USA
Keith Brown moves slower these days. A few years ago, he fell off a
ladder and crashed to a concrete slab 20 feet below. "August 16, 2013,"
Brown said, recalling the exact date without hesitation.
The
accident led to seven operations. Brown explained them in language known
only to orthopedic surgeons and the people they operate on.
"Let's see," he said. "I had two, four-level anterior discectomies on my
neck. A five-level laminectomy on my lower back." These were to remove
broken discs and vertebrae from his compressed spine. My right rotator
cuff was ripped apart, so I had surgery for that," he said. "And I broke
my right knee."
Even before the fall, Brown had never been gentle
with his body. He did hard work. And play.
By day, his hands
loosened and tightened stubborn parts on everything from kitchen sinks
to Harley engines. He put his arms and shoulders through the
repetitive-injury work of painting, sawing, sheet-rocking, spackling,
roofing – all the things that make a young man get old fast. By night,
he trained in martial arts, using those same hands to whack an
unyielding heavy bag, or grip and grab unwilling opponents.
But
...
"I would take the pain I have today over what I went through
as a kid, any day," said Brown, who lives in Columbia overlooking the
Delaware River with his wife, Joan who, he said, nursed him back to
mental and emotional health.
Brown is 56 now, decades removed for
his childhood in foster care. Those scars, he said, are more deeply
embedded. The pain of the anatomy – a broken neck and back and other
bones – can be managed. The childhood trauma of abandonment and abuse
planted in his heart and soul cannot.
"It's with you all the
time," he said. "The pain in my body is manageable. I can move into
comfortable positions. The other pain stays with you forever. It doesn't
go anywhere."
Brown is a writer and a playwright. His drama
written in verse, called "Shadow Kids," opens tonight at the American
Theater of Actors, a respected off-Broadway house.
The play
follows four kids in the foster care system through their childhood
friendship, until they "age out" at 18 and, like the siblings from their
families of origin, go their separate ways, lost to one another forever.
It is an expose of foster systems. Kids being collected in foster
homes to enrich the host parents, kids drugged to make them compliant or
docile, kids being physically or sexually abused. The only thing not
bleak is the willfulness of these children to survive.
The play
started out as a gritty musical called "Lost in the Field," nearly 10
years ago and Brown has been working to refine it ever since. Last July
he submitted it to the American Theatre of Actors, one of 800 plays
founder James Jennings receives every year.
"The subject matter
is extraordinary," Jennings said. "When we think of foster parents, we
think they're doing a heroic thing, that they walk on water.
"This play is about the problems encountered by the children in these
situations," he said. "But," Jennings added, "I didn't think it should
be a musical. It wasn't light or happy enough to be a musical."
That did not deter Brown. He just went to work. "I didn't want to give
up," Brown said. "I didn't want the message to fall by the wayside."
So, he removed the music and rewrote every scene in verse, to give
the dialogue a hard-hitting rhythm.
Working with local actors, he
rehearsed in a Montville church auxiliary room. One of the people
helping with the staging is Renee Montgomery, 27, of Lake Hiawatha, also
a product of the foster care system.
"I wish I had a beautiful
adoption story," she said, "but it wasn't like that. I was in seven
foster homes and separated from the siblings. One foster family used to
leave me in a basement. Another left me on the front steps in the snow
on Christmas Day for DYFS (New Jersey's child services) to come pick me
up."
Brown's story is similar. His parents were both drug users
unable to care for the children. Brown's sisters were sent to live with
afamily in Ohio. "You never get over it," he said, explaining how almost
everything, good or bad, triggers his childhood loneliness and abuse.
"When I see a loving family, or when I see somebody yelling at a kid
or smacking them," he said. "It brings it all back. It's never far from
the surface."
Brown was put in foster care at age 2. Somewhere
around age 5 or 6, he wrote his first story. It was called, "Don't Hurt
Me Mommy." It was the first chapter in a childhood memoir of neglect and
physical punishment.
At age 18, he was put on the street –
aged-out. "I did what a lot of us do," he said. "I joined the Army. What
else? I had no job, no skills, no money."
That childhood
experience has colored all of Brown's work. He started a non-profit
foundation that brings Christmas parties and other outings to more than
200 kids in shelters and the foster care system.
"It's just to
give them something special," Brown said. "They get so little."
On Friday night, his sister Diane Johnson, 59, is coming in from
California to see "Shadow Kids." Brown has no recollection of her.
"I haven't see in her 54 years," he said.
His other sister,
Terry Pratt, 58, who still lives in Ohio, made it happen. She found her
brother more than a decade ago, working through the Salvation Army,
after New Jersey child services officials said they lost track of him.
"She never gave up," Brown said. "Now, I'm going to meet my other
sister."
By Mark Di Ionno
2 May 2018
