Jason Fuchs: Earning Extra Credit for Speech & Debate

About the author:
At age 21, Jason Fuchs has spent most of his life juggling school and work. Since making his Broadway debut at seven in Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Fuchs has worked steadily on stage as the "turkey boy" in A Christmas Carol at Madison Square Garden, in the Obie-winning off-Broadway musical Gorilla Man and in Sea of Tranquility at Atlantic Theater, to name just three credits and screen Flipper, TV's Law & Order: SVU and his own short film, Pitch, which premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Many young actors with his level of success choose to forego college, but Fuchs enrolled in Columbia University and has managed to continue attending classes while starring in the Roundabout Theatre Company's hit off-Broadway production of Speech & Debate. Stephen Karam's clever play tells the tale of three Web-savvy high school misfits who address their issues and ambitions by forming a debate team. Originally scheduled for a brief run at the Roundabout's new black box Underground theater, Speech & Debate has extended several times and is continuing through February 24. Broadway.com added to Fuchs' workload by asking him to write an essay about his experience in the show.

I'm going to start by being very upfront: I'd like college credit for this article. It's very early, just past the first clause of the second sentence, but already I feel strongly about the piece and I think it's worth at least three credits, possibly four depending on whether or not I can come back round to where I started in the final paragraph and provide what one English teacher of mine used to refer to as "rhetorical symmetry."

I have had a thrilling and exhausting fall semester doing double duty; spending days at Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus trudging through my junior year and nights at the Roundabout Underground black box theater performing in the premiere production of Stephen Karam's fantastic new play Speech & Debate. While none of my teachers at Columbia—lone exception and mad props to Professor David McKenna—have been particularly excited about my extracurricular activities, my experience with S&D has been an absolute and unadulterated joy and possibly the most gratifying experience of my career.

More than anything, the show has been adventure. Nothing about how this all turned out was certain when we gathered for our first read-through four months ago on a sunny September morning. I certainly had never done a play in such an intimate space, where the audience would be nose-to-sternum and, at times, check-to-cheek with the cast. This would account for one spontaneously interactive student matinee, which remains perhaps my favorite performance of S&D, largely because of the gentleman in row two who attentively responded to my opening speech: "He did what?! Nah!"

This experience was equaled only at a later and slightly more tense student matinee in which half our audience included members of a teen Gay-Straight Alliance joined by students from a Bronx inner-city school either without or with a very scared Gay-Straight Alliance; all, of course, a build-up to next month's joint Sunni-Shiite matinee, which we're all very excited about.

What's really been exciting, though, has been seeing the vast age disparity of our audience and the way in which the story of Solomon, Howie and Diwata—I place my character first because I wrote this article—translates across the generation gap in a way that I'm not sure everyone anticipated. We are a play very much of the 21st century; more so, in fact, than any other I've seen. The primacy of the internet and online chatting in the lives of teens has, I think, never been better visually articulated onstage than by Anna Louizos' innovative and, in our case, practical notion to have each character's room defined by the projections of our computer desktops and the IM chats we have on them.

People talk about why young people don't come to the theater. I don't think it's because the stories don't ring true, but because the storytelling doesn't ring timely—and what Stephen Karam did so magically with Speech & Debate was to craft a good, old-fashioned comedy about real people and inject it with the trappings of the day in a way that feels real to the people to who live in it, and even to those who watch it from a distance with a spectator's bemusement. There are few things more fulfilling than seeing an audience ranging in age from 18 to 80 laughing and applauding together inside a theater on a chilly winter New York night. And for that achievement, which I've been lucky to be part of and to witness firsthand, the team behind this show and my castmates deserve a great deal of credit.

And for which I deserve credit: three, to be exact. Which brings us back to where we started.

In which case, make it four.