Everybody’s restless and they’ve got no place to go

Someone’s always trying to tell them

Something they already know

So their anger and resentment flow

But don’t it make you want to rock and roll

All night long

MOHAMMED’S RADIO

It’s hard to escape a small town and its expectations. At it’s very core, that is the message of Mohammed’s Radio. Gerritsen Beach is more than just a town, it is a community and a way of life. There are expectations of how a person should behave, and to challenge those expectations, at best gets to mocked and bullied, and at wort puts you in danger. Joe, Little Joe, Alice, Allie, Kelly, and Jen are all characters who either don’t fully fit in or don’t want to. While the play itself is about Kelly, and her attempt to break free, each of these characters provides a unique insight into what it means to be a nonconformist in Gerritsen Beach.

For Little Joe, the fact that he doesn’t use bad language and doesn’t know what is between a girl’s legs leads to him being teased in school. However, there is hope for him to “get out” in the future. Joe gets constantly mocked and belittled by his friends, even those who work for him, because he is weak and therefore less of a “man.” These remarks get to Joe, causing him to have a low sense of self-worth. Alice is trying to make the best out of a bad situation, trying to keep her family in one piece, unaffected by the world around them. Tragically, by the end of the play her worst fear has come true. Jen, Allie, and Kelly all simply want to escape Gerritsen Beach, and all experience different levels of success.

Jen is the first to escape Gerritsen Beach, if you can really call it that. She still goes back to the small town to work, where the people look down on her for leaving. It’s enough for her though. She didn’t get to L.A. like she originally planned, but at least she no longer has to call Gerritsen Beach home. In some small sense of the word, she is free. Even Jen’s minuscule attempt to escape caused a backlash. This left little hope for Kelly’s, far more extravagant, attempt.

Converting to Islam provided Kelly with a mental escape when a physical one was impossible, but it also shocked those around her. The people of Gerritsen Beach are so set in their ways that they could not possibly accept her religious conversion. This was especially true due to their abhorrence of Muslims after the events of September 11th. Kelly must have known the backlash that she would face, but she was desperate. She wanted to go away for college, but when her father made that impossible she still needed to find another way to escape. Her attempt to break free, however, set off a chain of events that ultimately led to her being raped- just the kind of situation she wanted to avoid by converting to begin with.

While she is still too young to do so, Allie has already come up with her own plan of escape. She says that she will try to convince her parents to let her go to a school on the other side of the country but will eventually offer a closer, but still away, college as an alternative- where she really wants to go. Allie knows that you have to be smart to escape Gerritsen Bay. You need to be clever, to convince the people that they have sill one.