1. OBLATION is a recent play you’ve submitted to The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. What is it about?
Johnny Chromik is returning home to McKee’s Rocks, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, after having served five years in Florida for having tried to set up a meeting with a 13 year old girl. He, a now former English teacher, has lost not only his own wife and daughter, but any true significance in his life. His last remaining hope of some emotional, spiritual contribution at least to his family is to somehow uplift his 22 year old nephew Eddie Minukas, whom Johnny suspects of having a substance abuse problem of which his parents Maggie (Johnny’s sister) and Gus are entirely unaware.
Maggie and Gus have just returned from watching the Steelers, where their team has just gone “O” for October. Maggie and Gus now go to different bars as Maggie honors her father’s dying wish that she take his ashes to what was his favorite bar. So now Maggie and Gus “worship” in different establishments, Gus unwilling to give up the bar where he has seen the Steelers win six Super Bowls. (Plus wearing his lucky jersey and his underpants inside out. Where would the Steelers be without him?)
The piece remains eminently theatrical as a sensuous African-American woman haunts the interior of Johnny’s mind, she the only one able to perceive his dishonesty. She becomes integral to the climax of the play, allowing Johnny at long last to admit the true magnitude of his sickness.
2. Why was it important to you to write this play, and what do you hope the audience will take away from it?
Our society today is plagued by sickness. Yes, perhaps this is not new, but with the dawn of the internet and social media, it is not a stretch to suggest that our thoughts and feelings are forced to penetrate a very flawed filter. Obsessive/Compulsive behaviors emerge like lust, as in this play, or alcohol and drugs. It is not implausible (although this is NOT what this play is all about) that the anger, prejudice, hatred and befuddling prevarication that occurs throughout society are not just a disease, but more a medication for that disease. I too have my own medications. As a playwright, I have no desire to “preach to the choir.” We must have a new understanding.
3. When did you begin writing and what was the prompt?
I began writing Oblation when a friend of mine, who’d set up via the internet to meet a 13 year old boy in Florida was actually the victim of an FBI sting. I wrote letters to him, understanding that though what he did was wrong, he was not an evil person. He was a good man. A very good man….yet would not admit that he had a problem!
And Maggie taking her father’s ashes to the Steelers bar? In 2015 I was in a Steeler bar in Virginia Beach and there she was! She would be a character in a play of mine some day, but not for a couple of years.
4. Tell us about yourself.
I am an actor/playwright in the Washington suburbs of Gaithersburg, Maryland. I have had just enough success to delude myself. My acting forays include a bevy of Irish plays, plus being a member of a small non-Equity Shakespeare company called Avant Bard. I am currently basking in the afterglow of having been in Wonder Woman 1984, which has at long last been released and my presence not only survived the final cut, but turned out about as well as one line can turn out! I’ve had around twenty productions of my plays and am currently represented by Gary Da Silva in Los Angeles, who also represents the estates of Neil Simon and Larry Gelbhart. I work one day a week as a newscaster at Voice of America.
5. What are you working on now?
Sometimes characters roll around in my head for ten years before I find a play to fit them in. For years I had a grandma who ran a phone sex service for people into bestiality. At long last in 2009-10 I found a place for her in Mookie Cranks a Tater! which played to glowing reviews in Buffalo, New York. In my head now is a struggling actor in 1937 who’s has an opportunity to audition for an MGM movie going soon into production.
6. What is coming up next for you?
Nothing…that I know of. Last time I said that to anyone at the beginning of the New Year in 1997, within short weeks I sat in for Dick Cavett on his very short-lived radio show in New York. Quite an experience. I’m glad it was because I never got paid.