The Play The Boys Next Door is a great story of four mentally challenged adults trying to live life to the fullest and a social worker trying to do the same. The cast is pretty open in terms of non-traditional casting except for the character of Lucien P. Smith. He must be played by a black man because of references made to him in the script. All of the other characters would work well as any other race, but must all be men. The Character of Jack has been known to be played by a female actress and would then go by the name Jackie. I think this is a great choice to cast a female in this role as it totally changes the group dynamics. Women tend to be more emotional than men and become more involved in their work and when Jack or Jackie because so drained that he/she has to find a new job it just seems to work better for me with a women, because to me a woman would have more invested than a man would. The character of Norman Bulansky is another character that has to be somewhat type specific. There are tons of references to him being overweight and that he eats a lot of donuts. Having a skinny man playing Norman talking about how he is “not so skinny minnie himself” would distract from the play.
Another issue I would like to address is that of portraying a mentally handicapped person. The Sunset play house included this statement in their program “The audience is encouraged to laugh at the cognitively impaired not because they are strange and freakish, but because their offbeat idiosyncrasies are honest reflections of neuroses common to even the most functional among us. The key to a successful staging of the play is the delicate balance between the comedy of the individual and the comedy of disability in a way that maintains a universal level of human dignity." This is a great statement of purpose to share with everyone coming to see this play and I think that something close to this statement should appear in our programs as well. I read numerous reviews that stated how unreal or unbelievable the portrayal of these real people was. One theater actually held a two week audition process to see the consistence of each actor and how they viewed and portrayed a person with a disability. One of the most important things we have to remember is that it is ok to make these people funny because in real life they are funny, but we must be careful to make them real. Real life is funny and for these guys they are just living life and it happens to be funny. I think that a couple trips to a special education home or group living situation would greatly help out this production in terms of set design, costume design and most of all acting and directing. I feel that the only way to really learn the characteristic or each individual in this play you really need to interact with them. No matter how much you read on a page, nothing compares to actual experience.
Overall I think this is a great experience for anyone involved including the audience. Before we get ahead of ourselves I think a lot more research should be done on the mental illnesses at hand and to push design elements to the back burner. I feel as though if we concentrate on the actual condition of these guys and what they do on a day to day basis that everything else will come secondary. When we see how they act we will know in what kind of space they live and what kind of cloths they like to wear and even what kind of donuts Norman likes to eat.
