And after all of that preamble, the truth is I’m doing the very thing I warn the reader against: going home again. As an author I have now gone back to check in on a group of characters whom I wanted to see again and find out what has happened to them in the last few years. I’ve often envied television writers who get the opportunity to revisit the fictional lives of their characters week after week, year after year, and so I decided to do the same but on the stage. It’s certainly been done before but it’s a first for me and it was a pleasure to do so. I thought for a long while about what group of characters I might want to spend some time with again—the characters in Fat Pig came close and I was certainly curious to see where the people in The Shape of Things might be a decade later—but in the end I wanted to head back to the small Midwestern town that Greg and Steph and Carly and Kent called home. It’s in the middle of nowhere (or what some folks might call “anywhere, USA”) and it’s a place that I don’t want to live but I also feel like I’ve spent half of my life there. It could be a college town or the kind of rural industrial landscape of my youth or one of those suburban backwaters that exists from Florida to Maine and from the tip of California to the border towns of Washington state (and virtually any spot in between). These days, to be a person struggling to get by at work and in love is to say you’re an “American.” People live from paycheck to paycheck, they work late and at several jobs just trying to make ends meet and everybody has a dream, whether it’s getting through trade school or running their own company or falling in love or taking one more breath. Life is hard and I get to write about that—little tragedies and victories that play out in an hour and a half—and I feel lucky when anybody says to me that what they’ve just seen rings even partially true.

Nothing we do on stage matters as much as life—nothing I write means as much as somebody else’s birth or first communion or marriage or retirement or death—but if writers and actors and audiences can band together and play out a few stories that feel honestly created and genuinely inhabited then maybe we can find some kind of solace together for a few hours, reminding ourselves that we are all in this together and that maybe, just maybe, an imagined version of life can lead us toward how and why we should go about living the real thing. I might be full of shit, but it’s meant to be inspirational shit and even now it doesn’t sound completely crazy to me.

So this is the next chapter in the lives of four people in whom I hope you’ll recognize yourselves (or at least your friends and neighbors). I like these guys and I’ve tried to give them all an opportunity to be happy and to do better and to get ahead. Some of them do good things and one or two of them even feel like they’ve got a real chance at writing themselves a new ending to their seemingly preordained lives. I like Greg and his bumbling attempts to be a nice guy. He makes nearly as many mistakes as I do in life and so I appreciate the way he keeps picking himself up off the ground, only to fuck up yet again. Steph is one tough chick and yet her heart is huge and I love the passion with which she lives her life, always going for broke. I had no idea where Kent would take me this time around but he surprised me a lot along the way—he just might make it as a man—and Carly is the kind of person I wish I was a little bit more like: centered and caring and disarmingly honest about herself and others.