Ed Schmidt, a playwright and performer who should be better known, stood behind a table with twenty-seven objects on it, which he said were found in a box belonging to a man named Edward O’Connell. One by one he picked up each object — a Bible, a group of four gaudy neckties, a pair of eyeglasses, a pocketknife, a Nader for President button – and told a story connected to it.
“Edward” evokes Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” with Schmidt as the character of the Stage Manager, but rather than the ordinary lives of an entire town, the play pieces together the life of one ordinary man. The man, like the town, is exquisitely rendered — and fictitious. I eventually realized that Edward O’Connell is a creation of Ed Schmidt’s imagination because paradoxically the cumulative portrait of this long-time high school English teacher from New England is so realistic — too detailed about the man’s intimate life and his private thoughts for the playwright to have had such access to somebody we’re told died 13 years ago and left no memoir, nor letters; only this box.
There are two ways in which Schmidt deliberately makes “Edward” an unconventional theatrical production. It is being performed over the next six weeks in a series of independent bookstores in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. (I saw it on its first night, at the Rizzoli Bookstore on Broadway.) And the order of the objects whose stories Schmidt tells is determined at random – or, more precisely, by members of the audience whom he picks at random to choose the next item.
Schmidt has been creating such unusual works of theater – one-person plays for small audiences in non-traditional venues — for a quarter of a century. “The Last Supper,” which he wrote in 2001, ostensibly told the Biblical story, but with a literal sit-down meal he cooked for an audience of twelve each night, initially in his own Park Slope apartment. In “My Last Play” in 2010, which was also first performed in Schmidt’s living room, he announced his retirement from the theater and gave away his collection of over 2,000 theater books. Luckily, his retirement was short-lived. In “Our Last Game” from 2015, Schmidt portrayed a high school basketball over the course of his 40-year career, going backwards in time, and taking place in a cramped locker room in the East Village. All three plays were published a year ago as 3 Plays by Ed Schmidt – which was available for sale after the show at the Rizzoli check-out counter. This is as good a reason as any for “Edward” to be taking place in bookstores.
Performing the stories in “Edward” at random in a series of book stores is not all that make the play unusual. It’s also uncommonly literate and engaging. Schmidt’s delivery is practiced, hyper articulate – I wondered at one point whether his decision to present the stories at random was a way of showing off, then felt guilty for questioning his artistic choices. But the stories he tells are all plausible, often mundane, and therefore somehow all the more riveting — variously clever, funny, moving, even inspiring. Many stand on their own, but they also often refer back or even follow up on each other.
That “Nader for President” button launches a list of 24 things that Edward regretted, such as “Finishing books that, fifty pages in, he knew he didn’t like,” and “Voting for Ralph Nader in 2000,” as well as a slew of references to other stories in the play, such as “Sleeping with Mimi” and ‘Telling Angela that he’d slept with Mimi” and “Not writing back to Mimi.” These refer to an elaborate story of adultery with a woman Edward met at his twenty-fifth college reunion — prompted by a watercolor painting. We learn that Mimi had mailed him the painting six months after their affair, which she had drawn of the spot on campus where they’d had coffee. “Let her write once more, to prove that she was serious, and then he’d write back.” Years later, he recovered an alumni magazine from the recycling bin. “The announcement was brief and worse than he had expected: Mimi Parsons, class of ’61, had remarried…”
Among the stories that stood out for me was the one connected to a copy of “Catcher in the Rye,” which the chair of the English department at the high school where he taught for thirty-five years, wanted to phase out as being out-of-date. The story is primarily a passionate and enlightening defense of J.D. Salinger’s novel.
Another is prompted by a jigsaw puzzle. Schmidt explains how Edward created a Thanksgiving dinner family tradition of starting a jigsaw puzzle that the members of the family would finish by Christmas. One Thanksgiving, Schmidt tells us, Edward’s 23-year-old son Eddie, who was working in New York, returned to his parent’s home when everybody was at the table with the puzzle. He looked withdrawn and distracted.
“’Gil is sick,’ he said. ‘Gil is dying. Everyone’s dying. And I’m terrified that I’ll be next.’”
His mother and his sister hugged him. Edward, never having heard the name Gil before and learning for the first time that his son was homosexual, did not know how to react. “So he sat, silent, hands in his lap, head bowed, eyes focused on the mess, the jumble of fragments, that would become, hopefully, by Christmas Eve, the Pemigewasset River that flows straight through downtown Enright.”
In the Nader button story, one of his regrets was “Waiting until Christmas Eve, when it was too late, to put his arms around Eddie.”
Edward
At various NYC independent bookstores through March 1
Running time: 95 minutes,no intermission
Tickets: $40
Written and performed by Ed Schmidt
