Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad, so bad
Sometimes I wish life was never ending
And all good things, they say, never last
Prince wrote that in 1985 on the song “Sometimes It Snows in April” for his 1986 studio album Parade. Never released as a single, it drifted into obscurity. Until 2016 when Prince—a musical GOAT—died. Convinced that the song foreshadowed his death, devout fans downloaded it heavily, causing it to chart across Europe.
Craig (Craig Wallace) loves Prince. Why else would he theme a work happy hour after him, as he did in episode 3, “We Wear the Mask”?
“I want purple. I want eyeliner. I want curly hair if you got any,” he told his colleagues as he signed off from the Gilligan’s Island themed happy hour.. “’Cause we are gonna purify ourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka, figuratively speaking.” Lake Minnetonka’s shores reside in “the star of the north”—Minnesota, also the homeland of Prince Rogers Nelson, who was born, raised, and tied to Minneapolis his whole life and in death.
“Sometimes It Snows in April,” Homebound’s episode 6, written by Tim J. Lord is, of course, titled in homage to Prince. Maboud (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) is repairing his electric guitar while wearing a Back to the Future t-shirt (FYI: that film was released in 1985).
Craig calls. Maboud doesn’t pick up. Craig calls again. Again Maboud doesn’t pick up. Craig emails and asks to Zoom. Seeing Craig only a few moments before, “suited up” to take on the outside world in a time of COVID—you know, masked and fully covered head to foot—but hesitant to open his front door, we know something is amiss. And that he needs a friend.
Episode 6 brings Homebound back to the realities of the pandemic-created chaos effortlessly via the smooth bandy between the two engaging leads, together again for the first time since episode one, who veer casually from serious to funny. Writer Tim J. Lord has not only picked up a kernel from a previous episode which mentioned Prince and made it into a thread, but also spun it into a golden rope somehow tethered to the future when you consider that he wrote the script weeks before George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis on May 25. Lord then uses the dialogue between Maboud and Craig to toggle back and forth between issues of race and the pandemic until he’s woven a tight narrative that binds the original premise of Homebound—explore pandemic life—with what it has decidedly centered on: racism in America yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The real crux of episode 6 is Craig’s struggle to understand an individual’s ability to affect change with a single, peaceful act of innocuous protest.
Lord and Farah Lawal Harris before him, and even the other Homebound writers, might be prophets. Or maybe they just made an educated choice, going with Prince, in choosing an icon for whom Maboud and Craig would share a love: his death still resonates globally and across race, his music changed music, and he was a stellar human. That Prince led the writers to the doorstep of a historical moment as they were working through another historical moment? Well, Prince earned his place reigning on high for a reason.
But has Homebound gone meta too quickly while sometimes losing sight of the quiet, and often dystopian, discontent coursing through pandemic life? The kumbaya commercials deployed by corporate America meant to placate society; the demands that new skills (i.e., sew your own mask!) and routines put on individuals and families long set in their ways; the widening divide between science believers and non-believers; and the stress of buying and reconsidering hard-to-find cupboard essentials? Is all this lost, left unexplored?
And yet all this feeds into the race and racial injustice conversation Homebound pushes with great dexterity in episode 6. Because, in America, institutionalized racism touches everyone whether we acknowledge it or not. Roaring discontent, despite life saving stay-at-home orders, drove people, long isolated, into the streets this weekend to protest George Floyd’s murder. To crowd and storm the gates of the White House to demand better from a leader who has consistently disregarded human lives, be it the uninsured, the poor, the unemployed most struggling these past months or any non-white, non-English speaking, non-been-here-since-my-great-grandmother’s-womb defined “American” struggling to find a place for themselves at a time when white supremacists have been declared “very fine people.”
Homebound’s strength is also its weakness. It decided to follow, and somewhat stumbled into, one cultural event while unpacking another. But that doesn’t change the fact that it set out to explore pandemic life, which is entirely new territory in this day and age in America and for which there, too, will be a reckoning—something this show, and America, cannot lose sight of.
Homebound’s foresight and ability to follow a cultural current is awesome. I hope it finds a coda worthy of where it started and where it stands now because both are equally important, and valuable, and, as episode 6 shows, intricately linked. With only four episodes left, and American streets filled with protests, the pressure is on Audrey Cefaly, who writes next week’s episode.
That said, “Sometimes It Snows in April” is stellar and poignant—right up there with episode 3. It’s a detailed piece of storytelling that subtly starts to flip your understanding of its two main characters, with Craig beginning to break and Maboud beginning to steady himself.
The coronavirus is far from finished with us, and with thousands of people still taking to the streets to demand justice and change, what would Prince tell the upcoming series writers to do with Craig and Maboud who are both a crossroads, it seems, one personally and one professionally?
Round House Theatre’s Homebound is an original web series that explores life under Stay-at-Home orders in the Nation’s Capital. “Sometimes It Snows in April” was written by Tim J. Lord. Directed by Ryan Rilette and Nicole A. Watson. Featuring Craig Wallace and Maboud Ebrahimzadeh. Produced by Ryan Rilette and Ed Zakreski. Post Production Courtesy of Digital Cave Edited by Joshua Land. Original Music Courtesy of The Curious Music Company. Sound Design & Audio Post Production by Matthew Nielson. Reviewed by Kelly McCorkendale.
The 10 episode Homebound series is produced as a benefit for Round House Theatre’s Resilience Fund.
View the entire series here.
