A Compelling Illumination of 'Different"

 

A Compelling Illumination of ‘Different’

By Tom Wachunas 

‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ – from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3

“A much-needed, beautiful testament to the power of the human spirit and the power of being oneself.”  - Craig Joseph 

 PERFORMANCE: THE ABSOLUTE BRIGHTNESS OF LEONARD PELKEY, written by James Lecesne, Directed by Abraham M. Adams, Starring Craig Joseph

A Seat of the Pants production, at Malone University Founders Hall, 425 25th Street NW, Canton, OH  

Sunday, August 8th at 2PM (in person) / Saturday, August 14th at 8PM (in person) / Friday, August 20th at 8PM (in person or all day online)

Tickets $20 - info at     www.seatofthepants.org/productions.

   This play is a marvelous one-man show and an otherwise brilliant tour de force of storytelling. Written by James Lecesne and here deftly directed by Abraham M. Adams, it stars Craig Joseph, who plays every character – eight in all – beginning with Chuck DeSantis, a frayed-at-the edges police detective with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, as in, “The evil that men do lives after them...” We might quickly think we’re in for a rough ride when in his opening lines, he glibly declares, “… The dark side is my beat.”

    For the next 70 minutes, we watch and listen as he re-lives a case from 10 years ago, probing what happened to Leonard Pelkey, a fourteen-year-old boy who had gone missing in his Jersey Shore small town. The detective interviewed a bevy of local citizens. They included Leonard’s guardian, feisty “aunt” Ellen, who owned a local beauty salon and who refused to call the boy “gay,” preferring instead, “just different”; Ellen’s jittery daughter, Phoebe; chain-smoking Marion, who tearfully recalled at one point how Leonard  “…saw us not the way we were, but how we hoped to be…”; Buddy, the British director of a local drama and dance school who treasured Leonard’s uncanny theatrical talents; Otto, the German immigrant who owned a clock repair shop where Leonard took refuge from the bullies who relentlessly attacked him; and Gloria, the church-going, bespectacled widow of a mobster, and who spotted one of Leonard’s signature  rainbow platform sneakers floating like an omen in the lake outside her home. Good news, this Leonard’s shoe, thought the detective. And bad news. Leonard wasn’t attached.

    Yes, there’s evil and darkness and tragedy here. But that’s not the end of this ride. Evidenced by all the character’s very animated testimonies, most of the townsfolk judged Leonard’s differentness to be somehow intolerable. “Too much,” they said. Yet in honestly recalling what he did and said, and how he did it and said it, hardened hearts were softened. It’s a bittersweet hindsight, to be sure. Only when Leonard was gone from their midst did they see him, in all his objectionable “flamboyance” and quirkiness, as a bringer of light, indeed love. His undaunted trueness to himself gave them pause to examine their own lives in that same light.

    All of these characters come to credible life thanks to Craig Joseph’s remarkable performance acumen. From the timbre of his various accents (New Joisey, Britain, Germany) to the detailed nuances of body language, his expressivity is riveting, at once fiery, poignant and not without a generous dose of edgy humor. He turns the playwright’s words into specific, tangible people with attitudes - funny, happy, frightened, angry, mournful -  switching from one to the next with astonishing speed and precision. And all of it is beautifully enhanced by lighting and sound elements designed by Micah Harvey and Megan Slabach respectively.

   This is beyond fine acting. It’s absolute magic.