I'm Here

I’m here because I lied to my mother. Better still, I’m here in Zagreb, Croatia, because I lied to my mother. You see, I am a Fulbright scholar teaching “American Comedy as Cultural Mirror” to a group of graduate students in American Studies at the University of Zagreb. Why Croatia? Because I wrote a random email to Boris Senker, a scholar from Zagreb, who presented a paper at a Theatre Symposium I hosted on Comedy a few years back and asked him if his school hosted Fulbrighters. I chose comedy as the topic of that conference because I’m interested in it as a scholar and practitioner, and I wanted to invite the writer Larry Gelbart to be the keynote speaker and visit me in West Virginia; ends up I couldn’t invite him after all because we had no money in the department at that time. I got to know Larry because I was stuck for a research topic in a graduate Latin class I took years ago and out of frustration wrote him a letter asking him why no one had written on the subject of how his musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was adapted from the plays of Plautus. I also asked him why every one of his colleagues and contemporaries—Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, et al.—had books written about them and no one had done the Larry Gelbart bio . . . and promptly asked if I could “claim” him. I was an overworked grad student and thought Forum would be an easy topic to write on since I had played the wily slave Pseudolus in college in New Orleans back in the ’80s. I wasn’t even a theatre major, but got cast in the lead. I auditioned over the protestations of my mother, who thought I needed to work more shifts at Steak & Ale rather than waste my time acting in school plays. So I told her I was off to wait tables and auditioned anyway. And that’s how I lied to my mother and that’s how I got to Zagreb.

MUCH more on Zagreb and Larry in days to come