Can teenagers today understand what it once meant to make someone a mixtape? The careful selection and sequencing of tracks, maximizing the available space on each side of the cassette, fervently hoping you could convey the right tone and coded message through other people’s music. For those who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, the act of putting together a mixtape was a labor of love, and sometimes a confession of it.
“Girlfriend,” playwright Todd Almond’s sweet and inventive rock musical now on stage at PrideArts, hinges on the gifting of a mixtape; it’s also, in itself, a narratively enhanced example of the form.
