A workshop production takes its first steps!

I’m extremely excited to get started on you don’’t have to do anything, written by Ryan Drake and directed by Ryan Dobrin. This new work addresses queer attachment and desire, trauma, and the internet. The piece explores the critical period of middle and high school sexual & personal development. We’re in the earliest stages of pre-production, assembling the budget and whittling down a venue. Stay tuned!

The play begins when Teddy brings us into the past where it all began: 7th grade at a new school. After being shunned by the rest of their classmates, Teddy and Clark decide to have a sleepover that takes an unexpected and uncomfortable direction. They then fall out of touch until Teddy receives an AIM message from Clark after he’s been expelled for groping a student at school.

The conversation incites an online communication over a decade that’s part friendship, part adversary, part sexual exploration. As their communication progresses we start to see the ways it bleeds into Teddy’s own life and sense of intimacy and identity. As realities and personal discoveries clash, his relationship with Clark ends but the effects linger in Teddy’s present.