Narrative Podcasts with Laila Abdo

Laila: With The Great Pyramid Scheme, I saw on Reddit this comment that just said, “What if there was a workplace comedy about building the pyramids? LOL.” It was very Reddit-y and it just kind of stuck in my brain. And went in my ideas book until I told my friend who’s in my writing group and he said, “That one, that’s the one you need to do next.”

So I kind of followed a lot of curiosity with it. The story is in Ancient Egypt. Pharaoh Khufu is building the greatest pyramid of all time, but amid feuding queens and union strikes, will he ever finish? Krapopolis meets Futurama in this narrative comedy podcast that is absolutely not safe for work. And if you look up not safe for work podcasts, those are normally erotica podcasts. I’m not saying we don’t make sex jokes, but this is just definitely what you would normally be watching on Adult Swim; we’ve made into an audio play series.

And what was kind of fun about this was the team that we had together. We had a team of five writers including myself Nabra. And we followed what was fun about something or what was interesting about something while also trying to get a lot of historic inspiration.

So I was initially inspired with a character design that Pharaoh Khufu’s dad, who’s Pharaoh Daddy in the series, but in real life he’s Pharaoh Sneferu. The ancient Greeks wax poetically about what a great dude, super amazing, Pharaoh Sneferu, two thumbs up.

Then it comes to be Pharaoh Khufu’s time, and Pharaoh Khufu is the one in the Great Pyramid of Giza—and for some reason none of us know his name. Even though I have multiple social studies textbooks that had the Great Pyramid of Giza on it, and we never actually talked about anything Egyptian. It’s a little bit of a sidebar, but we didn’t know his name.

And then come to find out the Ancient Greece, including Herodotus who is the Father of History, he’s termed the “Father of History.” He wrote the craziest lies, and they have to be lies. At some point that he’s like, “He’s pimping out his daughter to the slaves, otherwise nobody would work on this pyramid. He is doing all of this. Pharaoh Khufu, boo.” Very intense, very intense, like saying, “You’re pimping out your daughter or selling other people in order to build this pyramid” when the government of Egypt has recently been going on this kind of campaign to say, “We have the archeological proof pyramids were not built with slaves. It was not slave labor. We have the remains.” All these funerary remains show that they were buried with respect and with this kind of dignity that showed that they had to be of a certain economic class. So, a worker class instead of slave class.

There was a lot of evidence that supported this was kind of an FDR-like project—FDR with the New Deal of having all of these things that we still enjoy in America today of the national parks, murals everywhere. The way that we were investing in the environment and arts and other kind of things while people didn’t have jobs. We can make a job that’s something for the value of society.

So how this relates to Egypt was the pyramid was built because there was always flooding season. What does an agricultural society that’s also a trade society, but Egypt is still the Middle East breadbasket, what do you do when the agricultural society can’t do anything because the Nile has flooded? And that’s what they would do: “Here, you can still work. Make a block.”

I’ve really felt this call of, “we don’t have enough out there.” We don’t have enough that’s even offered as a counterpoint to the barrage of other images, the barrage of other statements.

Nabra: It’s amazing how much of this, the history and conversations about representation, came up throughout the writing process, and still in what we do. Because you’ll listen to it, and it’s, I mean, the product is a very silly, hilarious podcast with a lot of inappropriate jokes.

But this was constantly on our minds. All of us as a writing team, we were always going back to the source material, the history, looking up gods and rituals and real traditional practices. And because we had a lot of MENA folks on the writing team, we were always thinking about representation and how we can balance having this ridiculous comedy that we are having so much fun writing—and all of us have this sense of humor—and also do well by our identities. It’s such an interesting and bizarre, I guess, balance, especially when it comes to this project.

Laila: Yeah. I kind of hope that people will take that as getting a bit more interested if they heard something, since we were really following the fun of what came up. I think I can say all five of us super dig mythology. So all five of us really had fun of feeling, okay, what god can we put in this episode? So we had this kind of point of magic and mythology that we were really leaning on that was super fun because gods are awesome.

Then we had the second point where this is really a labor show. This is really about supporting unions, supporting workers’ rights, and kind of doing that in a funny way. The big major conflict of the show is Pharaoh Khufu is trying to build this pyramid and then the kind of secondary protagonist, Aaron, is leading a labor movement that somehow winds up including crocodiles to be protected under workers’ rights. And the crocodile should have beer in payment as well: Stella, the Beer of Egypt.

So we had all these different kinds of bits, that was really fun, and then we had all these anachronisms at the same time. So hopefully it’s just one of those things that’s a spark for people to get more interested in accurate depictions. Instead of what I am tired of, which is always the Western lens first. I know I grew up in America, but Western lens first in all of these things has been very, very challenging, particularly in current media. It’s been very challenging.

Marina: Well, and I think sometimes people take comedy as being a media that you could just play with. And that things like representation don’t play into it as well, which is of course not true. You want the representation to be true and good. And it makes the comedy deeper and richer when those things happen, when the care is actually being given.

Laila: Yeah, I fully agree with that because in my time in LA, I was getting deeper and deeper in different comedy communities, including Upright Citizens Brigade, that improv community. Or even just there are a lot of great Arab stand-ups. Laura Laham and Lynn Maleh, who have actually voice acted on the show, have been both hosts of different Arab American comedy shows all across the US. Very proud of them. They’re hilarious. You should go watch them. Go to a show, you will not regret it.

And the specificity of something… it doesn’t have to be your culture to still be super, super intriguing. But because of the way joke writing works, I felt like my level of comedy got more specific. Because Laura and I actually were in a kind of virtual comedy writers’ group where everybody else was working on their stand-ups and getting really specific with jokes, and I would bring in pages and be like, “What do you guys think?” Which is very nice of them to let me tag along as a non-standup.

And when you see the actual detail and the microscope that goes into every single joke of saying, “Where is this joke hitting? Who’s the joke on? Would it be better if we try to switch out this?” It’s like watching a chef or something be like, “No, I need a little bit more of this garlic. I need a little…”—well, everyone always needs loads of garlic. That’s a false equivalence—but, “I need a little bit more of this. I want an essence of that.” And being aware that who it’s going out to totally changes the comedy as well. So, I think comedy is also the best and been the most exciting for a lot of marginalized communities. I felt very lucky to be part of that space and to continue to be part of it. People are saying really exciting things right now and doing a lot of exciting things.

Marina: Yeah. I feel like sometimes the doom scrolling is broken up for me by a Middle Eastern artist coming across my newsfeed. And saying something that hits really close to home, but that is dealing with the heartbreak and trauma of the current times in a way that is witty and smart and funny.

Laila: Yeah. I mean, it’s tough, but I think we all celebrated. Emil Wakim is on SNL now, and he gets to be Christian Lebanese on SNL. That’s not a fight that has been nothing. But I am very much interested in, the reason I’ve been producing more, which has been a gift as I’ve really felt this call of, “we don’t have enough out there.” We don’t have enough that’s even offered as a counterpoint to the barrage of other images, the barrage of other statements.

I mean, yeah, if there was a time in my lifetime where the word terrorist got untangled from the Arab identity, I would feel so blessed. I would feel so grateful. And that’s what we’re fighting. I mean that’s what we’re going up against, that this is an insane first picture. It is a crazy first image that is held very deeply by people. And I find it very irresponsible that this image is being propagated. I don’t really blame ordinary people when they’re getting thrown this image all the time. What are they going to do differently? That’s our job. Different image.

Marina: Definitely. And The Great Pyramid Scheme will give that different image, which is really exciting.

Laila: I hope so.

So this is a form of protest in the sense that it is a comedy. It is not keeping us in a tragedy porn space, and it is remembering that there are other great civilizations before Greece.

Marina: I have faith, based on everything I’ve heard. But you brought up voice actors and now I’m very curious. So narrative podcasts are new to me. One, I’m curious how many episodes? Would love to hear if you don’t mind sharing about how you structured them. But I also am curious now about voice actors. Because I’m like, “Do I know these voice actors? How did you cast?” More great representation happening here.

Laila: Yeah, that’s kind of the cool, also joy of getting to produce yourself. We were working with a small budget and immense talent, and I am very grateful for everybody for doing so. As Nabra would attest, because also Nabra signed up for so many episodes to write on, we had a breakneck pace.

In February, we spent two weeks kind of talking out, what’s the story? What’s the character design? So that was one week. And then the following week we already said, “Okay, these plot lines are going to go together. These plot lines are going to go together and these plot lines are going to go together. So sign up what’s interesting to you.”

And everybody wanted “Aliens,” so I bowed out of that. Nabra is actually one of the writers on “Aliens.” “Aliens” is very funny. Please make it to “Aliens.” It keeps getting more ridiculous. Stick with the show, guys.

So we wrote over, from March to May, we wrote three hundred pages. So each kind of arc is kind of a part one and part two. We get to a climax of “Aliens” week, and then we come back to have the kind of big finale and finish of it.

Then that following week we do “Atlantis,” and then we come back and we finish it. And the following week we do what’s actually turned out to be everybody who worked on the shows, what they think is the craziest episode, which was the “Duat Afterlife and Periods” episode, which Nabra and I also wrote on with Robert.

Nabra: Which will probably be the feature of this pod swap. So if you’re going over to Great Pyramid Scheme, you may see Marina and I talking about pyramids and the afterlife.

Laila: Yes, that’s become our dramaturgical baby of equal representation for women, I guess. I’m not sure. We could probably spend this very nicely, but we found very funny research regarding periods. So we followed the fun of that.

And then we’ve finished with the finale of the “Plagues.” But we had what will come out is the “Week One,” which will introduce us to the world of the characters, as well as a bonus full storyline of propaganda, which has been very fun. Of just kind of talking about propaganda in a kind of light and silly way.

So that’ll be the whole first weeks, and then we’ll have four weeks following that. So it’s going to be quite a few episodes, twenty-five-minute length. And that’s just mostly because I don’t know how to write short form very well. And we really treated it very much like a sitcom as much as we could, even though they were sixty pages.

So for people who may not be writers or screenwriters, you normally call a page a minute. So, we try to kind of do that and we’ll see how far over we are when we’re out of post-production. But really treating it as okay, we have a Plot A and a Plot B and a Plot C, and we have all these very layered in-depth things going on.

We have all these different characters, very ensemble-y because that’s also the comedy I drift towards loving. And everyone had a favorite to write for or a favorite, yeah, “that’s the one I want.” Became very clear, very fast. Nabra loves writing for Queen Henutsen, who’s the poison queen.

Nabra: And who I will always take the opportunity to say, many people or many historians believe is Nubian. So y’all got to recognize.

Laila: We love it.

Nabra: There’s some representation, y’all.

Laila: We kept it accurate. Yeah, it was very cool because in the writer’s room, Nabra is Nubian, I’m Lebanese and Syrian, and then we have another writer who identifies as biracial, Palestinian and American, I guess, I don’t know how you say white in another way from this. He’s Palestinian. And so we have 60 percent from our writer’s group.

And then our voice actors, we had, all the writers actually wound up doing some voice acting bit roles at some point. But likewise, 60 percent of our writer’s room, including myself, are also actors. And so I knew that, hey, I’ve got a wealth of people I’ve worked with before and a wealth of talent here. Where Robert and Bree did so many of the additional voices, as well as Robert’s wife Morgan was an amazing voice help.

So for our additional voices, we just tapped on the people we know. And I held a casting session for following the other people. I don’t know if you guys have talked about OuLuLi on this podcast before, but that’s actually how I saw your podcast being distributed before, was Nabra posting on OuLuLi, “I have Kunafa and Shay.” So I definitely was definitely… Or, Marina, do you also post for the show in there?

Marina: No.

Nabra: I think it’s mostly me. And for those who don’t know, it’s OuLuLi Arabs in the Arts Facebook group because we still holding down the fort on Facebook. But it’s such a good community, honestly, of many different types of artists across the nation—I don’t know if it’s even international—posting about art, activism, and just pumping each other up and creating real community on Facebook, which doesn’t really exist that much anymore.

Laila: It’s been great. And there are several people in the group that they’re just been completely lovely throughout. Ali Nasser, who is the voice of our Pharaoh Khufu, as well as the voice of Yahweh, it’s his notable, I guess secondary role. Ali was somebody I had gotten to know through some activism in the group, and I knew I’d wanted to work with him. I just knew I wanted to work with Ali some point, work with Ali at some point. And so we did. And that was awesome that he was available. He did the table read for us. Then he made time in his schedule to do the full season, which was great. The voice actor for Aaron as well as Anubis, and a few other random roles here and there, actually knows Nabra.

Nabra: Yeah, who I know from Seattle. He was in Selling Kabul over there and is an Egyptian actor. Adam El-Sharkawi, who I’m always trying to get more Egyptians into all the spaces.

Laila: And I fully believe you should definitely hire both Ali and Adam, both Egyptian, both fantastic actors outside of that. They’ve got amazing range, amazing voice talent. And then Lynn Maleh and Laura Laham, I actually called up and saying, “We really need some Middle Eastern women.”

And they got kind of spooked because I had a very intense casting call saying, “Please do not submit if you cannot commit to the dates. Please do not submit if you cannot record at home.” And Lynn said, “Oh, I don’t have an at-home.” I was like, “That’s okay, we will make it work.” And she is so funny. She is such a great Queen Meritites. She’s such a joy to work with. She has such a great sense of timing and beats.

And Laura, the same thing of she just has the Queen Henutsen arrogance and the very much tackling it in a great way. So I was very grateful to these excellent, funny women for joining the team.

Last but not least of our voice actors, that’s kind of separate from the writing community that we hired, was Adron Duell who is an Iranian American. And Adron and I had worked on a project a few years ago, but he’s also a standup comedian. So we are basically theatre people and stand-ups did this show.

Ali and Adam also have a significant theatre background. Bree, Robert, and I have a massive theatre background. Nabra obviously theatre background. So we wanted to have that kind of live theatre feel. Instead of, yeah, we kind of wanted to honor the performance of being able to do things together. So instead of recording separately, we did use Zencastr to record virtually all from at home and mostly be able to feed off each other’s energy in that way.

Nabra: And so another thing we want to talk about with this podcast, more I guess generally zooming out into the realm of narrative podcasts, is how it might fit into this huge umbrella of performance art? Since this is our performance art season, which really we’re using to be like anything.

Because we’re learning more and more that performance art has been, it started in, kind of, galleries and as a complement to visual art. But now it really encompasses so many different forms and multimedia expressions and just different ways of presenting performance.

Do you have thoughts on how narrative podcasts, as they’re especially gaining popularity, fit into this umbrella of performance art? And also any other projects you may have considered performance art in your career? I’m thinking about standup or sketch comedy as well.

The narrative podcast genre and medium is a really accessible way to get yourself out there and to get representation out there.

Laila: Yeah, I think that it’s so awesome that you guys are spending a whole season really dedicated to performance. Almost everybody’s first connection who is a professional today, does come from doing either a school show or whatever. Something that was done live in front of everyone.

But that’s not fully the case anymore that it was always live. Some people’s first connection now is by doing TikTok. Sometimes it’s being able to control that many different factors.

What I love about this narrative podcast is we took a lot of the joy of live, a lot of the fun theatricality of my forced theatre boot camp of “we’re all doing this together, saddle up!”—and we took that kind of fun and play as we’re also using digital techniques. This is going to be distributed digitally.

You’re going to be able to find this on all the major podcast platforms: Apple, Castbox, Overcast, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, you should be able to find it. And if not, please stalk our page on Instagram, The Great Pyramid Scheme. You will find us, please.

Yeah, it’s been very kind of a different experience to understand a digital audience goer. Because almost everybody listens to their podcasts in the car, doing chores, on a walk, while doing something. Whereas if you think about the history of radio, the radio was in the living room. You turned it on, you sat at the fireplace.

So there’s something kind of fun about the motion and the enjoyment of different people are ready to approach something at a different time in their day. So I always think digital’s an exciting space, and I’ve really enjoyed it.

I came from a musical theatre background. As a kid, I did a ton of musical theatre. And I also have done a lot of classic Western classical music. That’s what my focus was as an undergrad.

Whenever I left college, I actually was in Chicago at storefront theatres for a while, which was an awesome experience. If you are a theatre person, you should go to Chicago, live in Chicago, be in Chicago. What an amazing community. I cannot give the Chicago theatre community enough love or enough of a shout out of the quality of what’s happening in Chicago. It’s extraordinary. Had an extraordinary experience there.

So when I moved to LA, it was learning all over again. The rules for film and television are completely separate of what live performance rules are. My very, I know I’m old, I’m a Lebanese woman, so I guess my face is rather overactive. I’m using my hands quite a bit right now. You won’t be able to hear my hands, but I can hear my hands.

And the difference between that with finding kind of stillness and how that’s going to work on screen, how are you repeating to have a close enough take for your editor but differentiating to have an interesting take for your editor, was a completely awesome skill set by filming that I really enjoyed.

And while there, doing improv I think is probably some of the most fun performance art there is, that it can be long form, short form. There’s just no boundaries in comedy. There’s no boundaries in standup. Because standup also is a very specific feedback loop that they will just kick you out, which is great. I fully believe in that kind of instant feedback loop in some ways, which is great.

So I think that some of my favorite performance art experiences have also been very much in community, very much in ensemble. Or like when I was in college, I went to Southern Illinois University. And we had a partnership with the Gaiety School of Acting in Ireland, mostly just because my concert choir director, Dr. Stevenson Davenport—amazing, amazing person—had a connection there. And we did what we called an original musical project because Patrick Sutton, the director of Gaiety School of Acting, just does not dig musical theatre in the American form. So he wanted to be very clear, “This is not a musical, it’s a play with music.” Which after you spend enough time with theatre people, that becomes very clear, is it a musical? Is it a play with music? What’s the medium we’re going with?

And we did a devised thing, where we did a lot of different exercises. And from that the story was lifted up, as Martin Maguire, our writer, kind of observed and put things together for us. It was very organic, it was very nice structured, devised work, which was really fun. And then we composed stuff.

There was one time where one of our comp students composed something and one of our trombonists composed something, and they were like, “We should layer this.” And they layered it, and we kept that in the show.

There was one time when they were trying to ask us to do an exercise everybody can do. And I said, “Okay, everybody lift up your shoe and tap it on the floor and then pass it on.” And our writer was like, “It’s a shoe factory. That’s our location.” And I mean, it was just a very exciting, very loose ends connotation, pulling things together.

So I think performance art can have two sides. It’s just this kind of place to be open and exploring. Or it can be what The Great Pyramid Scheme has done with our scripts and our specificity and our acting as close to a TV show as we can without major funding.

What we are telling in The Great Pyramid Scheme are very specific stories with a very specific goal in mind. The pilot just introduces you to the world. But the next episode about propaganda, it’s propagandists everywhere. And being able to kind of understand that and recognize that, I think, is really important.

But while also kind of silly. Isn’t it ridiculous that we have crazy amounts of swag for just a local business? The pen, the squeeze stress ball. What other things did we throw in there, Nabra? Do you remember? We threw in so many crazy things.

Nabra: I think there were just things that were shaped like a pyramid. Like a pyramid but with the logo on it. Yeah.

Laila: Right. You could even see that on Foodstagram of burning a logo onto a crepe or something. So this kind of extreme capitalism, this extreme marketing, has been kind of a lot. Then with, is there a moral to the story with “Aliens”? Or just maybe there’s not. “Aliens” might not have a moral.

Nabra: It’s up to the audience to find the moral.

Laila: Yeah. And then with “Atlantis,” I feel like that was very much more like a marital story while also having a union rights Plot B. But it was just very marital in nature of that relationship. And the “Period/Duat” episode, moral of the story is give women healthcare. This is really crazy, isn’t it absolutely nuts?

The moral of the story is how is it that half the population, sometimes more in different places, has no access to feminine care products. And you just kind of expect society to keep turning without honoring this very normal biological thing. I find very surprising. And then we kind of wrap it up with the joy of “Plagues.” But I think Nabra wanted to speak on the period.