Alumnus Production Returns to Campus, Revised, Revamped

Author: Yvonne Chen
Staff Writer

Meet Avery, a deli owner from around Jersey and an everyday blue-collar guy. Avery is proud of his job, makes chit-chat with his regular customers and pontificates on the Yankees, the novelty of horse radish in sandwiches and other oddities of an ever-changing world outside. In one of the funniest moments in the play, Avery says to his nephew, " A man called for 200 pounds of hummus…. He says it's for a stag party [pause and a smirk], I don't even want to know!"

Paul is a high school kid prepping for his senior prom, waiting for his girlfriend who he excuses as "driving slowly" and who momentously raps about smooth sensation condoms and describes "his ejaculation like an emancipation proclamation" and his prom night as one involving "poppin' cherry."

Behind the façade of ghetto superstar wanna-be, however, we learn that Paul is just a kid who stills gets dropped off at school by a Land Rover, who just wants his father to teach him how to shave and to give him his first condom on one of the biggest days of his life.

Harold is psychopath rapist, whose crime is interrupted by constant phone calls from his mother. Threatening his victim with a shiny knife, he explains to her that all his life his mother has been dependent on him, that he can't just "cut the cord" and, like the little red button on her thermostat that he is constantly being called over to his mother's to press, Harold is yearning for the love that he never knew. Albeit he looks for it in all the wrong places, but he's looking nonetheless.

He confesses to his tied-up victim "I am a grown man…living in a freezing basement. My thermostat is broken. I am freezing…[pause]. Are you going to press my red button?"

These are just three of Jason Lemire's '01 seven characters in his one-man show "Pockets" that played this past weekend at the Hepburn Zoo.

There is also a little boy named Jeremy who comes to terms with his newborn sister's usurping his family status; a drunken best man named Daniel who in an embarrassing toast to the groom learns to accept his loss of importance in his brother's life; a stroke victim named Harvey who, in the presence if his son, blames him for his wife's death; and Mark, the pool shooter who is experiencing a bad divorce.

"Pockets" was a refreshing change of pace. In Lemire, we see a spirit completely independent from the expectations of drama in the academic environment as we know it.

This can be troublesome as the show may seem to be a bit incoherent, a bit patch-worked, seedy, unrehearsed and therefore a little too true to life for over two hours of show. One must keep in mind, however, that this one-man show is just that. "That is what is so great about the genre," says Lemire, who was inspired by the everyday characters and naturalist approach of solo performers like Danny Hoch (OBI winner at age 24 with his play "Some People" whom Lemire saw perform in a winter term class in 1999 by the name of "Going Solo."

Nevertheless, the independent creativity of writing, directing and performing of "Pockets" allows for a higher artistic freedom that one can't find in the re-workings of lauded playwrights. Whole episodes are improvised (the mirror scene in which a teenage boy getting ready for the prom cuts himself shaving for the first time and later when, as a four-year-old boy, the boy's He-Man figurine

Mark rants for an unlimited time over how to shoot the eight ball in a losing game of pool. Tormenting extensions of each scene pull us into the world of its characters, as if in real time, when one is afforded the time to toss back and forth the pain of psychological violence. One such moment occurs when we feel the inconsolable solitude of the old man, slobbering with drool and mumbling almost incoherently, as cries over his wife's death that has long past.

Given the absence of luxury, Lemire also makes clever efforts to make do with no more than a black wooden box, a fold-up chair, some clothing, a skillet, a knife, toy figurines, a glass of champagne and a pool stick.

For example, the wooden box that sits enigmatically on the stage before the opening scene, is first imagined as a short order stove, then transforms into a basin and mirror, a baby's crib, a hospital bed, a wedding banquet table and finally, a pool table.

"Pockets" is intense, at times hilarious, at times tear-jerking, but not wholly devoted to emotionalism for the sake of it. "Pockets" is a compelling contemplation on the every day as it is. Just as Mark delivers his last glib lines: "Doolsy, there's always a pocket that doesn't treat you right, but you have to keep shooting…. Every man is a sum of his losses," we learn that all the characters share a universal loss of something in their lives that was dear to them. Each character lives on despite their losses, and can continue only with a complete acceptance of their losses.

"If we don't find a way to live with the pockets, we're not really living, we're not really playing. We're doing something else, " says Lemire. The embodiment of a cautionary tale told seven ways, "Pockets" is a play that confronts the ugliness of life in the everyday as it brings out the beauty through a subtle acceptance for both the wins and losses and the hope for better things to come.

When a student, Lemire was a member of the Otters, student produced the plays "Son of the City" and "Art" and wrote, directed and performed in the play "Night Hawks." Lemire had also performed an original version of "Pockets" here on campus in '01 (directed by Jeff Price '01) as well as in the Producer's Club Royal Theater in New York City last fall. He has plans to perform at the Producer's Club as well as tour colleges with "Pockets" in the future.