Magic play that led James from fishing to theatre

When New Yorker James DeVita saw Ian McKellen’s one-man show, Acting Shakespeare, in 1984 on Broadway in 1984, it changed the young man’s life.

As a result of that moment, James will visit Galway next week with his own adaptation of the piece, entitled In Acting Shakespeare, which is on an Irish tour.

Before his ‘Ian McKellen moment’ James had been working as a fisherman with no real idea of what he wanted to do in life.

The young man, who grew up in Long Island, had started several courses in local community colleges, including one that would have given him a captain’s licence to run his own boat, but kept dropping out.

“I was terrible at maths and you had to do trigonometry for celestial navigation. I kept failing,” he says. Eventually his captain asked him if there was anything else he liked apart from boats. “Old movies,” was James’s answer.

There was no movie course in the community college, but there was a theatre programme, so James embarked on his third attempt at third-level. However, he had no great interest in drama, instead focusing on set-building, for which his boating career had prepared him well.

Then his class took a trip to New York City to see a play. James had no idea what it was, but since it was part of the course, he went. It happened to be Ian McKellen’s show of Shakespearean monologues interspersed with personal theatre stories, and it blew James away.

“I had never heard Shakespeare before and I knew I wanted to do that. I had no experience in theatre but that changed my life,” he says from his home in Wisconsin.