"I'm your boy," Jack Henry says to his father. "I'm like you. You killed people over there in Korea, and you lost your brother, just like me. Our brothers aren't like us. They don't have the stomach for this fight. He shouldn't even be out here. He knew to stay clear of my path."
Maybe it's not surprising that the Eason family Thanksgivings don't revolve around Runt of the Litter.
Bruce Bennett
As Jack Henry, Eason revels in the searing violence of the game.
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These are great days for Bo and Dawn Eason. Runt has gotten rave reviews from Houston critics, and serious movie offers are under discussion.
Castle Rock wants to make the film, working with Frank Darabont of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. They've already "taken meetings," as the saying goes.
"I've never been called by an agent, and now all the big ones who wouldn't deal with me in the past are calling and wanting to set up meetings," Bo says. "My agent and manager dumped me a year and a half ago because I didn't want to do anything but this play."
He and Dawn fly to L.A. early this month to try to settle on an agent. Dawn also hopes to have some sort of producing role in any film made of the play.
"She's put aside her acting career because she believes in this so much," Bo says.
Dawn definitely has the take-charge personality needed to succeed in Hollywood, constantly working the phones to try to get more publicity. "We need people to know this is a play about family and not just about football," she says as she talks of handing out flyers at sports bars and society luncheons.
She's also supported Bo in a more concrete way: The bulk of their income in the past year has been her earnings from a DiGiornio Pizza commercial. (She's the scantily clad, blindfolded girlfriend in the 9 1/2 Weeks spoof who freaks when she thinks her boyfriend sneaked a delivery boy into the room.)
Dawn also was the one who first called Rob Bundy, the artistic director at Stages, with the idea of having the world premiere of Runt in Houston.
"She said she was married to Bo Eason, a former Oiler, and he had written a one-man show, and were we interested in renting them space so they could put it on," Bundy says. "I get a lot of calls like that, from people wanting to put on one-man shows. And I thought of a former Houston Oiler safety-turned-playwright, and I thought it was a recipe for disaster."
He took them seriously when she told him the director working with them was Moss. "That made me go, 'Hmm. Larry Moss. That's not chopped liver. If they have his imprimatur on it, there must be something going on,' " he says.
"I was also quite astonished -- I thought it would be a vanity piece, but it is exactly not," he says of the script. "The next test was, 'Can this jock move?' They sent a video of his performance, and he is an actor. He's not self-conscious in his movements. There's a fluidity about him."
Stages had a dark theater handy, so Runt opened February 16. Bundy too has heard talk of a movie, and of taking the production off-Broadway, and doesn't disparage it. Of course, Hollywood is a town of movie deals that never come to fruition, and companies and directors whose attention span lasts only until the next trend comes along.
Bo Eason is too optimistic a person to admit that, but even if the Hollywood thing never comes about, his life has been changed by this play.
"For the first time, I feel like I'm a man with my own voice," he says. "I've always been indoctrinated, by coaches, or parents, or friends -- 'You're this; do this.' It's not until now that I'm really finding out what I am. Who knew I could write this thing?"
Certainly not his family. And maybe someday, the father and mother who make up so much of the play, who attended almost every sporting event he ever participated in, will actually see what he's brought to his new arena.
