When the greatest ballplayer in the world, BJ Choice, announces he intends to play for free, he immediately becomes a league-wide laughingstock. Fans riot, teammates brand him a traitor, and no club in the Professional League will sign him. Falling from greatness with BJ is Sal Shea, the reporter who hosted BJ’s fatal press conference and who is fired in the wake of his humiliation.

One year later, BJ has retreated to a simple, desert life, far from the highlights and fantasy boards. Sal tracks him down, hoping to convince BJ to attempt a comeback. For if BJ can rehabilitate his career, Sal may yet save hers.

Four plays. Four barely defensible choices.

Spring: Opening Day, 2050: O's at Nats
Summer: Fireworks
Fall: The Critic
Winter: Plunge

Sherri Blount sits in her Baltimore rowhouse, sipping a cup of tea as outside a blizzard rages. Upstairs, Andy Bowden reflects on the revelations of the past few days. While sifting through the belongings of his recently deceased wife, Andy discovered a pile of letters written by a man with whom she had once had an affair. He then drove all night to confront the adulterer, only to find that the man—Sherri's husband—has himself recently died. Just then the blizzard hits, and Andy has no choice but to wait out the storm with Sherri.

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.