Peanuts Play?

The play "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead" seems like your average play. It wasn't a book turned into a play or even a movie turned into a play. It just seems like a normal play that some random person decided to craft up in their head. Until you find out that it's a play based on the Peanuts comic, except this time their all grown up. In a review by the NY Times writer Jason Zinoman says that:

It's 10 years later, and - prepare yourself - Snoopy has been put to sleep after
killing Woodstock. Linus has become Van (Keith Nobbs), a stoner who smoked the
burned remains of his security blanket. Pigpen has cleaned up into a violent
jock (Ian Somerhalder, from "Lost"). Lucy, known only as Van's sister (Eliza
Dushku, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), is a lithium-addled pyromaniac who has
slept with, believe it or not, Charlie Brown, or CB (Eddie Kaye Thomas), as he's
called, a popular kid with a mean streak.

So pretty much it's nothing like the comic strip at all. It makes me think of how I loved the show Rugrats on Nickelodeon, but then they decided to make the Rugrats All Grown up show and it was horrible. Sometimes you just got to stick with the original. When you try and milk something for all it's worth, normally the second thing is not as good as the original. The fact that it deals with so much "normal teenage life experiences" makes me feel like it is pushing it. Homosexuality, drugs, sex, violence, suicide, and teenage rebellion are all themes that can be found in this play. Seems a little over the top to me. I mean when you place all of these themes in a 2 hour play it seems like it definitely trying to get the "awe factor" which can be very annoying. I'll leave you with a quote that Charlie Brown (CB) says in the play which seems to show the stupidity of the show.

"Do you ever feel like you're not a real person?" CB asks his sister. "That
you're the product of someone's imagination and you can't think for yourself
because you're really just like some creation and that somewhere there's people
laughing every time you fall?"