"The Dodger" by David Zellnik

From TRUTH BE TOLD's September 25th, 2025 show ("Scary Monsters!") David Zellnik's "The Dodger" tells the story of an overweight kid, and a monster lurking in the dark of a high school theatre...

David is a writer in New York who loves telling stories, making old-fashions, drinking old-fashions, and showing you pictures of his cat Jupiter. For more on the writing part, check out www.davidzellnik.net

TRUTH BE TOLD was created by Susan Kim and David Zellnik and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svejcar. Logo designed by Joseph Zellnik.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Truth Be Told Season 1: Love and Monsters. Each of these 14 episodes will feature one story performed at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City as part of the live event Truth Be Told. This story night was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick and features members of EST and friends who tell heartbreaking, embarrassing, hilarious, true stories based on a theme. This seven-week season draws from our first two sold-out nights, one called First Love, First Lust, and the other Scary Monsters. And now, without further ado, a story of an overweight kid and a monster lurking in the dark of a high school theater. Written and performed by David Zelnick.

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Okay, this is a story about a monster. This is a story about high school theater. Junior year at my enormous public high school in New Jersey, the Big Spring musical was announced. Lionel Bart's Oliver. People here know Oliver, right? For those who don't, just in case, it is the inspiring story of an orphan named Oliver Twist in 1830s London who flees from a workhouse and becomes a pickpocket in a gang of thieves. There are two major authority figures: the comic Awful Mr. Bumble, head of the workhouse, and the devious Fagan, ringleader of the gang of pickpockets, Jewish, problematic. There's also the artful There's also the artful Dodger, Oliver's friend, who pulls Oliver into a gang and other characters. There's tragic romance, there's a courtroom scene, there's drama, there's death. But suffice it to say, many of my classmates were disappointed. Oliver, it's a kid's musical, not sophisticated like Pippin or the Pajama Game. I was not unhappy. I loved Oliver. I grew up on the album, and when I saw the movie in sixth grade, I was dazzled. I became obsessed with the actor playing Oliver, a feeling I now understand to be a sort of proto-gay crush. I fantasize about him and the other pickpockets. This world of boys and teens who lived by their wits and stole from the rich and slept cheek by jowl in Fagan's lair. It made me ache with a strange excitement. This Hollywood vision of 19th-century London slums instead of my real life in an affluent South Jersey suburb with a mom who cried every day and an unemployed dad and two older siblings and all of us eating to excess, eating to avoid our various overlapping sadnesses. Anyway, auditions. The director is a man I will call Mr. N. He announced that while Oliver would be cast with an elementary school kid, the other roles would be played by high schoolers. A word about Mr. N. He was a local legend, not least of all in my family. The amazing, glamorous director who cast my sister and brother in musicals and plays when I was still in elementary school, who directed shows in this enormous theater where I first felt the sacredness of the stage. Back when my biggest dream was to perform in high school theater, in his theater. And by junior year, I had. Freshman year, I was in the chorus of Funny Girl. Sophomore year, I was in a featured role in Man of La Mancha. But by junior year, I wanted a central role. I wanted to play the thief who seduces Oliver into a life of crime, into the world of bad boys and scary men. Yes, I wanted to play the artful Dodger. My first audition for Dodger went great. At home, I'm gonna sing. We've taken to you so strong. It's clear. We're everybody going to get along. Oh, there's there's more. Um, I was called back for Dodger. I was even better the second time. Nobody tries to be Laudie Dah and Uppany. There's a cup of tea for all. Okay. I'd like you to picture the scene now. Teenage me is on a cavernous stage in that 600-seat auditorium. I am looking out at the wide blackness, and a voice calls out, David, can you see me back here? It's Mr. N. I jump off the stage, I walk back full of excitement, though also a sense of dread. Like I know what's coming. David, he says. Yes, Mr. N? Your audition was wonderful. Oh, wow, thank you. But I wanted to ask, have you considered the role of Mr. Bumble? Bumble is, remember, the head of the workhouse. He is also, I should have mentioned, very, very fat. I'd like you to read for Bumble. But uh, you said my Dodger audition was great. David, the artful Dodger, lives on the street. He misses meals. But but Mr. Bumble isn't even in most of the show. I find the larger kids do better with the older roles. He doesn't even have scenes with the pickpockets. I'd like you to read for Bumble, but I can lose weight. Now I had known I was a fat kid, no fat kid is spared this knowledge. I knew my family was fat, that my parents always had been, but us kids had gained weight when we were five, seven, and ten, sometime between the bicentennial and Reagan's first inauguration. I am not sure why. I also knew musicals were a refuge, the classic gay refuge, the one place I felt seen, maybe even accepted for who I was. Maybe that's why it stung so much what Mr. N did. Or maybe there's no need to explain. My therapist, in fact, once said she hoped Mr. N choked and died, but I think she's angrier than I am. There was a time I might have taken this story out to earn pity. Shared laughter, sure, but also pity. But now that I'm older, I find myself more interested in Mr. N himself. This man who chose to call a 16-year-old to the back of a theater and annihilate him. What kind of monster does that? What kind of man does that? Does it matter that Mr. N himself was fat? That his son fatter than me by far? Did he think he was doing me a favor? Explaining the situation man to man so I wouldn't be blindsided when the cast list went up? Was it bitterness, this genius who hated directing what in retrospect were just perfectly ordinary high school musicals? And so he subconsciously wanted to destroy an ambitious kid's dreams. Or perhaps even it was tied to sex, because it was the hotter kids who got the leads, and he always picked his favorites, usually, but not only boys, and he'd hang out with them after rehearsals in his office, doors locked. I am not making accusations, but I am reporting the truth as I remember it. Which also includes my classmates calling him Blowjaw Bob. This was his first name. This is a cruel, crude, awful slur, and a slur with no evidence. He was married. But I was horrified, not so much that there was a rumor that Mr. N might be gay, but that the rumor was about him, who I perceived to be a fat, sexless man. Sexless as Bumble. Cut off from our all the hot boys slept. And suddenly I wonder were musicals a refuge for him, too. A few years back, Mr. N had a retirement party and hosted a huge event celebrating it. I was invited, I declined to go. I was amazed at how much love others still had for him, how their memories of him had stayed golden. And looking back, I also recognized Mr. N was but a small monster, or perhaps merely one hydrahead of the larger monster, that most American monster hatred of one's own body. Anyway. I did play Bumble that year and I crushed it. And the next year I got the lead, Captain Hook and Peter Pan, for all you completists. And then I went to study theater in New York, and then I made theater my life, and in that life I have gotten to play many roles. I'll admit it, at times I have been Bumble, cut off from the hot pickpockets. But I have also been Oliver, the wide-eyed new kid, seduced by the city's magic. I have even been Fagan, that devious head of the pickpocket gang. I mean, I help organize talented rogues to lie and take money from the rich, which is one definition of a playwright. But most of all, Mr. N. I have cast myself as Dodger. I moved through the world theater to theater, making life on my own terms. And while the scars of growing up fat will always be with me, I have found love and adventure and some success. Never taking anything for granted as I make my work with my fellow band of misfits. I always feel lucky, and I am always convinced that I've gotten away with something. Giddy and triumphant, like a thief. Thank you.

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David Zelnick is a writer in New York who loves telling stories, making old fashions, drinking old fashions, and showing you pictures of his cat Jupiter. For more on the writing part, check out DavidZelnick.net. Truth Be Told was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick, and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svaikar. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening. More stories of love and lust will be released every Monday and scary monsters every Thursday. And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps. Till next time, remember, truth wants to be known. Yours too.