Side Effects May Include premieres @ CPT
After writing for a television show about nothing, Seinfeld, comedian and Shaker Heights native Mark Jaffe found himself in an entirely different and more serious ballgame when a couple of years ago his successful OB/GYN wife was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Considering writers write about what they know, eventually the funnyman had enough material that needed to come to the surface. The result is a one-man play, which he wrote along with Eric Coble. Dealing with a roller-coaster ride through an escalating mountain of pills, fidelity, secrets, questions of manhood and bedroom performance anxiety, Side Effects May Include makes its debut Fri 3/4 through Sun 3/6 at Cleveland Public Theatre.
CoolCleveland talked to Jaffe about the inspiration for the show, the evolution of the material and its future.
CoolCleveland: Let’s start at the beginning. When did you get the idea for Side Effects May Include?
Marc Jaffe: It’s a play based on true events. The inspiration was kind of my life. My wife was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a couple of years ago and had to take some medication. It’s been in the news of late, this medication. A guy in France is suing the company because he turned into a gay cross-dresser because of his medication. Everyone has been getting a lot of laughs on that but it kind of has some merit. So the play is a look at what medications can do to people and how they can make peoples’ lives a little bit crazy. More so than any disease you might get.
Among the topics discussed in the show is your wife’s increased sex drive, which apparently is problematic. How autobiographic is the show and are all parties involved OK with the attention?
That’s for me to know. There’s some license there. And some family members haven’t seen it yet so we’ll find out afterwards. But, yeah, we’re all good, I think. We’re doing it for good purposes. It’s one of those things where you never know what you’re going to get and something seems like it’s horrible and it turns out to have a silver lining behind it. Then something looks like it’s great and you go, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize that was going to lead here.” It’s kind of an interesting ride, I hope. That’s why I thought it was worthy of turning it into a show.
How long did it take you to write Side Effects May Include?
What happened is I was taking notes and was turning it into a manuscript for a book. That took over the course of a year or so. Unfortunately, a book would lose the element of fiction that we’re instituting by a play so that’s kind of why we went in this direction. I was interested in exploring theater for the first time and approached Nick Koesters, who is an actor. We had worked together in the past as actors. I had been writing a bunch of stand-up that I couldn’t really do because it would have been necessary to give the backstory to have the jokes work. I wasn’t ready to do that in public. So I approached Nick and said would you be my beard doing these jokes? I can start doing stand-up through somebody else… He wasn’t comfortable with that but he said you should turn that into a play. After that it came pretty quickly.
With its debut finally here, where do you see Side Effects May Include going in the future?
It could go straight to hell (laughs). Right now, I’m just kind of waiting to see the reaction but certainly we have hopes there will be other opportunities as both a theatrical piece and maybe even uniquely positioned for focused audiences related to the Parkinson’s community.
Side Effects May Include? takes place at 7:30PM on Fri 3/4 and Sat 3/5, and at 3PM on Sun 3/6 at Cleveland Public Theatre’s James Levin Theatre, 6415 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. Each performance is a double bill with production Voice Over. Tickets are $15 adults, $13 for students and seniors. For more information call 216-631-2727, ext. 501 or visit http://ShakingWithLaughter.com.
Free-lance writer John Benson spends most of his time writing for various papers throughout Northeast Ohio.
When he’s not writing about music or entertainment, he can be found coaching his two boys in basketball, football and baseball or watching movies with his lovely wife, Maria.