Spread the Love: Pressure by Lindsay Price

This week on Spread the Love Craig talks about Pressure.

Transcript

Welcome to Spread the Love. This week I’m talking about Pressure, by Lindsay Price.

All high school students, all teenagers, all human beings face pressures of one kind or another.

Penny is facing the pressure of juggling her school work with dozens of extra-curricular activities. Kyle is facing the pressure of living up to his parents’ unreasonable expectations. Alex is not only facing the pressure of learning a new language and a new culture, but also have to step up and be the man of his family.

Now, I understand that plays with descriptions like this tend to turn people off. And I think it’s because there are so many really badly written scripts with this theme. There are a lot of quote-unquote “teen angst” plays are one-note maudlin cry-fests.

But what I think Lindsay’s great accomplishment with Pressure, and what I love about it, is the characters. The characters are real living people. You know these people. You meet them every day in your school. They are alive on the page and on the stage. Yes, there is angst in the play. But there is also humour. There is love. There is humanity. And that’s what makes this a piece of theatre as opposed to a piece of dreck.

Pressure runs about 45 minutes long. It has a good-sized cast of about sixteen, fifteen?, SIXTEEN speaking parts. And there’s also an ensemble, which is called “The Mob”, and that can be any size you like.

That’s it for Spread the Love.