Angst Over Teenagers: ‘Parents in Chains’ Premieres

Hurricane Hilary heading up the coast to California when his own teenage daughter and several of her friends were due to drive back from a weekend in San Francisco was the impetus for prolific writer Jay Martel to create his latest play. But Parents in Chains – which has its official world premiere at Ensemble Theatre Company from March 12-30 at the New Vic Theatre – is mostly focused on the fretting of their six guardians, revealing the wide range of parental approaches through a series of messages exchanged over a text thread. 

“All of us were concerned and consulting with each other on what the girls, who had grown up together, should do,” Martel recalled. “I’ve always been fascinated by how many different styles of parenting there are just within a couple blocks of where I live. Some parents still spank their kids, and others won’t even ever raise their voice. There are hovering helicopter parents, and ones who want their kids to be free range chickens.” 

But an equal impetus is how texting has taken over our lives across the generations, even with the strong possibilities of miscommunication in the realm of nothing but words written with shorthand. 

“Everybody had radically different ideas about how to deal with their daughters in this hurricane, and there were mixed messages in the thread over how to negotiate this one somewhat traumatic event” Martel said. 

The play’s original conceit is that the entire story is told through the reading of texts, a cousin to the ever-popular Love Letters, although the actors in Chains won’t be chained to a podium. Martel – who served as a showrunner, producer and writer for the TV sketch show Key & Peele, and boasts Emmy, Peabody, WGA and American Comedy awards in his credits – created the script so that it’s both funny and heartfelt as well as dramatic. 

Getting over the novelty of the format is what made it challenging to write, he said, but the format of having the actors read from phones or tablets is what allowed him to attract a series of veteran actors of stage and screen from Los Angeles to perform in the piece, which will have three different casts over its run. 

“So many of them are my friends, and they’re much more likely to participate if it’s only a week and they don’t have to memorize pages of dialogue.”

Sharon Lawrence (NYPD Blue, etc.) will appear all three weeks, Melora Hardin (The Office, Transparent) is booked for two, while Montecito resident Jane Lynch (Glee, The Weakest Link), Joshua Malina (The West Wing), John Ross Bowie (The Big Bang Theory), Thomas Sadoski (The Newsroom, The Crowded Room), Gina Torres (Firefly, Suits) and Matt Walsh (Veep) are among cast members performing for a single week. Veteran director of stage and screen Andy Fickman will direct the run. 

Visit www.etcsb.org for details and tickets.