Petaluma playwright keeps it personal in ‘Polar Bears’

At 6-foot-2, his blue eyes looking straight out at the audience, David Templeton stands alone onstage and immediately commands attention, but it’s his words that win people over.

In his first solo play, “Wretch Like Me,” he wrote a piercing but essentially gentle satirical memoir about his teen-age years in L.A. County as a cultish “Jesus Freak.” He learned to recite the hymn “Amazing Grace” backward, for example: “See I now but blind was, found am I now but lost was once I.”

At the time, he noted, “That line sounds like something Yoda would say.” Even devoutly religious theater-goers enjoyed it when it debuted in 2009. The show did so well that Templeton revived it repeatedly, performing it in San Francisco and at the world-famous Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland.

During his 22 years as a journalist in Northern California and a player in the Sonoma County theater community, Templeton, 55, has gotten to know a lot of people, and they know him. But they continue to find out more each time he writes a new play.

The Petaluma writer’s half-serious, half-comic and thoroughly personal tone persists in his new one-man show, “Polar Bears,” opening next month at Main Stage West in Sebastopol.

“It is really about the extraordinary lengths I went to as a father to try to keep the spirit of Christmas and the magic of Santa alive for my children right after the death of their mother,” he said.

In the play, Templeton does his best to convince Jenna, 8, the skeptic, and Andy, 7, the true believer that Santa Claus is real, going to such extremes as making sure that Santa’s snack never winds up in the garbage can, and that Santa’s gifts just magically appear, without wrapping paper.

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was 4 because my parents were sloppy with their wrapping paper,” Templeton said. (Young David had recognized the polar bear pattern on the paper his parents used.)

The onstage Templeton also must cope with his children’s grief.

During one of the show’s more serious scenes, set in a local shop during the holidays, the kids tell the clerk that their mommy’s an angel now.

Early in his first marriage, Templeton protested that he was too immature to face raising children, he said, but his first wife, Gladys, “tried to convince me that my immaturity made me the perfect candidate for fatherhood since I’d so much in common with our children.”

Gladys and David had been divorced for several years when she died of cancer, just before Thanksgiving, leaving him to see their two kids through both mourning and the holidays. Her prediction proved accurate.

His childlike excitement about Christmas was his saving grace.

The writer, who grew up staging backyard plays with his brother at the local library in Downey, freely admits he’s working his way through his own life with his plays, fictionalizing as little as possible. In between “Wretch” and “Polar Bear,” he wrote “Pinky,” about a lost love from his adolescent years.

“’Pinky’ was a two-person play,” Templeton said.

“It was based on a high-school crush I had on girl named Pinky, and my attempt to sweep her off her feet using our mutual love of Dungeons & Dragons, ‘Lord of the Rings’ and stuff like that. I actually had her kidnapped by Orks and goblins, and I rescued her in a big sword fight in the park to try to impress her. That really happened, but it was not enough to win her heart.”

Now, with “Polar Bears,” Templeton’s stage-by-stage self-exploration brings him into adulthood.

“This play picks up with me as a young father at the age of 25,” he said.

Sheri Lee Miller, who is directing the Main Stage West production of “Polar Bears,” also worked with him on “Wretch” and “Pinky” and believes the new show may be his best yet.

“There is some very touching, sad stuff in the play, but there is a tremendous amount of laughter, too,” she said.

“This show is more storytelling than anything else, and David is a very well-rounded writer.”

Templeton never pursued a college degree, but he has been well-schooled by practical experience. He began his long career in newspapers as a graphic artist, working at the Marin Independent in San Rafael from 1982 to 1995.

He since has become a prolific freelance writer, reviewing plays for the North Bay Bohemian and writing reviews, features and columns for the Pacific Sun in San Rafael. Three months ago he took a reporting job at the Sonoma Index-Tribune.

It was journalism that led Templeton back to performing.

“The Bohemian sent me ‘undercover’ to audition for the Santa Rosa Players production of ‘Wizard of Oz’ and write a first-person story, and I got a part as the Tin Man,” Templeton said.

“I told them I was just doing it for a story, and they said, ‘We don’t care. Write what you want. We want you in the show.’”

He went on to play other roles that included Judas in “Godspell,” and eventually he began writing his own shows.

Templeton lives in Petaluma with his second wife, geologist Susan Panttaja. His daughter Jenna, 29, now works for the Yolo County election bureau, and his son Andy, 28, teaches videography and acting at Alchemia, a Santa Rosa nonprofit serving developmentally disabled adults.

Well-established as a working journalist and a playwright with successful productions behind him, Templeton continues to explore other creative outlets. Last year, he wrote a novella about the author of “Frankenstein,” titled “Mary Shelley’s Body,” to be published next summer by Word Horde of Petaluma.

But he probably won’t stray for long from his autobiographical plays.

“I think there’s something extra poignant about a story that’s being told by one person. It’s very intimate,” Templeton said.

“In my case, I have to just peel back the layers and be real and honest with the audience. It’s a special experience.”

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.