Mutations

Young and upcoming playwright offers a humorous and cynical outlook on the shifting topography of the american family and the effect it has had on a generation in the world premiere of Mutations.

LOS ANGELES— Tom Valentine Gelo, 23, is a millennial who has opted to set down his iPhone, step away from Facebook, and take an anthropological look back at the culture that has shaped himself and those around him.

“As a playwright, I was studying a lot of Chekov, and I thought… these Russian bourgeois family dynamics, with all of their fatal pride… they’re not so different from the families dynamics that surrounded me growing up.”

Mutations is a dark comedy from Gelo that follows an upper-middle class teenager as he navigates relationships with a power-hungry father, a pot smoking suicidal brother, and a step-mother just eight years older than himself. The structure of the piece, inspired by that of a Caryl Churchill play, begins in the style of a 1950s sitcom, complete with optimi