Time Traveling Mom-Dad

Opening Night: December 6, 2009
Theatre: The Gorilla Tango Theatre in Chicago, IL
Written by: Shawn Bowers
Directed by: Amanda Engborg
Starring: Adam Schreck, Jon Matteson, Briana Hansen, Neil Huff, Chris Kordys and Todd Gebhart

Synopsis: The titular Time Traveling Mom-Dad is Shawn, a young man whose best friend Rodney Hogan has just died of a vicious heart attack.  When a version of himself from 30 years in the future offers him the chance to save Rodney, he must race through time to seduce his friend’s parents and make sure that Mrs. Hogan gets impregnated with the corrected genetic material that will change everything.  As they’re wont to do, things go awry, forcing temporary gender reassignments, jaunts to the prehistoric and some literal self-reflection along the way.

THE FULL STORY

Time Traveling Mom-Dad started off as a one-note joke in a video sketch that never got shot, turned into an inside joke about a fake play that would be the worst show ever, was hastily prewritten as a two-man show that would see two men going back through time and having sex with eachothers’ relatives, and ended up as a very personal full cast, hour-long play about the inability to deal with losing control.  How’s that for creative evolution?

I’ve always been a big fan of time travel, and it’s really start to come back into the popular culture in the last few years.  Think about it…Lost?  The Time Traveler’s Wife?  Hot Tub Time Machine?  Star Trek?  People are willing to accept it as a plot device again.  TTMD uses time travel, yes, but it’s not all about time travel.  It’s about a man who isn’t willing to accept the death of his friend and the loss of control that that death embodies.  It’s about getting over yourself.  And more than anything, it’s about having sex with your friend’s parents.  So there.

TTMD was a self-produced work that was made as part of the Gorilla Tango Theatre’s Experimental Series in December of 2009.  I still consider the work to be in open process and am still refining the structure to possibly restage the production in the summer of 2010.  Not much documentation exists from this intial run, BUT for the sake of providing a learning experience, I’m posting the original draft of the script and the most recent draft.  That way, you can not only read the work as it appeared onstage, but see the evolution of the script as we adapted it for our time restrictions and cast.

This script is available for production for little-to-no licensing fee, so if you’re interested in staging your own production of Time Traveling Mom-Dad, please e-mail me at shawnbowers (at) gmail.com.

The Original Draft – Dated 4.6.09

The Final Production Draft – Version 10, dated 11.24.09