“I didn’t even think I could stand up straight but I got on that stage and my shoulders went back quite naturally.”
Leslie Caveny ’80
B
est known for her work writing and producing for the NBC sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond” and for writing the feature film “Penelope,” Leslie Caveny ’80 has returned to her first love. “My most rewarding work has been in theater,” the actress, writer and director said. “When I was doing theater, I was communicating what I truly cared about. And that all stems from Harry Holcombe and Peddie and the joy of doing plays at Geiger-Reeves.” After decades of writing for television and film, she said her focus for the next decade will be on the two things she first learned to love at Peddie: writing and performing for theater. While in an independent study writing class at Peddie, Caveny said, she wrote her first musical. “I still remember the songs from my musical. They were so filled with teenage angst,” she laughed. The most memorable song, she said, was titled, “Spit on my mailbox.” “I got an ‘A’ for the book but I got an ‘F’ for the music,” Caveny remembered. “I could play it on the piano but I wasn’t good at transcribing it. I had written the score in all whole notes so every word lasted four beats. After that, I quit writing musicals for a couple of decades.” Today, she is working on writing two new musicals. She is rewriting her 2006 movie “Penelope,” which starred Christina Ricci, James McAvoy and Reese Witherspoon, into a musical. The first play she ever staged, “For Love of a Pig,” is also undergoing a transformation into a musical version. The original play was dedicated to Holcombe. Caveny is also returning to the stage as an actress, something at Peddie that she said “quite literally saved my life.” “Going into Harry’s class, he saw who I was inside and he invited me out of myself and onto the stage where I could feel my power,” she said. Everyone was surprised, she said, by his casting for the production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“I was a broken teen with broken self-esteem and I was feeling hopeless. I walked with my head down and my hair in my face. I looked like a scary little drug addict even though I didn’t do drugs,” she said. “And Harry cast me as Nurse Ratched. I didn’t even think I could stand up straight but I got on that stage and my shoulders went back quite naturally. What Harry taught me is that it’s all about permission.” She said she has often remembered the profound lessons she learned from Holcombe. “If I could have taken Harry with me everywhere I went, the power I would have had would be amazing,” she said. In addition to the two musical projects, she is currently mounting a new production of her second play, “Impact This,” which she describes as a dark comedy about rape and suicide. Last year, she returned to the stage. She wrote and starred in “One Woman Gone Wrong” during New York’s Fringe Festival. A theater performance major at Boston University, Caveny said she has finally gotten the “performance power” back that she first felt on the Peddie stage, but which she said she lost again in young adulthood. “I really think the best is yet to come. I’m still finding myself, to tell you the truth,” Caveny said. “But it is thanks to Harry that I can even do that.”
Roger Durling ’82
I
n 2002, Roger Durling ’82 had absolutely no experience running a film festival. Yet having grown up loving films and attending film festivals, he had some pretty strong opinions about what it
“Peddie would give me diversity. There was a whole rainbow there and I’m very grateful for that.”
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