Lefty Parent » jlo

Not Enough Boys to Sing & Dance

Cooper Zale — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:07:46 +0000

Nancy Grace and me in the 1971 JLO production of Oklahoma

When I first got involved in theater (see “JLO”) I was focused on doing work backstage and despite a brief and reasonably successful experience in Junior High (see TBD), was still generally too shy to consider being onstage as well. But some of my latent desire and external circumstances led me on a path to put me under the lights in front of an audience by my junior year in high school.

Prior to that, my combination of timidity and low self esteem made me very reluctant to take the spotlight, though at some level I longed to be acknowledged as talented or at least capable. My work backstage in several theater productions with JLO and my high school’s drama club had given me some of that longed for acknowledgement of competence at least as a lighting and set designer and a person who could pound out some sort of stage adaption however limited or flawed (see “Lord of the Flies”) on my portable electric typewriter.

The composition of JLO, like most youth theater groups I have participated in or encountered, included way more young women than young men. This was in contrast to the fact that most plays, particularly most musicals, generally had more parts for men than women. Given this, those of us who were active in the company, of high-school age and of the male persuasion were always being pitched to take a crack at playing onstage roles in our robust slate of theatrical productions. I had given in to these requests only to the extent of doing very limited work onstage in crowd scenes with no lines of my own.

But two of my JLO comrades, sisters and very talented actors who attended my high school, had decided that they wanted to enter a high school district competition in forensics in the area of “multiple reading”, a performance of a written piece with voice but no staging. They had found a piece that they both liked, the climactic scene of the play “The Innocents”, based on Henry James classic gothic novel, “The Turn of the Screw”, but they needed someone to play the male part – Miles – the demon possessed youth who is exorcised by his governess in the play’s final scene. I think I was one of the few male type persons they know who attended our shared high school and was involved in theater. They must have figured that since I had no track record of playing a part onstage, I had no record of being bad on stage, so I was worth the risk.

They had me read thru the piece with them and decided to pitch me to participate, and given that they were two intelligent, capable, good looking young women that I admired, I maybe was to shy to say no. We rehearsed after school and with their constant encouragement I got into my part and was able to vocally portray a young boy fearfully coming to grips with my demonic possession, ending the dramatic final scene raising my voice and screaming out the name of my possessor before dying. It was an exciting piece, the kind of angsty and overwrought stuff that appealed to my teenage self. When we performed it in front of Forensic tournament audiences it was well received and I enjoyed the rush of putting on a show for the audience of this very disturbed young man loosing it completely. After coming in second place in the district competition and then again in the regional one, I was hooked.

After a brief cameo in the JLO production of “The Sound of Music” as the male half of the “Sengerbund of Herwegen” (one of the sisters I had done the multiple reading with playing the other half) in the music festival competition scene at the end of the play, I was prevailed on to try out for the second male lead part in our planned summer musical production, “Oklahoma”. Such was our dearth of high school males in our theater company that I and one other guy were the only two to try out for the part of Will Parker, for a show to be double-cast and thus needing two guys to play the role. Simple arithmetic had sealed my fate and I was committed to a path forward that would have me singing and dancing under the lights in front of a large audience of mostly strangers, two things that I was no way comfortable in doing. But… the show must go on!

Looking back, these two experiences I have shared so far were the first examples of an ongoing personal pattern of being usually overcome with shyness to try something new and personal parameter pushing, but occasionally throwing myself completely in the deep end. I was always in an internal tussle between being scared and wanting to protect myself and wanting to be some sort of a star.

So again, with much encouragement from my JLO comrades, I learned the part, including the songs and with greater difficulty the dances as well. My performance included my first on stage passionate lips-to-lips kiss made particularly freaky because I had never had an off-stage lips-to-lips kiss with anybody (see “Cooties” for more details). Scared by yet craving the spotlight, and fearing failure to the point of willing myself to somehow be good, I got through my rehearsals and did my two performances before an audience of several hundred people including my mom and my aunt.

From my theater comrades’ reviews and the audience’s applause, I felt like I had done a good job and my addiction to the stage spotlight continued to grow. I went on to play lead roles in several other musicals, coming to specialize in the bad guy type roles, including…

* The biblical “Snake” in the musical “The Diary of Adam and Eve” with a dramatic song where I lure Eve into taking a bite out of the forbidden fruit

* The egotistical yet bumbling “Wazir of Police” in the musical “Kismet”

* The maniacal marketing director “Orson” in the rock musical “Do Your Own Thing” based on Shakespeare’s “Tempest”

* The TBD older brother “Noah” in Harvey Jones and TBD’s musical version of the “Rainmaker”

* Finally, my favorite part and I think my best work, “Mr. Rich”, the mega-wealthy avatar for “The Man” – too old, filthy rich, bored, jaded, etc. – in the allegorical musical “Celebration” by Harvey Jones and TBD

So what does it mean for a shy kid like me to be able to play these loud, in your face, larger than life characters? It was a revelation of another side of my personality, a way I could learn to be even playing myself someday. It was a way to channel and release a lot of angst accumulated from suffering through my parents’ divorce and my mom’s depression and suicidal moments. It was a chance to be acknowledged by others (and myself) as a capable person and to build some badly needed self-esteem.

Lord of the Flies

Cooper Zale — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:17:59 +0000

Michael Harrah, the prime mover of our Junior Light Opera theater company, had an inner circle of older youth in the company who he bounced ideas off for what shows we would do. I recall one day, he and I returning in his station wagon from the Tobin Lakes Studio outside of Ann Arbor that rented or sold various props, costumes, lights and lighting supplies that we needed for several of our productions. I was telling Michael that I had recently read William Golding’s book “Lord of the Flies” in my British Literature class and fantasized about doing it as a play.

To give you a little background, Michael was always looking for the challenge of an unorthodox theater piece or doing a more traditional theater piece in an unorthodox way. For example…

* Since our company had nearly two females for every male youth while most plays had more male than female leads, he was known to cast young women to play parts written for males – so when we did the musical “Fantastiks”, the parts of the two fathers of the leads he changed to two mothers, with great added comic value.

* He added a love scene to our production of Hamlet where Hamlet takes Ophelia into his bed, something that is only implied in Shakespeare’s dialog.

* He hired a young rock composer to rescore the musical “Flohooley”, with an original score written in the 1940s.

If you read and remember “Lord of the Flies”, it is a very provocative story about British school boys, crashed on an island with all their accompanying adults killed, who quickly lose their veneer of civilization and descend into mayhem and savagery. When I broached the idea, I am guessing that Michael immediately saw this as a potential production that would raise more than a few eyebrows when staged. He told me it was an inspired idea and he thought we should do it. Only problem I told him, was that to my knowledge no one had written an adaptation of the novel for the stage.

“Why don’t you write it,” Michael suggested. Now I was a fifteen year old kid at the time who had never attempted anything close to a project of this magnitude. I struggled to type a three page school paper on my little portable electric typewriter. But like a good teacher or mentor, Michael had a way of inspiring us to do things we would not have otherwise thought we could do. After much discussion the rest of the way back into town, I finally agreed at least to give it a try writing the script.

I spent most of my free time for the next three months pounding out a script on my JC Penney’s portable electric typewriter. It was certainly no great work of adaptation, since I really had no idea what I was doing, but I kept at it until a draft was finished.

One of the issues I encountered early on was that the characters were English and spoke English swear words and other slang. I decided to Americanize the dialog, mapping the English slang to its American equivalent or near equivalent, as best I could figure out. The phrase “Bollocks to the rules”, used several times in the book’s dialog, was a particular challenge. “Bollocks” is an old Anglo-Saxon word for testicles, and is used in English slang to mean nonsense or to otherwise demean the object of the sentence. What would an American kid say in the same situation? After some thought, the two Americanized phrases I came up with were “Screw the rules” and “F**k the rules”. Profanity for a fifteen year old is pretty heady stuff. I decided to go with the later of the two phrases.

When I showed the eighty page script to Michael and he read the passages with the Americanized expletives, he did not flinch at all. He felt the script would work, “F word” and all. He mimeographed copies of the script and we began the process of assembling our production team and casting the show. Later on the “F word” would lead to controversy and a hearing with parents, a school board and recreation department representatives. Artistic freedom versus the appropriateness of the material for school age youth was discussed. In the end I think we agreed to leave “F**k the rules” in the evening performances, but change it to “Screw the rules” in the school matinees.

Me in costume

Another exciting element of the production was the costumes. The characters start out in the white shirts and dark slacks of their school uniforms but soon resort to a uniform more befitting their descent into savagery, animal fur loin clothes – very brief and rather risqué. You can probably imagine our performances – kids on stage from five to fifteen in loin clothes carrying spears smeared with blood and occasionally shouting “F**k (or Screw) the rules”.

As I have said before, most youth theater companies including JLO, have more females than males. “Lord of the Flies” had some 15 male speaking parts and not a single female. This was a bit of a challenge because some of the males in our company who often did key backstage jobs were recruited to be in the cast. So to staff all the positions, we ended up with an almost all female stage crew supporting the all male cast.

The person in the show’s production team responsible for publicity got in touch with the theater critic of the Ann Arbor News who agreed to do a story on me, the 15 year old youth who wrote the script for the play. Later the same critic came to the show and wrote a review, calling the play “flawed but suspenseful”.

The whole thing was an incredible experience for me. Taking an idea from conception through script writing and language controversy, and then participating in the production as one of the scantily clad and blood spattered cast. Heady stuff for a teenager with low self esteem but delusions of grandeur.

One final thought on Golding’s book. Though I loved the experience of writing, mounting and performing in the play, the book is an interesting tale of the inner savagery of British school boys. It is an interesting discussion between some who believe that men in particular are innately savage and need to be “tamed” by civilization, others who believe that children have the devil in them until it is beaten out of them, and still others (like myself) that believes that our patriarchal society with all its mores kindles violent behavior in boys (to be good soldiers someday perhaps) and then tamps it down with conventional parenting and schooling. Whatever the source, Golding’s is a dystopian tail of the release of that savage energy.