In this ShowBizU interview, musical theatre collaborators Lily Dwoskin (lyricist) and Austin Nuckols (composer) discuss their new musical Hyena in Petticoats, which dramatizes the life and work of 18th‑century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They explain the provocative title, reference Wollstonecraft’s enduring quotes, and highlight how her struggle for women’s agency and narrative control remains relevant today. The duo also share their creative philosophy: to craft shows that are both entertaining and educational, using memorable songs to carry the message. They reflect on lessons from the Theater Accelerator program, emphasizing the importance of defining a central question for a show and how that insight reshaped their rewrite process. Overall, the conversation blends historical context, feminist themes, and practical insights into musical development.
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My name is Lily Dwoskin.
And I'm Austin Knuckles. So the two of us together, we wrote Hyena in Petticoats. I wrote the music.
I wrote the lyrics. And we co-wrote the book.
Co-wrote the book, yeah. So basically Hyena in Petticoats was about the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft, who was the mother of Mary Shelley. And also in a way like the mother of academic feminism. She published a really important work in 1792 called A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which is like basically the very first widely published book about women's rights, like basically over an entire century before women had the right to vote. And so she was just a very controversial figure in her time, hence the name Hyena in Petticoats, which one of her critics called her.
I think that Mary would be thrilled by all the progress that women have made, but also deeply disturbed about the amount of things she argued for and spoke about 200 years ago, which we're still fighting for.
One of her most famous quotes from "Villa Kitchen: The Rights of Women," which was written in 1792, she wrote, "I do not ask for women to have power over men, for only then to have power over themselves." And just the fact that that is a quote that is still relevant and literally over— what's that? 230 years later is just kind of absurd.
She argued for equality equality between women and men, we're still talking about a pay wage, a wage gap today. And we're still fighting.
Her works were just about like women just living their lives. Because she wrote like fiction as well as the nonfiction kind of work that she wrote. But all of her, she was kind of a troll in a way in which that like one of her first published books was called Mary: A Fiction, which her name was Mary and she basically just wrote the autobiography of herself as a child but knew that more people would read it if she just called it a fiction. So she's like, here's my autobiography and I'm just going to call it a fiction. So she was a very interesting figure to work with. But it's like, we're just like, even like those small things of like women having control over their own narratives is like still a pertinent topic in like in Hollywood and in theater today.
Our mission, I guess you could say, as collaborators is to write shows that are both entertaining and educational, that are message or theme forward, but that people come out singing the songs. Because we believe that that's the way to get through to people is entertain them, make them hum the tunes, because then they'll be humming your message on the way out.
One thing is that we've historically been really bad at explaining like what we're trying to do with a certain show or even like what it's about. I think for me one of the most important lessons that we took out of the Theater Accelerator experience was like, what is the question of your show? In a way, like what questions does your show ask at the top and then how do you answer it at the end? And that That was something that prior to doing the program we hadn't thought about. And by the time we were in the program, we were like 75% of the way through a major rewrite. So like we didn't quite make it into our next version, but like we've just started coming back around to the show again like 2 years later. And like that's like a central part of like what the show is, and it's hugely shaped our vision for what the next draft is. It's like, what is the central question of the show? Because when you're— especially when you're writing a show about one person's life, Like, so much happens in a person's life. Like, people's lives—
What's relevant, what's not relevant, what feels like cheating the person out of their own experiences in the past as we're now in charge of their story, but what will actually tell their story to today's audience. Also, nobody else is teaching you how to market yourself. There's a lot of people who are teaching you incredible, valuable lessons about craft, how to write the show, and then you're out there in the world with your show show and there's no one else teaching you, well, what next? How do I drive the show forward into the world today? How would you describe the Theater Accelerator experience to someone who is applying and wants to be a part of it? Oh gosh, how do you explain it? We a lot of times now start with the central question. We've written a few shows since being part of Theater Accelerator and we often We'll stop and be like, well, how does this song relate to the theme that we originally said we were writing this show about? And keep going back to that. And I think we continue to talk about our pitch for each show, like, and those were, you know, crucial things we talked about at Theater Accelerator.
