Oliver Thomas: Acting out his confessions

Oliver Thomas is readying himself for the performance of his life, said Doug MacCash in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Thomas, a disgraced former New Orleans city councilman, is preparing to portray himself in a play called Reflections: A Man and His Time. Four years ago, Thomas, 53, was a rising star and possible mayoral candidate when he was charged with accepting a $20,000 bribe and sent to prison for two and a half years. It was in prison that a director and writer approached him to star in a play about his own rise and fall. “The gall of him,” Thomas recalls thinking. “I’m fresh in my sentence and he wants me to think about putting the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me on stage.”

Eventually Thomas, who has a background in community theater, bought into the idea of playing himself. “Why would I be able to play everybody else’s story and not lend the theater the story of my life?” Owning up to his mistakes through the vehicle of drama has been cathartic. “I’ve cried during rehearsal,” he says. “It’s like going to therapy and admitting who you are to your therapist.” Being a politician, he says, prepared him well for acting. “In the sad sense, politics is too much theater. Some of the acting in politics has been crafted by politicians so well that people believe it’s not acting, when in too many cases it is acting. It’s just a stage play at the highest level.”

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