Alex Brightman

Matthew Murphy

Alex Brightman

Matthew Murphy

Marc Acito’s How I Paid for College, adapted from the playwright’s own autobiographical novel and receiving its world premiere at The Hub Theatre, provides an evening of witty musical fun that producer/director Helen Pafumi says “reaches farther than being solely a comedy.” It is funny, honest, and heartfelt.

Acito calls his 2005 debut novel “just true enough to be embarrassing to my family.” The protagonist Edward Zanni, a goof with a dream, navigates his way through the summer of 1983 in New Jersey, dreaming of going to a drama school he can’t quite afford. Fortunately, his friends are just amoral enough to help him lie, cheat, and steal his way into Juilliard. (This part, Acito assures his audience, is fiction: he didn’t turn to a life of crime to pay for drama school.) “If you put all of the characters together, you get a better picture of who I am,” Acito says. “I was just as gullible and guileless as Edward when I was young, but I was as crafty and histrionic as his best friends.”

Critics of Acito’s book remarked that his voice—faithfully recreated in the play—is “sure to appeal to David Sedaris fans” (Library Journal), and is “wildly camp and achingly funny” (BBC). How I Paid for College won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, and was voted a "Teens Top Ten” for favorite young adult book from the American Library Association.

A movie adaptation of the novel “malingered in development” for seven years, according to Acito, never getting off the ground. Edward’s first-person narrative voice, while potentially problematic in a film, fits naturally onstage. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Acito observes, “In retrospect, it’s the ideal place because the play is about theatre. What’s more, the novel began its life as a stage monologue with songs, which I performed as my senior project for AP English in high school.”

Acito found that adapting his own novel wasn’t much different in terms of process from his previous adaptations — A Room With a View and Bastard Jones, since he was prepared for the ruthlessness inherent in cutting and modifying an existing work. “There comes a magic moment,” he says, “when the adaptation ceases to be an adaptation and becomes a work in its own right.” And, indeed, How I Paid for College has made that leap: the novel’s heightened theatrical language has found its home onstage, from Edward’s opening number to the dramatic realizations he comes to during the course of the play. The songs enhance the heightened sense of reality: they don’t push the plot, but as honest homages to musical theatre, they are completely at home in a show full of entertaining devices.

Acito returns to The Hub Theatre after last season’s Birds of a Feather (recipient of The Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play or Musical in 2012). Acito remarks, “Helen [Pafumi, Hub founder and Artistic Director and director of How I Paid for College] understands my work better than almost anyone I know. With Birds, she told me the play was about love. I wrote the play she saw and it was better. So I brought her this one so she’d tell me what it was about.”

Acito and Pafumi decided that the play was about the lengths one is willing to go to make a dream come true; Acito immediately set to cutting anything from his story that didn’t relate to that theme. During rehearsal, Acito and Pafumi worked closely together, puzzling out solutions to things that just weren’t working quite right.

The play coalesced when the one man in this one-man play, Alex Brightman, was cast. Pafumi notes, “Hearing the script is always the most helpful” in a script development process. Table reads became rehearsals, which further strengthened the narrative, as well as the collaboration. Brightman’s work informed the characters’ final voices. He creates a world of multi-dimensional characters, each with its own voice that lends to the chorus of friends and family in Edward Zanni’s world.

If Acito has one piece of advice for an audience member coming to see How I Paid for College, it’s that “It’s much more fun to laugh at a comedy if you bring your friends.” Since the narrative focuses on the antics of a high school senior, Acito suggests, “It’s also a great show for parents and teens to see together. It’ll start some very illuminating conversations.”

With Acito’s command of language comes a love of anagrams, evident in both the novel and the play. His favorite? Elvis Lives. “But,” Acito notes, “I also take immense pleasure in knowing that Marc Acito is an anagram for A Comic Art.”

Login to post comments

Printer-friendly version