It’s rare that you get to interview your idols, especially ones with such a large fan base in the college community. This Monday, representatives from college newspapers across the country, myself included, got the opportunity to interview Matt Stone and Trey Parker, best known as the creators of the animated series South Park. The comedic duo spent the past seven years writing a musical called “The Book of Mormon,” which is currently running on Broadway. The show, written by Stone and Parker along with Avenue Q writer Bobby Lopez, has received outstanding reviews from both Broadway critics and South Park fans alike. This interview took place via a phone conference, so some of the following questions were asked by this Argus staff writer while others were posed by reporters from other schools.

 

Press: You seem like critics of organized religion, but you also seem sympathetic toward individuals who somehow benefit from religion. Do you think that organized religion should have a place in American society?

Matt Stone and Trey Parker: First of all, that’s a very college-like question, but it’s a good one. You know, I don’t know if we’re qualified to say if organized religion should have a place in society, because it seems to have a place in society. And we sort of just spent the last seven years of our lives making a two-hour musical that tries to explain what we think about that. I think the way we’ve kind of followed on the issue is: this is what human beings do, so to argue whether they should do it or not is not really that interesting of an argument.

 

P: What kind of an audience are you guys expecting to get for “The Book of Mormon?” Are you expecting old South Park fans or are you expecting more of the Broadway crowd?

MS/TP: So far we’re really seeing a crazy mix; it’s really cool. We’ve already had about a month of previews, so we’ve been going every night seeing the show, and the first few nights were definitely very South Park fan driven and sounded more like a rock concert. Then the Broadway crowd started showing up, but they seemed to like it just as much, and so now we’re really seeing a mix. We didn’t sort of sit down and say, all right, “Who are we doing this for?” because we never do that. We always just sort of do what we do and see who watches it. But so far we’re pretty pleasantly surprised by the mix of people that seem to be coming.

 

P: You guys are definitely known for pushing boundaries. With this whole surge of hipper, more boundary-pushing musicals showing up on Broadway, did you guys take it up to the next level?

MS/TP: Maybe we’re part of that group, but we really didn’t think about that when we were writing it. We’ve been writing this for seven years and even a couple years ago we didn’t know when exactly we were going to go launch this on stage, on Broadway. We really started with the [idea that] we [wanted] to do a work about these two missionaries that go to a place, and we picked sub-Saharan Africa in a war zone. They go to a place that is just about as far from where they grew up as they can imagine, and they’re confronted with all these new challenges, and what they’ve been taught in their Mormon Sunday School doesn’t really jive with this. That story of two Mormon missionaries going to Uganda, that’s not super hip, right off the bat. I think that with our sensibility we probably will be a little bit further out there than most stuff on Broadway, but we didn’t start from a place of doing it that way. We’re just so hip, we’re so hip on our bones we couldn’t help but do it that way.

 

P: Is the play’s humor similar to that of South Park?

MS/TP: It is, definitely, in a lot of ways it is, but it’s such a different animal because we’re doing a Broadway show. We’re sort of used to being able to do whatever we want and in any scene we can say, oh let’s have a tank show up and have half of France show up and we can do all that. With this, we’ve been working so many years, [and realizing] the limitations of the whole thing, the fact that we’ve got a finite cast and finite sets and we can only do so much, so it really becomes such a completely different animal. And I think that if anyone saw it and then learned that we wrote it they wouldn’t be shocked, but it doesn’t really feel like a South Park episode at all.

 

P: Do you speak through your characters or do the characters speak for themselves?

MS/TP: Well, God speaks to us and then we speak through the characters. If you like to argue with what they say, I guess you have to take it up with God. You know, the truth is probably sometimes it’s in the middle. I think the stuff that Trey and I like the best is when the characters speak for themselves. I think in some of the episodes of South Park we’ve obviously gone a little more the other way, but again our favorite ones are the ones where the story is true to itself and you can’t quite figure that out. I think the Book of Mormon is a lot more in that vein than anything we’ve done. When you have 22 minutes, you kind of have to land some place, you expect different things from it. I think for “The Book of Mormon” we’ve tried to do something that’s much more the characters speaking for the characters and the lines being true to that.

 

P: With your previous knowledge with your background in Mormonism, did you mostly go off that in making your musical or did you do more in depth in research in developing this play?

MS/TP: Oh there was lots of Wikipedia time. It just depended on where the musical was going, if we needed to talk about baptisms or whatever, we’d suddenly spend maybe even a whole day researching that and seeing how they do all that. So that’s always part of the fun of doing something like this or doing a South Park episode, it’s a crash course in what your subject is. The Latter Day Saint Church has its own kind of Wikipedia thing, so they make it very easy on someone who wants to learn everything about their church. We used that a lot too.

 

P: Have you guys had a particularly memorable interaction with Mormons?

S/TP: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of them…We ended up going to Salt Lake City a bunch because we’d always go to the Sundance Film Festival before South Park, but we’d never get into any screenings so we’d always go to Temple Square and hang out there. There’s tons of great stories from down there but [this is] one of my favorites. It’s just so pristine and clean right there and one time, we were walking around and there was a homeless guy, right on Temple Square. I always wondered what happened if homeless people hung out at Temple Square, and he was sitting there with this little sign out in front of him that said the typical thing, “give me some money,” and so I sat there and watched for a while just to see what would happen. In about four minutes, this guy in white shirt with a tie and a big smile on his face comes and just very calmly comes out with a little sign and puts the sign in front of the homeless guy, and the sign says, “The Church of Latter Day Saints recommends that if you want to help the needy that you give to these charities,” and listed off some charities. And the homeless guy kind of looked angry and walked a few steps away and the guy in the suit went and grabbed it and put it front of him again and just kind of followed him around with it until he went across the street. It was genius.

 

P: Do you guys approach a Broadway musical differently than you guys do a South Park episode?
MS/TP: Well yeah, in some ways you know you sit down and start doing the same work. When you’re coming up with jokes you’re just trying to make each other laugh, which is the heart of all comedy: just sitting in a room with your friends and trying to make each other laugh. But a musical or a movie, something that’s 90 minutes long, or this is two and a half hours with intermission, it takes a little more planning and [going] a little deeper into the story telling than an episode of South Park. A lot of it at the very heart of it is the same but, I don’t know, it’s like a big bad version. One’s writing a term paper and one’s writing a book. We started this by writing kind of an album of all the songs, because obviously at the heart of any good musical would be great music and it’s really all about having great songs. A Broadway musical is going to live or die by that alone.

 

P: Do you expect any kind of feedback from the Mormon community or have you already gotten any feedback?

MS/TP: The LDS [Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] church put out an official statement, which was pretty nice, and we haven’t gotten any real feedback other than that. I talked to a couple Mormons that came one of the first preview nights and they really liked it. And then we’ve heard from other friends that have brought Mormon friends that they liked it. I’m sure if you’re a devout Mormon you probably won’t like the show, but then again not many devout Mormons are going to come, I mean really hardcore devout Mormons without a sense of humor. I think even most practicing Mormons have a good sense of humor and are totally able to laugh at their religion, at least the ones that I’ve met and have heard about coming to the show. I think they’re going to like it. It’s for them.

The Book of Mormon is now playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in New York City, New York.