Father-and-Son Team Carries Message About Broken Youth to Flight Theatre

It’s 3, maybe 4 o’clock in the morning outside a gas station on Las Palmas Avenue in Hollywood. A 23-year-old man--thin, undernourished, an outsider in his own world--is coughing up blood. He’s a crack addict, and his time is running out. He needs a hand to pull him out of the quicksand before it’s too late.

“Nobody wanted him,” his father says today, “including me.”

The next morning, the young man woke up “in front of some AA place.” A hand reached out and led him inside. He’s been sober and clean for four years now. He has also played the lead in Columbia’s feature “Stone Cold,” and has co-starred with Steven Seagal in “Hard to Kill.” His name is Evan James.

The story of James’ recovery and a frightening event in its aftermath are at the core of “Thanksgiving Cries,” a true drama at the Flight Theatre in Hollywood. James plays the lead in the story of his exodus back into reality, and has co-written the play with his father, Bruce Malmuth, who directs it.

Malmuth is no stranger to theater but is known primarily for his direction of films, including such hits as “Nighthawks” and “Hard to Kill,” and his short television documentary “Baseballs or Switchblades? A Boy’s Dream,” which earned him an Emmy.

At the moment, father and son--the latter dropped the family name professionally--are more interested in getting across their message about the broken young and the lack of concern about their repair. After James’ decision to straighten himself out after years of drug and alcohol abuse, he became a volunteer counselor at a Los Angeles juvenile detention center. He found an emotional breakthrough for three of his charges when he took them out of the center to visit a Thanksgiving celebration at Narcotics Anonymous. But he was fired for breaking the rules. The authorities, he says, don’t know about helping, they only know about punishing.

“I know ,” James says with not a little anger. “From about the time I was 16 years old up until four years ago, I’ve been in and out of juvenile detention places, East Lake Juvenile Hall, County Jail--I know what the system is about. I know that there is no love in there, and if there is a counselor that happens to come along that treats the kids with love and understanding, most of the time my experience has been, being in those places, and working in places like that, the system weeds that out.

“A lot of the system is about punishing, and not about understanding, and not about loving. That was one of the things that was important for me to bring up in the play, and to have a realization that these kids just basically need to be loved, and played ball with, or whatever the case may be. That’s missing a lot in what goes on in our world, in society.

“All these kids, at a certain point in time when they’re growing up, if they come from broken homes and they’re hanging out in bad areas, by the time they’re 13, 14, 15 years old, they’re going to get in trouble with the law and they’re going to wind up in these detention places. That’s when they need to be gotten to. Once they get past that stage, sometimes it’s too late, as we see every day with drive-bys and all that stuff.”

Malmuth, who raised James as a single parent and came from a broken home himself, couldn’t agree more fervently. “It’s like when a fish gets into the net,” he says, “there’s a time to either throw it back in the ocean or kill it. And this is what happens here. Just about every kid who comes from--it’s an ugly expression--a dysfunctional family, at some time, whether he’s 8, 11 or 14, is going to wind up in that net.

“Now, it’s the job of that person who’s holding that fish, that poor kid, in that net to either nurse it back to an ocean it can swim in or, in effect, kill it. What they do is they amplify the pain, because the kid’s been hit in the face and they come and smack him in the back of the head. What is that ? Some of these kids don’t get back. They’re just abandoned, period.”

The mending of the relationship between father and son was not easy.

Malmuth explains about the years that climaxed in the gas station on Las Palmas. “I had had all I could take. I hit the low point with my relationship with my son when he kept violating all the trust that was built up between us. And each time I gave him another chance, another chance, and I would get burned. Everybody kept saying, ‘You’re enabling him, you’re enabling him!’ ‘I love him,’ I said. ‘You’re enabling him,’ they said.

“So I went to an Al-Anon Tough Love meeting in Culver City, and while I was telling everybody about how hurt I was because he was doing this to me and that to me, this lady hit me in the head with her pocketbook, and all her stuff went all over the floor. And she said, ‘You’re going to have to wake up. The only way to get him to stop what he’s doing is to stop what you’re doing.’ It just made sense. They came with me to the house and put signs up on the windows, if he comes I’m going to call the cops. He was at that point on his own path to oblivion.”

After Malmuth and his son decided to write the play about James’ recovery and experience as a juvenile counselor, the similarity of both their childhoods helped heal the wounds, along with their dedication to bringing the problem of juvenile homes and their lost charges to public attention.

The reliving of it three nights a week still affects James. “It’s still difficult,” he says, “because this is so true and so close to the vest. Even today, during the week, after I do the play and bring up all this stuff over the weekend, all these emotions, rehash my life, rehash a broken relationship with a girl I really loved a lot--that I thought I was going to get married to--when I rehash all this stuff, I find myself on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday still feeling sad, still thinking about it. In some ways it’s healing, and in other ways it’s still upsetting. And I found the process of writing the play with my father to be both healing and upsetting.”

Malmuth nods in agreement. “My youth was not dissimilar to Evan’s youth. By doing the play with him, I’m addressing my own pain about certain things that went on in my life. It’s true. It was so common, my pain and his pain.”

Malmuth and James created the play for the theater because it was the shortest and quickest road to get it before the public, but they’ve already begun working on a screen adaptation, which they intend to be as honest and probing as the stage play. “Even more ,” says Malmuth. Their intent is to reach the widest possible audience.

“It’s about being honest, being open, and letting people know what your pain is, and then saying, ‘OK, let’s not wallow in it. Let’s start doing something about it.’ ”

And, father and son agree, let’s start doing something about the kids. James’ character in the play says, “You can’t squash young hope. It’s easier to build a child than it is to repair a man.”