by Brady Thomas. @cbradyt.
GARY, IN. - Up-and-coming playwright Jackson Moss, upon leaving the dining room table at his parent’s suburban home, has reached out to The Broadway Beat to express his disappointment with the fact that his most recent family dinner did not end in a screaming match over decades of buried trauma.
“Look, you’ve got to realize how frustrating it is to be stuck here with these well-adjusted freaks,” snarked Moss, having finished a cozy meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes with his loving parents, siblings, and grandmother. “I feel like you can’t even consider yourself a member of the canon of American drama without having at least one explosive dinner scene in your arsenal, and I gotta say, the fam is giving me jack shit to work with inspiration-wise. It’s like they don’t want me to have a career!”
Laurie Parker-Moss, a dedicated homemaker who’s been happily married for three decades, struggles to understand her son’s desire for dinnertime theatrics.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have taken Jackson to that Arthur Miller play at such a young age,” sighed Parker-Moss, doing the dishes as her husband watched NCIS: Hawaii in the other room. “I love my baby boy, of course, but not every family has to have hidden betrayals or questionable wartime manufacturing practices. Sometimes, you just have a couple of normal people that want to gossip about Aunt Lisa’s haircut.”
Becca Lee, Jackson’s beleaguered hometown best friend, was unsurprised upon learning of Moss’s yearning for theatrical familial strife.
“Yeah, he’s just sort of like this,” stated Lee, eyes glazed over with the knowledge that her friend was back on his bullshit. “I love Jackson, but Christ does he try to wring drama out of every situation imaginable. Last summer, he was invited to my sister’s wedding, and he spent the entirety of the ceremony with a notepad in hand, waiting for somebody to reveal that the groom had a secret gay football buddy or something."
At the time of reporting, Moss was said to be briefly toying with the radical notion of “just making things up” for his as-yet-unwritten play. Having entertained that idea, he instead decided to return to his family home to see if there was any racist memorabilia in the attic that he could write about.
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