Things, I'm glad to report, have changed. Gone are the days when you had to be a King Oedipus or Queen Phaedra to find your way onto the stage. Now great works of drama feature workers in a shoe warehouse (Glass Menagerie), prostitutes and their johns (The Balcony), tramps on a country road (Waiting for Godot) and down-in-the-mouth real estate salesmen (Glengarry Glen Ross). Meaningful dramatic characters, it turns out, are literally everywhere, and all of them are just waiting for that gifted, inspired author who'll know how to use them in the service of a higher vision. You think that your story is undeserving of art? You're wrong: Every moment of your ostensibly ordinary life is raw material for a work of genius, a powerful tragicomedy that will bring tears to the eyes and consolation to the soul. You think that your narrative is too conventional, too humdrum? Wrong: it's just waiting for an author who sees its pathos and its grandeur.
Maybe it's waiting for Rob Nash. The actor/writer of Holy Cross Sucks! takes the least promising material — three geeks going to high school — and turns it into a truly wonderful evening of theater. And he does something quite as notable: he plays all three adolescents, as well as 20-odd other teachers, parents, friends and love interests, all on a nearly bare stage and with no costume change. And he does it all — the writing and acting — so successfully, with so much humor and wisdom, that at the end of two hours you'll be ready for two hours more. This is a winning memoir about the difficulties of growing up, the tempests of puberty, the burdens of family life, and the ineluctable search for a role model that won't screw you. I've complained in the past about single actors performing multiple roles — usually for financial reasons — but this is one stirring performance that makes sense from start to finish, and that seems all the deeper for being enacted by its writer. In short: see Holy Cross Sucks! It's poignant, powerful theater. And it's also very funny.
The material doesn't, at first glance, seem promising. We're so used to high school kids as the denizens of TV sitcoms, we can't help but doubt a play about adolescents. But Nash has an artist's — not a hustler's — sensibility, and even more than our laughter, he's after our understanding. So as he tells us the stories of his heroes Johnny, George and Ben, he's careful to show us not just their swagger but their naiveté, not just their hijinks but their fragmented judgment, not just their fresh energy but their perilous ignorance.
Johnny, we learn, wants to be a writer and suspects that he's already on the cusp of greatness. George has to deal with an abusive, drunken father and his father's beautiful secretary. And Ben is cautiously discovering that he's gay, and preparing to come out to just about anyone who'll listen. There's a lot more: Johnny gets involved with a young woman named Maria, though his parents don't want to have Mexican grandchildren (she's Colombian); Maria's friend Jennifer gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion; Johnny's brother is killed during the U.S. assault on Grenada (the play takes place during the 1980s); and Ben, when not looking for sexual encounters in a city park, is seriously tempted to become a priest. For a time the three friends grow upset with one another and break apart. Back together, they make an unauthorized trip to New York in the company of a favorite teacher and his "roommate." As Johnny says, sure, their parents will bust them for a month. But that week in New York will remain with them a lifetime.
Nash's approach to all these stories is pleasingly modernistic. He acts out each one (and there's no narration) in an unpredictable, ever-changing order, with only a title projected on a screen to alert us to where we are this time. He depends, at times, on sound effects: parents waking their children, rock and roll to comment on a scene, the secret thoughts of essential characters. His talent is uncanny: When Ben is mugged by a gay-basher and stumbles into a teacher's apartment, Nash somehow makes you see the imaginary cuts and bruises. There are more than a few epiphanies — Nash as a woman giving birth is typically daring — but my favorite is a conversation Johnny has with Maria's father: it's quiet, a little melancholy, and I'll probably remember it for a decade. In fact, after seeing this winner, I'm eager to discover more of Nash's work. Artists at this level don't appear all that often.
Anyway, roll over, Coriolanus: Rob Nash has arrived to tell us that high school, that's right, high school, is a place of profound drama. With a sharp eye and a feeling heart, he reminds us that adolescence partakes of heroism and farce, and that there's nothing insignificant about the heroic, silly struggles of males and females in their teens.
So now it looks like there's nowhere immune to art.
Which is just as it should be.
Yesterday's News
Fine acting and sharp direction can't save Jobsite Theater's A Girl's Guide to Chaos from predictability and, finally, tedium. Author Cynthia Heimel's got a nice sense of language, but her portrayal of three friends lamenting the man shortage in Manhattan is 30 years too late: it's been at least that long since anyone was shocked by assertive women speaking explicitly about sex. And that's Chaos's main gambit; otherwise, this is theater without drama, without suspense, virtually without story. Actors Summer Bohnenkamp-Jenkins, Kari Keller, Nevada Young Caldwell, Katrina Stevenson and Shawn Paonessa do their best to keep this moribund creature alive, and Ami Sallee Corley's direction moves everything along at a fast clip. But there's more originality in Sex and the City, which covers much the same ground and has some interesting story lines to boot. Still, if you want to shock your grandparents, this is the show to send 'em to. As for you, you've already heard it or said it yourself. So why bother?
Contact Performance Critic Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2004.