31 Plays in 31 Days, #3 - "Just a Kid"

[breakinglight11]

Today’s scene stems from The Cousins Crane, my idea for a spinoff of Frasier featuring the children of the main cast.

One of my artistic goals for that idea was to take the themes and concepts from the Frasier show and iterate on them. One of those was the Niles-Daphne relationship. While I liked them together, and thought that the whole business was funny, outside of sitcom-land it’s pretty uncool for a guy to follow a woman around and obsess over her for so long without asking if she was interested. So, in this show, I wanted to take that concept— a man pining over a woman who was apparently uninterested —and show a different version of it, that was a little more critical and maybe a touch more realistic.

So I used David, Niles and Daphne’s son, and Roz’s daughter Alice for that. I had David, who is also six years younger than Alice, obsess over her similarly to how his father obsessed over his mother. But Alice is definitely not interested, tells him so, and asks him to back off. And when he has trouble with that, she calls him on how inappropriate it is.

This scene includes Alice talking to Freddy, Frasier and Lilith’s son, about her feelings on the subject. It grew out of the circumstances of her birth in the original, which I thought could be interestingly related to her current situation with David.

You can listen to the entire Zoom reading of the Cousins Crane pilot here.



Day #3 - “Just a Kid”
From The Cousins Crane series
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~

Dramatis personae
FREDDY CRANE, an adjunct professor, early thirties
ALICE DOYLE, a political science grad student, late twenties

Boston, 2023
~~~

ALICE: Did you ever meet my dad?

FREDDY: No, I never did. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention him.

ALICE: Well. I think you know he and Mom weren’t married. Rick was just a twenty-year-old kid in college when I was born. And Mom, obviously, wasn’t. So she told him to go to school, go abroad, and go grow up before he tried to take on a whole life’s worth of responsibility. She raised me by herself.

FREDDY: Aunt Roz is a hell of a lady.

ALICE: You better believe it, pal. She said he wanted to be there, but he was just a kid. He wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment.

FREDDY: Do you have much of a relationship with him?

ALICE: Yeah, a little bit. He’s a good guy, and he does try. But by the time we connected, it was kind of too late. He’s more like a cool uncle than a dad.

FREDDY: That’s something.

ALICE: And my grandparents are pretty great. But he lives in Nevada, and he’s got a new family now— a couple of kids I’ve never met. Most of the time, it’s like I never happened to him.

FREDDY: I’m sorry. That must be hard.

ALICE: It’s not, really. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, with the stuff you do when you’re a kid. But every time David tries to make his big promises to me… I think of Rick. And David’s even younger than he was then.

FREDDY: Does David know that? That it brings up all that stuff for you?

ALICE: No. I never told him. But I shouldn’t have to. And he doesn’t need the weight of… somebody else’s mistakes on him.

FREDDY: Still, he could stand to learn from them.