Around Here

ABOUT

A patriarch’s death leads his disjointed family to return to their small midwestern town where, while grappling with past secrets and complicated histories, they find their way back to music, form a band, and create a new definition of home.

This is the story of Around Here…an hour-long ensemble dramedy about an extended family of musicians who move to a small town in Ohio and form a band. Some disrupt their lives and leave everything they’ve known, some are fleeing the past; all need to figure out how the #@%! to work together to find their collective sound.

Two musically-gifted sisters, a world-renowned conductor, a bi-racial teen stuck between families, an eccentric disabled child they call The Dictator, a mother who would rather spend her time exploring vibrations of the earth than raising her precocious daughter….our show features a collection of vivid characters and a community of distinct artistic egos who only seem to truly connect when making music.  Just like their lives, the musical style of this large and diverse acoustic ensemble is ever-evolving.

WHAT DO WE WANT? WHERE DO WE BELONG?

These fundamental yet motivating questions of identity and desire swirl around the lives of the unfulfilled parents of two families, one black, one white, connected by a bi-racial son from a brief and youthful marriage 17 years ago. When the family patriarch passes away, they toss up their separate lives in NYC and Los Angeles and end up moving to a small Ohio town, full of secrets and memories of the past. There, an estranged sister, who had been traveling the world with a rag-tag hippie band, inspires them to find the music and the connection that once filled their youth. 

Their children, complete and unique beings with their own stories, age nine to sixteen, have their specific responses to this new life — they aren’t from around here but do they belong? Yearning for independence, yet controlled by their parents’ whims, they get bumped around for the ride. 

The story will unfold over multiple seasons, told in an intimate and cinematic style. (see Inspirations page) The series will be tuned to the unique rhythms of the various households and family groups, both given and found. Each episode will play off of and around a musical idea — a series of notes, the chime of an airport security announcement, the rhythm of a child’s marbles bounding down a stairway, a powerful sound found in the throat and released from a place of longing — that grows until the audience will get to witness the birth of a song. Sound design will be a character of its own.

As the families become more intertwined and the band finds surprising success, things get complicated. It is those complications, the pains of the past and the negotiations of the present, that move our story forward; old wounds will re-open, family secrets will come to light, new tensions and new alliances will form. Ultimately, Around Here is a humorous and hopeful story about the need to create a new definition of home.

Why Now?

We want to make a series that has the quality of music, breadth of filmmaking and the depth of human relationships as the 2018 film A Star is Born.  But in this case, our story is about family, an extended and found family in need of healing, searching for community, for connection.

To come together with a common purpose, in the act of creation, is the only way this family, and perhaps humanity, is going to survive. And music is the bridge that connects us all.