***SEMIFINALIST, INAUGURAL STAGE 32 FEATURE DRAMA SCREENWRITING CONTEST***

On the occasion of the 1986 NBA draft, an eccentric, outspoken young woman struggles to navigate the conflicts between her involvement in the Boston mob and her interracial relationship with a Len Bias doppelgänger. (128 pp. Adults only.)

SYNOPSIS:

Boston, June 1986. As the city looks forward to the Celtics' imminent drafting of Maryland prodigy Len Bias, in the suburb of Westphalia, Regan Croake walks a tightrope. Still mourning the death of her godfather Warren from AIDS, Regan takes her activism beyond the law, giving out clean needles at the methadone clinic where she idles her hours and running a shooting gallery out of abandoned tenements, all with the blessing of Warren's friend, neighborhood crime boss Irving McSorley. Tenacious, socially ungainly, and well ahead of her time, Regan carries on an interracial tryst with Grenada vet Judd Ivors, and brooks nothing with anyone who dares to challenge her on it. Regan's privileged status as Warren's goddaughter means that she's been able to keep these two sides of her life separate with relative ease. But then, Regan is faced with a painful moral dilemma when a unique threat to the shooting gallery emerges from an unexpected foe. As she and McSorley put an irrevocable plan in motion to stymy the threat, raw memories of her years as a punk vocalist and high school swimming prodigy amid the city's busing crisis come to the fore; a ghost from her past confronts her over an unusual injustice; and Judd's uncanny resemblance to Bias results in a bizarre incident. These events and more converge and snowball, leading to a series of bad decisions and catastrophic betrayals, and a final moment of reckoning that Regan never sees coming.

WESTPHALIA