By Eleanor Boudreau
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkno/local-wkno-893958.mp3
Memphis, TN – This is either a story about art imitating life, or it's a story about life imitating art.
Playhouse on the Square is finishing its run of Frost/Nixon, which is billed as a "modern Shakespearean tragedy." Shakespeare wrote that the purpose of acting is to hold "the mirror up to nature;" and Frost/Nixon is, of course, based on real events, but ask Jackie Nichols, the Executive Producer at Playhouse, what theater does, and he'll go a little further.
Nichols says theater, "Makes a difference in peoples' lives."
For an example Nichols chooses a musical he saw in New York called Next to Normal. It's about a woman with bi-polar disorder, and a son who died 16 years earlier. The son exists only as a hallucination in his mother's head, but is played on stage by a real-life actor.
"I almost lost my own son recently," Nichols reflected, "and that whole musical really spoke to my own feelings about my family and about my son. And it was great to sit there and just ball and cry."
Nichols' son Jordan was at the Blue Monkey when he suffered a heart attack. A waitress started to do CPR, and someone called Nichols. Nichols was there in about a minute and a half, but there was nothing he could do.
"I mean the only people that know what to do are doing it. All I can do is get angsted out and stay the hell out of their way," Nichols said.
Nichols watched and waited. It was a situation not unlike being an audience member at a play.
I asked Nichols--after his son's heart attack--when did he go see the play in New York? There was a dramatic pause. Nichols hummed the Jeopardy theme.
It turns out, Nichols saw the play before his son had a heart-attack.
"In my mind I've always been thinking that I saw it afterwards," he said.
So much for art imitating nature--but Nichols did cry at both. "It didn't seem any less real sitting in the theater," he said.