By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Lane Hakel will be back at Kenwood Elementary where he taught for 12 years. He won’t be returning to the classroom.
Hakel, a veteran teacher who taught for more than 20 years at Kenwood and the middle school before retiring two years ago, will be engaging in another of his passions.
Hakel will be in the one-man show “Balloonacy” presented by the Children’s Theatre Workshop of Toledo. Hakel has been traveling to schools in the region this fall portraying a man who discovers the joys of play.
A free public performance will be presented Saturday Oct 21 at 11 a.m. in the atrium of the Wood County District Public Library in downtown Bowling Green.
The show, the actor said, checks off an item on his theatrical bucket list.
Since he saw Kent McClary, another Kenwood teacher who acted, perform a one-man biography of Teddy Roosevelt with the Black Swamp Players, Hakel has wanted to go solo.
“There haven’t been that many opportunities,” Hakel said. “The secret to having a large audience in community theater is having a large cast.”
And if that cast includes kids, all the better.
The CWT presented Hakel with the chance. That it’s a play that appeals to kids 3-7, same age as his own two grandchildren, made it more appealing.
Based on the Oscar-winning short film, “The Red Balloon,” this script substitutes the young boy with an old man.
“It’s a reimagining of that same story,” Hakel said. “An old man is alone in his apartment sad and depressed, and it turns out to be his birthday.”
All this is communicated through the actor’s “motion and carriage.” He doesn’t speak.
The recorded musical score “defines things from time to time, and there are some sound effects that help develop the story.”
The old man unsuccessfully tries to celebrate his birthday, but his attempts all fall flat.
Then a balloon starts appearing at the window. “Basically, the balloon muscles its way into his apartment,” Hakel said.
“The old man makes utterances and gasps, but never speaks. That gives the audience little kids permission to say what they want. That’s a good deal of fun, unpredictable but good to work with. When kids start responding to that they go in a couple different directions.”
Recently the touring company performed the show for a large audience of kindergartners and first graders at Washington Local schools. When the balloon forced its way into the man’s room, the students began chanting “pop it!”
Yet, in the same audience another small boy kept yelling repeatedly “it just wants to make you happy!”
The script was written by Barry Kornhauser. Aimee Reid, the CWT artistic director and a BGSU graduate, was in a workshop with him while he was developing the 40-minute show. So, she was interested in presenting it.
Because of grant funding, the troupe can offer the production, which is quite elaborate for a touring show, Hakel said, for the minimal price of $100.
Hakel is very active on the theater scene. He performed in high school, but then set it aside as he married and raised a family. It was “an itch” he never scratched until his kids were older.
So, at 39 in 2000 he performed in the musical “My One and Only” directed by the late Bob Hastings of the Black Swamp Players. Hastings’ musicals were a genre unto themselves, he said.
For his first 10 years, Hakel confined his theater activity to the stage. “I took without giving,” he said. “I performed in a lot of shows but didn’t help with making those shows happen.”
Hakel eventually joined the board of the Black Swamp Players and eventually became president.
He was the president in spring 2018 when it looked like the curtain would close on the BG troupe.
Instead, the members and the community rallied. The troupe found a new home on East Oak Street and changed direction, taking on more adventurous fare.
Hakel does four to five shows a year. “I play the field,” he said. He’s performed with most of the area’s theater companies, everything from a “fighting prawn” in “Peter and the Starcatcher to Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
He’s still on the Black Swamp Players board and helps build sets. He was last on the Oak Street stage in February 2022’s “August: Osage County.”
Beside “Baloonacy,” last week he was part of the ensemble for the new musical “Common Grounds,” staged by TBD Productions.
Hakel said it’s “thrilling” to see the Players’ new direction. Now, he said, performers from the Toledo area are now coming down to participate in shows in Bowling Green making the trek Hakel has made so many times in the past 23 years.
He quips that he’s in theater because he’s a lousy bowler.
“It’s fun to have something I myself intrinsically believe I’m good at,” he said. “Once I decided that, it’s been fun.”
