Set in the luxurious home of Hollywood producer Russ Rigel, this suspenseful drama pits a manipulative powerbroker against two teenage consumers of his bloody action films. Kenny and his accomplice Jimmy are Russ’ biggest fans, and when they sneak into his home and terrorize Russ and Jennifer Barton—his star actress and girlfriend—it’s a riveting riff on the classic theme of the “scientist” forced to encounter what he has mistakenly birthed in his “workshop of filthy creation.”

“The template for the entire process in the back of my mind was Frankenstein,” says Mastrosimone. “A brilliant doctor creates something that turns on him. And also, in the back of my mind, was a quote that I heard twenty-some years ago. [Former Senator] Patrick Moynihan, who’s been concerned with children’s issues for a long time, once said that in the year 2000, our children will rise up against us and punish us for neglecting them. Those words have been prophetic.”

Originally written during a two-hour plane trip, Like Totally Weird’s tight construction perfectly matches its content: it’s a full-length, one-act, fast-paced, incredibly tense series of ordeals which begin to crack Russ’ fast-talking Hollywood veneer as he confronts Kenny’s reenactment of scenes from his graphically violent films. “Russ is the common denominator of producers in L.A.,” says the playwright, noting his own contact with the movie industry players. “It’s like the play-within-the-play in Hamlet. When they’re watching, I hope they’ll see themselves.”

Mastrosimone adds an important caveat, however: “We don’t need another Hollywood play. It’s about America—not only about what is happening, but what it will become.” And Mastrosimone’s portrait of Kenny offers a disturbing vision of what Russ’ greed has spawned: a generation whose major cultural reference points—the mall, the Cineplex, video games—perpetuate a dangerous boredom and restlessness. Kenny becomes a dangerous mimic whose confusion of cinematic illusion with reality comes back to haunt Russ—quite literally.

“It’s not just poetic justice, where they do a wrong and a wrong is done to them—but for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s a scientific principle,” explains Mastrosimone, citing the numerous instances in which scenes and images from popular culture have become the violent vocabulary through which young people learn to express their frustrations. “I don’t think that the movies make people go out and kill other people. But I think the accumulation of images—the breakdown of morality, over a lifetime just makes it more likely...That steady diet of murder and mayhem without consequences has now become real.”

The imagination of the audience is a powerful thing—volatile, uncontrollable and, in the case of audiences who ingest a steady stream of brutal images, potentially deadly as well. As Kenny and Jimmy emerge from their endless repetition of afternoons at the Cineplex to take part in Russ’ fantasy, they cross a line. And when they do, the play confronts us with a troubling question: at what point does consuming representations of violence become an active—real—experience?