A man and his ego
by digby
A play about Ben Carson’s life, based on his book Gifted Hands, which is part of Baltimore’s school curriculum has been shown to thousands of students over the years. This article interviews the actor who has played Carson for 20 years.
I guess you can see why Carson believes he’s been anointed by God
The play’s plot hewed closely to the 1990 memoir Gifted Hands—Carson’s poor childhood in Detroit, his bigamist father, his mother’s insistence that he and his brother write book reports even though her third-grade education prevented her from being able to read them. And it made dramatic use of the moment Carson says defined his life—when he claims he stabbed a friend and then prayed in a bathroom for three hours for God to take away his “pathological” anger.
“This young boy with the knife would have ended up in jail or reform school!” the narrator says as Havely, in a surgeon’s smock, turns around to face the audience. “That man with the knife led a team of 70 on a groundbreaking operation!”
That story gained new scrutiny Thursday when CNN interviewed childhood friends of Carson’s from Detroit who said they didn’t remember ever hearing of such an attack. Carson later admitted that he made up the name of the boy he says he stabbed, but Havely stands by the overall veracity of Carson’s account.
I’m super nervous,” he recalls. “Ben comes up and he just starts crying. He said that it was so accurate, it was like he was reliving it.”
“That’s what the whole show is about! He never hid any of that,” Havely said Friday. “The whole point of us doing the show was us showing this.”
Carson and his family did more than simply green-light the production. Carson donated family photographs for a video that was projected behind the stage. “Anything we needed, he would give us,” Havely says. Sometimes that included gentle directions on how to play certain scenes.
Havely remembers the first time he played Ben Carson in front of Ben Carson, a kind of thrill he had never approached.
“I’m super nervous,” he recalls. “Ben comes up and he just starts crying. He said that it was so accurate, it was like he was reliving it.”
Havely’s performance schedule was tireless. During the school year it was common for him to perform the show for several thousand students from 50 or more schools in a matter of a few days. Often the schools would make a trip to Toby’s Theatre in Columbia, but Havely and the cast would also take the minimalist production on the road. The show went from a local novelty to a sprawling exposition of Ben Carson literature, including his self-help book Think Big.
As Carson told Politico in an email, “The play was supposed to go for one season and went on for more than 20.”
Over the years, the Carson family remained devoted to the production. Sonya Carson, Ben’s mother, came to a performance of the play every other week, according to Havely. She was a constant critic of her son’s character and her own, letting Havely and the play’s directors know when the fictional “Mama” got a little too sharp-tongued. In a 1997 feature about Sonya Carson in Parade Magazine, she asked the author to accompany her to the play, where she basked in the “moist eyes” of the students around her.
Havely says that area teachers would arrange for children who had been operated on by Carson to attend the play. Havely would feature them in the post-show Q&A session. He believes the idea of kids seeing Carson’s patients in their classrooms and social circles served to accentuate the force of the Ben Carson lore.
The real Carson saw the play at least once every year starting in 1994. The surgeon, Havely says, didn’t just come to watch. Once, while bringing a group from the Carson Scholars Fund to a performance, Carson stood up in the front row to play himself in the play about himself. “It was cute, because I got ready to end the play, and I go, ‘I have an answer for that: it’s think big!’ He’s in the front row and he goes, ‘Let me take that from here.’ And he comes up, and everybody applauded. It was the coolest thing,” Havely says.
On several occasions, Carson brought Havely to dinners and Scholars Fund events to appear in character for a selection of the most memorable scenes.
Wow…
Update: Might I just point out that if Carson’s mom saw this show constantly i might explain why she “remembered” the alleged stabbing incident in 1998?
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