When does life really begin? Some people say it begins at conception, and we call them conservative. Others say it begins at the end of the second trimester, and we call them doctors. There are yet others who believe it begins at birth, and we call them parents. Maybe it's when you speak your first word or you have your first kiss, the first time you experience love or you see a sunset, or whichever interpretation you would like to believe.
Perhaps life begins in high school.
Perhaps life begins the first time you bow to a thunderous applause.
This life will start as a junior at a New Jersey school called Ramsey High School, in an oddly shaped room on the third floor. Auditions are held for the comedy Wild Oats; perhaps Mark should have been more nervous, but being surrounded by naught but friends, how could one be? In any case, mere days later the cast list is up on the auditorium and Mark is cast as the villain, a trend which will run through his high school career.
Maybe a star is born, or maybe a lifelong passion is developed. Only time will tell.
It's been said that things come easy to Mark, and perhaps this is true. His parents would certainly agree, and maybe they're correct. Throughout high school, he was involved in a number of shows which seemed to fall into his lap. The western villainy of Ike Gammon in Wild Oats was followed up by the stage manager character James Throttle from The Mystery of Edwin Drood (book and music by the amazingly talented Rupert Holmes, singer and writer of Escape, the Pina Colada Song) before hitting two of his favorite roles to date; Oysters Rockefeller from My Son is Crazy, but Promising and Axel Hammond from The Nerd.
The role of Oysters brought Mark back to the villainous character while also allowing him to die on the stage, be pushed around dead on roller skates, and stomp around dressed like the invisible man. It was by this role that Mark had developed a bit of a following at the high school level and his next role was a shoe in - the extremely cynical and sarcastic Axel Hammond, a great character from The Nerd. Nobody will ever know why the sarcasm of the role came so easily to him.
Being only a mediocre singer did not phase him in the least from auditioning for Godspell, in which he was cast as a chorus member. It was in Mark's next role that he had his first opportunity to cross-dress on the stage, for the goddess of theater is a harsh mistress. Never had he stooped so young as to play a 10 year old cross-dressing boy named Francis in Our Girls, and most likely never would he again.
After one more stint as a real jerk on the stage playing Jack from Epic Proportions, Mark graduated from Ramsey High School and thought he had said good bye to that particular stage forever; he was wrong. That "come to me" complex that had been developing throughout the years came back with a vengeance and he found himself cast as a lead in a show he had not even auditioned for - OnStage's production of Brigadoon. Playing the comedic relief for a drama is a fantastic thing to do, and this is exactly what he got to experience in this show as the alcoholic American Jeff Douglas, stumbling around drunk and being sexually assaulted by the female comic relief.
It took some time to get back into the theater world when Mark went off to college. He tried out in the first weeks of school for Proof but was not cast; hell, the show only had a cast of four. After that nothing really caught his fancy until the extraordinarily anti-Semitic Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. Ironically, Mark was cast as the oldest person in the play while being the youngest member of the cast.
After that slight pause in the action, it has been basically non-stop theater for Mark. He played a few minor roles over the rest of that season(for full list, see resume) before coming back the next semester and being appointed to the Executive Board as the Managing Director of Musicals for the 2005-2006 theater season. This was followed closely by one of his largest roles to date, Ken Gorman, the lawyer of Neil Simon's Rumors and his first producing gig - Assistant Producer of The Rocky Horror Show. The stage has missed Mark's presence since then, finding him producing the always interesting Songs for a New World, but it will soon see him again in The Spell of Sleeping Beauty.
He'll be playing the White Witch.
It's not cross-dressing, but it's damn close.
March 24, 2006