User:Jay ducharme/sandbox



Jay Ducharme (b. 1958) is a writer, composer and teacher from Westfield, Massachusetts. He started his life in the town of Easthampton, MA, the son of John and Jeannette Ducharme. After attending Notre Dame parochial school for eight years, he moved on to Easthampton High School where he first became seriously involved with writing. He was production manager and a writer for the school's newspaper, The Eagle, and oversaw its design and layout. But he changed his focus when he took a creative writing class. From then on he focused on writing prose and poetry.

After high school, he was cast in a 1976 production of Daniel Shays Rebellion at Look Park in nearby Northampton. He once again changed his focus and attended Holyoke Community College to study theater. He wrote two plays there and directed several others including an ambitious production of Macbeth. He also began writing background music for productions. After graduating with honors from HCC, he matriculated to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and continued his focus on theater. While there, he also mounted a production of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana for which he adapted the score for piano, soprano and baritone and also translated the entire text. He performed the score himself. He also decided to become a playwright.

For a summer job, he began working at Holyoke's famed Mountain Park amusement park, a job that would follow him for the rest of his life.

In 1980, he was accepted into Columbia University in New York. During his year there, he actually wrote more music than plays. He provided the music and lyrics for An Equal Opportunity House, a agi-prop show performed off-Broadway, as well as incidental music for After Us the Savage God, a collection of dadaist plays. While in New York, he saw a production of Richard Foreman's Penguin Touquet, which was a tremendous influence on him. He was no longer satisfied with the standard Broadway fare (which at that time consisted of musicals like Cats and plays like The Fourth of July). He was much more interested in experimental theater. And so he left Columbia.

He went back to Easthampton and mounted a film production based on Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Using his own money that he managed to save, and with Robert Aller as cinematographer, he wrote, produced and directed the half-hour production on black-and-white Super 8 film. Ducharme discovered the logistic difficulties in making a film. Even though he shot nearly five times the amount of footage he needed, he never shot the correct scenes. After nearly a year of editing, he abandoned the project.

During that same time, he also enrolled in Werner Erhard's est Training. That set him on a path that would take him to San Francisco to work with the Hunger Project in 1982. His job, however, was strictly voluntary. For six months he scrounged together a living with part-time theater work. He designed special lighting for the San Francisco Repertory Theater's production of Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. And he was hire as tour manager for a senior citizen theater troupe, Talespinners.

During that period, he had been working on an abstract screenplay and shopped it to Francis Ford Coppola. Ducharme was asked to make a test reel and called Joe Alberti, one of the actors he had worked with on Rite of Spring. But Alberti wasn't interested in doing the film; he was already committed to being graduate theater studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS. He said the school was paying him $5000 to go there. Desperate for money, Ducharme called the school and enrolled. He left San Francisco behind and spent the next three years working toward a Master of Fine Arts in theater directing.