Ever feel embarrassed when you run into one of the Blackman twins and don’t know which it is? We sure do. Well you’re off the hook. We just found out that Gary’s wife Amy even gets them confused occasionally. (We think the one without the jacket is Gary.) The brothers — Gary lives in Glen Ridge and Mark in Montclair — run ArtsPower, a Montclair-based theater organization that tours shows for young audiences.
Gary? Mark?
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I happened to see their upcoming play which is about to tour for children, Salem Justice, based on The Crucible, and it was terrific. It was really chilling, but so well adapted and perfectly appropriate for middle school aged children. I hope you all get to experience the performance.
Twins? I had the perfect strategy to get around any confusion. When I joined ArtsPower this past January, I figured I would refer to the brothers as “Mr.Blackman” until I could tell them apart. Little did I know that Gary and Mark weren’t found of formalities in our family-like work environment. They asked, even insisted in being called by their first names. Now that I come to think about it, maybe I wasn’t the first one to try the trick… By the way, Gary is on the left.
Honestly, it takes too much brain power that could be better spent promoting ArtsPower’s field trips, for example, in order to tell them apart without intuitive guessing (there’s always a 50-50 shot, those odds aren’t so bad).
I don’t think it really matters anyway, and I’ll tell you why. They spend enough time together that if you tell something to one of them, you can just assume that the information will get passed on to the other one pretty quickly.
It would be much easier to tell Mark and Gary apart from each other if they weren’t both so nice and pleasant to be around. In my opinion, they could minimize all this identity confusion by one of them developing a mean personality so he could then be known as “the evil twin.”
Jenna Long
Assistant Production Manager
ArtsPower National Touring Theatre