University Times

Larry Glasl is the kind of person who always wants to do what is right. So, when he is elected president of the United States, he sets out to do what he believes is best for the country.

Such idealism, however, has little place in Washington, D.C. Soon Glasl finds himself butting heads with various entrenched interests, powerful people who decide he should become the first president to disappear.

How Glasl manages to find his way years later to a secluded fishing village on the Maine coast is the mystery at the heart of "Monty by the Sea" by Chris Mackowski, assistant public relations director at Pitt's Bradford campus (UPB).

The play, Mackowski's first, recently was selected as the first original script to be produced by the Olean Community Theatre (OCT) in Olean, N.Y. It will be performed May 16-18 in St. Bonaventure College's Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. Casting calls for the play will be March 24 and 25. Interested members of the UPB community should contact Mackowski at 362-7505. "This is an exciting project for us because it expands our role as a community theatre," OCT President Daryl Johnson says. "Our mission is to provide an outlet for community members who enjoy performing, directing, and doing musical and technical work in theatre. This production expands that mission to include someone who enjoys writing for the theatre." In the play, the mysterious former-president Glasl befriends a 19-year-old woman struggling to make her mark on the world in the face of a series of misfortunes that befall her family. The young woman is pragmatic and realistic, while Glasl is enigmatic. Through the two characters, "Monty by the Sea" explores the conflict between reality and imagination, an individual's dreams versus doing what is expected by others.

"Larry [Glasl] in many respects represents surrealism and things that can't be explained," Mackowski says. "There are things in life that can't be explained, so I think people need to have this power to imagine or to dream or to believe there are things we can't understand. The world is not as pragmatic as we might like to believe." The underlying theme of "Monty by the Sea" is imagination, according to Mackowski. "Is there value to having imagination?" he asks. "Is there value in our every day lives for imagination, [a value] for the ability to dream?" Mackowski himself thinks imagination and dreaming are crucial to humanity, even if they lead to stories about aliens landing in Rosewell, N.M., and being captured and hidden by the Air Force, Big Foot wandering the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest or the Loch Ness Monster seeking refuge at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.

"I think that there is a romantic quality about those kinds of things," Mackowski says. "Yes, they're off-beat, they're strange. But it kind of appeals to the romantic in me to think there are some things out there that are beyond my ability to understand." News reports about the discovery of possibly fossilized microbes in a Martian meteorite are wonderful, Mackowski says. He loves the way such a possibility transcends the routine of daily life.

At the same time, though, Mackowski worries that he may have gone a little too far with his imagination by writing a play in which powerful interests cause a U.S. president to disappear. He does not want people to think he is someone who sees conspiracies behind everything involving the federal government, even though he is certain there are government cover-ups.

"There are wonderful, fantastic things that the government does for us," he says. "I think there also are some under-the-covers sort of things they do too, Iran-Contra, Watergate, those types of things. But I don't want to sound too much like Oliver Stone." Although the play is called "Monty by the Sea," there is no character in it named Monty. The title is a reference to Monty Hall master of ceremonies of the old television game show "Let's Make a Deal." The title symbolizes the chances people encounters in life that are beyond their control, and the way things work out for some people, but not for others.

Glasl, as Mackowski sees it, stands at the center of the play the way Monty Hall stood at the center of the game show. He is a constant surrounded by all types of wheeling and dealing.

Mackowski himself was in the right place at the right time when it came to "Monty by the Sea." Inspired by the rock song "Monty Got a Raw Deal" by REM, Mackowski wrote a short story called "Monty by the Sea" while he was a graduate student at the University of Maine in 1994.

Although Mackowski is not sure what REM wanted to say with the song, his own interpretation pointed to the fact that "sometimes people try as they might to do well, but they just get the raw end of the deal. That's kind of the way I looked at the story. My main character is a symbol for good and yet somehow, through forces beyond his control, ended up with the short end of the stick." A long-time community theatre actor, Mackowski began rewriting the story as a play in July 1995 and completed it in November 1996. After Mackowski finished the play, he showed it to a friend who is involved with the Olean theatre. At the time, he was only looking for some feedback on the work, to find out whether or not it was entertaining or interesting to anyone besides himself.

As soon as the friend read the play, he wanted to submit it to the theatre company for production. Mackowski was flattered and totally taken aback when OTC opted to perform the work, the first original play the group has staged in it 18-year existence.

"What attracted me to the script was the imagination of 'Monty by the Sea," OTC President Nelson said. "There is an almost surreal quality to parts of it, which exemplifies the central issue the show deals with, the value of imagination." Mackowski himself calls the opportunity "very exciting. It's a little different than the regular public relations work I do, which is probably the understatement of the week."

–Mike Sajna