After spending decades as a psychotherapist, Steve Cadwell now has a second job that is admittedly a “bridge to retirement,” he said. But his autobiographical one-man show, “Wild and Precious,” has catapulted him into a national conversation on both gay rights activism and pure theatrical entertainment, with major performances planned in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
Cadwell will perform his show, sponsored by the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life and the LGBTQ Center, in Manning Chapel Saturday. Cadwell met University Chaplain Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson at the funeral of their mutual friend Maxim Daamen, a local psychiatrist, gay rights activist and professor at the Alpert Medical School. Cooper Nelson invited Cadwell to bring his show to Brown both as a memorialization of Daamen and as a celebration of the future of human rights, she said.
The show takes an unusual approach to gauging its success. Cadwell tells audience members that they are free to leave at the intermission. But with most audience members sticking around for the full show, the performance seems to be catching on.
Cadwell speaks of his show’s positive reception with more than a hint of pride in his voice, and his confidence is fitting for a psychotherapist who has built a career on fighting shame associated with gender and sexuality. But he wasn’t always so self-assured — at 23, his psychological distress over coming out caused him to spend time in a state hospital. “When I was a sophomore at Amherst College, homosexuality was a disease,” he said.
The show features an interlude of poetry and songs written over the past half-century, combining various visual and auditory media into a cohesive narrative of self-acceptance. It follows his journey from a child on a farm in Vermont to a proud parent with his husband Joe.
“I’m doing a life review on stage,” he said, adding that he aims to detail the impressive “social change in the last 50 years” from a personal perspective.
As Cadwell’s life story continues to change, so does the play: He added a new musical number in front of a Burlington crowd Sept. 12. And though the show used to include an onstage assistant, Cadwell scaled down to a one-man cast to communicate with the audience on a more direct level.
Cadwell’s respect for the roles of both storyteller and listener stems from the years he spent on the audience side as a psychotherapist. “My appreciation of what happens in a good therapeutic relationship is that we connect, we relate,” he said.
The story is simultaneously a ritual of aging, a celebration of an increasingly accepting society and a reflection of the horrors of intolerance. This last point adds a crucial element to the performance: In understanding previous generations’ experiences of oppression, the current generation is better equipped to fight homophobia and cultivate diversity in a world in which gay people continue to be minorities who are vulnerable to scapegoating, he said.
By sharing his story, Cadwell challenges others to live out his titular inspiration — Mary Oliver’s poetic provocation, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” He said he plans to perform long into his “baby elder bloomer years.”
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