Once I Was a Brainwashed Thespian

(Warning: Indulgently long post follows - dedicated to my dear friend, Michael.)

As I alluded to in a previous post, by the time I got to high school I was willing to wage war against anyone who dared to compare me to my older sister, Mary. There was, however, a time, somewhere on the other side of junior high commencement when I desperately wanted to live up to her reputation.

I had seen Mary perform in Jerome McDonough’s stirring “one act of social awareness,” Addict, when I was in fourth grade. I sat transfixed when she, as Lucia, the inhalant abuser with a bad-attitude and nothing to lose, tromped throughout the theatre harassing audience members. “Wanna huff?” she asked somebody’s father who had, of course, learned from the seven preceding vignettes that drugs are bad, he shook his head. “I didn’t think so.” Lucia laughs before launching into a formulaic monologue teeming with dated slang. After that performance I knew what it was to love the theatre.

When I was in eight grade, four years later, I campaigned the Drama club sponsor to let us put on Addict (it had been performed two years before but had been given a rest my seventh grade year). She accepted my suggestion and held auditions the following week. Though I could probably have had any part I wanted (this is not a reflection of my talent, rather a reflection of the general lack of talent that was the Kenmore Middle School dramatic community), I went out like hell for Lucia, inhalant abuser extraordinaire.

With absolutely no resistance, I got the part and memorized Lucia’s “edgy” monologue that very night. I came to rehearsal the following day with suggestions for blocking and a willingness to coach others on their delivery. The play (as I remember it) was a smash hit – at the end every single character dies and to punctuate this further all the actors take the stage, lie down with their heads at the foot of the stage, and slowly, dramatically, lift their won tombstone…duh duh duuuuuun. It made 12 year olds whimper. I got chills.

I remember there being some little preamble to the play, you know, something like “drugs WILL kill YOU, no one is immune!” And I remember totally, totally buying it. I believe I was already in my twenties when I realized that the plays was neither based on actual events nor the factual effects that drugs have on their users. It was a total load of propaganda and I had peddled it like a obedient little narc.

In my defense, it is not as if I vehemently believed for a decade that those flamboyant little vignettes were the gospel truth, I just hadn’t given them much thought. But tucked in the back of my head was the conviction that I had been a 13 year-old purveyor of life-saving fact.

One look at Jerome McDonough’s portfolio should have risen suspicious – he is also the author of such theatrical giants as Alky and Juvie (and four plays about Christmas?), plays with equally stark, simplistic, and blatant messages – one wrong turn = your life is over. Even the character in Addict who ultimately gets clean, has a “flashback,” imagines there are rats gnawing at the backs of her eyeballs, and gouges out her eyes with knitting needles (and then dies).

Drugs by and large are BAD, and they can really screw up one’s life, but it isn’t fair to lie to kids – they crave the truth much more than adults do and when we manipulate their trust we’re screwing them over, and once they wise up, those with weaker wills will make a beeline for the forbidden ecstasy that lies in the use of steroids, Quaaludes, and PCP.