As a theater person - actor, writer, director, designer, whoever - there are few moments more fraught than seeing your name in print. Sure, it can be tense to watch or perform in the show you helped create, but at least you’re in your element - that’s what you signed up to be a part of. But once someone else writes about what you did, you’ve ceded any vestige of control - the ephemerality of the stage becomes captured in printed words, and there’s nothing you can do to change it.
In the lower-lever dramatic purlieus in which I swirled for many years, this moment was especially complicated, as New York City print publications rarely condescended to acknowledge us. To even be considered, we would have to pay a press agent to beg and pester editors on our behalf - no promises, cash up front. And even if an editor came through, our efforts were often treated with a form of lofty disdain, like flies buzzing around the complacent cash cow of Broadway. For all our efforts, the results could be devastating - my first (and really only) legitimate New York Times theater review was an extravagant, scorched-earth pan that explicitly accused me of wasting the audience’s time.
So when my friend John DeVore announced that he was writing a theater memoir - one that covered the period of time when we worked together on shows - emotions ran high. One the one hand, excitement - how cool, I’m gonna be in a book! Nothing says “You’re important” like someone else being paid to spell your name right. On the other hand, foreboding. A 20-year-old article or review chronicling your artistic inadequacy is long forgotten (by everyone but me, at least), but books are intended to be more enduring. Do I really want my awkward past immortalized between someone else’s covers? People could take this out from the library, for christ’s sake.
To be clear, John’s book is by no means about me. John is a humorist and journalist who has twice won the James Beard Award for funny, moving essays that layer personal history and culture criticism into bittersweet burritos of insight. (You can follow his work on Medium and Substack.) His literary debut, Theatre Kids, is about how the stage provided a community that helped sustain him from adolescence through a messy entrance into adulthood. It’s about a young creative person striving - and generally failing - to find himself in turn-of-the-millennium NYC. It’s about grief, addiction, and failure; cheap laughs and expensive tears.
The “Jeff” who appears in this book plays a supporting role to John’s star turn. I’m one of an oddball troupe who participate in the quixotic production at the narrative’s center. In 2004, we both acted in one of the strangest and most intense performances I’ve ever been a part of: a four-hour staging of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that took place entirely in a small wooden box. Hope was in the show too, along with some of our closest friends. As a willfully abstruse avant-garde experiment, requiring an incredible amount of work for very low returns (only a dozen audience members could fit in the box a night), it was the ultimate test of our commitment to the artistic lifestyle - and the dramatic crux of John’s book.
In a number of scenes scattered through the book, John describes the affectionately competitive nature of our friendship. (Please note: He informs the reader not once but TWICE that he is jealous of my erudition.) I also get a nifty subplot about my struggles sharing a role with an 11-year-collaborator who somehow managed to bully me every time people’s backs were turned (an experience I might have to write about in more depth myself one day). But mostly, I’m part of the grizzled chorus of diehards who commit themselves body and soul to this doomed endeavor, an experience that makes John question all of his life choices to date.
So yes, I’m in there. But I’m also out here, in 2024, reading about events I participated in through someone else’s eyes. This could have been a profoundly uncomfortable experience - unpleasant memories bubbling up, the shock of getting caught in another writer’s headlights. Except for one thing: While reading the book, I discovered that, even if I’d never met John in my life, I’d still be in there.
While John’s personal story is the book’s structure and throughline, it’s also a wider meditation on what it means to be a “theatre kid” (note the deliberately archaic spelling). It examines the phenomenon of misfit kids across the country who turn to the pomp and circumstance of semi-respectable make-believe to find affirmation and camaraderie during the merciless process of learning who they are. I’m one of those kids, and I’d relate to his descriptions even if I’d never stepped on a stage after high school.
But on an even higher level, as with any good memoir, John’s story becomes ours. He invites us to share his struggles and decisions, even - especially - when they madden us. By making his personal story universal, he allows us to translate it back into the personal for ourselves. It helped me see that a good memoirist is like a good playwright who invites us to cast ourselves in the lead role. Playing the part requires empathy and imagination, but gives back double what you commit.
That said, it was pretty weird to encounter myself when walking in John’s footsteps. Enough about this Jeff guy - I want to know what happens to John. High praise coming from a narcissist like myself.
You can preorder John’s book here. If you’re in Brooklyn next week, he’s holding a launch party and reading at the Old Stone House in Park Slope on Tuesday, June 18 from 6-9pm. The site says it’s sold out, but just show up anyway. I’ll be there, and I’d be happy to sign your copy.
Are you in a book? I love talking to people who have been in books. Did you know that I’m in one too? Let’s compare notes!