[BONUS] Subject Matter: Four Teenagers Built a Play From Scratch

Welcome to a very, very, very special bonus episode of Out of Patients, and one unlike anything published on this feed before. For nearly 20 years, Matthew Zachary has handed these microphones to patients, caregivers, doctors, advocates, troublemakers, and people with something worth saying. This time, he handed them to his daughter. Hannah Greenzweig grew up around this show, and now she has commandeered the studio with 3 of her wonderfully creative high school friends to talk about something they built entirely themselves. There is an enormous amount of Dad Pride baked into this episode, along with the strange and wonderful realization that sometimes your kid grows up, takes your chair, takes your microphone, and produces a better show without you.Hannah Greenzweig, Michael Aidinov, Gwendolyn Baldini, and Astronomy are student artists from the Roundabout Youth Ensemble at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Working alongside teaching artists from Roundabout Theatre Company, they spent a school year creating an original play from the ground up, writing every scene, developing every character, and producing the performance themselves.Instead of discussing a Broadway production, they dissect one they invented.Their play, Subject Matter, began with a room full of improbable ideas. Murderous bounce houses, pirate family sagas, underwater adventures, courtroom dance battles, and birthday parties at math museums all competed before the group settled on an absurd rivalry between New York’s fictional History Museum and Math Museum. From there, they built a fully staged comedy about institutional competition, sabotage, oversized personalities, and the unexpected discovery that history and mathematics need each other more than either side wants to admit.The conversation pulls back the curtain on a creative process most audiences never see. The students explain how scenes evolved through constant rewrites, how characters emerged from improvisation, how costumes came together with last minute ingenuity, and how rehearsals often collapsed into uncontrollable laughter. They recount cutting favorite ideas, solving production problems with limited resources, and trusting each other enough to keep rewriting until the story worked.The episode also captures something harder to script: teenagers speaking honestly about collaboration without adults translating their experience. They celebrate classmates who stepped into unexpected roles, teachers who quietly held the production together, and the strange joy of creating something that exists only because everyone showed up.It is a conversation about theater, friendship, education, creativity, and what happens when 4 young artists get the microphones and the adults get out of the way.RELATED LINKSRoundabout Theatre CompanyRoundabout Youth EnsembleJames Madison High SchoolFEEDBACKLike this bonus episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.