Penn State senior Frederick Miller is producing and starring in a semi-autobiographical play titled “Headspace”. Put on with the assistance of the Penn State School of Theatre, the show will debut on Thursday, September 16.

Directed by Sebastian Trainor, of the School of Theatre faculty, Headspace follows a fictionalized version of playwright Miller in a “semi-autobiographical new play about heartbreak, religion, community, and how to be your authentic self at a big university like Penn State,” according to a Penn State School of Theatre press release.

“The play is about my experiences living alone on campus last fall,” Miller said. “My goal is to have other people think about…their own damn lives. For me and several people that I’m close with, we haven’t processed what has happened over the last year.”

A work in progress for the last year, Headspace is featured in many forms. Beginning as journal entries recorded through the pandemic, it slowly became a monologue-driven play before then becoming the fourth-wall-breaking wonderland of rainbow sticky notes that it is today.

Miller cited Tennessee Williams as his biggest influence, crafting parallels between his own life and the lives of the narrator-protagonist hybrid in Williams’ “Glass Menagerie.” Though, on a different level, he also said “It’s Time To Go” by Taylor Swift offered its fair share of artistic evocation.

Headspace is a message to all that sometimes “the most courageous thing you can do is pull yourself out of the situation,” Miller said. “Without the bad days, the good ones wouldn’t mean as much.”

Headspace runs September 16 and 17, in the Downtown Theatre at 146 S. Allen Street. Performances will begin at 8 p.m. with an approximate runtime of one hour. Admission is free.