The Whistleblower's Dilemma

Sep 24, 2021 12:17

Now it is time for me to review my own production of The Whistleblower's Dilemma, which was at Playcrafter's Barn Theater as its Barn Owl show in August of 2021.

Written by Jimmy Sederquist and directed by Mike Turczynski, stage-managed by Marni Turzcynski, The Whistleblower's Dilemma is the story of Joe Linton, the financial director for Johanson and Linton Components, LLC. They manufacture autoparts. The front office and factory are based in a non-descript town in rural Caleghany County, Michigan.

Our play opens with Joe entering the office of Gerald Johanson, the present and CEO of Johanson and Linton, which he has in his boundless pettiness and narcissism rebranded J & L Components, having bought out Joe Linton's father's shares in the company shortly before his death about ten years before the action of our play starts.


There's no other way to put it. Gerald Johanson is an absolute piece of human garbage. No redeemable qualities. I was instructed by the playwright to make him the worst possible human possible.

Joe catches Gerald dead in the water writing out grants for Research and Development money from the state of Michigan, to the tune of 999,997 dollars a fiscal year. He's gotten away with stealing 3,999,988 dollars thus far. And he's fixing to pull off the scam yet another time.

Joe is torn when Gerald tells him that if he turns him in, he'll turn all the blame on him. It's sad, because Joe was absolutely clueless about the fraud taking place. He had in fact been begging Gerald Johanson to invest in Research and Development. And never saw a dime of the money Gerald had been requesting. Think of what Joe could have accomplished if he had actually gotten his hands on the money Gerald was hoarding for himself in a miserly fashion. I kind of wanted the character I was playing to just die. It was taxing to do Act 1 Scene 1, and Act 1, Scene 5, when Gerald plays cat and mouse with Joe, showing zero remorse, and threatening to get his underling thrown in jail for crimes he did not commit.

Now, from the first scene of this piece of work, it would be easy to assume that it was a drama. That's what I assumed on sight as I worked my way through the script.

But then we meet Jackie Thrash, the state investigator, who is trying to convince her smart but jaded boss that an investigation needs to be started up right away of the shady finances of Johanson and Linton. My wife Sara plays the sunny and chipper Jackie. She's not out to make a name for herself. She is a ladder climber, though. And she is very much by the book. Jackie is willing to conduct the investigation, in her own time, and on her own dime, so that she can stop the fraud from occuring again in 2014. Just out of principle. It's not even about earning her salary. Her father had been the CEO of Thrash Automotive. They also made car parts and vehicles in the state of Michigan before they went belly-up. Dad got a pay-out and moved to Antigua. The other people who worked for him were forced to find other work, and faced hard times as a result.

It is a reputation that Jackie is working painstakingly to live down. She doesn't like being saddled with her last name.

Meanwhile, back in Caleghany County, we meet Dan, the friend of Joe Linton who works in Information Technology for Johanson and Linton. Dan is the screwball, and has a wisecrack for every lament made by Joe. He was played by Andy Sederquist (cousin of Jimmy Sederquist). Dan decides that he will go along with Joe's potentially self-incriminating yet tactical plan to try to entrap Gerald Johansson. They would do so by making a modification to the digital form Gerald has to use to request the money.

Joe wants to make out to look as though Gerald Johanson is requesting more money than he actually is. He wants to push it up to 1,000,012 for the fiscal year 2013, when our show is set. This will set off an automatic state audit after the first of the year.

And if perhaps Joe could get ahead of the state audit getting underway, and whistleblow on the cumulative 5,000,000 in fraud, he could net half of the money in whistleblower reward. This, he would use to turn around and save the company. Gerald Johanson has let it backslide. The factory probably wouldn't last many more years anyways, if Johansson stayed at the helm. He's not a very good man. And in my opinion, not a stable genius. Sara and I had discussions about how smart I was to play Johansson as a character. I was comfortable letting him come off as not in the know about everything. How else would this sting get carried off by Joe and Dan? He had to be obtuse enough, just harebrained enough, to let them use his own computer to submit a doctored form and let his fate be sealed as he boards a flight to Fiji for the New Year.

Initially, I hated playing Gerald. When I read it on the page, seeing that you just had to hate him, I didn't feel that I had it in me to go down that path. I like playing complicated criminals, or idiot criminals. Complicated criminals have moments where you see that they're not entirely given over to evil, not at every moment (my character Shem in Children of Eden, my character Elijah in Inherit the Wind, and to some extent, my character Senator Alan Hughes in An American Daughter at Augustana College.) Idiot criminals get to grab laughs from the crowd as they stumble through their scheme, ultimately outsmarted by the protagonist, because why now? (I played a pirate in Peter Pan, and Pablo, a henchman in Sister Act. These roles gave me breathing room to be a moron.)

But I looked to Sara, a week before rehearsals started, and asked her, "do you think I can carry this off?" And she said yes.

So a week later, the two of us were headed to our first rehearsal together as actor and actress since we got married. It would our first time acting onstage together since Promises, Promises at Playcrafter's Barn Theater in 2008.



Andy Curtiss, as mentioned, a veteran of Playcrafters and Genesius Guild, played the role of Joe Linton. He was quiet, but we got along well. I was very careful to draw a line between my onstage persona of Gerald, and my offstage persona of myself. He liked to remind me that my character of Pete; the floorworker who pops in twice to offer help during the three day holiday shutdown, and again months later, always following Dan around with one distracting character or another; seemed as if to be based off of his favorite David Lynch show, Twin Peaks. I haven't watched it yet, so it was serendipitous.


Joe and Jackie meet earlier than Joe would have liked. At Klaus', the tavern in Caleghany County where everyone congregates. Jackie comes up to just this county where J & L Components' headquarters and factory are located. It just so happens that her best friend, Madeline, played by Elle Winchester, is going home for the holidays. Rather than go to the Caribbean to visit her family, with whom she's not on all that great of terms, Jackie agreess to head home with Madeline.

Jackie decides to do some snooping around once she finds out Madeline's brother, Dan, works for J&L Components in Information Technology. And it's absolutely great that Sara got cast to play Jackie. Sawa (Freudian slip, Sara, that's how her dad pronounces her name) was able to play Jackie with enough optimism and sincerity that she could start an unofficial investigation without once giving off so much as an iota of suspicion as she reunites with Dan and meets Joe for the first time in the Caleghany watering hole, Klaus' tavern. If they hadn't been aware of the fraud that my character Gerald was committing, I could see Joe and Dan being very cooperative with Jackie.

She knew that good detective work would mean getting people to trust her. She is self-aware that her ninceness and integrity could be the undoing of the CEO. If she gets in well with the employees, she could get enough information on the snake who runs the place to get his head cut off, metaphorically speaking. (I'm borrowing a term from a crossover event of Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., and Law and Order SVU.)

Joe, for his part, is terrified that Jackie's catching the fraud before New Year's Day will mean no whistleblower reward. Merry Christmas, no one. The state investigation will freeze the factory's assetts, slow orders, stymie production and ultimately get the factory shut down.

So the play turns into a comedy.

I chuckled at the comic relief, heartily, while reading it at my kitchen table in the week leading up to our first rehearsals. But I thought of it as just really good comic relief within a terse drama, like Fargo, Argo, or The Red Sea Diving Resort (see IMDb.com, it's like Argo).

But in the deft hands of Andy Curtiss, Andy Sederquist, Sara Laufer, Elle Winchester, Kassidy Holdridge, and; if I may be so forthright, yours truly; what it turned into, before my veyr eyes, was a comedy.

We turned a dramatic premise into a comedy. It happened before my very eyes, with my own participation. It was theater magic.

I really grew to like the play more watching Andy Curtiss and Andy Sederquist as Joe and Dan playing a frustrating game of Whack-a-Mole with Jackie Thrash, her being onto them with some new piece of information, and the two hapless employees frantically working to distract her. They have abundant information in Joe's apartment that could be potentially incriminating. Figuring out how to make the fraud big enough; by adding a tiny fifteen dollars to the 999,997 dollars being requested for 2014 by Gerald Johansson in 2013, to set off an investigation by the Michigan State Assessors; requires having a lot of numbers and figures about the finances for Johanson and Linton and the reimbursement amounts for research and development on the whiteboard in his apartment. Yes, Joe Linton keeps a whiteboard in his apartment.

And it's setting out there in the open just waiting for Jackie to arrive with donuts, hoping to get a factory tour out of them. You know, as a tourist.

This as it were vacation for Jackie is actually not all that different from some of Sara and my vacations as husband and wife. On a recent trip to Nebraska, our friend Kent took us on a tour of the three fire stations in Kearney. We got to climb on the rigs, put on turn-out gear, lift the oxygen tanks, and watch a fire call in progress.

Joe uses his whiteboard for bringing down Gerald. Jackie, for her part, would have to use this information to open a formal investigation. If she sees past Joe and Dan's smoke and mirrors deception that it's information on Fantasy Football, or the NCAA tournament, or whatever it is that Michigan State is playing in. (I think at a rehearsal we discussed this matter, as the play was set in the heart of college bowl season, and regular season basketball.)

Nobody else in the world gets Joe. For having a rolling dry-erase whiteboard in his house.

Nobody else but Jackie Thrash. He confides in her that it's such an easy way to keep track of one's thoughts. But she finishes the sentence with him.

It was in this moment, while reading the script, and at the read-through, and at the rehearsal, that I realized that Joe and Jackie Thrash were meant to be together.

If only he could keep the fraud secret for long enough that he can whistleblow on his own terms. If only he can keep her from seeing his whiteboard's contents long enough for her not to arrest him.

A complication? Dan's younger sister Madeline is also head over heels in love with Joe Linton. Joe's been utterly oblivious to this fact. And, evidently, she's been in love with him for years.

I loved playing Pete, the working class north country factory foreman. And I loved playing John Clark, the ne'er do well town drunk. I got to hit on my own wife. And be rejected for my efforts.

But I'll take it. It was great to be in a play with Sara again! She's a terrific actress, and whenever we are on stage together, the fact that we are a married couple kind of dissolves (not literally), and we are once again two actors who understand each other's rhythm, lost in our characters, and interacting with each other how they would react. AS it should be when I work with ANY actor or actress.

I really enjoyed doing The Whistleblower's Dilemma. It gave me another script to pick up, another show to work on, when the show hole following my production of The Music Man set in.

Here were the other highlights of my 2021 theater participation and theater going year 2021:

The Music Man - Countryside Community Theater
Musical Mayhem- Lewistown Community High School
Newsies- Double Threat Studios
Mamma Mia- Quad City Music Guild
Princeton's Rage- Playcrafter's Barn Theater
Hippolytus- Genesius Guild
Spamalot- Quad City Music Guild
Newsies- Countryside Community Theater
Matilda- Quad City Music Guild

the whistleblower's dilemma, playcrafter's barn theater

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