From: Michele Jackson
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc
Subject: Re: GH: Tony Geary's Play? (was Super Stalker Spoiler)
Date: 14 Aug 1996

> Michelle,
> What was the play about, what did you think of it, and how
> was Geary?

The play was about a guy who was sort of a Killer Forrest Gump. I don't know whether he was born with cognitive problems to begin with, but he was raised with a passive-agressive distant mother and a physically abusive father. The mother would goad him into doing things that set the father off (i.e. reciting the bible), the father would strike him and the mother would turn away, silently satisfied that she'd irked the father and oblivious to the boy's torture. Anyway, as a result he obviously grew up with a fragile mental state. He had a child-like quality about him, sweet and gentle; he married a woman who loved him, Sarah. She was like mother, lover, teacher and friend. She had an appendicitis attack. He took her to the hospital and she was getting worse and worse while the staff ignored her. He grabbed one doctor and BEGGED him to look at his wife, the doctor brushed him aside. He wouldn't examine Sarah, but he had time to stop in the busy emergency room and comb his hair (sound like Dorman?). Sarah died needlessly from a burst appendix. That night in the parking lot, he saw the doctor. He killed him and he took that comb that symbolized the doctor's apathy and he kept it. He left town after that. Then there were other killings. He killed someone who was hassling a little girl and could have been a physical threat to her in an alley, but eventually his justification for the murders grew less and less, more attenuated, his motive less direct. He killed an evangelist just because he thought he was robbing the public (well, religion was associated with violence and pain in his mind anyway, because of his childhood and his mother who used it as a weapon to discipline him and also to taunt his father) and lying to them (he would preach and collect thousands of dollars and then go and sleep with a male prostitute.

The protagonist saw 2 skinheads arrested on tv. They had committed a violent hate crime. He went to their school and had gone so far off the deep end that he was going to kill two boys because he thought they PROBABLY were the skinheads. So, he's sitting behind them in a movie and he's looking for the right moment to kill them. They are being loud and a black woman asks them to pipe down. Well, since these boys are suspected skinheads, Geary expects them to act in a racist manner, but they turn around and say, "Sorry ma'am, we'll keep it down." He realizes that he was just on the verge of taking two lives for no reason at all. Maybe the boys weren't the skinheads at all. Maybe they WERE the skinheads but they had reformed. Either way Geary's character had been about to take away two young lives that might have had value. He starts sobbing, breaks down and the woman comes over and begins to sing to him in an African language. He finds out the song is about God and in the end he is at peace with God. It was his religion that drove him to violence, because of the way it had been used when he was a child, but it was also religion (which was basically the only thing he'd had to cling to, since his parents were aliens) which redeemed him. That was the end.

The significant thing about it is that it was a one man play. Geary played all the characters himself with a change of voice or a change of mannerism. There were 40 different characters and he switched back and forth between them on a dime and I never had a problem distinguishing who he was at any given time or knowing who was speaking. There were no props except the momentos he kept from the murder victims (i.e. a small comb and some sparse furnishings). So, Geary became an expert in pantomine. He created a car, he created the prostitute's clothing and everything else by transferring them from his mind to ours. Also, the story wasn't told in plane chronological order, moving from one point to the other. The guy had these Vietnam-like flashbacks. He would be speaking normally and be in his gentle mode, when suddenly a flash would go off and he'd quote the scriptures mechanically or turn dark and violent suddenly. Towards the end, as he got sicker, his moods would become more volatile. Geary's gun was imaginary, yet when he got in his crazy, unpredictable mode the people in the small theater actually tensed because they didn't know when it would go off. So, it was a real tour de force for the man as an actor. Hope you weren't looking for a short answer *g*. Michele