The Women’s Club of Glen Ridge presented a dramatic reading of a play Friday evening, Feb. 23 titled “Brother Act.” It was written by borough resident David Shaw.
About 100 people came to hear performances by Heather Wallace, as Sarah, playing an art gallery owner, and Troy Hall, as Daniel, her husband and a working actor. The couple have a transgender child who is unseen. Also performing was Matthew Walton, as Craig, Daniel’s older brother and a former actor, and Jennifer Nolan, playing Amanda, an actor performing with Daniel.
In the story, Craig has come unexpectedly to stay with his brother and wife in their New York apartment. He is pretty much over the hill with the saving grace of knowing it. Although he is in his early 40s, he lives on the edge of college, smoking pot, drinking, asking women the color of their panties and giving motorists the finger.
Daniel, his all-forgiving brother, while recognized as a talented actor with a bright future, is enamored of the bottle and not his craft. For this, he is criticized by Craig. Sarah is caught between them, but the tension of “Brother Act” is that we do not know how much she is caught. She is a concerned wife, but Craig once meant something to her and Daniel believes she slept with him. Although she wanted to, she did not because Craig was too stoned.
In an interview after the performance, Shaw said he had been working on “Brother Act” for about a year. His wife, Elizabeth, is the office manager for the women’s club which had recently upgraded its stage and welcomed the opportunity to present “Brother Act.”
“I’ve been performing with the Gas Lamp players for about 17 years,” Shaw said. “I’m pretty much in all the shows and I’ve been writing most of my life.”
Shaw said he worked in transportation sales — “a lucrative business for someone without a college education.”
He said the play was loosely based on his relationship with his brother and when told he wrote effective dialogue, he joined a NYC theater co-op to finish the script.
“I thought it would be easy,” he said, “but it was hard. I could write dialogue, but here you had to tell a story.”
Shaw said he received significant guidance from the people at the co-op and the actors in his cast, three whom he knew from Gas Lamp.
“All of the characters had reiterations,” he said.
A basic problem Shaw said he confronted was how to create empathy for his characters.
“I had to soften Craig and harden Daniel,” he said. “I did this by creating more of their pasts. Craig was good to her when Daniel wasn’t there. That was an important leap.”
Shaw was referring to the dialogue explaining how, after her son’s sex change, Sarah was visited by Craig who flew from San Francisco to be with her while Daniel performed in Chicago. Shaw said the idea for installing the transgender son into the play was a “device,” suggested to him to prompt Craig’s actions.
“It’s a neat trick to create depth for a character,” Shaw said. “But I’ve got more to learn. The reading was very special for me. I never had a work read before an audience.”
He said he was nervous for the week before it.
“People were paying to see this,” he said. “It was like I was back at my old job. No amount of confidence I had made any difference.”
But when he heard the audience laugh, he was relieved, but surprised because the audience found some things funny that he did not.
The script was originally 180 pages and ran about three hours. It was whittled down to 60 pages and 90 minutes.
“I was rewriting on Friday, the night of the performance, and it messed them up,” he said, referring to a humorous moment in the reading when Walton, performing Craig, and Wallace, performing Sarah, stop reading to look at each other’s script. Wallace, it was determined, had the correct script and they both read from that.
“The play is good, but it could be better,” Shaw said. “I’m sentenced to still working on it. There was a lack of rhythm and some cadence issues.”
Although in writing “Brother Act” Shaw envisioned a staged performance with silences in the dialogue, he knew pauses were unworkable for a reading.
“I read playwrights and like to know what’s going on in a play,” Shaw said, “but I think I have an intuitive grasp of this ‘mishegas’. That’s Yiddish for crazy stuff.”
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