In May 2004, David Holthouse's first-person article "Stalking the Bogeyman" ran in Westword, the Denver alternative journal where he was working as a reporter. In it, he recounted being raped by an older boy when he was 7 years old and his subsequent plans to kill the assailant a quarter-century after the event.
The electrifying, award-winning piece received national praise, but there was particular interest in Alaska. Holthouse and the rapist lived in Anchorage at the time of the assault. It took place here. Within a short time it was reprinted in both the Anchorage Press and the Anchorage Daily News.
In the past 12 years, "Bogeyman" (that's spelled "Bogey," as in the actor, not "Boogie" as in the dance) has established itself as a classic of modern, full-contact journalism. It reached a national audience via Ira Glass on "This American Life" in 2011. Stage director Markus Potter heard the show and contacted the author to talk about turning it into a play. The play debuted in September 2013 at the North Carolina Stage Company and had a New York off-Broadway run at New World Stages.
This month, the West Coast premiere will take place at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
There had been overtures about turning the original story into a movie, Holthouse told the ADN, but he wasn't interested. "They wanted to turn it into either a thriller or an after-school special," he said.
Potter's offer, on the other hand, immediately appealed to him. "He had me when he said 'live theater,'" Holthouse said. "I spent my youth going to live theater in Anchorage, the Theatre Guild, Alaska Rep."
Most importantly, he added, "Markus wanted to be faithful to my story."
Tweaking reality
Nonfiction theater is a rarity. Even historical dramas -- think "Julius Caesar" -- are largely made up to accommodate the artistic arc required by performed storytelling. Putting a newspaper essay onstage as a play required injections of non-journalistic creativity. Dialogue had to be written, for instance. That task largely fell to Potter and a team of stage writers, though Holthouse said it was re-created as close to the real conversations as he could remember them, particularly in the final scene.
That's the longest scene in the play, a confrontation between the adult Holthouse and the Bogeyman in which they just talk. Holthouse acknowledged that it probably doesn't conform with standard drama conventions but it is, in many ways, the most complex and revealing part of the script.
"It was important for me to get all of that out," he said.
Newspaper articles and other forms of the written word are pretty much set in stone when they go to press. Plays, on the other hand, tend to have a long gestation and undergo repeated revisions as the pages are performed, then returned to the writer who may have thoughts for improving the effect of what he's written.
"Bogeyman" is no different. It's been tweaked relentlessly since Potter and crew began work on it. One tweak that Alaskans may find superfluous is the explanation of what is meant by the word "cheechako," hardly necessary for the home audience.
"That was added after the North Carolina performance," Holthouse said. "One of the actors in New York said, 'Can we give this a little more Alaska flavor?'" So references to cheechakos and salmon were inserted.
Another and more significant change has been made for the Anchorage production. In the first shows, David, Holthouse's character, opens up to a psychiatrist. In the latest version of the play, the analyst has been turned into a drug dealer named Molly.
"It's a lot closer to what was really going on in my life at the time," Holthouse said.
Molly is smart-mouthed, lucid, observant and comes with her own horrific backstory, all compressed into a few lines. Actor Jasmine Saxby plays both that role and the part of the assailant's mother, Carol. Carol comes close to becoming wallpaper, which may be an accurate reflection for how most of us remember the mothers of other people from our youth. Saxby seems to spend at least as much time onstage as Carol as she does as Molly, but Molly is the part that pops out almost as much as the Bogeyman, played by Chris Evans, and David, played by Devin Frey, who is onstage for the entire 75-minute show.
The rest of the cast includes Emily Pratt as David's mother, Kevin Lee as his father and Justin Steward playing multiple roles that include the Bogeyman's father and a barrio gang leader who provides David with a gun and advice.
Molly, the most "invented" character in the cast, is also one of the liveliest. Though Frey and Evans gave strong and convincing portrayals in a run-through last week, delivering visceral punch after punch, it felt like they were testifying at a trial. Molly was the cross-examining attorney, the supplier of unexpected perspectives.
One listens differently to this character, and that probably has something to do with the freedom the writers had to shape her.
Theatrical or not?
UAA instructor Brian Cook, making his Anchorage debut with this play, said the benefit of presenting the story with flesh-and-blood actors gives it a new dimension.
"It's not about statistics," he said. "It's about a person and his family. The audience recognizes how much these kinds of things impact people."
And unlike a page of print, which you can set down when the details become too uncomfortable, the viewers in UAA's black box Harper Studio Theatre will have to ride out the maelstrom -- from a very close perspective. A stage occupies almost half of the theater. The actors will in some cases be toe-to-toe with the audience.
In addition, the fact that it takes place onstage stirs up an atmosphere that is, at best, only imagined while reading print. "The descriptions are opened up," Cook said. "It plays out more like the type of narrative we're used to from film and television."
Critic Neil Genzlinger, writing for The New York Times after the off-Broadway debut, called the resulting impact "riveting" and said, "The trip from page and airwaves to the stage has only deepened it."
On the other hand, Zachary Stewart, reviewing the same production for the online magazine TheaterMania, thought the play was "something less satisfying than the source material. Potter's adaptation traffics in something closer to moral absolutism, which is not nearly as mind-blowing as the tale of ambiguity and the unknown on which it is based."
And Matthew Murray's review for the "Talkin' Broadway" website missed the theater of the mind so vividly realized in Holthouse's original article. "The images our imaginations capture, and the blanks we necessarily fill in with our own feelings and prejudices, tend to evaporate once they're literalized." It was not "inherently theatrical," he said, arguing that we need to believe that oral history "has been embellished in the telling."
But this is not the case with "Bogeyman." It is ostensibly a "just the facts" exposition, much of it conveyed with long monologues from David. Even the Molly character is not embellished in a way that obviously departs from cold objectivity. That makes the play something fairly unique in the art form.
Cook said the production will travel to Palmer, where it will be presented at the Glenn Massay Theater on the Mat-Su College campus at the end of May. In June it will be included in the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez. There are tentative plans to take it to Homer, Seward and perhaps other places in Alaska.
The European premiere will take place in July in London. There are also productions scheduled in Florida.
Holthouse is now working on another play with Potter and company. "It's about a reporter who infiltrates the white supremacist movement," he said. Which sounds like some of the assignments he undertook while working for Westword. More nonfiction theater.
It could be that "Bogeyman" marks the start of a whole new genre.
STALKING THE BOGEYMAN will be presented at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, April 1-24, in the Harper Studio Theatre in the UAA Fine Arts Building. Author David Holthouse will be present for a Q&A session after the opening-night performance. Tickets cost $9-16 advance, $14-21 at the door, with discounts for students, seniors and military. Tickets are available at uaatix.com.