One-Man, One-Woman ... Plays

         People may not guess that I actually enjoy live theater - not musicals - theater. I mean, there are a handful of musicals that I have enjoyed, but I generally have a hard and fast rule against musicals. But dramas and comedies, I enjoy. While we were working, it was kind of difficult to get up and get going to see a play. After a day of teaching, the prospect of driving into the city traffic and parking situation was not always an appealing one, but, now, we have the time, and there are several great theater companies and venues for us to choose from, and they are roaring back from pandemic shutdowns. We've seen several very good plays in the past several months, and three have been one-person biographical shows about legends. We recommend seeing all of them if they are performed near you.

    The first was I Love to Eat, written by James Still, the life of cooking icon James Beard. Foodies all know the name from the extremely prestigious awards given to chefs, restaurants, and cookbooks annually. A James Beard Award is the pinnacle of culinary success, perhaps slightly eclipsed by Michelin stars - perhaps. In reality, James Beard was a master cook, cookbook author, and food critic. He starred in one of the very first cooking shows on television. He championed good food done well, and he enjoyed "rustic" food as much as gourmet food. The play is hilarious, and we were fortunate to see Matt McGee playing the role; he is apparently a bit of theatrical icon himself in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area, and he was fantastic. While there was much humor throughout the play, there is a bit of tragedy as well. James Beard was a gay man in the public eye in the 1950s and 1960s, so he had to deal with keeping closeted or dealing with stigma that came attached to that identity at the time. As portrayed on stage, he also had to deal with issues of depression and loneliness that clung to him throughout his life, no matter how famous he became. 

    Tragedy apparently makes for great one-person shows, as the other two plays' subjects are two of the most tragic figures in the history of the 20th century. Their subjects are legendary icons who contributed so much to society, but society - specifically government authorities, with a little assist from addictions - destroyed them, leaving us to wonder what more could they have done in their lives and careers?  Lady Day At Emerson's Bar & Grill, written by Lanie Robertson, is a night in the life of singer Billie Holliday, performed in our case by the extremely talented Karole Foreman.  Technically, there is a second character on stage, Billie's pianist and music director, but it is all about Billie. In between the dozen or so songs sung during the play, Billie tells the nightclub audience all of the tragedies of her life, and that's a lot. 

    Finally, there's "I'm Not a Comedian...I'm Lenny Bruce" , written by and starring Ronnie Marmo as the comedian and social commentator who spent much of his career being arrested for obscenity and standing up for freedom of speech. With all of the current controversies surrounding stand-up comedy today, like the fear of cancel culture, the existence of trigger warnings,  and even the fear of physical attack, Lenny Bruce's life and career are so relevant today, 56 years after his tragic death by overdose. Marmo, as Lenny, takes the audience through his life and the demons that bring his end. It is an incredibly tragic tale, with some humor and keen insight along the way.

Different Genres, Different Stories?

     Last month, I got involved in two different true crime stories. They were totally entertaining and thought provoking from beginning to end, and I actually explored each one through two different media formats.

    The first was Under the Banner of Heaven, a book by John Krakauer and the dramatic series of the same name on Hulu. 

    Krakauer's book, first published in 2003, tells the story of the gruesome 1984 murders of  Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter in Utah. Their killers were two of her brothers-in-law who targeted her because they believed that she was preventing their wives and her husband, their brother, from living the moral life that their fundamentalist Latter Day Saints demanded. Krakauer juxtaposes the murder and its investigation with the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, from its founding by Joseph Smith to the fundamentalist sects that started breaking away from the orthodox Church. There were some fractures within the Church immediately following the death of Smith in 1844, when there were a few men who announced that they were Smith's chosen successor, but there were even more in the late 1800s when the LDS Church leaders agreed to strip polygamy as a tenet of the Church, in exchange for statehood. Several groups condemned this blasphemy and created their own communities in Canada, the US, and Mexico where they continued, and continue to this day, practicing polygamy. These groups have officially been excommunicated and condemned by the orthodox LDS Church.

    The Lafferty brothers found themselves drawn to the ideas espoused by some of these fundamentalist prophets, and they began living by what they called the "true" principles of Mormonism. This led them to murdering Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

    Both the book and the series were incredibly enlightening and stories well told. It was interesting that the makers took different approaches to telling the story. Krakauer spent a large portion of the book, close to the first third, delving into the history of the Church and of the fundamentalists. The tv series is more focused on the murder and the investigation, but there are flashbacks to moments in Mormon history.

    The Staircase is an even more recent story. In December 2001, writer Michael Peterson found his wife Kathleen dead at the foot of the staircase in their Durham, North Carolina home. Police quickly discounted the accidental fall and charged Peterson with murder, theorizing that the motive was Kathleen's discovery that he was secretly having sex with men. The revealed secrets and the murder trial, of course, took their toll on Michael and Kathleen's children. Kathleen's daughter from a previous marriage sided with her mother's two sisters against Peterson, while his two sons and two adopted daughters stood by their father. After his conviction and imprisonment for 8 years, it turned out that a couple of the state forensic scientists who had provided damning testimony were guilty of manufacturing harmful evidence, hiding exculpatory evidence and committing perjury, not just in his trial but in numerous other trials. He was finally freed, pending a retrial, but the wheels of justice turned very slowly over the next several years, and he decided to take a plea that allowed him to avoid a retrial.

    So there are two series on the case you can watch and they are somewhat intertwined. During the trial, Peterson agreed to allow a French documentary making team to cover everything. The team followed him around for years and years, and they had access in the courtroom, jail, his home, and prison that no other documentarians have ever had before or since. They interviewed everyone on his side, they filmed defense strategy meetings, they saw everything. And they added more material as events occurred. That documentary can be seen on Netflix.

    Just recently, HBO Max has created a dramatic series starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette as Michael and Kathleen.  It's obvious that the creators of this series saw the documentary because there are lots of scenes that replicate the documentary scene for scene and word for word. Also, the actors cast to play the real people are dead ringers for those people, with one exception. For some reason, the drama producers cast the part of the defense private investigator - an older white guy in real life - as a young black man. The drama producers also took some other liberties with the story which haven't made the documentarians very happy, and the makers of the documentary have taken to the press to denounce these changes and to demand that disclaimers be added to the series. It's a dynamite story, and I'm still not sure what really happened that night. Maybe we will never be.