by Zach Raffio. @zachraffio.
As the new Broadway play Is This A Room makes its debut on the city’s main stage, the next iteration of the true story - in which a woman is interrogated by the FBI over suspicions that she has leaked a classified document on Russian tampering - may already be in the works, in the form of my dad, who just found my weed and is asking me all kinds of friggin’ questions about it.
“Where did you get this”; “how long have you been smoking?”; “why did you hide it in a shoebox labeled ‘not weed, just, uh, just my client’s taxes’ even though you’re not an accountant?”
These are the types of tough, confrontational questions my father presents as he stands next to my bootleg Grand Theft Auto: Vice City poster, holding a bag of weed I was charged three times the price for because I “looked like I would”. Which, to their credit, I def would, and I did.
While Is This A Room features a powerful performance by Emily Davis as the real-life air force intelligence specialist Reality Winner, my dad finding my weed stars me, a guy whose friends had to hold an intervention after I kept trying to learn how to do that crawl out of the TV thing from The Ring. It also stars my dad, Henry, who is just trying his best. Some critics say that casting is the only real difference between the shows, and those critics are my guinea pigs, Lewis and Norm.
Finally, much like Is This A Room, which only runs every other evening at the Lyceum Theater, my thing also happens a few times a week. I am - as the French say- “not good at hiding my marijuana”.
Dad Finding My Weed runs through the day in which I finally move out, or whenever my dad decides to finally be cool and stop telling me that “if you’re gonna smoke it out of an apple, please don’t use a wax one”.