How Star Wars Saved My Life, Performance Works, Dec. 6-10, 8 p.m. daily, 2 p.m. matinees Dec. 8 and 9. For more information visit starwarssavedmylife.com/
The little boy carried a secret.
His parents didn’t know what it was. His friends sitting beside him in the movie theatre didn’t know about the secret, either.
He’d been abused, sexually and physically, from kindergarten until he was nine years old by the priests at his Catholic elementary school.
Later, Nicholas Harrison would speak out. He’d talk about the men who manipulated him, raped him, and threatened him to make sure he’d keep their secret.
But in the spring of 1977 he was still silent.
The lights went down in the theatre. It was Smokey and the Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds and a Trans-Am. Harrison’s pals settled in to watch. Harrison couldn’t.
“I hadn’t really had friends before,” he recalls.
The boy retreated to the concession for candy. On his way back, he walked into the wrong theatre and looked at the screen.
C-3PO and R2-D2 were journeying through the deserts of Tatooine. In the fashion of an English butler with a faltering upper lip, C-3PO bemoans: “We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life.”
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s exactly me,’” Harrison remembers.
The wrong theatre was the right one.
“I kept going back and forth between the two movies,” he says.
He played cinema ping pong until he was “dragged out” of Star Wars by his friends after Smokey screeched to a halt.
But he’d found what he needed.
He was out of the Catholic school at that point. His mother, in the manner of mothers since time immemorial, had asked him to put on something a little more sensible. Once he was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, Harrison’s mother could see welts from whippings administered by a teacher with an electric cord.
Having been assured divine wrath would follow any divulgence about the priests, Harrison kept quiet for a while. But then he found a loophole: “The woman who did this was not a nun or a priest, so I could tell on her,” he realized.
His mother pulled him out of school the next day.
For a generation lost in space, the blend of Buck Rogers cliffhangers and First World War aerial dogfights overlaid with mythic archetypes “colonized our imaginations,” as Roger Ebert noted. But Harrison discovered something else amid the saga of good vs. evil: rebellion.
It was a concept he’d never considered.
Following his first, incomplete viewing, Harrison asked his father to take him back to the theatre. He watched Star Wars. And he watched it again.
In Darth Vader, Harrison was reminded of priests dressed in black.
“The Death Star represented the Catholic Church in all its power,” he writes on his blog, StarWarsSavedMyLife. “I dreamed of the Catholic school blowing up and thus liberating all the tiny souls who had been victims of the priests’ tyranny.”
Clinical psychiatrist Leonard Shengold describes clerical sexual abuse as “soul murder,” in part because the victims are left with a feeling they may never reconnect with God.
Harrison wasn’t from a religious family, but he believed in God. For four years he’d begun every school day singing “God Save the Queen,” reciting the Lord’s Prayer and doing what he later called “Catholic aerobics,” (stand, sit, kneel).
But the abuse changed everything.
“Spirituality was ripped out of me,” he says.
Star Warsreplaced it, surrounding him, guiding him, and introducing him to The Force.
“I wanted to be a Jedi. I was going to do whatever it took,” Harrison remembers.
He launched a career as an actor and fight director. He qualified for the British national kendo team, learning kendo after discovering the martial art was the basis for Star Wars’ light saber duels.
But his past was still back there, and for a time he ended up doing what his abusers counted on: staying quiet.
“I tried to just shove it away and not talk about it,” he remembers. “Every day you wake up and you feel the shame and the guilt and the humiliation and the worthlessness.”
He’d once written a university paper using himself as a case study while examining pop culture as therapy for abuse victims.
After posting the paper on his blog, a friend told him it could make a good story. Harrison wasn’t sure.
“Who’s going to want to read it? Who’s going to want to pay attention to it?” he remembers thinking.
Doubts like that hang over abuse victims like interest on a debt that should never be theirs.
But ideas can be resilient, and that one stuck with Harrison. He wrote. He rewrote. And after “several dozen” drafts, he had an 80-minute, one-man play.
“It provided a sense of really helping me to continue my own healing . . . and to speak out that what happened to me wasn’t right.”
It was also an opportunity to speak on behalf of all children, including the one he used to be.
The play includes memories of Harrison’s father building him a log cabin, (“Not some plastic, order-it-through-the mail catalogue kind of cabin,”) he tells the audience early in the show. There’s Mighty Mouse and recollections of dunking buttered toast in hot chocolate. But there’s also an examination of how pedophiles target their victims, establish trust, and avoid punishment.
Harrison recounts how one abuser had children whisper in his ear for candy. He would give them the candy later, outside, then inside, then in his office.
“Secrets to me are terrible things,” Harrison says.
Pederasts condition children to secure their silence, Harrison explains. How Star Wars Saved My Life is about breaking that silence.
“There is a message of hope through the suffering,” he says. “It feels good to finally have a voice, to share my story and to know that my abusers did not get away with keeping me silent,” he says. “Hopefully it will encourage other people to share their stories and speak out.”
