I didn't set out to write a soap opera parody. I set out to write a murder mystery. But somewhere between the first draft and the table read, the two ideas collided — and what came out the other side was something I hadn't expected: a play that uses the absurdity of daytime television to say something real about ego, validation, and the desperate need to be seen.
Where It Started
The seed of The Young and the Rest of Us came from a simple question: what happens when the people who perform heightened emotion for a living are forced to confront real emotion? Soap opera actors spend their careers crying on cue, faking betrayal, performing grief. What does that do to a person? What happens when the mask slips?
I'd been watching a lot of classic daytime TV — partly for research, partly because it's genuinely compelling in ways that are hard to explain — and I kept noticing this fascinating tension between the artifice of the form and the very real human needs it was tapping into. Audiences don't watch soap operas ironically. They watch them because they care. And the actors who make them work are doing something genuinely difficult.
The Murder Mystery as Structural Engine
Once I had the world — a cast of soap opera actors celebrating their Emmy nominations at the home of their leading man, Jesse Chandler Montgomery — I needed a plot engine. The murder mystery gave me that. It's a genre with built-in structure: everyone has a secret, everyone has a motive, and the audience gets to play detective alongside the characters.
But more importantly, the murder mystery gave me a reason to strip away the characters' professional masks. When someone is dead and everyone is a suspect, the social niceties evaporate fast. The rivalries that had been simmering under polite smiles suddenly boil over. The resentments that had been professionally managed become impossible to contain.
That's where the comedy lives. Not in the death — but in watching people who have built entire careers on performing emotion suddenly unable to control their actual emotions.
Writing Jesse Chandler Montgomery
The central figure of the play — Jesse, played brilliantly by D. Anthony Boone — was the hardest character to crack. He's the star. The one everyone orbits. His portrait hangs on the wall of his own home, which tells you everything you need to know about him.
But I didn't want him to be a villain. I wanted him to be a person — someone who had been told for so long that he was exceptional that he'd started to believe it in ways that were quietly destroying him. The validation he'd built his identity around was always going to be insufficient. No amount of awards, no amount of applause, was ever going to fill the particular hole he was trying to fill.
That theme — the insufficiency of external validation — runs through almost everything I write. I keep coming back to it because I think it's one of the central anxieties of our moment. We live in a culture that has industrialized approval. And the play asks, quietly: what happens when the machine breaks down?
Working with Douglas Jewell
Handing a script to a director is always an act of trust. You've spent months alone with these characters, and then you have to let someone else see them — and inevitably see things in them that you didn't.
Douglas Jewell brought a clarity to the material that I hadn't fully achieved on the page. His blocking was purposeful in a way that made the subtext visible without underlining it. The moment in Act Two where Karen and Dithers are on opposite sides of the stage, both pretending not to watch Jesse — that was Doug's instinct, and it's one of my favorite moments in the production.
The LA Theatrix review noted that his direction was "focused and intentional, aligning with writer Yardenne's tone and structure." That alignment was real, and it came from a lot of honest conversation early in the process about what the play was actually about — not just what happened in it.
What I Learned
Writing for the stage is different from writing for the screen in ways that took me a while to fully internalize. On screen, you can cut. You can use a close-up to tell the audience where to look. On stage, everything is happening simultaneously, and the audience chooses where to direct their attention.
That means every character in every scene has to be doing something — even if they're not speaking. The characters who aren't talking are often the most interesting ones to watch. I spent a lot of time in revision thinking about what each character was doing while someone else had the floor.
The other thing I learned — or relearned — is that comedy is hard. Harder than drama, in some ways, because the feedback is immediate and unambiguous. If it's funny, people laugh. If it's not, they don't. There's nowhere to hide. The rewrites I did after the first table read were almost entirely about timing — about finding the exact word, the exact beat, that made the joke land.
Come See It
The Young and the Rest of Us is running at The Group Rep Theatre in North Hollywood through May 10, 2026 — Thursdays and Sundays at 7pm, Saturdays at 4pm. If you're in LA, I'd love for you to come. And if you've already seen it, thank you. Genuinely. There is nothing quite like watching an audience discover a play you wrote. It never gets old.
Tickets at TheGroupRep.com.
Tamir Yardenne
Actor · Writer · Director
Award-winning creator of Adversity and playwright of The Young and the Rest of Us, now playing at The Group Rep Theatre in North Hollywood.