Arlington native collaborates with Irish playwright

A theater production at Marquette University in Milwaukee last weekend, brought Arlington Heights native Jack Jostes full circle.

Jostes, who is a senior at Marquette, starred in, "Poor Tom," an original play that was created as the result of a year-long theater workshop called "The Dublin Project."

It began in August before Jostes' junior year, when he and other theater students worked with Patrick Sutton, artistic director of the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, to create an original theater piece centered around social justice.

Their brainstorming sessions sent Sutton back to Dublin, armed with abstract stage relationships and images, which he then turned over to Irish playwright Martin M. Maguire, to develop into a new play.

The result was "Poor Tom," which explores some village women who manufacture the very gunpowder that will kill their fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands in the war.

Last June, the Marquette students spent three weeks in Dublin, rehearsing the play in Dublin's historic Smock Alley Theatre. They returned to Milwaukee, where this month they performed its American premiere at Marquette's Helfaer Mainstage Theater.

Jostes played the role of "Johnny," a mandolin-playing troubadour, who supported the main character Tom's resistance to the war.

"Johnny is kind of a Bob Dylan character, in the sense that he sings songs that question and oppose the war," said Jostes, a 2004 Prospect High School graduate. "But in this play, Johnny is silenced -- the authority literally cuts out his tongue, and smashes his hands and mandolin. It's awful, really."

Its gritty realism was a long way from the plays and variety shows he performed in while at Prospect, and from the stringed instrument training he received as a youngster, through Arlington Heights Elementary School District 25's Music For Youth program.

However both experiences provided Jostes grounding in fleshing out his memorable character, and have served as something of a springboard for his collegiate pursuit of the performing arts.