been a journey also for us, you know, just to kind of feel out what the truth of it is in our show.
CHAS: The world they inhabited was a really brutal one and terrible. Their lives were short and they knew they were going to be short. I think they had this kind of a light philosophy of living it up. But the thing that I think we don't shy away from, that a lot of pirate stories do, is that pirates like Sam Bellamy were political actors. They were deeply aware of their place in society and of what they were. It wasn't just robbing ships. They were deeply aware of what they were doing in terms of waging essentially a war against the nations of the world. They considered themselves villains of no nations. But they didn't have a flag. They were a very international movement and they knew that. The idea of a motley crew is really true to them. Like, you know, they spoke like a polyglot of languages. You know, they were multiracial. They were probably the most multiracial, most progressive political space of their time. You know, they had health insurance. They had workers' comp. They had things that we still dream about in this country. And they voted democratically for their leaders. And they shared their income, their booty, in a very fair, equitable way. And I think these are things that a lot of pirate stories just don't talk about. And because there's so much other stuff that's so fun. Like, they drink a lot and they party. They have wenches and they go to jungles and they treasure hunt and maybe walk the plank. All cool shit. But I feel like the political stuff is something that is tied into the world they lived in. And I think that's something that we were really interested in tackling for this project.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, how do they fit into the political spheres isn’t something I personally consider. Not, like, the sexiest part of pirate life, but very interesting.
JASON: Yeah, they were entirely political actors. They were kind of created by a political situation. It's foundational to who they were and why they were.
STEPHANIE: So what would you say is the emotional engine of this show?
CHAS: That's a composer question.
JASON: It's definitely the relationship between Sam Bellamy and Mary Hallet. And just how they interact and inspire each other. Looking at how they fulfill each other's wishes and destiny in the world. It's a love story at the heart of it.
CHAS: We've been working on this for a long time. And I think the thing that has been the North Star of this piece, that's kind of kept us focused, is that love story is really front and center. They were doing it all for each other. And I think that they never lost sight of each other. And it's quite moving, I think. Even when they were such vast distances away from each other, they really did dream of a life together.
STEPHANIE: Something that feels moving to me is if you're a woman like Mary in today's world, there's no shortage of partners that are going to get you and understand you. There really probably was such a limited number of partners that she could choose from being who she was, and to have found that in someone is beautiful.
JASON: She was a farm girl in Cape Cod back in the 1700s. So she was very locked into a kind of society there. And then Sam was kind of this rogue, bad boy sailor that blew in that she had this affair with who then became a pirate. So she did find someone outside of her social milieu too. I think that’s something that speaks to her intelligence and need to move beyond her world.
