In 7th grade I was in the school musical production of Sandy Wilson’s, “The Boy Friend,” a 1950’s musical that parodied 1920’s musicals and was about a group of English girls who summer in the south of France and who are all looking for boyfriends. I remember the music well, and for the next 20 years the musical has lived with me on and off as an earworm, sometimes for months. I thought it would be fun to stage my own production, maybe remake it as a movie. But those ambitions required people, money and a certain kind of collaborative energy that I didn’t feel I had in me at the time. Instead I recreated the musical at home, alone, in my living room.

The Boyfriend (2016-ongoing) is a play in twelve videos. I perform each song from the original “The Boy Friend” and use the lyrics to tell stories of love, loss and desire. I began this project in October 2016, and as a result this work has become a sort of diary of the past 4 years, documenting the ways that the deeply personal intersects with our public politics.

This projects lives at large and online at www.thatcertainthing.com.