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Meet   Steve Gilbane

Writer & Composer of Lost Cellphone Weekend

STEPHEN GILBANE has written music and lyrics for 11 of ImprovBoston’s annual Halloween-themed Gorefest scripted musical extravaganzas. He workshopped his full-length 1980’shigh-tech musical Showstopper! with Boston’s New Opera &Musical Theater Initiative (NOMTI). He has musicalized several of Jerry Bisantz’s plays, including Romance 101 and Hollywood Insider. He has taught and accompanied the art of improvised musical theater with various improv troupes in and outside of Boston for over 20 years, including performing full-length improvised musicals with Hidden Falls and Musical ImprovCompany. He attended Berklee College for Film Scoring and recently composed the music for the 5-part RI PBS series Slatersville: America’s First Mill Village.

SYNOPSIS Don Birnam and his fiancée Helen enter a bedroom in “A Quiet Little B&B”, to spend the weekend vacationing without access to a cellphone.  Helen shows us that she has found several cell phones Don hid in his clothes. We see that going without social media access is going to be difficult for Don. Don convinces Helen to go checkout a sale they saw on the way in.  When she leaves, he scours their luggage and the room for a spare phone, while singing about how he loves being “Connected”. Don goes down to the bar at the B&B, where Nat, the proprietor, is tending bar.  They chat, and Nat reveals that he came up to the backwoods to escape the dysfunction that cellphones had wrought on city life.  He sings how he thinks cellphones will be “The Downfall of Man”. At the end of the song, Gloria, a sexy patron carrying a state-of-the-art cellphone, enters.  Don and Gloria chat, but while it is clear Gloria is interested in Don, he is more interested in her hardware.  She implores him to “Put That Thing Down and Kiss Me”, but to no avail.  She leaves the bar, disgusted. Don leaves the bar, looking for a cellphone store. He ends up in a restaurant that Nat had recommended. Don steals a patron’s cellphone and takes it into the bathroom to use it, but finds that he cannot get a signal.  When he comes out, the patron has caught him, and the help throws him out of the restaurant. Don roams the town looking for a cellphone store.  He is accosted by a stranger with an odd looking cellphone who offers to help him.  He sings how he is “A Quite Important Person”, but Don realizes he’s just a mentally challenged asylum inmate. Meanwhile, Helen is shopping.  She sings to the sales clerk how she just wants Don to “Look At Me”, to deal with his addiction, while she surely has no problems herself. Don returns to the B&B, where Nat tells him that not just the lodging but the entire town is without cell service.  This pushes Don over the edge, and back in the bedroom he has a hallucinogenic “Social Media Breakdown” where he imagines he sees & hears all of the internet on his bedroom wall. Helen comes back from shopping, and reveals that Don’s hallucination (and indeed the whole weekend) has actually been part of a planned intervention orchestrated by Nat.  When Don retorts that Helen herself has a shopping addiction, they all admit “Everybody’s Got A Poison” to help them through life.

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