This is a guest post by Cleo Handler.
Remember how you felt at the end of a big sleepover, when you’d wake up with a Sour Patch Watermelon and Junior Mint hangover and the DVD menu for Mean Girls back up on the TV, still blaring the same few bars of “Overdrive” on repeat? You’d reach around groggily for your glasses, not wanting to leave, but feeling kind of sick and realizing you had a full day of homework ahead of you. That’s just what graduating college is like.
Or at least, that’s how I felt. When I found myself alone in New York City, after four years of playing a Little League game of “Adult” and winning participation trophies, I was disoriented and overwhelmed. But most of all, I was no longer at one giant, constant slumber party with my friends, where no one told us what to eat or when to go to bed. Friendships suddenly required work (and hours on the train!) and I wasn’t sure how to adjust. Plus, things got in the way–like jobs, schedules, coworkers, relationships, disappointments and distance…basically just growing up. So when I sat down to create Young Like Us, an original series that I wrote with Chloe Sarbib, my real college roommate, this is exactly what we (and the rest of our all-female production team and main cast) wanted to explore.
When the main characters Mia, Ava, and Charlie realize that post-college life is pulling them in very different directions, they are forced to give up their shared Brooklyn apartment (with their creepy landlord Brad Dourif) and maybe more. In a last-ditch effort to stay in Neverland, Charlie convinces her reluctant friends that the best way for them to hang out more is to become a girl band – because bands never break up, right? Through the songs the girls (try to) write each week, they are able to explore the confusion of being a semi-adult, the same confusion we often struggled to articulate in our own lives.
Many shows out there deal with similar issues of shifting female friendships and navigating the transition to the real world (like gems Broad City and of course Girls, but we still felt that something was missing – and that’s where the music came in. The Young Like Us characters, like most 20-somethings we know, are too self-aware, self-deprecating, and defensive to address many of the serious issues they’re wrestling with in conversation. But the songs could take the characters to places where dialogue could not. In their music, the girls can more honestly explore crises of sexuality, identity, and piercing loneliness, as well as a nostalgia for the past and an anxiety about the future.
Of course, there are many great musicals out there that do this, like the incredible Fun Home now on Broadway (speaking of Alison Bechdel and powerful feminist stories, check this) but there’s one key difference – for them, the songs are (largely) supposed to be unconsciously interwoven with reality, an external projection of their inner angst, expressed when their feelings are just too large to be contained by dialogue. What we found with our series is that music is not only a powerful tool when it’s supposed to be invisibly intertwined or employed effortlessly. Our characters do not have the power to burst into fully formed, gorgeous songs through theater magic; they sit there working it out consciously, struggling and writing together, and the material they come up with is not always great. They have some successful moments and some nice turns of phrase, but basically they don’t know what they’re doing and it doesn’t really matter. (Not only did this take some pressure off us as writers, but it also gave us the cool opportunity to actually finish the girls’ incomplete song fragments post-episodes, in collaborations with some generous and extremely talented friends of ours on a full album). But most importantly, this let our characters grapple with the idea that writing music takes work, as does friendship. Neither is about the finished product because the thing that really counts is the struggle to put your feelings into words, the give and take along the way, the collaboration.
So I’m not necessarily saying that the cure-all for keeping your shifting friendships alive in the real world is to form a band. BUT–if you’re thrust out into a new situation, finding yourself a bit lost, and feeling that familiar sugar high post sleepover crash coming on, you might as well break out the old Rock Band game and let yourself ease into real life with another round of “Island in the Sun.”
Cleo Handler is an actress, writer, and lyricist in Brooklyn, NY. She has written several original plays and musicals, including Glass Act and From the Fire, and co-created and starred in the musical web series Young Like Us. She is a member of the Advanced BMI Musical Theater workshop, and has recently acted in projects such as the upcoming TNT drama Public Morals (Barbara) and the sitcom Honest Living. Cleo can be found on her website and on Twitter.