True Grits

Keefee was, and maybe still is, a real person: a longtime gay-barfly
in Tallahassee who impressed a young Stephen Hando with his blend of
Southern grace and low-down crudeness. One night in the early 1990s, at
one of Tallahassee’s two gay bars, Hando overheard Keefee arguing with
somebody. The old boozer spat out a line Hando would always remember:
“Bitch, don’t fuck with me!”

The sentence is simple, even witless, but its delivery—a
swivel-necked, finger-snapping, razor-tongued viciousness—stuck
with Hando. He had come from Toronto for college and fell in love with
Florida’s muggy heat, Spanish moss, and grimy gay culture. “Those
Southern queens are just nasty,” he says with a mix of
admiration and repulsion. “Something about that combination of
hospitality and foulmouthedness; the sad, sweet sincerity; that git
down they-er accent.”

Hando began performing short monologues as Keefee in 1997—a
director asked him to create a character he found funny but thought
nobody else would—but rebuffed suggestions that he develop a
full-length Keefee show. (“Most solo shows are so boring,” he
sighs.) One tipsy night in Port Townsend, he and some friends started
playing blackjack, and Hando slipped into character, dealing cards and
trash-talking in a stretchy, syrupy drawl. He had found Keefee’s
vehicle.

In House of Cards, Keefee is working on his birthday, dealing
blackjack at a broken-down Vegas casino called Shenanigans, “where the
rainbow ends.” It’s his fallout job after chasing a romance to Nevada
that ended poorly: “Ladies,” Keefee asks, “you ever wake up in the
backseat of your Camaro, on your birthday, out in front of your
ex-boyfriend’s house, to the sound of his wife knocking on the window
telling you to get the fuck outta here before the kids wake up? Huh?
That happens to me sometimes.”

Shenanigans looks more Reno than Vegas, with souvenir shot glasses
for sale, green streamers shimmering over the exits, and potted plastic
plants. (It’s depressing from the beginning: Designer Michael Mowery
should be proud.) Four audience members sit at the battered card table
onstage, and Keefee, in cutoff denim hot pants, a handlebar mustache,
and short, bleached hair, totters onstage and starts prattling away.
After his warm-up drink, he’s in a dealer’s uniform, sipping from a
not-very-concealed can of
Pabst and sassing his audience and his

coworkers: Ruth (old and grouchy, played by Katy Bourne), Debra
(hugely pregnant, played by Shannon Kipp), and Raymond (the schlubby,
sleazy boss, played to sad-sack
perfection by Joe Zavadil).

Part scripted and part improv, Keefee’s House of Cards is a
surprisingly tender journey into one busted ho’s heart of darkness.

Hando is a deft character actor who keeps his loser lovable, even
when he’s belligerent and obnoxious. He plays up Keefee’s tragedy, but
never makes jokes at his expense, nor the audience’s. (Hando is
emphatic about wanting his audiences to feel comfortable with this
slightly discomfiting character. “I hate improv where they pull someone
up onstage and make fun of them,” he says. “Like, ‘Grab this hat!’ and
then laughing when the hat gets tugged away on a string: ‘Ah-ha! You
can’t catch the hat!’ That’s just cheap.”) Hando is a comedian of the
sad-clown lineage—his real target is the empty sadness of life
itself.

Hando has an instinct for what local playwright Keri Healey (the
production manager of House of Cards) calls the “sad-happy
sandwich.” “Good comic actors are content to just find the funny button
in a moment,” she says. “But Stephen is more than a good comic. He
finds the ugliness and darkness underneath, something sick even, but
always something the audience can empathize with.”

Hando has been making Seattle theater for 17 years, but he’s a
choosy actor, going long stretches without performing. He’s wary of
most plays (“they’re too pretentious, too
play-y”), doesn’t like
to audition, and talks about being a professional actor as if it’s
mildly distasteful. “I don’t love acting so much that I’d be willing to
do anything for it,” he says. “I don’t want to be in plays I don’t want
to be in.” He doesn’t have an Equity card.

Hando misses the raucous, topsy-turvy energy of defunct companies
like Greek Active (where he played King John with a ruby in his navel
and a rabbit-fur jacket) and Piece of Meat (where he played the
downtrodden boyfriend of an abusive, morbidly obese shut-in). He’s been
quiet for the last few years, aside from a few shows with Sgt. Rigsby
& His Amazing Silhouettes—shadow-puppet plays with a vintage
radio-drama feel whose characters (surprise!) often end up in the
gutter.

But that’s changing. Hando, always a terribly capable actor, is
starting to generate his own opportunities, starting with Keefee and a
few forays into modern dance with choreographer Juliet Waller Pruzan.
(They made a particularly funny short, about two office workers
marooned as a leadership-building exercise, for On the Boards.)

“I’m trying to push myself more, to find that energy and
get-out-there-and-fuck-it-up aesthetic,” he says.

Keefee’s House of Cards is an auspicious start.