In 1994, an actor named James Lecesne created a solo show in New York City. He ended up starting a movement and saving the lives of uncounted American teenagers.
This is the story of Trevor. A fictional 13-year-old. A kid who loves Diana Ross and her music more than anything else in the world.
The narrative includes his monologue, his movie, his project and now, at Writers Theatre in Glencoe, his musical.
The cast of famous supporting characters includes Ellen DeGeneres, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Eve Ensler, Daniel Radcliffe and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. When “Trevor the Musical” (book and lyrics by Dan Collins, music by Julianne Wick Davis, direction by Marc Bruni) has its world premiere Wednesday night, marking the first pre-Broadway tryout in the history of Writers Theatre, Trevor will have come full circle. Back to the American theater, where he was born.
His spiritual father was Lecesne.
“It was the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City,” recalls Lecesne, who now is 62. “There was this whole generation about whom nobody seemed to care. I was trying to find a way to address that.”
Lecesne had decided to work on a show called “Word of Mouth,” a collection of monologues, really, all about the interconnection of people. Ensler was the director (she had not yet created “The Vagina Monologues” and was not yet famous). Nichols and May were, intriguingly, the producers.
“I had happened to hear this report about teen suicide on NPR,” Lecesne says. “They casually mentioned that gay young people were three times more likely to attempt suicide than other teens. So I decided to go back through my own journals and tell my story of being different, and feeling strange when compared to my friends.”
But even in the early 1990s, it still wasn’t common to talk about the budding sexuality of kids who were just 12 or 13 years old. It especially was not common for older gay men to bring up the topic in a public arena; it was widely perceived as a dangerous idea. “I remember,” Lecesne says, “being terrified to step out on the stage and just do the Trevor monologue.”
That now-famous Trevor monologue — which really was a lightly disguised version of the Lecesne monologue about his young gay self in a hostile world — was all of about 10 minutes long.
“It has gone out to the world and changed the world,” Lecesne says, his voice cracking a little over the phone. “It really is such a tribute to the power of story.”
And luck.
* * *
It just so happened that two filmmakers named Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone came to see “Word of Mouth” (the late Nichols and May were very well-connected, after all). Rajski homed in on that one monologue, decided it could form the basis of a short film and asked Lecesne to write the screenplay. Lecesne agreed. And write it he did.
The resulting 12-minute movie — a funny, emotional and honest little film — is all about the titular 13-year-old kid, a boy with a crush on the wrong friend at school. It won an Academy Award. In the film, Trevor wants nothing more than to be accepted by his friends. When they reject him, he tries to kill himself.
The Oscar helped bring visibility to the short, of course. But it wasn’t until 1998 that things took another turn. Stone, a savvy producer, had persuaded the cable network HBO to air “Trevor.” And as the airing approached, it quickly dawned on Stone, Rajski, Lecesne, HBO executives and pretty much everybody else involved that the film might connect intensely with gay or questioning kids sitting at home. There might be a need for a phone number for them to call. So everyone went looking for a national service for these teenagers and found that such a service did not exist.
So they had to start their own.
And thus the Trevor Project — now a national nonprofit suicide prevention service for LGBTQ youths with some $6 million in revenue, more than 1,000 volunteers, some 200,000 callers a year, a 24-hour phone lifeline, new TrevorChat instant messaging, new TrevorText, new TrevorSpace and major financial support from Radcliffe, among other famous names — was born.
The filmmakers asked DeGeneres to introduce the film. Her remarkable, deeply personal, semi-improvised introduction is as funny, and as emotionally intense, as the film she was introducing. (You can watch it and the full movie at both www.thetrevorproject.org and www.ellentv.com.)
First, DeGeneres asks viewers not to change the channel, insisting there is nothing better on that night on cable. Then she says why.
“It’s a movie about this guy, Trevor, and he’s gay,” DeGeneres says, her body constantly shifting in the frame. “Hold on. Hold on. It’s not what the film is about. To me, the film is about, really, anyone who has ever felt they were the only person in the world who looked or thought or felt the way they did. It’s about someone who …”
She stops midsentence.
“You ever felt like the whole world has been invited to some big party and somehow your invitation got lost in the mail? Yeah. Yeah.”
That night in 1998, when everyone still watched cable at the same time, the phones of the brand-new Trevor Project rang off the hook.
* * *
“The job of suicide prevention is a constant one,” says Amit Paley, the chief executive officer of the Trevor Project, after ticking off all that his growing organization does in this age of anxiety. “People are coming out every year. You can help all the 13-year-olds, but there is always another generation right behind them.”
Paley seems eager to point out that the Trevor Project is not involved directly in “Trevor the Musical”; clearly, he does not want his donors to think they are sinking money into a Broadway show. “We are not in the business of producing musicals,” he says. “The nonprofit work we do saves lives every day.” But he also sees that this show, should it be successful and move on from Glencoe, might be yet another major channel whereby kids find the Trevor Project.
“There are so many young people who are alone and don’t know where to go,” Paley says. “This is an amazing new opportunity to spread awareness and save more lives.”
So who actually had the idea for “Trevor the Musical”?
That was John Ambrosino from a relatively new producing company called U Rock Theatricals. The show opening Wednesday at Writers is very much Ambrosino’s baby: He hired the writers, secured the director and enhanced the production budget at the nonprofit theater. Michael Halberstam, the artistic director of Writers, says he is delighted with the project and the high-profile opportunity it represents for a Chicago-area theater with a beautiful new complex and a loyal local audience, but that still has to build its national visibility.
“For me, this is just a story that I think we need to hear right now,” Ambrosino says by way of explanation of his current passion. “And I also thought Trevor would make a great musical theater character. He’s someone with these really great dreams and wants and a turbulent past. And the tone of the film is both heartbreaking and funny.”
So Ambrosino secured the rights. He’s already been working on the show for nearly six years.
He put out requests for writers and composers to secure the gig by creating a couple of songs on spec. He secured the director, Bruni. The idea of doing the tryout at Writers came, as do many of these deals, from an agent at ICM Partners. It made sense to Ambrosino, especially given that “Trevor the Musical” is one of those smaller, intimate musicals that could eventually land at a lot of places other than Broadway. Then again, if your goal is visibility, one street trumps all.
“Everyone is either a Trevor or has known a Trevor,” Ambrosino says, talking up the show’s universality as producers must always do.
* * *
In Glencoe on a warm afternoon in early August, a group of enthusiastic, mostly teenage actors are circling Eli Tokash, the young actor from New York who is playing Trevor.
Tokash has a face like an open book.
“Trevor, please! Just leave me alone,” one of the kids shouts.
“You’re a fairy.”
The group looks hostile. The choreographer, Josh Prince, intervenes.
“We have to be careful not to look like we’re going to kill Trevor,” Prince says to the kids. “Remember, the absence of love isn’t hate. It’s …”
“Apathy,” shouts Bruni, almost jumping out of his chair.
It’s a revealing exchange — most bullied gay teens don’t face an angry mob at their schools (although some do). Most face being ostracized or merely ignored. The drip-drip-drip of that daily scenario is what can eradicate your self-esteem.
“They don’t care,” goes one of Collins’ lyrics, “if I stop breathing air.”
In an interview a few minutes later, the teenagers, most of whom are from suburban Chicago, talk frankly about their experiences at their own high schools. Some say gay kids now are admired and accepted. These kids seem to see the musical as a period piece, a cautionary tale reflecting the prejudices of previous generations. Some say the issues raised in a musical set in 1981 haven’t changed as much as you might think. It seems to depend on the school. Or maybe on the kid.
The score to Trevor is not 1981 disco, nor is this a Diana Ross jukebox musical, even though the material would seem to support both of those approaches. (There are some iconic Ross songs in the score and the singer is a character in the show, played by Salisha Thomas.) “Those approaches were not interesting to us,” says Wick Davis, the composer. “We’re coming more from a place of contemporary musical theater.”
The lead role of Trevor has been written for a kid with an unchanged voice.
In the film, of course, treble Trevor serves as his own narrator. “We wanted him to have a relationship with the people watching him,” says Collins, the writer. “So what we really did was take his diary and make that the audience. He is, after all, a showbiz kid.”
Bruni, who directed “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” on Broadway, says he took the gig because he’s convinced that the world needs “Trevor” right now, more than ever.
“I wanted to work with kids doing something entirely accurate to their experience,” Bruni says. “The show is set in an era before the language we use now was really possible, in a pre-social media, analog world. You could still be a bully and faceless. You could just leave a handwritten note.”
“There is an innocence that the story carries,” Prince says. “And so the tone can’t live in too slick a place. Physically, there’s a rawness around the edges. It was not a slick time; the things we accepted as cool, to our eyes right now, are quite crude actually. That’s my childhood up there. One day in rehearsal, some kid’s cellphone dropped out of their pocket. It was very jarring. There was something about that sudden visual, seeing a cellphone in the middle of our story.”
Bruni says he has no intention of directing a show that feels like an after-school special on the theme of anti-bullying, nor a PSA announcement about suicide prevention.
Like all musicals with serious topics, “Trevor” also has to stare down the need to entertain as well as sadden, to leave the audience with hope and belief in the future. As anyone who has seen the film knows, the central character should be the show’s biggest asset. On screen, he’s a charming, funny, lovable, vulnerable kid, finding his way in the hostile world of the early 1980s.
Now he has to sing out, loud and proud.
“A lot of people who are in their 20s or 30s now come up and quietly take me aside,” Lecesne says. “That is better than any Academy Award. Those are human beings who are alive. I think ‘Trevor’ is the thing that I was put on the planet to do.”
“Trevor the musical” is in previews and opens Wednesday at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, and plays through Sept. 17; 847-242-6000 or www.writerstheatre.org.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
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