1998 and Before
“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Love in the Time of Cholera
In my right hand, I’m clutching the award-winning short story I’d written about the ancient Greek vase to my left.
In 1998, when I graduated from a large public high school in a small Southern town, I had hardly ever seen a professional production — let alone written or performed in one.
What I did have was an obsessive love for the stage. I'd already done a dozen plays and musicals, and I could — and sometimes did — recite another dozen shows by heart. (On a related note, I didn't have many friends.)
I read constantly and studied obsessively. I loved Greek mythology, Roman literature, King Arthur, fantasy novels, and Dungeons and Dragons. I was, in other words — as you can see in the picture — a huge nerd.
And theater was the one thing that released me from the relentless exhaustion of thinking. When I was on the stage, I was no longer in my head.
Lylburn Downing’s auditorium.
(Notice the basketball hoop stage right.)
OLIVER TWIST
Middle School Production
adapted from the novel by Charles Dickens, dir. Vicki Parker
Role: The Artful Dodger
Lylburn Downing Middle School
The first play I ever did.
I based my accent on Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins, which he later called the “most atrocious Cockney accent in the history of cinema.”
What I lacked in precision, I made up for in enthusiasm, and when the audience applauded as I left the stage (led off in chains to The Old Bailey), I felt a surge of enchantment with this strange new world.
WINNIE THE POOH
Middle School Production
adapted from the book by A.A. Milne, dir. Vicki Parker
with Amy Woody
Role: Owl
Lylburn Downing Middle School
I enjoyed Winnie The Pooh, but I was disappointed that Mrs. Parker decided against her original idea for the spring production: Macbeth.
(I’m not making this up.)
Owl, a know-it-all intellectual, was a real stretch for me.
ANTIGONE
Middle School Production
by Sophocles, dir. Vicki Parker
with Jenny Parker (Isemene), Emily Peck (Antigone), and Sam Rude (Haemon)
Role: Creon
Lylburn Downing Middle School
"It's great I’m getting my first stab at Creon,” I remember thinking, “I'll be able to play this role for years."
I was in eighth grade.
SHENANDOAH
College Production (Musical)
April 13-23, 1994
music by Gary Geld, lyrics by Peter Udell
book by Peter Udell, Philip Rose and James Lee Barrett, dir. Joellen Bland
Role: Robert Anderson
Virginia Military Institute
Shenandoah, written in the waning days of Vietnam, centers on a Virginia farmer struggling to keep his large family safe from the ravages of the Civil War.
This was two years before the Supreme Court’s monumental U.S. v. Virginia decision, and Virginia Military Institute was still an all-male institution. Though a fourteen-year-old boy like me could wander freely through the barracks, our female director Joellen Bland was forbidden to enter.
My 102-year-old grandmother says seeing me play “Boy” is when she knew I’d become an actor.
BRIGADOON
Community Production (Musical)
1994
music by Frederick Loewe, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner
with Agatha Kaplan and Justin Tolley
Role: Harry Beaton
Fine Arts In Rockbridge at The Lenfest Center for the Performing Arts
Harry Beaton is a tortured outsider, the first of many I've played: Jody McKenna in Dirge (1994), John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (2001), Leo Frank in Parade (2002), the title role in Sweeney Todd (2002), Hunter in Welcome to Nowhere (2007-2009), Yegor Timoveivich in Dying For It (2014-2015), and Max in The Whistleblower (2019).
Drawing on teenage angst, I successfully captured Harry's agonized relationship to his oh-so-happy Scottish community.
Less successful was my Scottish accent. I'd never heard a real one, and what I ultimately concocted was an unholy mélange of French and German.
Twenty years later, I finally perfected the accent when I played a Scotch salmon in the Broadway tour of Peter and the Starcatcher (2015).
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
Regional Production (Musical)
September 2-17, 1994
music by Robbin Thompson and Carlos Chafin, dir. Randy Strawderman
Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University
at The Lenfest Center for the Performing Arts
Based on Stephen Crane's brutal anti-war novel, The Red Badge of Courage was my first professional production.
Well, sort of.
Unpaid locals like me made up the ensemble, while salaried career actors came in from Richmond to play the principals.
We were all convinced the musical was Broadway-bound. Decades later, it has yet to make its New York debut — and neither has its volatile director Randy Strawderman. (At the time, I thought all professional directors threw chairs.)
Many years later, I ran into our lead, Duke Lafoon, at an audition in New York. He's still working regularly in theater and television.
A full recording of the musical (with a different cast) is available here.
Ben with Lesley Larson and Amanda Duff
(photo by Claudia Schwab)
DIRGE
High School Production
November 17-19 and December 3, 1994
by Jerome McDonough
with Amanda Duff, Lesley Larson, and Sam Rude
Role: Jody McKenna
Rockbridge County High School
The first leading role I ever played.
Jody McKenna is a poor kid from a broken home. When he witnesses a violent altercation at a neighbors home, the judge assumes Jody’s at fault and sentences him to the death penalty.
It doesn't end well.
We took home first place in the District Festival Competition, but at the Regional Festival Competition we lost out to — if I remember correctly — a play that featured a lot of umbrella sword fighting.
BIG RIVER
High School Production (Musical)
1995
music and lyrics by Roger Miller, book by William Hauptman
dir. David Sorrells
with Boise Holmes, Molly Quinn, Fred Rice, and Nate Weida
Role: Ben Rogers
Chapel Hill High School
In 1995, I left Virginia to join my dad in North Carolina, where he was on sabbatical for the year. Spending sophomore year at Chapel Hill High — where we performed in the stunning Hanes Theater — changed my life. I’d never met people as deeply passionate about plays and musicals as I was.
One of them was a fellow sophomore named Nate Weida. Later that spring, after we’d played Tom Sawyer’s friends in Big River and hardworking cowpokes in Oklahoma!, Nate wrote and mounted a full-length musical, Commander Squish, starring our Curly (Scott Speiser) and Molly (Laurie Williams).
Ten years later, I performed the title role in New York, and twenty years later, Nate and I wrote a musical together.
After I was kidnapped as Robert Anderson in Shenandoah, murdered as Harry Beaton in Brigadoon, slaughtered as a young soldier in Red Badge, and executed as Jody McKenna in Dirge, my parents were relieved that nothing particularly terrible happened to Ben Rogers in Big River.
director David Sorrells
writer/performer Nate Weida
OKLAHOMA!
High School Production (Musical)
1996
music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II
with Scott Speiser, Iva Taylor, Molly Quinn, and Nate Weida
dir. David Sorrells
Role: Ensemble
Chapel Hill High School
After graduation, our Curly (Scott Speiser) joined The Blue Man Group and had a recurring role on Amazon's The Tick, and our Laurie (Molly Quinn) become a professional soprano, performing in classical concerts across the world and even singing backup for The Rolling Stones at Barclays Center.
DREAMWALK
High School Production
1996
by Eddie Kennedy, dir. Linda Gorman
Role: David
Rockbridge County High School
Though heartbroken to leave Chapel Hill High, I was excited Linda Gorman had taken charge of the drama program at RCHS. She was smart and dedicated, and despite a school administration that preferred athletes to actors, she persisted.
In Dreamwalk, I played a doomed young cancer patient who falls in love with a fellow patient.
Ben (center) with the cast of The Man Who Came To Dinner
THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER
High School Production
1997
by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, dir. Linda Gorman
with Sam Rude (Banjo) and Justin Tolley
Role: Sheridan Whiteside
Rockbridge County High School
My first leading role in a full-length play. Sheridan Whiteside, a golden-voiced radio celebrity, is universally loved by his adoring listeners and generally loathed by anyone who actually knows him.
In those days, I thought my first line ("Great dribbling cow!") was pretty harsh language. This was before I worked with Tommy Smith.
CURCULIO
High School Production (Latin)
August 1997
by Plautus
Role: Therapontigonus Platagidorus
Virginia Governor's School (Latin Academy)
The ancient Roman comedies of Plautus defined the comedic types (the wily servant, the horny old man, the callow young lover, the hooker with a heart of gold) that found their way into Commedia dell'Arte and persist in present-day sitcoms.
At Latin Academy, an intensive summer program for spectacularly geeky kids like me, we spoke conversational Latin at meals, studied Roman history and literature, and performed Plautus' Curculio in the original Latin.
I played the braggart soldier Therapontigonus Platagidorus—better known to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum fans as "Miles Glorious".
I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY
High School Production
1997
by Celeste Raspanti, dir. Linda Gorman
Role: Pavel Friedman
Rockbridge County High School
A play inspired by children's poems collected from Terezin concentration camp.
Was the enormity of the Holocaust a reasonable subject for a short one-act at a Southern high school? I don’t know, but this play made an enormous impression on me, and I still think about it.
GODSPELL
High School Production (Musical)
1998
music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by John-Michael Tebelak
dir. Linda Gorman
with Brevin Balfrey-Boyd, Meredith Cox, Valery Estabrook, Jennifer Harris, Brennan Harvey, Kellan Harvey, Tiziana Lopez, Jonathan Mayer, Jenny Parker, Lauren Robbins, Sam Rude, Jeff Schwab, Justin Tolley and Macon Williams
Role: Jesus
Rockbridge County High School
above, Ben (back center) with the cast of Godspell
below, Ben with Sam Rude in "All For the Best"
Lexington, Virginia’s a small town, and people still talk about this production.
Godspell has a quintessentially ragtag glory, a quality that may actually be tougher to achieve with slick professional performances than with a group of plucky public school kids putting on a show.
(Whether it’s an appropriate choice for a public high school is another story.)
Our fantastic director Linda Gorman assembled an extraordinary group of students. Justin later joined the New York NeoFuturists, and Valery’s now a Brooklyn-based video and installation artist. Our choreographer Jenny Parker — later Obama’s Chief of Staff for the Department of Housing and Urban Development — knew her way around a flap-ball-change before she became an expert in public policy. Sam Rude, my best friend, played Judas; we’d lose touch with each other after graduation.
Godspell wasn't Mrs. Gorman's first choice. She'd initially proposed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, then Oklahoma!, both of which our administration rejected as "too risqué".
Ironically, I'd done both shows already, more or less.
(Though to anyone not fluent in dead languages, Plautus’ play sounds a lot less lascivious in the original Latin.)