“This place is perfectly, incredibly boring,” says Alex Brightman, welcoming a reporter into his temporary home, one he shares with his writing partner Drew Gasparini, as he describes Goodspeed Musicals’ Johnny Mercer Foundation Writers Colony in East Haddam in the depths of winter.

“It feels so desolate,” says the actor-writer of the picturesque little town along the Connecticut River. “It feels like a place where murderers come, or the set of some ‘70s horror movie or Twin Peaks.”

“But that’s good, because most writers are sociopaths,” jokes composer-lyricist Gasparini.

They are there to work on a new musical based on the 2006 novel and 2010 film, It’s Kind of a Funny Story that Universal Stage Productions has commissioned them to write. And boring is exactly what these easily distracted Manhattan men need, they say.

They’re not alone. More than 30 composers, lyricists, and book writers are making use of the remote surroundings and the vacant, newly built housing during Goodspeed’s winter months for the annual weeks-long creative retreat—now in its fifth year—as they work on a total of 18 new musicals. They get the heave-ho in March when a new wave of artists arrive to begin rehearsals for Goodspeed’s first show of the 2017 season Thoroughy Modern Millie.

Among the new shows is a musical by Matt Gould and Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (Baby Girl) and musical stage adaptations of the films Benny & Joon and Into the Wild.

Brightman and Gasparini, both 30 and who both grew up in Northern California, originally intended to just brush up their second draft and score ahead of a spring reading for the execs at Universal.

“We thought it was just going to be tweaks, but now here we are working on our third entirely new draft,” says Gasparini. “You can see our surgery so far,” he adds pointing to a wall filled with yellow sticky notes detailing changes in each of the show’s scenes.

“It looks like a scene from Homeland,” says Brightman, referring to the television drama about covert operatives.

They regularly report the show’s recent developments—and receive feedback—from Universal’s Chris Herzberger—the executive behind the stage version of the musical Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn that premiered at Goodspeed and later transferred to Broadway.

So what’s a day in the life like here?

“Lets not talk about today,” says Brightman. “Let’s talk about what a super successful day yesterday was.”

“We wake up at around 7, get coffee, chat a bit, check email, do personal stuff, and then we get cracking,” says Gasparini. “Sometimes there’s a breakfast in there and when Alex whips out a breakfast he really does it well. Steak and eggs, this morning, damn.”

When the Upper West Side men—they have been collaborators for seven years—work in Manhattan they share an office in the Gramercy Park area. They work on multiple projects including another musical based on the 1987 children’s novel, The Whipping Boy. When they hit a wall with one project they “have a drink and shift to another,” says Brightman.

There’s an upright piano in the living room, but it hasn’t been used much, save for the writing of two songs, one called “Performing Normalcy.” Their focus since arriving has mostly been on restructuring the book “and raising the stakes” of the characters in the story, says Brightman.

And in the tradition of famed Broadway bookwriters and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, they act out everything they write with flourish. It also helps that Brightman is the Tony Award-nominated actor from the Broadway musical School of Rock.

“I can’t do it inside my own head,” says Brightman. “I have to say things out loud, as an actor.”

There’s some but not all that much interaction with some of the other creatives in the housing nestled next door to each other in a kind of Olympic Village setting.

“At night there is a kind of a salon thing where we hear everyone’s stuff that they’ve been working on,” says Gasparini.

“The feedback is tough,” says Brightman adding “and we don’t always ask for it. But it’s all fine and it’s sometimes good to get ideas off other writers—though it can be annoying because they could be imagining a different show in their head than the one we’re doing.”

“We take everything with a grain of salt,” says Gasparini, which sounds like the grounded advice of a balanced person.

“Which we are not,” says Brightman.

“What’s the opposite of balanced?” asks Gasparini.

Their banter is the secret of their relationship, they say—”Staying silly,” says Brightman

“Not taking any of it too seriously,” says Gasparini.

And then back to work.

Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.