Courtesy photo Haley Burnside (left) and newcomer Stphen Brogdon bring 1969 comic-book love to life in a scene from ‘Sob! Choke! ..... LOVE!”

John Poole was at an estate sale when he came across a stack of romance comic books from 1969 to 1973 aimed at young girls. They were cheesy, silly and histrionic, filled with exclamation points and melodrama.

So Poole, the founder of the Overtime Theater, decided to create a stage production of six of the comics, called “Sob! Choke! ..... LOVE!” Because that's the kind of guy he is.

“I was interested in how they were expressing romance to little girls in 1969,” Poole said.

“There's some icky scenes. Occasionally the audience is going to say, ‘No way. No one wrote that way. You're making that up.' But we didn't make it up.”

They didn't have to. They copied the text from the comics into script form verbatim “and the comedy was there,” Poole said.

One of the comics, “Hiawatha's Daughter,” is about a half-French, half-Native American girl who falls in love with an American boy with the improbable name of Cobie Slade.

“Portrait of an Actress” features a struggling actress in New York whose roommate has to pay a heavy price for stardom.

In “I Wish I Wasn't Born a Girl,” a tomboy decides she wants to embrace her feminine side after falling in love.

“The ending is going to make you cringe,” Poole said about that one. “Women's libbers will leave screaming.”

Co-directors Poole and Kathy Lovejoy and production foreman Sophie Bolles wanted to recreate the comics on the stage, so they built four rectangles of different sizes to represent the panels of a comic book; the actors move from one panel to another for each scene.

They also embraced the different forms of storytelling in the comics. When the lines in the books are contained in word balloons, the actors perform them normally. When the lines are in a thought balloon, the audience hears a recording of the actor speaking them.

Poole instructed the actors, who are dressed in mod fashion, to act as over-the-top as possible to match the emotions portrayed in the comics.

“It's a joy to watch. It's the hardest thing we've ever done. I'm a little scared,” Poole said. “But it's going to be the best thing we've ever done.”

Jessica Belasco | 210SA Contributor