DEMENTED AND SAD, BUT SOCIAL - BY DAVID HANSEN

When my friends started having kids, I heard this common refrain from (mostly) the guys, who would say things like, “I can’t wait to share Star Wars with my kid!” or something along those lines. I remember seeing “Star Wars” during its first run, in summer 1977. I was nine. It was exciting. It was also scary. My parents didn’t “share” this movie with me; I discovered it on my own, attending it with my older brothers, and dealt with the exhilaration and the horror in private.

The movies my parents did share with me, that’s a whole other story. At around the same time they took me to an art house to see “The Man Who Loved Women.” It was Truffaut! They didn’t know it was going to be so dirty. Then again, I was never sheltered from sex; it was violence they disapproved of, and I have to say I respect that.

And when it came to teen movies of the 1980s, those that I enjoyed so well when they were released, I knew our kids would just have to find those themselves. Many are extremely problematic, and not just because many of them have so much to do with teenage sex.

The origin of the script “Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club Play)” was an imagined conversation between a Gen X parent and their Gen Z child, about “The Breakfast Club.” In the wake of #MeToo, the actor Molly Ringwald wrote a wonderful essay for The New Yorker about watching it with her adolescent daughter. She knew it was problematic, but didn’t realize how much, and decided it was better for her child to see it first with her rather than, say, at a sleepover with all of her daughter’s friends.

My age cohort has always held up “The Breakfast Club” as the finest example of the John Hughes films, while today’s kids are much more concerned about Claire’s sushi sitting around unrefrigerated all morning. Just kidding, they are much much more concerned about the character of John Bender. The working title for this play was, in fact, “John Bender is the Villain.” Kimberly Belflower still hasn’t returned my email.

The pandemic and ensuing lockdown provided the opportunity for this imagined conversation I had to take place in reality. In 2020, our elder child began their senior year in high school, the younger was a sophomore. We all gave each other space, coming together occasionally for meals, though the kids more often chose to take their plates to their rooms. Online classes were attended in pjs with the camera turned off. There was a lot of screen bingeing. You know what it was like, you were there.

I watched, I witnessed, I listened. And then I wrote this script.

The piece has only had one online “zoom” reading. I have never had the opportunity to listen to an audience react to the play. The director of that virtual reading asked me a very interesting question as we were preparing for rehearsals. She asked me if the character of Dots was meant to be trans, that she felt like Dots is trans.

I was surprised. No, I hadn’t meant Dots to be trans but, and I want to be clear about this, Moms and Dots are not meant to represent my spouse and our elder child. My wife would never say some of the things Moms says here, and my child would never do some of the things that Dots says that they have done. And they had not come out as trans until after I had finished my first draft of this script.

And yet, they were trans before I had written this script. Had I unintentionally written Dots as trans? I suppose that if I were to have done so, unintentionally would probably be the best way to have done so.

So, a period piece. Soon after the pandemic began, I would manage the morning in the usual way: rise, make coffee, light the fire, and write. The rest of the day, however, would be much the same. And on Friday mornings, the last day of the work week, traditionally a cause for celebration, TGIF and all that, I would first write, “Just another fucking Friday.”

And that’s where the play begins. A kind-of “locked-room mystery” set in late 2020, and maybe not just another fucking Friday night with Moms and Dots.