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Actor/Playwright Brings One-Man Show Back to Tulsa
by Don Rush, The Gayly Oklahoman
Listening to Jerry Rabushka’s characters as they mention various locations in and around Tulsa (including a reference to a local country radio station), one might think that the actor and playwright was born and raised here. However, in fact Rabushka has lived in St. Louis, MO all of his life.
Rabushka’s familiarity with Tulsa comes from his frequent visits with relatives who live here. Tulsa became the setting for one of his most recent plays, a one-man show entitled “Somebody Else’s Life.” Throughout the three scenes in the play, Rabushka plays various characters who live in Tulsa and Sapulpa.
Rabushka’s degree from the University of Missouri is in political science, but he says that he became involved in theatre because it was something that he had long wanted to do. “I was a writer of various sorts. There was a play-writing contest back when I was about 26. I had written a couple of plays, but nothing very exciting. I was a welfare worker and I scribbled down a play while I was doing welfare budgets. I typed it up and sent it into this contest, and I got an honorable mention, actually.” Rabushka continued writing and submitting plays to the annual contest, but never won any awards. He did, however, end up with a backlog of unproduced plays. “I figured, eventually, that if no one else would put them on I’d start doing it on my own.”
In 1995, a guy I‘d worked with at the welfare office ten years before called me up out of the blue and said ‘I have a space if you want to put on a show.’” The space was a church parish hall and Rabushka did not direct or act in that first production, but just stood on the sidelines and observed as his play was produced.
In 1996 Rabushka and his partner at the time founded Ragged Blade Productions, and began putting on plays at the local Pridefest. “From there it was a matter of thinking, ‘Hey, this isn’t so hard,’” he said. Ragged Blade continued producing shows in various venues. Eventually Rabushka met the pastor of a local Methodist church which had an old gymnasium that had been converted into a theater space. The pastor acted in one of the group’s plays, and offered to let the troupe continue to use the theater space which is now the main stage for Ragged Blade. The space is also used by three other theatre groups.
In January of this year Rabushka had the opportunity to premier “Somebody Else’s Life” at the Nightingale Theater in Tulsa, sharing the bill with Jade Esteban Estrada’s one-man show “Icons: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World, Vol. 1.” Since one of the play’s characters is a gay teenager, a couple of audience members mentioned OpenArms Youth Project, a youth center for glbtq teens, to Rabushka. Not long afterward he contacted OYP and booked his play for a one-night-only performance there.
The three scenes in the show are about several different characters, but all of them are connected in some way. As is common with writers, Rabushka based some of his characters on people that he has known. The first scene is about a man who is dating a cowboy-wannabe trying to live up to his expectations by wearing the kind of jeans, boots, and hat that “a real cowboy” wears. The third scene, about a gay teen whose crush on the boy down the street turns into a disaster, is a composite of two teens that Rabushka has known. “One of the reasons we wanted to do it at the youth group was because a lot of the folks (who saw the show in January) thought it was really very much like what kids that age go through, and that they could relate to it,” he said.
The play’s second scene is a fantasy where same-sex marriage has become legal in Oklahoma. It imagines the consequences of that situation on a straight man living in Sapulpa. His wife threatens to leave him after her pastor convinces her that legalized gay marriage has destroyed the sanctity of all marriages, including hers.
Rabushka, who is also a composer and pianist, recently finished performing in a play that he didn’t write in which he played, appropriately, a keyboard player.
