By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Creatista Films, Video and Photography
David Alexander Johnston plays a cop recalling the crime that changed his life.
The horror of the story is in the quietly matter-of-fact way David Alexander Johnston tells it. The tragedy, too, because Leonard Pelkey couldn't help himself. He was always going to be the misfit teen who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Invisible Theatre has chosen to shake up the local stage scene a bit by opening its season with “The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey.” Directed by Susan Claassen and written by James Lecesne as a one-hander about a cop remembering a crime that changed his life, Johnston creates the disillusioned detective as well as several eccentric characters typical of the kind who seem to collect in those nondescript blue-collar towns “down the Jersey shore.”
That cop would be Chuck DeSantis, who knows little of the glamour and all of the tedium working in “some God forsaken precinct,” as he calls this place. We meet DeSantis in his office, behind him a table of items that are evidence for the Leonard Pelkey case.
The town doesn't get a name and doesn't deserve one, as even the people who live here don't seem to think much of it. Their lives are nondescript in most every respect. They know what they don't like and that's all there is to it.
We never meet Leonard, but do see his photo projected on the wall. He was a good looking 14-year-old, kind of soft around the edges. The townspeople DeSantis talked to would describe him as “different,” “unusual,” “not like the other boys.” We know what they really mean. “Leonard is gay.”
Now Leonard is dead, and it is this detective's job to find the killer. In a kind of TV crime show manner, DeSantis breaks down all the evidence. Among the items are a watch, a backpack, one of those classroom essay books and a pair of brightly colored fairy wings.
As Johnston takes on the roles of several other people remembering the last time they saw Leonard, each one reveals a little more about this close-minded community. As these random facts accumulate, we begin to feel how Leonard's innocence was working against him.
Some of the adults would tell Leonard he should try harder to blend in, wear more conservative clothes, things like that. Leonard would have none of it. He was determined to live free and be himself
The truth was, these people simply didn't want a flamboyant boy around, someone so full of colorful ambitions he only reminded them of their own drab, failed lives.
But solving the crime isn't what the play is about. Johnston the actor focuses his performance on wanting us to remember the greater crime. Not to recognize who killed Leonard, but what killed Leonard. To agree with DeSantis that even if someone did step forward to say “I did it,” these senseless murders wouldn't stop.
They aren't even crimes of passion. They are crimes of community, where motivations can fester for years, fed by one person's insulting comment here, another person's snide response there,
Until, suddenly, it happens again and then someone says, “He was asking for it.”
“The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey” runs through Sept. 16 with performances at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 3 p,m. Sundays, at Invisible Theatre, 1400 N. First Ave. No performance Saturday evening, Sept. 8.
Tickets are $35, with discounts available. Rush tickets on sale half-price 30 minutes before curtain, when available.
Not recommended for age 12 and younger. For details and reservations, (520) 882-9721 or visit www.invisibletheatre.com
No comments:
Post a Comment