Pilot:
Episodes
COVID is here, and so is Student Orientation Day at Cortina Massage therapy school in midtown Manhattan. These facts compound, and create stress for reception-desk workers Erica and Pat. They find they’ve been grunting, not talking; disconnected from themselves, their thoughts and words. The confinement COVID demanded scrambled their brains. Pat is disconnected from his purpose (writer) and is therefore having a hard time expressing himself. He’s also extremely anxious and that doesn’t help with the brain-scrambling, and the grunting which results. Pat, still acting, goes on a humiliating audition which forces him to quit acting altogether and start writing. Erica goes on her own humiliating audition (same agent, different audition) and is demeaned and sexualized. She decdies to start a support group for actors with non-traditional body types.
However, Pat’s drinking threatens to cripple his new writing pursuit, and Erica’s dream of a support group may be hindered by her own low-self esteem. Pat and Erica are deeply interested in empathetic connection, but find it missing in society at every turn. How will these two white, 20-something actors navigate their newfound pursuits, while trying to find connection for themselves and others?
Three Future Episodes:
• Teachers/Leaders - Pat gets into a fancy grad school for writing. He’s fish-out-of-water there and is treated as such, by classmates and teachers. Pat is sure that artsy grad school means he can achieve his goal of developing empathetic scripts, but he finds his professors do not always practice what they preach. Meanwhile, Erica writes and performs her first stand up set for her therapy group. It goes terribly, and Erica must contemplate why her jokes offended all her friends. She has always been the one who helped others know when they had crossed the line; just who is allowed to tell jokes about whom? In a rare fit, Erica shuns Sandra from the group and notices that the group follows her behavior. Ultimately this episode wonders questions like: How is Erica received (as a heavy woman) on stage? How does the world of showbiz, entertainment, and stand-up comedy receive others?
• Offenders – What does it mean to offend? Pat goes from spending the night in jail, to attending A.A. and must not only navigate his own reception in both spaces, but also reckon with the reception of others in these spaces. Drunks and folx who’ve been arrested aren’t always welcome. Can Pat write about any of these people? Does he have the right? Has he lived any portion of their experience enough? He goes to get fully vaccinated, and encounters polarizing receptions. We learn more about who Pat is and what makes him drink. Erica, meanwhile, deals with an indecent exposure incident at Cortina. The exposer is arrested and Erica and the student who massaged him must decide whether or not to press charges. Erica invites Rocky to her first support group meeting. However, Pat’s longtime college crush Sandra drops in at the meeting and Erica (who despises her racist microaggressions) must examine the concept of inclusion in a new way.
• LGBT – Two openly gay students are harassed at Cortina and Pat and Erica find out that black students are the culprits. The black students complain that the two gay students are racist while the LGBT students complain that the black students are homophobic. The complex tapestry of social discriminatory overlap is in full view, and Pat and Erica are forced to take sides. Meanwhile, Erica is hit on by a woman after her support group meeting and she agrees to go to a gay bar. Pat befriends an older gay theatre producers who seemingly wants to produce his play, but ends up wanting more.