John Hinkley Jr. (attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan) must use his newly-learned coping skills to deal with the news that the "love of his life", Jodie Foster, is not "playing on the same team" that he'd always assumed she was.
From her earliest memory, Quiana, an African American woman in her twenties, is desperate for the love of an absentee father, which carries into her adulthood. Her fear of abandonment bleeds into her marriage to Tommy, an easy-going seaman, who demonstrates saint-like patience with his wife’s chronic daddy issues.
Papito is a ten-page short play addressing parentification, specifically how a young man who grows up without a father assumes the partnership role with his mother and has difficulty establishing a healthy partnership with a significant other. The narrator, Zoe, is that significant other who is frustrated with her domineering mother-in-law and her husband who refuses to establish needed boundaries for his mom.
