So begins "Yeast Nation," Greg Kotis and Mark Hollman's rock-comedy dramatizing one of the most pivotal moments in the planet's history. The co-writers of "Urinetown," a winner of three Tony Awards in 2002, spent seven weeks in Juneau over the last year working up to the Friday, Oct. 5, world premiere.

"Juneau has proved to be a great place to work," Hollman said. "You're sort of isolated there, and I think that leads to concentrating on what you're doing."

"Yeast Nation" is in a similar vein as "Urinetown," which was a satirical look at a world in which a private corporation seizes control of the world's restrooms in the wake of a 20-year drought. It mocked politics, corporations, capitalism and even theater itself.

David Sheakley / Juneau Empire   Making it Happen: From left, co-writer Greg Kotis, sound designer Rory Stitt and director PJ Paparelli watch Tuesday evening's rehearsal of "Yeast Nation."

The yeasts poke fun at themselves, the script and the very nature of a musical play. Along the way, it becomes clear that history will repeat itself millions of times over in the next 3 billion years.

"We live in a time when we seem to be butting up against the limits of our success as a species," Kotis said. "We hear about the consequences of progress all the time. And the question of the moment seems to be, 'Is there anything we can do about it?' If so, what? If not, what then? 'Yeast Nation' tries to wrestle with this reality in its own way."

As with "Urinetown," the first New York readings of "Yeast Nation" in 2005 were met with skepticism and puzzlement. Producers, even those closest to Kotis and Hollman, told the pair they simply had "no idea how to sell the show," Hollman said.

Fortuitously, that path wound through Juneau. Kotis and Hollman share the same New York agent as outgoing Perseverance artistic director PJ Paparelli. The writers jetted into town last October and spent several weeklong stints in February, March and August working on the project.

"We would have been reluctant to try this out in Chicago, where we would have been more exposed to the rumor mill," Hollman said. "We had a really safe place to work in Juneau and that definitely became a benefit to us."

The spark for "Yeast Nation" came in 1995, when Kotis was working with the Neo-Futurists theater company at a festival in Sibiu, Romania. While there, he saw a Greek company's four-hour production of "Antigone."

The words were incomprehensible, but he was entranced by the robes, the masks, the minimal choreography and the never-ending chanting. The actors spent most of their time marching in a circle, using call-and-response.

At first it was intolerable, but soon he was hypnotized.

"I began thinking 'This is an old play.'" Kotis said. "'This must be one of the oldest known plays. When did people first start writing plays? When did people first start telling stories? How far back can you go and still tell a story? Cave men? How about primates?'... By the time I was walking out of the theater, I had arrived at the dawn of life on Earth."

Kotis and Hollman began the "heavy-lifting portion" of the writing in 2002, soon after "Urinetown" had opened on Broadway. They've been refining it since.

"(The idea) appealed to me, because it's such an epic setting," Kotis said. "It seemed to be an opportunity to write lots of primal-sounding music."

To get into the minds of the yeasts, Kotis had to first visualize their stark, barren, primordial soup. He was most interested in the time when the Earth's first, single-celled, self-generating beings floated near vents and mudflats, absorbing energy-rich proteins.

"The moment when the salt runs out, when life is cast out of Eden, that's the moment I was interested in exploring," Kotis said.

The yeasts, most of whom are named "Jan" to symbolize their sameness, form a hierarchy based around "Jan The Elder," the very first yeast.

"I'm skeptical of people or characters when they're portrayed as simply villainous or simply heroic," Kotis said. "People are good, bad and everything in between. Mostly, people are hungry for one thing or another, as are the characters in 'Yeast Nation.'"

Hollman wrote the play's opening number based on the pentatonic scale of the piano. It was a primitive melody, evocative of the beginning of time. From there, his initial score got "a little too operatic" and "preachy," he said.

In Juneau, the score evolved into more of a rock musical. Somewhat inspired by "Spinal Tap," Hollman leaned toward 1970s classic rock. They wrote two of the major numbers, "You Don't Know a Thing About Love" and "Look at What Love Made Me Do," in town.

"I'm not 100 percent sure that we've written all the songs that we need to for it," Hollman said. "We'll find out on opening night if the audience gets restless at a couple points where I'm suspicious."

David Sheakley / Juneau Empire   Wig Out: Costume designer Paul Spadone works on materials Tuesday in the Perseverance Theatre costume shop.

So you've got a rock-comedy script about a kingdom of single-celled, salt-metabolizing yeasts, looking for love near the bottom of the sea floor some 3 billion years in the past.

Here's the first question: How do you anthropomorphize yeast?

That was the initial design challenge for Perseverance artistic director PJ Paparelli and costume designer Paul Spadone, when faced with the task of bringing Greg Kotis and Mark Hollman's "Yeast Nation" to life.

Kotis' imagination was sparked by a production of "Antigone" he saw at a festival in Romania that used masks and minimal costumes.

"Greg had this idea that ... the costume could be very sort of chiffon-like and flowing," Hollman said. "It wound up being a little more complicated than that."

"I kept the production of 'Antigone' in mind while writing, although I didn't have any set idea of how the world or the characters should look other than that it should be simultaneously simple and stark, unifying and individual," Kotis said.

The designers needed to establish a sameness among the characters, yet also find some way to differentiate their personalities and positions of status in the yeast kingdom.

"If anyone is interested in what yeast cells look like, there's not much to them," Spadone said. "They're basically egg-shaped. The challenge was: How do you find an analogy in terms of the costume design that will work to tell the story? The crucial hurdle to overcome was to find a balance between something that was nonhuman and something that was functional on stage."

Spadone and Paparelli tinkered with a spherical cocoon shape for the yeasts' costumes before embracing a robe-type garment. The yeasts are a "sort of chrysalis-green, a new-leaf," Spadone said.

The older yeasts in the play have blackened fading membranes. The muck of the ocean floor has risen up and contaminated their layer. The hairstyles also help establish the yeasts' age and position in society.

All the actors will put on their own makeup.

"It's great to see it now and look back over all the directions of where it might have gone, especially because we were starting with a blank slate," Spadone said. "There's no precedent for what 'Yeast Nation' looks like. It was really exciting to have that freedom to create this world on a stage."

• Korry Keeker can be reached at 523-2258 or korry.keeker@juneauempire.com.