Role: Charles
Where: New Mercury Theater
Playwright:   David Mamet

Photo......Program......Cast Notes

The Shawl by David Mamet was paired with... these [points to Victoria Station, Ohio Impromptu).  It was an evening called "Mamet Pinter Becket." They did count as separate plays - they were damned hard to do.We took a chance with this pairing  - they were known as heady pieces for intellectuals which audiences just hate - and we paired three of them very successfully.  We sold really well on that. But we had a lot of really intellectual people come to see that play.  It was lit very cool, and the pieces were short enough that they didn't collapse under their own weight. 

The Shawl is a wonderful play about a man who claims to be....Okay, you go into these places and they have a crystal ball and they ask you questions and they can tell things about your life and end up giving you advice; and people feel they have these special powers because they can tell things about them.  And in this play we have a man who reveals that this is just a technique - you put out a bunch of things and see what the person responds to. And that's the thing that's probably true and you follow that and you can start to make it seem like you can see into someone's life.  (clip) The guy in the play was doing it like a good shrink and really helping people, using it like a tool much like psychology.  But he had a younger person trying to learn the secrets who wanted to use it for money, so that was the tension of the play.  But I thought it exposed the trickery of it but also that there are a lot of people who use this to help people.  I played Charles - he was the guy, the villain, the young man who was trying to rip people off.   JM.com 2007

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"Dawson Nichols as the psychic, James Marsters as the apprentice and Deniece Bleha as their client - present a surprisingly gentle form of Mamet."  Joe Adcock · Seattle Post-Intelligencer · January 4, 1994

"More enigmatic is John's relation to Charles (James Marsters), his apprentice and - probably - his lover. While Charles wants to rip off Miss A ruthlessly, John stays sensitive to the "mysteries" he traffics in, and views his target as a collaborator rather than a victim."  Misha Berson ·  Seattle Times · January 12, 1994