Jim Stowell will literally go halfway around the world just to get a good story. A prominent force in the local theater community for thirty-five years, the actor and playwright has developed a specialty in the last decade and a half as a master monologuist. His deeply personal tales—funny, angry, politically aware, and wry—draw from his experiences in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Amazon. His current project, Family Values, was originally produced at Bryant-Lake Bowl Theater in 1999. (You may also have seen him that year in the Jungle’s Macbeth.) Family Values depicts Stowell’s experiences growing up in a small Texas town on the Mexican border, and his late-nineties trip to war-torn Northern Ireland. The play explores why people hate each other, and why anger in the blood so often leads to the spilling of blood. Like many of us, Stowell found his perspective on that subject irrevocably altered in September 2001, and he decided to completely overhaul the play in light of the way we live and feel now.
The RAKE: The original version of Family Values was, to some extent, about the Cold War. You begin with boys throwing rocks at each other, and end with Americans and Soviets threatening to shoot rockets at each other.
STOWELL: That was the original concept, that direction. Guys in jets doing exactly the same thing as those boys. But we got to talking about that ending, and Richard Cook, the director, said, “Because of the changes in the world, I’m already way ahead of that business with the atomic stuff. We’ve just zoooomed past all those things.” And I agreed with him. We’ve completely redone the ending.
So where does the play go now?
What we’re looking at now is the connection between what I learned in Belfast and how that connects to 9/11, and us. There’s a story in the play about a woman named Maggie who’s caught on the bus in Belfast with a bomb strapped to her. That story was told to me in Belfast, but it was never explained that she was going to the airport and putting the bomb there and then getting in a car and driving away. It was assumed that I knew that. When I told the story in 1999, I never had to explain.
And after September 11th?
I sent the script off to some people, and they asked about the “suicide bomber.” The unspoken assumption had changed: not “bomber”; “suicide bomber.” Willing to live versus willing to die. A life and death difference. The world’s fundamental assumptions have changed. In the play, I say to an Irish woman, “You’re taking a bomb out to the airport, you’re going to blow up all these people like me. I’m an innocent civilian. What the hell is that? What’s the strategic value in killing somebody like me?” When I was in Belfast, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. Everywhere I went in the world, I saw myself as an innocent bystander. And that’s just not true now. None of it necessarily was true even then.
What is true now?
The world is not Belfast anymore. The world is Tel Aviv. It used to be Belfast, where the bombers try to make a getaway. Now they don’t even try to. And that fundamental change in consciousness we’re now bringing to the script.
You’re also changing the structure of the story around, breaking up the narrative from the original three solid chapters.
In the past, I’ve always written things integrated like a movie. There will be flashbacks. I’ll go back to Texas, and then come back up to the present. For this play, initially, I thought, “Gee, I’d like to do something different. I’ve been doing this for a long time.” And I got to thinking about it, and I realized that everyone who’s going to come see this play, ninety-nine percent of them have never seen any of my other work. 1998 was my last big show. Five, six years, that’s a generation of theatergoers. So I changed it back to the way I like to be doing it.
You’ve been doing monologues like Family Values since the eighties. How did you become interested in the form?
This was at the end of fourteen years as a playwright, so I was ready to evolve to the next step. I had a great working relationship with Patty Lynch of the Brass Tacks Theater; we did three or four monologues together. The first one we did, we didn’t know what we were doing—nobody had ever done it! We didn’t know what the hell to do. We showed up at rehearsals at night and said, “Jeez, what are we doing tonight?” We put our heads together and figured stuff out.
This was before Spaulding Gray?
This is what happened: Spaulding Gray came to the Illusion and filled their house twice. Two or three nights in a row. So the producer looks at that and says, “Ah, hm… Full houses. One person. No set. This really looks good.” Then she brings Kevin Kling and I, we do a show, and there are so many people every night they had to move the set back to put in more seats. The producer didn’t have to be a genius to go, “Oh, big hit, no expenses. Good idea, let’s do this again.”
It’s hard to strip it down any more than that.
It is. That’s just about as far as you can go with one person. Almost no set, and no costumes, and almost no music.
If only we could get rid of the actor, we’d really have something.
Yeah! They’re a pain anyway.
Jim Stowell’s Family Values
October 30-November 16
Park Square Theatre
20 W. Seventh Pl., St. Paul
(651) 291-7005
www.parksquaretheatre.org
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