By Linda Chin

The Song of Summer – Creative Team: Lauren Yee (playwright), Taibi Magar (director), Adam Rigg (set design), Valérie Thérèse Bart (costume design), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (lighting design), and Mikaal Sulaiman (sound design). Original song by Max Vernon and Helen Park.

Much like those songs from the summers of our adolescence and young adulthood, Lauren Yee’s new play, The Song of Summer will most definitely touch your heart, stick in your head, and trigger memories of times good, bad, and in-between. Robbie Retton is a young self-made pop star who is living a life others dream of – with a hit song, manager, LA lifestyle, girls lining up to see him – a long way from his high school persona as an awkward nerd with an unstable home life. After an absence of about 12 years, he shows up unexpectedly at his old piano teacher Mrs. C.’s house in Pottsville PA, a one-hospital, one-movie theater, and one-new-Thai-restaurant town. Robbie was one of Mrs. C’s prized students and one of her daughter Tina’s good friends. In contrast to Robbie, Tina was the cool, adventurous, sexually experienced teen with the ambition and smarts to escape from the stifling town and be a doctor. We come to learn that Mrs. C is pretty cool herself, an ex-hippie, single mother who adopted Tina from China and with her wise and kind maternal touch “adopted” Robbie as well. Mrs. C. is also welcoming of Robbie’s manager Joe, who shows up in town to bring his runaway client back to his senses, and back to the tour route.

Read more “Trinity Rep’s The Song of Summer Represents Regional Repertory Theater at its Best”