“Marat/Sade” was my last show with The Public Theatre.  I was saying aloha to Hawaii and flying off to Atlanta soon.

I was supposed to do Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with The Honolulu Theatre For Youth and Wally Chappell but it fell through so I went into “Marat Sade.”  I played an inmate in the asylum that the entire play is set in, and I remember doing crazy-person makeup and dirty, ratted hair with greasy tips to go along with the filthy shifts all the inmates wore.  The play is a play-within-a-play, a performance the inmates give for some important visitors that goes awry, to say the least.  For me, with no real lines because I wasn’t supposed to be in the show, it was all about behavior, with some interesting interactions in vignettes with other inmates, most of them graphic, lewd, or shocking, or all three at once.  But that’s not why this show is so memorable for me.

My mom came to this show, as she had come to most of my performances, and I wondered what she thought of it, the kind of show it was.  So after the performance, when I saw her, I asked, thinking of how outrageous and graphic the show was and kind of smirking in my mind thinking of my mom’s response to such a show, “So, mom, what’d you think?”  Usually it’s oh, nice show, good, so funny, I liked it, etc., etc.  But when I asked her that night, she just looked at me for a bit, like she didn’t know what to say.  I thought later it was like she didn’t quite know who I was.  And then she said, quietly, I remember, “You were good.”

She saw something, I thought, and it wasn’t her son, it was a crazy, grotesque, obscene inmate.  She saw an actor.  That moment, as much as anything else that had gone before, told me I was ready to fly to Atlanta, and to the rest of my career.  Aloha indeed.