"Step Nine" at the BorderLight Fringe Festival (2023)

Nicholas Chokan & James Alexander Rankin
"Step Nine"
(Give me your keys, 2023)

Last year, James Rankin asked me to write a short play for his new theater project, “Give me your keys.” Specifically, he wanted a piece that could be performed in a bar by two men in their thirties, and by a bar he meant an actual bar. A site-specific piece.

The play I wrote is called Step Nine, an intensely private conversation between two old friends and artistic collaborators who share shameful and complicated secrets. I could have called it You’re So Vain, because of the several people who came to see it performed this weekend, former and present collaborators who thought this play might be about them.

The piece was performed four times this past weekend as part of the BorderLight Fringe Festival, a new and exciting eclectic festival of works produced by artists from near and far. It was a dizzying weekend, and I was delighted to see several other shows but not nearly as many as I would have liked to. And the shows I did attend, most were filled to capacity. There were so many folks downtown for this festival!

Step Nine was set in the Snug at Parnell’s Pub in Playhouse Square, which also happens to be where I celebrated my fiftieth birthday. The Snug is indeed snug, an alcove off the main room, and though the show was free you could say we “sold out” as for each thirty minute performance the place was packed.

James directed the piece, and until Thursday evening I hadn’t even seen a rehearsal. Nick Chokan played one character, the other by three other actors who cycled through the performances, including James himself, Jason Leupold and Luke Brett. They spoke at a conversational level, motivating the audience to lean in.

Folks who arrived late and couldn’t fit into the room craned their necks through the doors, some on Friday night opting to wander away to the bar and instead contribute to the cacophony which had made it hard for them to hear.

“I thought, while watching it, and for long afterwards, whether I could forgive. Whether I can. Whether I should.” - Samantha C.

Standing outside the Snug on Friday night, someone confided it felt inappropriate to bring drinks into a room for a “step nine.” That’s one of the twelve steps outlined by Alcoholics Anonymous where you apologize to those you have wronged. I understand it’s one of the most difficult steps.

Reaction to the piece was very positive. Even when I couldn’t hear the actors (after the first show I stood outside the room) I could hear the laughter. I could see what was happening. And when the performance concluded the applause was loud and generous. But folks also said it was disturbing. I think I need to accept the fact that I write disturbing plays.

 

UPDATE: BorderLight Theater Festival presents The Right Room, a new play by David Hansen and directed by Jasmine Renee, July 16 - 19, 2025. Help support our production by dropping a donation on our GoFundMe campaign! 

Play a Day: The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up

Carla Ching

For Sunday, I read The Two Kids Who Blow Shit Up by Carla Ching and posted at New Play Exchange.

When I was younger, I held the belief that I would have one of those relationships which lasted my entire life, from childhood and on through to whenever. I held onto this belief for longer than was necessary, but when I look back it really wasn’t that long. Life really does seem to go on forever when you’re in the middle of it.

Still, I love those stories that span decades about people who are each other’s one, less than perfect soulmates, much more than friends.

Max and Diana were united when their parents began sleeping together, and over the next thirty years they manage their folks and themselves, two souls entwined in a need for trust, for having one person that they can entirely count on.

And that’s hard. To be the child of divorce, to have addictions, enter into unstable relationships. To clean up after each other’s messes, and those of their parents. It’s a very touching, soul-bearing work that jumps back and forth in time, from childhood to middle years, and all points in between, creating a tapestry of love and dependence. It’s worth it to have someone.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Junk Bonds

Lucy Wang

For Sunday, I read Junk Bonds by Lucy Wang whose work is posted at New Play Exchange.

Here's a story. Twenty-five years, I had burned my prospects to the ground. My ex-wife was gone, my theater company had broken up, I was waiting tables, living alone, and needed a hernia operation.

So naturally, I auditioned for a play.

In 1994 Junk Bonds received the Chilcote Award for Best Play at the Cleveland Public Theatre 13th Annual New Plays Festival, and received a full production there in May 1995.

I believed I was perfect for the role of Connor, a hyperkinetic trader in his early 30s and losing his hair, but instead was offered the role of Kent, an ex-Marine in his "early-to-mid 40s" which is to say someone entirely unlike me. I was sorely miscast and should have turned down the part outright, and that is a lesson I offer to my young protégés. You feel like you have to say yes to absolutely everything, even if it doesn't feel right. I tell them there is always another play.

The scene is a financial services firm, the plot regarding one trader sinking the company through incremental, overwhelming loss. A quarter century on, the script is as relevant as ever. But it is a time capsule from when the trading floor was dominated by men and the business was done almost entirely over the phone. Before the internet, before 9/11, before the housing meltdown of 2008, and yet it could happen again.

Wang's rapid-fire banter, chatter and verbal abuse is deliriously loopy, poetry in and of itself, where masculaine toxicity is a sport, one the protagonist Diana, a Chinese-American, the new girl, has to learn or lose.

I didn't understand half of what I was saying, way back then. That's okay, the director didn't either. What I should have caught was the use of the word "junk" as in heroin. Because this play is totally about addiction.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Balm In Gilead (1989)

"Balm In Gilead" by Lanford Wilson, directed by Dennis L. Dalen
(Ohio University School of Theatre, 1989)

Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
- Jeremiah 8:22

“‘Disintegration’ is the best album ever!”
- Kyle Broflovski, South Park

Nineteen Eighty-Nine was the greatest year in musical history. This is a point of some debate, but I know it to be true. Psychologists have explained that each individual believes the music released in one’s twenty-first year will generally be regarded as superior to all others.

But come on, Paul’s Boutique, Three Feet High and Rising, Deep, Pretty Hate Machine, I could go on. Disintegration is indeed the best album ever, and well describes my own psyche at the end of my third year in college, when it was released.

I had gone from second-year golden boy to third-year pariah, and started my fourth-year in perhaps the most mentally correct place I have ever found myself. I learned that I need to get my professional shit together and was ready to just bear down and work until graduation.*

The undergraduate production that fall was Balm In Gilead by Lanford Wilson, a production which opened thirty years ago tonight. An ideal play if you want to cast as many people as possible, Wilson’s work is a hipster fantasia taking place in and around a twenty-hour diner frequented by the addicted, sex workers, and also thieves, hustlers, and criminals.

Joe (Peter Voinovich) and Darlene (Susan Hobrath)

All my best friends, my contemporaries, were in this production (except Jules, who was across the alley, performing in Hurlyburly) and we all underwent a deep, focused investigation of the world of heroin users, expending the kind of time on research that was so plentiful at school, even if we were unaware of it.

We had scheduled a meeting with a therapist at the campus addiction recovery center. I knew absolutely nothing about heroin, save for having watched Sid & Nancy. What I learned became quite valuable, as I will soon point out.

We did not need to study the time period, because director Denny Dalen did not set it in any specific time period, or to be more accurate, we were each from different eras, as though we were walking through some kind of purgatory.

Larry was a 70s street hustler, with picked out Afro, Pete a Miami Vice styled wannabe kingpin in a blazer and T-shirt. Ricky in all-white disco attire, Susan a 60s flower-child, Lisa a hard-boiled 1950s waitress with small apron and snood.

Me, I was the narrator, an addict named Dopey in a mid-80s Deep Purple T-shirt and a high school varsity jacket. My long hair ratted out and my first real beard, I have deeply warm feelings about this costume. Much love to designer Tavia DeFelice.

The script is very challenging to read, as several conversations can be happening at once. You had to say your line in the order it appears on the page, but you might be responding to something someone said three lines back. But the more we did it, the more we heard it, and the more it became like a kind of word jazz.

I remember the week leading up to opening was particularly tough. Denny had something for everyone, and more for some than others. The underclassmen were a pain, as they debated every observation Denny had for them, responding with some explanation for how the way they were doing it made sense.

There's a saying. "Take the note." Don't argue with me. Do it.

One night, before we started in with notes, someone speculated on how long notes were going to go, and how wearying it all was.

Self as Dopey

“Not for David,” said one of the second-years. giving me the side-eye. “He never gets any notes.”

I was a little too quick to respond. “No, I don't. But if I did I’d be sure to pitch a fit about them.”

It got better. Denny was not happy with the penultimate dress, and everyone knew it.

He said, “David is the only person on this stage who knows where he’s coming from and where he’s going to,” or words to that effect.

I don't usually remember compliments, but I remember that. A couple years ago, when posting about Greg Vovos' play, How To Be a Respectable Junkie, I recounted my experience in preparing for this play, and how close study of the text and an understanding of the effects of heroin made it possible for me to pick apart the threads of conversation and develop a clear map of (as the man said) where I was coming from. Where I was headed to.

Check out the post, the playwright makes it all crystal clear.

So yeah, I was proud of myself, for being the professional, for embodying a whole character and being confident about it. It has been a very long time since I have had the opportunity to dive so deeply into a character.

But the whole production was like that, it was practically immersive. Balm was staged in the Forum, a deeply thrust stage. The set (Daniel N. Denhart, designer) inspired by Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the non-present walls of the diner clearly defined by light (James A. Gage, designer) all organey warm inside, and bluishly cold out.

The script is a symphony of despair, one that repeats night after night, as we lounged about the set, crouching in corners, shivering, when we weren’t on. Smoking live cigarettes. Spitting.

DOPEY: (turns to face the audience) Are you getting any of this?

And who knows. Maybe I could have been an actor.

"Balm In Gilead" by Lanford Wilson and directed by Dennis L. Dalen, at the Forum Theater at Ohio University, November 3 - 11, 1989.

*Side Note: Fall Quarter 1989 I had roles in three productions, the mainstage and two fourth year studio plays, whereas all other fourth years were in only two. In addition to Dopey I also played the Fire Chief in Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" and in Tennessee Williams' "The Gnädiges Fräulein," the Cockalooney Bird.

Play a Day: Undead Anonymous

Gina Femia

For Monday I read Undead Anonymous by Gina Femia, and available at New Play Exchange.

I've been reading a lot of folk tales from Morocco. Like tales from everywhere, when you read several you begin to pick up themes, storylines and characters which are repeated and reflected across the earth. We're all human, and we tell a lot of the same stories.

However, there are also the regional differences, many of which are the result of religion or landscape. The Moroccan tales have a lot of holes, holes in the earth. People are punished by being thrown down deep holes.

Also, there are the ghouls. We have an idea of what that means in the West, though perhaps not a clear idea because (unless you're from Cleveland) no one really knows what a ghoul is because we've never had a series of books, films or programs about ghouls. So we do not know the rules for ghouls.

My play On the Dark Side of Twilight is all about the rules, the rules for vampires which have evolved over the course of the past two hundred years. The rules are literal; can't walk by day, must drink blood, they sparkle (wait, what?) They are also metaphoric, the vampire symbolizing the fears we have; fear of immigrants, fear of sexuality, fear of addiction.

Femia's play is very funny, and a tremendous performance challenge; a monodrama through which one actor performs all of those attending a support group for "the undead." Through their monologues, memoirs and confessions, they share their fears, disappointments and anger at having been separated from humanity. These lost and lonely people (for monsters are people, too) eloquently describe their situation with wit and passion, each a unique example for the denial and acceptance of illness, addiction, difference in its many forms.

We all strive for acceptance, from each other and from ourselves, and some come by best through solidarity. Undead Anonymous is a lovely elegy of hope.