Theatrefolk Featured Play – Floating on a Don’t Care Cloud by Lindsay Price

Welcome to our Featured Play Spotlight.  Floating on a Don’t Care Cloud by Lindsay Price is a powerful and emotional issue-based play that is a theatrical and vivid personification of drugs.

Jamie Peel is a pothead. He lives in his own world, a bubble, a cloud that calls his name and reaches out to him.

His sister TJ has watched him slowly drift away and doesn’t know what to do. Is she overreacting? Is it in her imagination? Should she tell somebody what she sees? Will Jamie ever talk to her again if she does? Will everyone see her as a snitch? Is it just pot?

An emotional tightrope between a sister and a brother and what really happens in the world of teenage marijuana use.

Why did we publish this play?
This play takes an issue and makes it theatrical. The theatre has to come first. Our stance on issue plays is that it’s not the job of the play to solve the issue, or point a finger. It’s the job of the play to show characters dealing with, struggling with, sometimes failing within an issue. This way the play ends and the conversation begins.

Let’s hear from the author!

1. Why did you write this play?
Issue plays are important to me, not because they provide answers but because they ask questions. I think of the final moment of this play as the beginning of the conversation that should happen afterward.

2. Describe the theme in one or two sentences.
An emotional tug of war between siblings and what happens in the world of teenage drug use.

3. What’s the most important visual for you in this play?
The Cloud! It turns drug use into characters and allows Jamie to interact with others as he sinks deeper and deeper into addiction.

4. If you could give one piece of advice for those producing the play, what would it be?
Don’t go all slow with the Cloud. That will drag the pace of the play.

5. Why is this play great for student performers?
Personification is a wonderful theatrical element that all actors, let alone student actors, should explore.