In the Orbit of the Wild Son
A father’s echo and a son’s return—a show interrupted, a life continued
There’s a certain kind of story that never sets out to be epic, yet somehow becomes exactly that. Not because of scale, but because of heart. That’s what Wild Son & Then Some feels like to me. A story that begins with a two-door car and a long drive west, an old radio converted into a cabinet and packed like treasure — a relic, a compass, a lighthouse of memory.
A radio cabinet. Not for music anymore, but for memory. A reminder of a father, of Baton Rouge humidity and family shorthand, of roots that stay even when you leave.
And then comes Los Angeles — odd jobs, telemarketing scripts, a tight T-shirt hosting tables on Melrose, auditions scattered like breadcrumbs across the map. Days when the dream looks ridiculous. Days when it looks possible. Days when it looks like both at once.
Before: The Testimony of Christian Brando
Before Wild Son & Then Some, there was another doorway: Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando — written by Champ Clark, performed by John Mese. A one-man show built from another man’s wounds, another man’s father, another man’s reckoning. He stood onstage as Christian Brando, carrying words shaped from interviews and memory.
Wild Son (the Brando version) taught him how to hold a story like a wound without dropping it.
But Wild Son & Then Some is where he turns the light inward.
From testimony to autobiography.
From portrayal to authorship.
From echo to origin.
Now: Wild Son & Then Some
This play is a story about a father who wasn’t mythical, but mattered.
Not perfect, but present.
Not larger than life — just large enough to fill a child’s world, which can be more extraordinary than legend anyway.
This year, life interrupted the script.
The opening night he’d circled on the calendar became the day everything changed. A sudden stroke that could have taken the stage away from him forever. But instead of an ending, it became a prologue.
And here’s the part that feels like theatre without even trying:
There’s something profoundly moving about a son writing a show for his father
and then surviving something that could have made that goodbye permanent.
The fact that he is still here to tell it — that alone is worth the ticket.
By October this year, Mese was recovered enough from his stroke to perform his paternal tribute at the UnUrban Coffee House in Santa Monica. On February 6 in the New Year, he will stage it again at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks.
2025: A Year of Father Stories
2025 has felt like a moment when stories about fathers and family sit closer to the surface—not as a trend, but as a tide. The questions they raise feel persistent: How do we reckon with the men who raised us? The ones who hurt us? The ones we misunderstood—who we might see clearly (as humans rather than archetypes) if we only grow wise enough?
This year we also lost artists whose work shaped how we remember family on film. Robert Redford, whose natural charisma alongside Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid became a kind of generational shorthand—charm with a shadow behind it. And Rob Reiner, whose films like The Princess Bride and Stand By Me aren’t about fathers outright, but about the tenderness, distance, and longing that childhood carries into adulthood. They’re stories that hint at the adults we wished we had (like grandpa Peter Falk reading us a story) or feared we might become.
And there’s a moment in Wild Son & Then Some when Mese recalls being a kid and watching his parents head out on a date to see Butch Cassidy —seeing them come out dressed up, his father like a man with somewhere to be, his mother lit up like a woman going to a movie that mattered. Not mythology. Not legend. Just the small memory, offered onstage without ornament, that lands like lineage: a boy watching his parents leave for a night out, not knowing he would someday stand in the light and speak their echoes out loud.
Maybe that’s why these films stay—with him, with us. Not because they are about fathers, but because they remind us that the world was already turning before we understood it, and that we spend our lives trying to read the past from the light on someone’s shoulders as they walk out the door.
🎬 2025 Films with Strong Father/Family Themes
Jay Kelly
Sentimental Value
Hamnet
One Battle After Another
Train Dreams
📚🎬All Time Stories with Strong Father/Family Themes
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) — Of course the great American novel makes every list, grand and small, because a father’s quiet nobility and teaching by example rather than performance are a compass of decency handed down like an heirloom.
Big Fish — Daniel Wallace & adapted for the screen in a 2003 film directed by Tim Burton — a son learns to respect his father’s mythology while reckoning with the distance between the man and the myth; the love survives in the telling.
https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/between-mediocrity-and-greatness
Stand by Me — directed by the late Rob Reiner and based on The Body, a novella by Stephen King — not a story about fathers directly, but about the ache of growing up in the shadow of what’s missing, and finding the courage to walk forward anyway.
Spy of the First Person by Sam Shepard — his final work is about the father at the edge of his own vanishing — a voice we strain to hear before it disappears.
https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/spirited-away-with-sam-shepard
Spirited Away is not about a father, but about inheritance of a different kind: identity, name, selfhood. Sometimes we must abandon safety to remember who we are.
Tales of Virtuous Stepmothers by Georgina Warren — an anthology of stories about families of all kinds but fundamentally universal in essence.
https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/tales-of-virtuous-stepmothers
Tatiana Schlossberg — a life that recently crossed the threshold, reminding us that inheritance is not only personal but planetary; a responsibility we share with each other.
https://www.heavycrownpress.com/p/a-battle-with-our-blood
—— my works in this constellation ——
The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story — a novel about a father and daughter who reunite after eighteen years of silence; not about perfection, but about return, recognition, and repair.
Shotline — a short story about the silence inherited from a father; what we carry, what we refuse, and what still becomes ours no matter how far we run.
Somewhere in that same constellation these stories harmonize.
Not as an echo or a mirror to Wild Son & Then Some — different cities, different wounds, different ghosts — but arriving in the same year, searching similar corridors:
What do we carry forward from the men who came before us?
What silence have we outgrown?
What love survived anyway?
They aren’t parallel to his.
They are just on other frequencies on the dial — part of the same cultural weather.
Wild Son & Then Some feels like one of the turning points — a story that waited until life caught up to it.
📁 Wild Son Archive
Compiled from public announcements, posts, and show listings.
Interview: John Mese
John Mese is an actor, producer, director, and truly awesome guy. He's so nice, so funny, and, get this, he hails from my hometown, Baton Rouge, though he's been an Angeleno since the 90s. Follow him…
Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando, written by Champ Clark & performed by John Mese
May 2019 — Santa Monica Playhouse, Santa Monica, CA
October 2019 — Chais Delachaise, New Orleans, LA
December 2019 — Shepard Theatre, Sun Valley, CA
Scheduled for June 2020 — National Arts Club, Gramercy Park, NYC1
Multiple showings, 2020/2021 — Whitefire Theatre/Solofest, Sherman Oaks, CA
June/August 2022 (twice) — Bistro Byronz, Baton Rouge, LA (Midcity location)
August 2022 — Festival Fringe, Edinburgh, Scotland
Wild Son & Then Some — the story of me and my dad, written & performed by John Mese
Oct. 18, 2025 — Debut, Unurban Coffee House, Santa Monica, CA2
Feb. 6, 2026 — Scheduled performance, Whitefire Theatre, Sherman Oaks, CA (Main Space, 8:00 PM PST)
This archive isn’t about keeping score — it’s about remembering where the stories stood so we can recognize how far they traveled.
Some stories are performed.
Some stories are survived.
This one found its way back to the stage.
See you when the lights come up.
Announced publicly by Mese on Sept. 26, 2019. Originally planned for early October, the date was rescheduled to June 22, 2020. The performance was disrupted/postponed during COVID measures but stands as an official NYC booking and milestone in the show’s history.
Mese did a preview of Wild Son & Then Some in 2024 at the West Baton Rouge Museum in Port Allen, LA. This was part of the annual Ethel Claiborne Dameron Lecture Series in partnership with the West Baton Rouge Historical Association: “Backstage Hollywood with Actor John Mese,” September 22, 2024.