"Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)" reading at Purple Rose Theatre Company

Next weekend, the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, MI, will present a concert reading of my new script Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play) via Zoom on Saturday, July 16 at 10:30am. This reading will be directed by Rachel Keown, Purple Rose Artistic Associate, and feature Rhiannon Ragland & Skylar Causey.

This will be the first opportunity to share the work with a larger audience. The piece has only been read twice before, for a small, invite-only audience of friends and shortly after for our NEMOFA playwriting workshop in late 2020. These were also, of course, presented online.

The working title was John Bender Is the Villain, a play on the title of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, a contemporary (and very popular) takedown of Arthur Miller’s sainted protagonist from The Crucible.

As with that play, two generations have very different opinions about the message sent by beloved classics. In the case of Forget About Me, a mother and teenage child discuss their recent trip to the local drive-in to see The Breakfast Club. They went to a drive-in because it is late 2020 and there’s a pandemic quarantine going on.

Brief Synopsis: A Gen X Mom and her high-achieving, high school senior spend a night together at home. Cake is baked, drugs are consumed, and lines are crossed, while they debate teen movies, whether or not John Bender is the villain, and wait for that thick envelope.

So, my play is like No Exit only there are a lot more laughs, pop culture references, and they get cake.

The pandemic has been hard on everyone, the quarantine was something different. Did that actually happen? I was lucky, my work continued, I even started grad school which was easier because I did not need to travel an hour (both ways) to get to my classes. But I watched as my high school age children struggled to maintain a sense of self as events were first canceled then never scheduled.

Our eldest lost their senior year, no plays, no concerts, no special celebrations of achievement. All that time and effort, building reputation and honing their skills, to at last work alone in their room on college application projects and materials that might or might not carry them away from us and onto an uncertain future.

Then there is us, the Generation they called X,  raised in the shadow of the Boomers, our own childhoods making us very different parents with very different children. It’s funny, it’s as though the Strauss-Howe Theory of American Generations has failed its first test. The Millennials are as “Recessive” as we are, it’s Gen Z who are the new “Dominant” generation.

Or maybe that just seems to be the case in my house.

Purple Rose Theatre Company presented a concert reading of "Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)" directed by Rachel Keown on Saturday, July 16, 2022 at 10:30 AM.

Seat of the Pants productions presents a staged reading of "Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)" directed by Katherine Nash on Saturday, June 13, 2026 at 1:30 p.m. at Clague Playhouse in Westlake, and at 7:30 p.m. at Christ Presbyterian Church in Canton.

Savory Taṇhā in Performance (Saturday)

Cardinal Hotel, Winston-Salem
Room #207

Three performances of Savory Taṇhā, three very different performances. Or were they? All five performers brought their own unique interpretation to each character.

It was challenging deciding who would play which role on which night. I didn’t want anyone to have too many performances in a single evening, or too few. I also didn’t want any actor to be in any more than three scenes in a row. And that was more challenging than I thought.

Having made that work, the evening’s each had a different dynamic, depending on who played what. An audience member felt Thursday's show had a large number of empowered women characters, and on Thursday there were.

My wife noticed that Hillary and Zyrece were the center of several romantic entanglements on Friday, whereas tonight Brian and Zach were engaged in a few scenes with sexual overtones.

The legendary Harvey Pekar said, “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” Folks in the post-show tonight were fond of those dramatic moments that come out of everyday experience, and how we captured those. More than one person has asked if any of these characters were meant to carry from one scene to the next, but if they did that was the actor’s work, and not mine.

The pitfalls of online performance have been bemoaned at length by others (and myself) so I was particularly gratified for the comments our production received in that regard. That folks were able to suspend their disbelief and we drawn into the possibility that our actors shared the same space. During our rehearsals we worked on creating similar backgrounds and lighting as best we could, and it paid off.

Finally, I remember a comment from Thursday night. One was pleased with the variety of ages, the span of generations represented. And that was intentional. Because the origin of these stories are very personal. Ten months of constant writing, digging up these deep parts of me, the thoughts that trouble me, and those that give me peace, represented in a spectrum of moments, moment which for three nights were played out in real time for a life audience.

Spaceship Earth (film)

Florian Schneider Lives

DID YOU KNOW ..? You can watch first-run art house films, streaming courtesy of your friends at Cleveland Cinemas. (This is not a paid advertisement, support your local businesses.)

Last night we watched Spaceship Earth, a new documentary directed by Matt Wolf, about Biosphere 2, its origins, what went wrong, and what didn’t.

For those too young to remember, or are only aware of the Pauly Shore flick, Biosphere 2 is a minor footnote in 90s history, like the Hale-Bopp comet, or Pauly Shore. It was an enclosed environment in the Arizona desert, and eight individuals sealed themselves inside for two years to see how well they could survive.

My wife and I were trying to remember the details. Didn’t they abort the mission? Didn’t they “cheat” somehow? We remembered them going in (it was in September 1991) but didn’t remember them coming out.

A great deal of the film is dedicated to the foundations of the project which go back to the 1960s. A band of surprisingly capable and intelligent back-to-the-earth people, led by a charismatic if somewhat odd leader, practice avante garde theatre, and teach themselves how to live sustainably, on the earth, and then on the sea. It is a remarkable American story.

By the 1990s, the world had changed and with media attention their greatest experiment, and the personalities of those involved, were picked apart and exposed as less-than-science. This is why people like us, who were only casually paying attention, were left with the impression that it was a failure. Biosphere 2 is a punchline, like Pauly Shore.

But the film’s sincere portrayal of the the founders of the experiment, and what happened to them is what I found most relevant. We have been fighting the same battles since the 1960s; those who are exploring new belief systems and new ways of doing things, against those who just hate those people, and seek dominance, control, profit, and adherence to the dominant paradigm.

This fucking guy.

In this case, ageing hippies built a very sophisticated terrarium, and when their work was complete, Steve Bannon stepped in, kicked everyone to the curb and seold the science to the highest bidder.

Yes, that Steve Bannon. It’s a real what-the-fuck moment. Just watch the movie. What’s amazing to me is that it is impossible to watch, listen to, or read anything today without seeing just how everything that has ever happened has led to this current moment. Baby Boomers have been waging an inter-generational civil war for almost sixty years, the idealistic innovators vs. the aggrieved demagogues, and have destroyed the nation in the process.

“Spaceship Earth” was released May 8, 2020.

Play a Day: Millenials Suck!

Alisha Espinosa

For Wednesday, I read Millenials Suck! by Alisha Espinosa and listed at New Play Exchange.

When you grew up defines your generation. But being a young adult comes with the requisite baggage of feelings and fears and it is the manner in which the latter copes with the former that makes you Millennial, Gen X, Boomer, Silent, Greatest, and so on, back and back through American history.

I mean, don't get me started. When it comes to generational politics, I am the one who gets a conference call from the lunchroom at work if the subject comes up.

Just yesterday, a Millennial cohort lamented "Why do people hate us Millennials so much Lol," and I said who are you calling people? Only Boomers do that. Another threatened to search "Millennial" on my fb page and I told them to go ahead, because I knew I was a card-carrying ally and then I told her her to search "Boomer" on my fb page and she came back and told me I am a joy to behold.

I did a "Boomer" search on my page myself and was surprised at how much shade I throw at them. It's startling.

Millenials Suck! is a collection of vignettes on a common theme, and it is alive with music and movement, packed with tales of aching and anger in the Big City. Espinosa chronicles the desire for and fear of commitment common to young adults, but complicated by the present moment.

We, Gen X, were raised in a nation that told us we should be able to have anything, because it was America, and it was easy -- our only war lasted a month and it was a rout. So any problems we have must be our own. These young adults today have seen that society collapse like a house of cards and refuse to take the blame for it, which is only correct.

If the Post-Millennials in my own home are any indication they will be much more cynical than their parents, and far more militant. But I digress.

The playwright wrestles issues of race and class and gender and ideology, with humor and style, creating a cohort of charismatic characters, trip from one small NYC apartment to the next (and also a county fair) with a wise and open heart. I loved this. I don't miss being in my twenties.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Inherited Traits

Nick Malakhow

For Friday, I read Inherited Traits by Nick Malakhow and available at New Play Exchange.

When I was a senior in high school I took Psychology. Learned a lot of things that were not helpful. You are warned not to self-diagnose, but hey. Seventeen year-olds, what are you gonna do?

We had to write a term paper. I asked, as a joke, if I could write about parapsychology. Probably heard the term first in Ghostbusters. The teacher was a gadfly, he said sure.

So I asked for a suggestion, because I didn't really want to write about ghosts or anything like that. He told me to write a paper on astral projection, so I did. He even recommended others teachers I could speak to as subhects. That was crazy.

What I most learned through my brief study was that I can respect those who have experiences that defy modern scientific understanding. I also came to understand and appreciate that I am firmly grounded in this reality and that I will never be able to open my mind to have such experiences.

Or maybe that's not true. There was a period in college where I was separated from my physical self and at that time, perhaps. I was leaning into the Dreamworld and finding I could spend some time there.

If this all sounds silly to you, congratulations. You are firmly grounded in this reality.

Malakhow spins a tale of ghosts and relations, for it is the ghosts of relations who haunt us the most.

These past few nights I have been thinking of mom before sleep, and feeling quite melancholy. It comes at me with surprise, and quite hard. Only at bedtime, though. There's too much to think about during the day.

Isaac in the play Inherited Traits is also haunted by his mother, who she was or is. And by her literal astral self, who can only see so far herself, even in this state.

I always wonder, does Hamlet's father know everything once he's dead? Does he understand the past? Or is he still limited by his own experience being murdered, and the seeing his brother and wife together in the aftermath of his death? If we do have life after death, what is the extent of our consciousness?

The narrative in this play has tension and humor, an ingithful view into generations of shame but also care, and a lot of open wounds begin to heal.

Who shoud I read tomorrow?