Pulse: Chatter: Theater: Dominic and Me

Hollywood was still buzzing the day after the Academy Awards. Entering a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, I half expected to step over a disheveled, torn-tuxed Jeff Bridges, sleeping it off. But tonight the stage belonged to a younger actor from Cherry Hill, named Dominic Comperatore. He’d landed the role of a lifetime — my lifetime. Dominic was going to play me.  

The backstory to this casting starts about 10 years ago, when I wrote a book called Renovations: A Father and Son Rebuild a House and Rediscover Each Other. Though my publisher used a publicity plan borrowed from the folks who run the federal witness protection program, a handful of people managed to find and read Renovations. Several did ask me at the time, “Who would you want to play you in the movie?” It became a fun little party game, which I often ended by saying, “Rosie O’Donnell. Who else?” Then, a few years ago, a young playwright named Andrew Gerle read Renovations and purchased theatrical rights. I blew the big windfall on dinner and a movie. Gerle told me, “You should start thinking about who would play you.” Rosie O’Donnell loves the stage.

Meanwhile, Dominic Comperatore was heading for his date with my destiny. He started acting while attending St. Joe’s Prep because it was one of the few extracurricular activities at the all-boys’ school that included girls — the actresses were imports. In college, though he was studying international studies and German at the University of Scranton (my hometown; coincidence?), Dominic kept acting. When he came back to Cherry Hill after graduation, his mom and dad sat him down and gave him advice unprecedented in the history of parenthood — move to New York and try to become an actor.

His first role was Hamlet, far downtown and “way the hell off Broadway.” But he worked and studied and ended up on Broadway. Then he did a few independent films and decided to move to Los Angeles, and he appeared on 24 and Chuck and Entourage. He got a part as a Holocaust survivor in a movie called The Good German that put him in the midst of Cate Blanchett, Tobey -Maguire and George Clooney. Dominic worked so hard to inhabit that part that he lost 25 pounds.

But Hollywood work “comes in waves,” he says, and the tide must have been out when someone asked him to play a burnt-out, bitter freelance writer who leaves the city to fix up a house in the country. “The script was touching,” he says, “and a lot of fun.” He didn’t have to live through it.

I wish I could tell you that Dominic Comperatore nailed me. But from the moment Dominic started reading his lines — many of them my lines — my head spun, and I experienced a full body blush. My fiancée said he was great — and really cute. I do recall that actor Apollo Dukakis (Olympia’s brother) really got my father.

The playwright tells me there’s a chance of another production of Renovations soon in Chicago. I’d certainly suggest Dominic Comperatore play me again. But would he be willing to gain the 40 pounds necessary to really capture my essence?

“That depends,” he told me, “on what kind of food I could eat.”