July 25, 2002
When “OK, OK,” a new play written by Gene Gately of Great Falls, premieres Aug. 1 at the Fells Point Corner Theater in Baltimore, it will be the first public glimpse of Gately’s latest career, that of playwright.
His play, a comedy, will be performed as one of six selected after stage readings in the annual Baltimore Playwrights Festival competition this year.
Since then, it has been professionally produced for an 18-day run Aug. 1 - 18 with four performances a week.
The play has been cast and rehearsed, sets and lighting have been designed, and the full production will be ready to open Aug. 1.
The director is Kwame Kenyatta-Bey,
Gately, who is retired from two previous careers, says playwriting has always lurked within his soul, but only in the last eight years has he devoted his efforts to it full-time.
The urge to write was “on hold” during careers in journalism and government service, although he performed in some amateur theater productions, Gately said.
Only since he retired, he said, has he “gone after the professional end of it.”
THE PLOT comes from one of Gately’s life experiences as a writer for Newsweek magazine.
He went to visit an old friend, Navy physician Tom Dooley, now deceased. When Gately went to visit Dooley at a field hospital in northern Laos, he discovered that Dooley and two medical corpsmen had all departed the camp for various reasons.
“I found myself alone at the hospital, and everyone assumed I was a doctor,” he said. A nurse approached him and asked if he would mind “standing around with a stethoscope and a white coat” while she treated the patients, until Dooley returned.
He did, for five days, during which he delivered a baby.
“The net result is the play and the developments in the play,” Gately said. “I delivered a baby, and assisted in surgery.”
In the play, the protagonist is a journalist who arrives to a similar situation with the intention of writing an expose because he suspects malpractice at the hospital.
Gately won’t reveal how the plot turns, but says it incorporates Dooley’s real-life premise in Northern Laos: he resisted using modern medical machines because he did not want to leave the natives there “with a long supply line.”
In the play, “The journalist is coming out to do ‘em in, and he puts his foot on the slippery path and becomes part of the problem,” Gately said.
THE TITLE comes from Dooley’s decision to teach the Laotians the phrase “OK, OK,” so they’d be able to converse with Americans.
As he “wears out the road” from Great Falls to Baltimore during rehearsals, Gately said, there is some degree of nervousness about watching the premiere of a comedy and wondering if the audience will laugh.
But “I know they laugh,” said Gately. “We had public readings and they laughed in the right places, so I think we’re all right.”