FORMER CAPE MAN'S PLAY TO OPEN IN ST. LOUIS

The premiere of former Cape Girardeau newspaperman Jeffrey Jackson's play next weekend in St. Louis is the culmination of a creative process that began many years ago in a class at Southeast Missouri State University.

"Potter's Field," the play to be presented next Friday and Saturday at the Chesterfield Community Theater, began life as a short-story assignment in a creative writing class taught by Dr. Nolan Porterfield. Porterfield deemed the original title, "The Gnashing of Teeth," to be awful and "ripped apart" the first two drafts of the short story, Jackson recalls.

"Finally he said the third draft was ready to present to the class."

"Potter's Field" went through three more drafts as a short story while Jackson was a doctoral candidate at Southern Illinois University. Studying under novelist Richard Russo, he unsuccessfully tried to turn the short story into a novel. Finally he ditched 160 pages and rewrote the remainder as a play.

That play he completed in 1994 will be produced by the YMCA's Sound Stage Reader's Theater in what amounts to a staged reading with a set and a few props. Curtains are at 8 p.m. both days. Phone (636) 532-3100 for information.

In "Potter's Field," minister Jack Potter's return to his home opens up familial wounds, causing a re-examination of relationships and of his commitment to the church.

Though Jackson is a former Methodist minister, he says the play is autobiographical only in one way. "It is in the sense that the emotions expressed, I experienced," he said in a phone interview from Nevada, Mo. "But did any of this happen to me? No. These people are figments of my imagination."

The inspiration for the story "was my own coming to terms with a lot of issues about the ministry and about faith, and coming to terms with relationships," he said.

A former reporter for the Southeast Missourian, Jackson now is editor and general manager of the Nevada Daily Mail in Nevada, Mo. He was employed as a reporter at the Belleville News-Democrat in Belleville, Ill., when he answered the theater company's call for original works by local playwrights.

Though this is his first play, Jackson has a 25-year history in theater. While in Cape Girardeau he had lead roles in the University Theatre's production of "The Music Man" and in the River City Players' "On Golden Pond." He also has had leads in "Fiddler on the Roof" and "The Tempest."

His poetry has been published in "The Cape Rock," "Studies in Contemporary Satire" and "Phase and Cycle."

Though he has been through many opening nights, Jackson is much more nervous about this one. "This is something I really gave birth to ... and I don't know what the actors are going to do with it," he said.

"I want it to be something incredible, for people to yell Author, author' at the end, but I'm afraid they're going to throw tomatoes."

Unless working with a masterpiece, actors in a bad production can always blame the author, he said. "Now I can't blame the script."

Perseverance might seem the lesson Jackson would draw from this long journey his short story has taken to the stage. He disagrees.

"The lesson is that I can't write fiction," he says.