[NEohioPAL] REVIEW: The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey

[Tom Wachunas]

A CompellingIllumination of ‘Different’

By Tom Wachunas 

 

‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it mustfollow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ – fromShakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3

“A much-needed, beautiful testament to the power of thehuman spirit and the power of being oneself.” - Craig Joseph

 

 PERFORMANCE: THEABSOLUTE BRIGHTNESS OF LEONARD PELKEY, written by James Lecesne, Directedby Abraham M. Adams, Starring Craig Joseph

A Seat of the Pants production, at Malone UniversityFounders Hall, 425 25th Street NW, Canton, OH  

Sunday, August 8th at 2PM (in person) / Saturday, August14th at 8PM (in person) / Friday, August 20th at 8PM (in person or all dayonline)

Tickets $20 - info at     www.seatofthepants.org/productions.


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Productions — Seat of the Pants Productions


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   This play is a marvelousone-man show and an otherwise brilliant tour de force of storytelling. Writtenby James Lecesne and here deftly directed by Abraham M. Adams, it stars CraigJoseph, who plays every character – eight in all – beginning with ChuckDeSantis, a frayed-at-the edges police detective with a fondness for quotingShakespeare, as in, “The evil that men do lives after them...” We might quicklythink we’re in for a rough ride when in his opening lines, he glibly declares,“… The dark side is my beat.” 

    For thenext 70 minutes, we watch and listen as he re-lives a case from 10 years ago, probingwhat happened to Leonard Pelkey, a fourteen-year-old boy who had gone missingin his Jersey Shore small town. The detective interviewed a bevy of local citizens.They included Leonard’s guardian, feisty “aunt” Ellen, who owned a local beautysalon and who refused to call the boy “gay,” preferring instead, “justdifferent”; Ellen’s jittery daughter, Phoebe; chain-smoking Marion, whotearfully recalled at one point how Leonard  “…saw us not the way we were, but how we hopedto be…”; Buddy, the British director of a local drama and dance school whotreasured Leonard’s uncanny theatrical talents; Otto, the German immigrant whoowned a clock repair shop where Leonard took refuge from the bullies whorelentlessly attacked him; and Gloria, the church-going, bespectacled widow ofa mobster, and who spotted one of Leonard’s signature  rainbow platform sneakers floating like anomen in the lake outside her home. Good news, this Leonard’s shoe, thought thedetective. And bad news. Leonard wasn’t attached.

    Yes, there’s eviland darkness and tragedy here. But that’s not the end of this ride. Evidencedby all the character’s very animated testimonies, most of the townsfolk judgedLeonard’s differentness to be somehow intolerable. “Too much,” they said. Yetin honestly recalling what he did and said, and how he did it and said it,hardened hearts were softened. It’s a bittersweet hindsight, to be sure. Onlywhen Leonard was gone from their midst did they see him, in all hisobjectionable “flamboyance” and quirkiness, as a bringer of light, indeed love.His undaunted trueness to himself gave them pause to examine their own lives inthat same light. 

    All of these characters come to credible lifethanks to Craig Joseph’s remarkable performance acumen. From the timbre of hisvarious accents (New Joisey, Britain, Germany) to the detailed nuances of bodylanguage, his expressivity is riveting, at once fiery, poignant and not withouta generous dose of edgy humor. He turns the playwright’s words into specific,tangible people with attitudes - funny, happy, frightened, angry, mournful -  switching from one to the next withastonishing speed and precision. And all of it is beautifully enhanced bylighting and sound elements designed by Micah Harvey and Megan Slabachrespectively. 

   This is beyond fineacting. It’s absolute magic.

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