‘A Jersey Cantata,’ a comedy by Linden resident Bill Mesce Jr., above, will be performed live in a production by The Theater Project at the Burgdorff Cultural Center in Maplewood.
LINDEN, NJ — A collection of three one-act plays about a group of Jersey guys, which their author, Linden resident Bill Mesce Jr., said fit nicely together into a single play titled “A Jersey Cantata,” will be staged at Burgdorff Cultural Center in Maplewood for eight shows, starting Aug. 18.
Mesce, who was born in Newark and attended James Caldwell High School in West Caldwell, said in a recent telephone interview that he played around with writing in high school but didn’t get serious about it until college.
He did his undergraduate work at the University of South Carolina, where he majored in film. He later received a master’s degree in communication at Montclair State University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Following his education, though he knew he wanted to be involved with making movies, he felt he lacked the technical ability to do so. Thus, he began to enter writing contests. He had success with his entries, with a small part of one script making it into a film by Brian De Palma starring John Travolta.
“They kept about a minute of my dialogue,” he said. “I’ve done about two dozen screenplays. The writer doesn’t have to be there. I’ve almost never met the people I worked for.”
He never did meet De Palma, but he did receive a letter telling him his services were no longer needed.
“Screenwriters are hired guns,” Mesce said. “I can look back on it and say I got the job and (got) paid and call it a win.”
“A Jersey Cantata,” he said, received a good response when it was given a reading in the late 1990s.
“The original one-act was about the funeral of a gay friend,” he said. “The second play was an awkward romance in a deli, and the third one, which is not being performed, was a poker game meltdown of a friend; his wife is having a baby. In the fourth story, one of the guys owns a go-go bar. The friends are trying to cheer up a guy who has just been jilted. That play is the most fun, but I have a sentimental attachment to the funeral one-act.”
The funeral one-act was based on a personal experience. Mesce said the running time of “A Jersey Cantata” is 90 minutes. A cast of six men and one woman perform.
“After I wrote the first one, they all came out pretty quickly, which told me this stuff was on a shelf in the back of my head,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. I’m not an artist or a playwright.”
Audience members will recognize his characters, he said, and respond favorably.
“People are people,” Mesce said. “I’m a character person. I look at people and say, this is how people are, how they talk. If my characters are about anything, it’s friendship. That doesn’t get old.
“I’m not a theater person,” Mesce continued. “Theater is not my focus. I’m a dabbler. Since the year 2000, I’ve written 24 to 25 books. People tell me I’m productive. It doesn’t feel that way to me.”
Mesce currently works as an adjunct professor at Kean University and Seton Hall University and will be teaching an MFA screenwriting class at FDU. From 1982 to 2009, he worked in the corporate communications division for HBO.
“A Jersey Cantata” will be staged Aug. 18, 19, 20, 25, 26 and 27 at 8 p.m., and Aug. 21 and 28 at 2 p.m. as part of The Theater Project’s “Three Plays in Three Months” presentation. The Burgdorff Cultural Center is located at 10 Durand Road in Maplewood. Tickets are available online at www.thetheaterproject.org or by calling the box office at 908-809-8865.