Writer, actor collaborate on off-Broadway show

Photos Courtesy of Raphael Badagliacca
Raphael Badagliacc is the author of ‘GPS,’ which was recently performed off Broadway.

A playwright who is a former borough resident, and an actor who is a current borough resident, recently collaborated on an off-Broadway production about travelers having surreal encounters with their car’s global positioning system.

Running from Jan. 24 to Feb. 4, at Producers Club Theatre, the 90-minute show is titled “GPS.” It is the creation of Raphael Badagliacca, who lived for 26 years in Glen Ridge, but moved to Montclair in 2018. The actor is Deb Maclean, founder and director of the improvisation troupe, Lunatic Fringe.

Badagliacca, who worked out of his house, at the corner of Forest Avenue and Baldwin Street, founded two advertising agencies and a software company and said there was a joke that at one time or another, everyone in the borough worked for him. He attended Chaminade High School, in Mineola, NY, and Columbia University, where he majored in comparative literature.

“I’ve always had a desire to keep writing,” he said. “I created my high school’s literary magazine and it still exists.”

While in his college junior year, he worked full-time for The New York Times, and for another six months after graduating.

“No one could believe I got the job or would leave it,” he said. “But I left to live in Paris for almost two years. It was my mythology. That’s what American who wanted to be writers did.”

Back in America and married, he wrote a book of autobiographical vignettes, “Father’s Day: Encounters with Everyday Life.”

Darren Gage, the Glen Ridge High School Band director, suggested to him that the vignettes be read by different borough fathers. This introduced Badagliacca to the idea of dramatizing his stories.

He wrote seven stand-alone scenes about an automobile passenger and driver interacting with a GPS. They were connected with musical interludes.

“The set was simple,” Badagliacca said. “It was a driver and a passenger on two blocks of wood as an imaginary car. A GPS, embodied as an attractive woman, enters the conversation.”

Ten actors played the 10 roles. The couples were a husband and wife, hitmen, sports rivals, twins, friends with midlife crises, pandemic refugees and “people living on the edge.”

“What the theater has shown me,” he said, “is that you can write something out of your head, hand it to an actor and director, and when they hand it back, you’ll see things you didn’t before.”

Maclean studied Russian at UCLA and taught it at the University of Southern California. She has been a borough resident since 1996. In 1997, she established Lunatic Fringe. The six-member troupe performs every second Saturday of the month at the Glen Ridge train station. About 13 scenes are performed for the 90-minute show.

“Everybody thinks it’s weird we rehearse, but my objective when I direct is that anyone can do anything,” Maclean said. “A lot is like basketball. We practice the same thing a million times. And the best improv is based on the real. You can create a weird world, but it has to be based on the real.”
In improv, she said, the “gift” is crucial.

“The ‘gift’ is knowing what a person is good at performing,” she said. “It’s giving the other person a reason to do what they’re good at.”

In “GPS,” Maclean performs in two scenes: “Two Broads and a Diva,” and “Homecoming.”

“Two Broads and a Diva” is about two friends, one a divorcee who is pumping the other for information because her friend is dating her ex-husband. The women have a dieting pact and the GPS is directing them to an exercise guru. When the friends reach an understanding and tensions abate, they turn off the GPS and head for cheeseburgers.

In “Homecoming,” a twin brother and sister are traveling to see the family homestead. Their parents are dead and they must decide what to do with the property.

“This is a sweet play,” said Maclean.

Maclean is currently working with a Teaneck theater group which is giving readings of all Edward Albee plays.

“Doing Albee is different,” she said. “He gives the actor lots of very specific directions. It’s kind of like reading music. A nice thing about Albee is that he had a bad relationship with his mother. I get to play a lot of mothers.”

Information about the Albee readings can be found at: BlackBoxPac.com.