Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead

Overview

When Charles M. Schulz announced his retirement from the daily comic strip business in 2000, he stated that Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang would not be appearing in future papers because his family didn't want the comic to be continued by anyone else.

It would be interesting to know, then, what the late comic legend's relatives would make of Bert V. Royal turning his loveable pals into fully fledged hormonal teenagers complete with drug problems, gothic siblings, eating disorders and institutionalised ex-girlfriends.

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, staged for the first time in Sydney by the Actors Assembly, propels the Peanuts kids out of the daily papers and into a future rife with the harshest elements of adolescent debauchery. The play commences with Charlie questioning the existence of an afterlife after his beloved dog dies from rabies, but this is only the starting point for a sequence of events that encapsulate the gritty (yet often hilarious) reality of teenage life.

Dog Sees God was Royal’s first play and is still earning him as much praise as it did when it premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival seven years ago. But the young writer hasn't rested on his laurels — the six-figure advance he subsequently received from Paramount to write them an original screenplay went toward penning a critically acclaimed teen comedy you might know as Easy A.