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.
