Badlands

I was inspired to write "Badlands" in the months following my move from Maryland to Los Angeles, where I had been hired as a sales representative for a chemical company run by my uncle. The play’s protagonist, Jeffrey, finds himself similarly transplanted, having agreed to work as an assistant to his friend Tyrone, now a successful editor. For a brief while Jeffrey distracts himself with the thrill of...
I was inspired to write "Badlands" in the months following my move from Maryland to Los Angeles, where I had been hired as a sales representative for a chemical company run by my uncle. The play’s protagonist, Jeffrey, finds himself similarly transplanted, having agreed to work as an assistant to his friend Tyrone, now a successful editor. For a brief while Jeffrey distracts himself with the thrill of a new home and girlfriend, but his enthusiasm soon wanes, due in part to his growing realization that he and Tyrone have drifted much further apart than he’d imagined.

Unable to turn for answers either to his best friend or girlfriend—a film student with little patience for speechmaking—and thousands of miles removed from familial comforts, Jeffrey begins to seek escape in an idealized fantasy of the American West through which he traveled en route to California. Of course, this is also the route I traveled, and Jeffrey’s awestruck memory of “the badland-scape,” as he calls it, was my own, as is his sense of being an “eternal tourist” doomed never to find his own place to call home.

Though Jeffrey can no longer relate to Tyrone, he discovers an unexpected kindred spirit in his friend’s would-be fiancée, Cynthia, a professional travel writer and amateur tour guide. When Jeffrey ducks out of a business convention in San Francisco so that Cynthia can show him the sights of the city, Tyrone fires him. No longer bound by the strictures of the workplace, by play’s end Jeffrey rekindles his friendship with Tyrone, though he remains jobless, uncertain even whether to remain in Los Angeles. As the lights fade to black, he is already contemplating a new career path, leaving the audience to consider whether Jeffrey is beginning to understand what he wants out of life or whether he has merely come full circle.
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