Jividen credits speech teacher Griffith for engendering his comedic pursuits
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—"Spoon-mentum" has taken hold of the American psyche, proclaims the man on the other end of the telephone conversation.
The "pop culture frenzy" to which the speaker playfully and wishfully alludes arises from "Spoon Millionaires," a play that he has co-authored that will be presented Aug. 10 through Aug. 12 and Aug. 17 through Aug. 19 at the Lima Civic Center in Lima, Ohio.
But seriously, Jim Jividen is comfortable in the knowledge that the production of the comedy, which he co-wrote with former Ohio Northern University classmate Kirk Hiner, probably will not reach Broadway or catapult him to stardom.
The play's the thing.
"In all likelihood this is going to stop at the water's edge," said the 1988 Elgin High School graduate and San Francisco native. His hope is "reasonable" that the play might be presented at a couple more venues, but "if anyone picks it up from there, that's terrific."
He acknowledges "my secret hope and wish" that someone in New York or Los Angeles catches the play and discovers the instructor in paralegal studies is a screenwriting phenom.
But if Lima is the end of the road he'll be satisfied.
"I'm going to watch actors say my words and they're going to laugh or, even if I'm the only one, that's going to be pretty good."
The man directing "Spoon Millionaires," George Frazee of Bluffton, said Jividen's play has been a joy.
"It's a wonderful show," said Frazee, who also is producer of Playfair, whose primary mission is to present plays that have not been staged previously.
"They've done a marvelous job of taking stock characters and taking them to the absolute extreme," said Frazee, who's directed nine Playfair productions. "As a director, I'm having more fun than a
human should be allowed."
Jividen has a bachelor's degree in organizational communication and a law degree from Ohio Northern University. After law school, he moved back to California where he is a member of the state's bar association and worked as a criminal defense attorney.
"I wasn't particularly good at it," said the 35-year-old, who in 2003 received a master's degree in American history at Florida Atlantic University where he has been an instructor of paralegal studies since.
He started writing while at Ohio Northern where he and Hiner performed in a sketch comedy troupe. "Since then, on and off, we've just kept on writing stuff. We wrote for our school's literary magazine. We wrote a pilot for a sitcom that got us a meeting with a Los Angeles agent."
"Spoon Millionaires" is a play "...we've just kind of been kicking around in some embryonic form for 15 years, really, and over the last year-and-a-half or so we just kind of focused in on it to get it out into the world, and now we're covered in spoon-mentum."
He described the show as a "1980s soap opera parody. ...It's 116 pages of one ridiculous joke after another. I don't know how many of them have to bit to be funny, but I hope some of them do."
At Elgin, then-school speech coach and play director Max Griffith gave hope and encouragement to his aspirations of writing for theater, television and movies.
Jividen was grateful "...to be in really rural Ohio and have a guy like that who just loved the theater and who was inspirational." He said, under Griffith's tutelage, "Pound for pound, student for studen,t if there was a more successful speech team in the country, I would be surprised."
"Public speaking was where I had my most success in high school," said Jividen, who also performed in the school's plays. "Everything I am is because of that guy. For better or worse, my burgeoning interests in performing was all about that guy putting me on stage when I was 13 (in "Twelve Angry Men"). I was terrible by the way."
Griffith disagreed with his former charge's self-assessment.
"In one play he was in, it was a melodrama, and he played an old man," Griffith said. "He did it in a sort of melodramatic, stilted way, and that's what we wanted. I just think he was hilarious."
Young people growing up in a rural community aren't as far from the limelight as he felt in the late 1980s because of the Internet, Jividen said.
"Someone who wants to express himself in the written form can put up a blog and the entire world can see it," he said.
But he said any theatrically inclined student who might feel confined by his or her circumstances should seek out an inspirational figure.
"My hope would be at every high school there's a guy like Max Griffith, some teacher, some director, someone involved in music or writing, poetry, art or photography, whatever it is, to flip your creativity," he said. "You need to cling to that guy like a barnacle. And then, gosh, go to the best college you possibly can and never give up."
While he suspects his aspirations as a comedic author may not be accomplished, he said he maintains a sense of determination about the goal he and Hiner share.
"Inside there's a kernel of hope that maybe one day someone will pay us to be funny," he said. "Maybe it comes out of this and maybe it doesn't. ...I'm going to push it as hard as I can."
