Friday Morning With The Franklins

By Brooke Cousins

Cast

Jay: Tobias Sanders

Larkin: Reese Verlinde

Host: Caitlyn Myers

PA: Veronica Thomas

Howard: Ella Galens

Vision

Second Stage Playwriting is the only group on Michigan State Campus that gives student playwrights the opportunity to workshop and perform their scripts in front of an audience. Friday Morning With The Franklins was produced as part of their 2nd Annual Student Expose.

In Friday Morning with the Franklins, TV Cohosts Jay and Larkin will soon be out of a job if they don’t boost their ratings, but is that really such a bad thing? Jay’s ready to take flight, but Larkin is hard pressed to see beyond her cage. Can they escape the suffocating world of traditionalism?

Learned helplessness permeates all classes of society; circumstances in which people feel trapped are so powerful that they functionally rewrite the brain. Systems of oppression are designed to instill this sense of learned helplessness within lower classes to keep people complacent, lost, and hopeless. A caged bird set free never reacclimates to the wild, and thus, neither will Larkin.