profile of local playwright

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
September 10, 2005

When James Brady’s play, “Cajun Poker,” was published last month by Norman Maine Publishing, it was billed as “a unique tragedy” set in New Orleans — “the land of voodoo queens and slot machines.”

A few weeks later, the New Orleans of that description has become a wistful memory in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, giving Brady’s play an unexpected poignance.

“There’s hundreds of things in there about the history of Louisiana, the politics and the people, so there’s an awful lot that applies to what’s going on right now,” Brady said in a phone interview from his home in Shushan.

“Cajun Poker” focuses on a man whose wife dies unexpectedly when he’s out drinking, which Brady hopes addresses a universal theme. “It’s about dealing with guilt,” he explained.

His ideas stem from personal experience or current events, he said, but they transform into fiction. The idea for “Cajun Poker” came from his grandfather’s reaction to the death of Brady’s grandmother.

“I remember that he didn’t respond like he should have, didn’t get her to the hospital, and that guilt seemed to haunt him.”

Another of Brady’s plays, “The Big Dance,” was published last month by Brooklyn Publishers and recently produced at the University of Miami. It’s about a college basketball recruiter who is desperate to attract a talented high school player.
Brady had noticed a news article that referred to college recruiters as “grown men fighting over a 17-year-old kid,” and began asking himself: “How far will a coach go to sign a kid? How dirty will he play?”

The result of his musings was “The Big Dance,” which won first place in Adirondack Community College’s Ten-Minute Play contest in 2003.

Brady has written 15 plays since the early 1990s, when he abandoned a 20-year career in computer programming to pursue a master’s degree in playwriting from Rutgers University. His plays have been produced around the nation, mostly in colleges and universities, although the royalties are certainly not a living wage, running from $25 or $50 per night of each production. The rest of his income comes from teaching math and algebra at a community college in Bennington, Vt.

Now 53, Brady said he wonders if he should have waited so long to begin writing plays.

“I obviously have more experiences to draw from, but I don’t have the stamina of some of these younger playwrights — I can’t pull all-nighters
anymore,” he said.

Then again, he reflected, “I was pretty idealistic when I started. I thought I was going to go straight from Rutgers to Broadway.”