"I would tell Stephen stories about my life that were informing the work that I had already done on the Tommy character," Mitchell says. "And he would tell me what he found interesting and would encourage me to follow those things." Trask suggested pursuing the dramatic possibilities of Helga.
"She was a German army wife," Mitchell recalls. "She had that world-weary thing, which was very impressive. But it's like when you meet immigrants here - there's a hope and determination. And she was fun. Me and my friend Brenda, who lived next door, we'd sing a lot of songs for her and act them out, like 'Copacabana' and 'Lyin' Eyes.' She would be tickled by that. She'd give us drinks in her trailer.
"Tommy is a lot closer to me. But I don't like autobiographical shows, actors who can't get work so they do therapy onstage. The mask of Hedwig - it's fun to leap into something. The specifics of her life are quite different from mine. But the emotional imperatives are mine." Mitchell points out that the name Hedwig comes from a character in Henrik Ibsen's play The Wild Duck: "She's the girl who's destroyed by too much honesty."
In writing and staging Hedwig, Trask and Mitchell - coming from very different disciplines - often had trouble finding common ground. "We were working on 'Exquisite Corpse,'" Trask says, "and that is very much a rock song, no narrative in it at all, just a relentless statement of feeling. And john is like, 'What is my motivation for this part?' I'm like, 'I don't know. You like it?' To me, I write a neat song, I get up onstage, sing it and hope other people think it's a good song. He needed a motivation."
Mitchell, in turn, claims that Trask could be defensive about his music: "I come from the theater, and there is a real collaborative history there. He was very proprietary about getting comments about his lyrics. They're so personal to him. At the same time, I was a new writer, so I'm sure I was very proprietary about sentence construction."
After a one-month run in 1997 at the small Westbeth Theater, in Greenwich Village, Hedwig and the Angry Inch was ready for more permanent digs. But the combination of subject matter and loud music scared off theater owners. "Nobody would have us," says Trask. The show's producers ended up spending $100,000 - a third of Hedwig's initial production costs - creating Jane Street Theater out of an empty ground-floor space in the old Hotel Riverview, a pre-World War I relic that once housed surviving crew members of the Titanic (and in the Eighties, featured a great New York punk club, the Rock Hotel).
Then, a week before Hedwig's Jane Street bow, Mitchell and Trask were refused permission to use their closing number, a cover of the Debby Boone hit "You Light Up My Life," by the song's composer, Joe Brooks. "We did it in German," Trask explains. "It started off like a Brecht-Weill thing and worked up into this Burt Bacharach thing. For the last chorus, we turned it into a huge Queen stadium rocker." Brooks eventually relented, but it was too late. Trask had written "Midnight Radio" in an inspired five-day panic.
"I had to write something to bring the house down," Trask says. "We wanted all of Hedwig's story and emotion to go into the song, to send it up but also to pay tribute to the audience and to Hedwig."
Hedwig's success at the Jane Street Theater has now brought Mitchell and Trask to an awkward crossroad: how to go wide with a winning piece of rock & roll theater - on record, in a movie, in touring companies - withour losing the intimate razzle and high-decibel dazzle of the original production and cast. Mitchell is leaving the show in January to concentrate on writing a Hedwig film script. (Michael Cerveris is in negotiations to rejoin the cast.) Trask is torn between bigger Hedwig payoff - he's already been approached by the Broadway establishment about writing another musical - and his hopes for a recording career with Cheater. "The next thing," Trask declares, "is for us to work on establishing the band's identity."
Meanwhile, Hedwig - the woman, the singer, the legend in her own mind - is on a roll, eager to run riot with her newfound stardom. "The second album, of course, would be about dealing with her fame," Mitchell suggests with a devilish smile. "There would be a song about rock critics, about how fucked up the record companies are, fans wanting too much." His tentative plans for the movie treatment include a climactic concert at the opening of a TGI Friday's restaurant - next to Madison Square Garden.
"I'm just ready to go off," Mitchell say eagerly. "There's nothing sacred about this text."
Trask figures that Hedwig will end up on Broadway "at some point in my life," he cracks with a hopeful laugh. "But I have this image - you know those laser-light shows with the Pink Floyd music? I was thinking of an annual Hedwig summer tour of planetariums. I could just imagine all these high school kids smoking a lot of dope, drinking malt liquor, vomiting in the parking lot and seeing Hedwig."