My new full-length play, Lab Rats, opens in Boston tonight. I've had a blast working with the Brown Box Theatre Project.
I couldn't asked for a better team--the director, Kyler Taustin, and I
really clicked, and our cast of Brenna Fitzgerald and Marc Pierre are
superb.The show runs for the next two weeks at Atlantic Wharf in downtown Boston (Fri-Sun, 7:30pm, November 6-15, and tickets are free! (But you should reserve ahead.) And then we go on tour to the Eastern Short of Maryland.
Opening Night day for the premiere of a new full-length play is a little like Christmas Eve. There's such great mystery and anticipation. The audience will be bringing the final gift to the production--their presence and attention. We give them our talents and energy and words. And when the lights finally go up, we unwrap it all and hope for great joy. The anticipation for that moment is wonderful and dreadful. The hours creep by. (I plan to pass the time by painting my house.) For playwrights, we're lucky if we get this moment once a year (sometimes it's a LOT longer between them). I try to do my best to savor it all, even the anxious moments of waiting.
Here's a summary of the play:
Mika and Jake earn a slim living as test subjects in medical experiments. When their waiting room banter deepens into a real relationship, these drifting twenty-somethings must navigate a treacherous maze of emotion, trust, and survival as their carefully monitored and medicated lives bleed into their true selves.Lab Rats, a World Premiere production by Boston playwright Patrick Gabridge, is a sharply comic love story that poignantly examines the raw connection between two damaged humans as they struggle to redefine what it means to escape.
My newest novel, Steering to Freedom, has just been published by