David J. McGee

How Jamie Roach Inadvertently Kick-Started My Theatrical Life

I don’t remember the exact order of things. Because that’s what tends to happen with events more than fifteen years gone that at the time didn’t seem particularly noteworthy.

My fifth grade teacher, the late Mr. Gillis, was the kind of teacher that movies get made about. He wanted to impart to his classes of ten year olds a love of learning for its own sake, a love of literature, and culture, and music. He conducted the school choir, had us reading constantly, and introduced me and I’m sure countless others to the works of one J. William Shakespeare. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He wrote under a pseudonym. Not a very clever one.

One of our class projects was a performance of various excerpts — language lightly modified for the non-Elizabethan young’un — from Shakespeare’s plays. I was to play Petruchio from the wooing scene in Taming of the Shrew.

(This was, side note, a role that I’m sure I already had memorized somewhere deep in the subconscious twists and turns of my brain, as I had listened to the BBC’s 1980 Taming countless hundreds of times during my infancy. As a wee tyke, I didn’t much like to sleep during the night, and my mother had a fair few sources of entertainment to choose from in those heady non-cable days in Tokyo. Therefore, it was John Cleese in tights and me in arms together on many a many early 80’s night. So, actually, come to think of it, maybe it was THAT that kick-started my theatrical life. If those Baby Einstein tapes are supposed to somehow make our infants more adept at spatial organization, maybe the tape of my childhood made me more adept at iambic pentameter and salty puns.)

Anyhoo, somewise because of this performance, I ended up being asked to audition for the Grossmont College (the local J.C.) production of Harvey Fierstein’s On Tidy Endings, as part of an evening of student-directed one-acts. My classmate and friend Jamie Roach was also asked to audition. I think that he had played Romeo in the balcony scene at our little class production, there, so obviously whoever was scouting out the elementary school for thespian talent was aiming strictly for the heavy-hitters. It was my first real audition for anything, and it went well, and I think they told me how cute I was and all in all it was a great time.

And lo: I got the part. I ended up at Grossmont College several nights a week for the next while, rehearsing and reading and sitting backstage waiting for my scenes. I worked with my first director who wasn’t a parent or teacher, the lovely and talented Ms. Alex Apostolidis, who gave me my first real instruction in things like “subtext” and “character” and “not moving just because you’ve been directed to move because then it looks stupid”. I got a chance to meet wonderful people, and to be part of a cast that included me even though I was just some damn kid, and to work in a theatre outside of school for the first time. And good grief: I was hooked.

After one performance of the show, an older man I had never met approached me. He told me that he would be directing a production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the college the next autumn, and I would be perfect to play the role of Jem, and would I maybe like to do that? I said yes, of course. And so after a summer off, I was back at Grossmont, in a bigger production with a budget and large cast and sets and lights and at least one bonafide professional actor and I knew pretty much right then and there that I never wanted to do anything else ever. Except maybe play basketball with Michael Jordan. I wanted to do that too.

So, yeah. I don’t remember when exactly in all this I found out that Jamie Roach had been offered the part first and had turned it down because his parents found the material objectionable (what with dealing with the AIDS and the gay and whatnot), but sometimes now I think about how things might have been different if his parents had been as cool hip & groovy as mine, and it’s hard to know, and it’s hard to think about, and it’s hard to wonder just how much would have changed.

Apr 27 2009

“ It’s true that good governments appreciate the holy indignation of the governed, provided it remains lyrical… Experience shows that one can and must refuse the theatrical role of pure and simple indignation that is proposed to us. ”

Michel Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights”

Mar 17 2009

Dream Dumpage

Two nights ago, woke up just after I had discovered (written on a wall?) a four line or perhaps four couplet poem that was so intensely beautiful that it put me on the edge of tears. Came fully awake, the poem drifting away as I sought to hold on to the end, at least. Couldn’t, although I kept the sense of it. My guess now is that the dream logic imparted some impossibly few words with some impossibly loaded meaning. Anyway, as close as I can get to recreating the final couplet is this:

Who of us, with flowers newly blossomed

Would rather cut them down than see them tended?

*****

Last night, long involved rambling thing that took place mostly at a picnic. A large yellow awning was erected to block the sunlight (making me think that I must have had this dream just as the sunlight began to come through the blinds). Someone suggested that any color shade was OK when in the sun, but this one stayed fiercely yellow. The conversation turned to artistic and athletic agents. My brother suggested that maybe some agents make decisions for their clients based on rolling dice like a game master, which would explain why many of their decisions seem so awful. I went to get some vodka over at the concession stand. A military plane circled overhead sounding several sonic booms and then crashed somewhere off in the distance.

Mar 12 2009

“ Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? ”

David Foster Wallace, quoted in the wonderful article about his life and work in The New Yorker. [extreme spoiler warning applies. the article discusses both The Broom of the System’s and Infinite Jest’s plots at length, and includes the final lines from both novels. you have been warned.]

Now, I worry about this. I worry that this is what I am doing when I write plays, and when I write fiction. That I am simply adding noise to noise, that I am with ironic distance pointing at the world as it burns, having a good laugh and cracking a few stress-relieving jokes, but doing nothing to actually put out the fire. What a shame, what a shame that would be.

This could easily turn into a treatise on why I think it’s worth the work and time and pain and trouble and pennilessness to produce fiction in the first place. And I should probably write that someday, but I only have 46 minutes and you probably wouldn’t want to read it anyway.

In the meantime, I’ll just say that I agree. It’s not enough to point. It’s never enough to just point.

Mar 2 2009

“ ‘I would not kill even a Bishop. I would not kill a proprietor of any kind. I would make them work each day as we have worked in the fields and as we work in the mountains with the timber, all the rest of their lives. So they would see what man is born to. That they should sleep where we sleep. That they should eat as we eat. But above all that they should work. Thus they would learn.’
‘And they would survive to enslave thee again.’
‘To kill them teaches nothing,’ Anselmo said. ‘You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred. That our enemies should learn.’ ”

E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

Feb 23 2009

“ 1. That which exists has value.
2. Except for that which is intended to harm or destroy. ”

Feb 22 2009

The Spoken Word

I had been planning to write an essay about how Obama co-opts the language of simplicity to discuss complexity, thereby sounding like Bush while thinking like, er, an adult, but Garth at The Millions beat me to it. And did it way better than I would have. So read this.

Feb 17 2009

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Listen to me tell a story about Moravia. This week on Podia.

Feb 12 2009

Audio