Wants His Name in Lights. Could Use an Editor.
Laura Collins-HughesNovember 4, 2014: Hey, Broadway! Kyle Sugarman has a play called Spacebar that he’d like you to read. If you’ve been checking your mail, you may have noticed that he’s sent it three times — all several hundred pages of it. Oh, all right. If we’re being technical, young Mr. Sugarman does not exist. But if he did, we would urge you to take him under your great white wing immediately. At 16, he is a lanky, rumpled elf of a boy, with an earnest intensity to charm the most jaded of hearts. He is, in a word, adorable. Spacebar: A Broadway Play by Kyle Sugarman is, in reality, a sweet, silly, semi-unwieldy Off Off Broadway play, written by Michael Mitnick (Sex Lives of Our Parents) and directed by Maggie Burrows. Starring the excellent Will Connolly (Once) as Kyle, it’s a coming-of-age comedy about a Colorado drama geek yearning for his father (Christopher Michael McFarland), who’s left the family and moved to New York. Kyle doesn’t just want his play produced on Broadway: At least as badly, he wants his dad to look out his Midtown window and see Kyle’s name, unignorably huge, on a billboard. Of course, Kyle has written a terrible play. It’s set 7,000 years in the future and, as he explains: “ Spacebar is not about the space key on the computer keyboard. Spacebar is about a bar in outer space.”
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