“PET BABY RACCOONS,” the advertisement reads, “has always been, and still is … America’s favorite pet. Easy to care for … Send money order or cashier’s check with your telephone number & nearest airport.”
This ad seems ridiculous, but what if you actually ordered “America’s favorite pet” – and it arrived at your doorstep, alive and intact?
University alumnus Barry Wood answers that question as the sole actor and co-author of Wonders Never Cease, the one-man, multiple-role play opening Friday at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Georgetown. Wood is part of the group Charter Theatre, the only theater group in Washington that exclusively stages new works.
Throughout most of Wonders Never Cease, Wood plays himself, alternately narrating in the present as a 44-year-old man and as a local child. As the child, he orders the sham items advertised in the back of his comic books – sea monkeys, X-ray specs, hypno-discs – with the hope they will give him superpowers.
It sounds like a true story, and it is – up to a point. Wood estimates about one-third of the play is accurate.
The truth: Wood did grow up with his parents in Wheaton, had a passion for magic tricks, and sometimes ordered weird, random items from the back of comic books, including a Polaris submarine. Those things were in fact rip-offs – the fighter submarine turned out to be a cardboard box.
The fiction: Wood’s real parents never held him back the way the parents in the show do.
“They were always very supportive,” he says of his mother and father, adding that in the play, “It’s more of an Everybody Loves Raymond-type thing where the parents are caricatures.”
In another obvious departure from reality, the play’s young Wood manages to use some of his comic-book items to acquire supernatural talents, with a little help from the nearby Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant.
A professional magician and mentalist (fancy for “mind-reader”) since his days at the university, Wood displays his character’s superpowers using a few tricks of his own, pulling audience members into the act just as he would in a magic show. He uses the X-ray specs to see the contents of a random person’s pocket, hypnotizes the audience with the spiraled hypno-disc and manipulates a realistic raccoon as a sidekick.
Wood’s interest in magic started as a hobby at age 11, and then the interest became a job when he was 14 in a magic shop, where he sold some of the same novelty items he uses in Wonders Never Cease. He worked at the magic shop through his days at the university, during which time he also started performing professionally at restaurants and private events.
After graduating in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, Wood applied for jobs in the business field, but the road always seemed to lead back to magic.
“I went through the motions,” he says. “I went through job interviews and interviews on campus, and what would normally happen is, the interviewer found out about my background and they would have some story about magicians or seeing a magician, and the interviews quickly became about my passion.”
Wood often didn’t get the job, but a few interviewers hired him to perform at office parties, he says.
In 1989, Wood joined the other two writers of Wonders Never Cease, Mario Baldessari and Jim Helein, to form the improv and sketch comedy troupe Dropping the Cow, along with two other performers. After the group broke up in the late ’90s, some of the other members wrote and performed Charter Theatre shows with titles such as Sacred Cows and Monkeyboy (which starred Helein as a giant cockatoo).
Then they decided it was Wood’s turn to take the stage.
“He’s a very, very funny person, just a great comedic actor, and I said, ‘Put him in the right light and that boy is going to shine,'” Baldessari says.
While writing a script for one person who plays several roles – two versions of himself, both his parents and, in one scene, his girlfriend and a crowd on a beach all at once – seems difficult, the writers speak to the contrary.
“It wasn’t that hard for me,” Helein says. “I didn’t have to do it.”
Wood, however, plays all of his parts quite successfully, the writers say.
“I wrote it, and I watch him do it, and every time I watch him do it, I still laugh,” Baldessari says.
Contact reporter Alia Malik at malikdbk@gmail.com.
