When I fully and officially retired from theatre in 2013, my younger son Keelan was only eight years old. My older son, Declan, was eleven. This means that the person in their lives mostly likely to spark an interest in them for the artform is also the person who cut it out of his life when they were little.
I was mostly okay with this for most of the last eight years, but this May I was blessed with a unique opportunity, which caused my mind to start changing. May 21, 2021 was the 75th anniversary of the accident dramatized in my play Louis Slotin Sonata, and thanks to generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and additional support from Circle X Theatre and Trial and Error Productions, I got to produce a virtual “Zoom” performance of the play, directed by John Langs leading a cracker-jack cast and crew.
Running up to the night of the broadcast, we had no idea what kind audience we were going to have (as it turned out, quite sizable, thank you very much) but I found that in my heart of hearts the only two people I really I cared about watching it were my two sons. See, most of what I have written for the stage is for grown up audiences. So neither of my sons had ever seen a staging of one of my full-length plays. And I didn’t even know this sad fact bothered me until I had the opportunity to rectify it.
My sons enjoyed this virtual staging very much (or at least credibly claimed to, smart fellows.) And I subsequently promised myself to expose them to more theatre, when more theatre was available, especially now that they are both close to the age I was when I fell fully in love with the artform.
I never regretted not encouraging Declan and Keelan to do more theatre. They have their own interests, and to me there’s no one quite so cringey as the quintessential stage parent, foisting their dreams of show business glory onto their children in hopes of vicarious fulfillment. But, on the other hand… a man does prefer for his sons to understand what he wasted his youth on.
An added reason for taking them to this particular production of A Christmas Carol at ACT is the fact that neither one of them really knows the story beyond the Muppet movie version. (A fine iteration, for the record. No need to fight me in the comments on that point.) So I will be delighted indeed to sit with them and watch a great story, staged at one of Seattle’s great theatres, performed by actors I know and love.
