Art from suffering MDI High senior draws on car crash to write play

BAR HARBOR – Having suffered debilitating injuries in a car accident when he was 11 years old, Ezra Halkett uses a Segway scooter to get around Mount Desert Island High School.

But now he has another vehicle of sorts that is helping him address how the accident has affected his life. He has written a dramatic piece about the experience, which left him in a coma for a month, and about how he and his family have navigated the eight years that have passed since it happened.

Halkett, 19, plans to perform the piece as his senior exhibition this weekend at MDI High School. The performance is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 12, in the high school auditorium.

The work mainly is a monologue that touches upon the family trip to Jamaica, where the accident occurred, and what it was like waking up in a hospital more than a month later. It also addresses challenges Halkett has faced in recuperating and in overcoming society’s subsequent assumptions about him.

“I broke my neck,” said Halkett, sitting in a chair on the auditorium stage as he prepared to rehearse the piece Thursday afternoon. “I turned 12 in the hospital.”

Halkett said he was visiting his grandmother and stepgrandfather in Jamaica with his cousins and his brother when the accident happened on March 2, 2000. Several of them were in a car when his stepgrandfather, who was driving, failed to see an oncoming car as he pulled into traffic, Halkett said. The other car smashed into the side of the family’s car at 60 mph.

“I guess I must have been in the unlucky seat,” he said, using a line from his monologue. “I have no recollection [of the accident].”

Halkett was flown to a hospital in Miami, where he spent a month before waking up. He then was transferred to Franciscan Hospital for Children in Boston, where he spent the next four months.

“I used to be a physically able kid,” Halkett said during the rehearsal. “I could walk, play sports. You name it, I could probably do it.”

Getting used to life after the accident, he said, has not been easy. Physical therapy has helped him learn how to get around, and if his spirits sag he turns to music to help brighten his mood. He likes Bon Jovi, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, AC/DC and other classic rock bands, he said.

“It’s been a long haul,” Halkett said.

Besides affecting his ability to walk, the accident also affected his speech, but he showed no signs of tiring during Thursday’s hour-long rehearsal. Others also will participate in the performance, acting out his interactions with other people and reading monologues that represent his mother’s and grandmother’s points of view.

During the piece, he recounts two trips he took with his mother to the Bangor Mall – one with a wheelchair and another with his motorized Segway.

The first time, he drew pitiful stares from others at the mall, he said. The next time was different.

“No one stared,” he said, but then he reconsidered. He got looks many people might get when they zip by on an upright motorized scooter.

“It was a good kind of staring,” he said.

The contrast between the trips, he added, “shows you how closed-minded [people can be].”

Casey Rush, theater director at the high school, said Thursday that maybe one or two seniors come up with a dramatic performance every year for their senior exhibitions, but rarely are they as autobiographical as Halkett’s. Rush said it takes courage for Halkett to open up his life onstage, even if he has been accepted into the high school’s community.

“It’s remarkable Ezra feels comfortable enough at MDI [High] to do that,” Rush said.

Halkett, who moved with his mother from Cherryfield to Bar Harbor in 2005 so he could attend MDI High, said his main interest in dramatizing his experience was getting the chance to act. He prefers acting to writing, he said, and hopes to study theater when he attends St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, N.C., in the fall.

After finishing up the rehearsal and rolling offstage on his scooter, Halkett was asked if he was excited or nervous about his coming performance.

Like many teenagers, he played it cool.

“I’m never nervous,” he said.