I had a dream last night that I was in a new show on Broadway and got major accolades for my performances as well as the show. The storyline has been in my head all morning, and it's one of those things that if I could ever sit down and develop it, it would be a great show. It WOULD be a musical.
It opens on a girl with a rough ponytail and old men's clothes that don't really fit her in a home office with graphs and reports that look like research. Opening song - "This was your life, you were my life."
Basic story - a father raises a daughter in seclusion her entire life, just the 2 of them. He's really her only contact the entire time until he dies. Show opens shortly after he is passed as she is questioning what she does now since he was her whole life.
A funeral director arrives to discuss plans and her lack of outside social interaction and life experience starts to show. At the funeral, she is approached by a man who was once her father's literary agent. Apparently he was a researcher who published some of the man's books before he withdrew from society a few decades earlier.
In speaking with her, he realizes she has an amazing story that he can take advantage of by shopping her to talk shows. She says she'll think about it and returns home. As she is working to pack up his office, she stumbles across a hidden stash of records. She discovers that he's been reporting on different parts of her life and experience - essentially using her as a research project. As she reads more and more and searches more and more, she gets enraged - believing that he secluded her to use her as a test subject, a lab monkey. She instantly feels even more abandoned and alone as her vision of her loving father changes into that of a manipulative traitor.
She contacts the literary agent in her rage, also believing that this is the path the universe has provided for her to finally take care of herself. She'll show him that he doesn't have control over her after all. There's ideally a musical number as she sits in a swiveling chair in the middle of the stage and turns from side to side, appearing to talk to different show hosts. Ultimately, she shouts to stop and the stage goes dark.
She realizes that this hasn't brought her happiness or clarity. It's leaving her just feeling hollow, used, and reduced. She returns home, once again lost as to where to go with her life. Again wondering why her father did this to her and didn't help make her more ready.
At the moment, there's a knock at the door. Someone a little bit older than her (guy/girl doesn't matter) introduces him/herself and explains they had been communicating with her father for years. They ask if they can come in, and she suspiciously opens the door for him/her to enter.
Turns out that this individual discovered his older research a couple of years ago and was so intrigued that they tracked her father down, desperate to make a connection. He began corresponding with them - using them a bit like a confidant and a bit like a research partner to share some of the developmental details about his daughter.
Ultimately, it is revealed that he secluded himself and his daughter briefly after her mother (his wife) died while the daughter was an infant. He was in such hopeless grief that he couldn't face the idea that he could one day lose his daughter as well so he removed them from the rest of the world in what he thought was protecting her. The data he recorded and collected on her over the years was the way his researcher brain processed being a father - other parents would have photo albums or journals with anecdotes.
As he began to realize he was nearing the end of his life and his health was failing, the individual reached out to him. He saw this as an opportunity to equip someone else with knowledge of his daughter to become her bridge to her new life once he died. Unfortunately, the individual didn't learn about his death soon enough to contact her before she mistakenly found the information herself and was lured by the literary agent.
The show explores themes of a child's idealized image of a parent, the complexity that arises of realizing their humanity, and the acceptance that while imperfect, all their actions were done out of love.
Those are the most basic and initial thoughts, but it feels nice to even explore the basis story elements of an original story idea for the first time in a REALLY long time.
