Playing it straight

For a non-profit theater company dedicated to conveying the dangers of addiction, Half Measures Group sure has a good sense of humor. Over the course of its three-decade existence, the troupe has spread its message of sobriety through musical comedy. Titles include: Pirates in Search of the Bottomless Bottle, The Brady Drunks, The Wiz That Was and Snow White & the Seven Defects. For those who came of age in the era of Just Say No, “this is your brain on drugs” and Requiem for a Dream, this method of convincing young people to avoid falling into substance abuse might be considered ineffectual, if not slightly offensive. But as longtime group member Glenn Moore, who made his stage debut in a Half Measures production called SMASHED, a parody of M*A*S*H, points out, there are two ways to look at recovery.

“You can laugh at it or cry at it,” he says. “We choose to laugh at it.”

And considering how long they have been around, there is little arguing with that theory. Half Measures began in 1974, the brainchild of Jay Thayer, a recovering alcoholic who believed in entertainment as a means of keeping fellow addicts off drugs and alcohol and the impressionable from picking them up in the first place. Starting with a performance of The Sound of Miracles at the Unitarian Church in Ventura, the group has been putting on at least one show a year at local high schools, hotel ballrooms, recovery program functions and the Oxnard Performing Arts Center. This year’s production, the slightly more serious The Soap Box, will be the second without Thayer, who passed away in 2006. But none of the remaining members have forgotten him.

“Jay Thayer didn’t save my life,” Moore says, “but he sure as hell changed the direction of it.”

Moore, a machinist by trade, joined Half Measures not long after he got sober himself in 1989, when Thayer asked him to build a full-scale prop helicopter for SMASHED. “He wanted it to fly onto the stage on cables with the propellers turning, land, break in half, and at the end of the scene it would come back together, lift and fly off. It was a year-long project,” Moore says. “In the process, Jay had a way to get you to push the envelope and do things you didn’t think you could do.” Thayer figured as long as Moore was contributing to the set, he might as well march as an extra in a scene. And since he was marching, he might as well sing with the group, too. “By the time show came around, I went out and sang solo in front of 1,500 people. I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Moore says a lot of the participants in Half Measures are also in recovery, having either been recruited by other members or finding the group on their own. For some, however, membership is a generational thing. Michele Beltran, for instance, has been with the company since 1977; before then, her mother was a member. Neither are recovering addicts, but Beltran’s father was an alcoholic, and she sees the performances as a way to help not just those dealing with addiction themselves, but those who are living with addiction in others. And now her kids are getting involved.

“They see that some people in the cast are in a recovery program, and it’s good for them to see people can change, people can better their lives,” Beltran says. “That’s what I want them to get out of it.”

Beltran and her two daughters, ages 14 and 7, are acting in The Soap Box, premiering in August at Pacifica High School in Oxnard. Unlike the plays Thayer would write — which would usually take a famous work and tweak the material into a cautionary comedic tale — this year’s production is based on an original script co-written by four Half Measures members. It is a period piece, following a group of friends from the 1920s through the ’40s, some of whom end up falling into addiction. While there are greater dramatic elements than in past Half Measures productions, Tom Hannon, who co-wrote the play with his wife and two others, says it is a mixture of styles — and, yes, it gets silly on occasion.

“We tried to throw in bit of everything,” says Hannon, who with his wife plays one half of a radio team that is responsible for much of what he calls the “comic relief.” “We tried to do that because it’s fun. The idea that the whole show is in-your-face about alcoholism is not the case. It’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted a show that a variety of people could relate to. … It’s entertaining.”

And according to Moore, being entertaining is a large part of the message of hope and sobriety they wish to get across.

“We don’t want to take it too serious even though it’s a deadly serious disease,” he says. “While we’re up there doing what we’re doing, we’re non-professional actors, and the message put across is, ‘We’re having fun, and we’re not loaded.’ ”    

For more information about Half Measures Group, visit www.halfmeasuresgroup.com.