David Alex dispels just about every notion you have about math teachers, track coaches and playwrights.
“I tell people, `I’m just your typical playwright-track coach-math teacher,” said the Hoffman Estates High School teacher-coach-writer, laughing.
The spring semester at Hoffman Estates is always a busy one for Alex, who has been at the school since it opened in 1973. There is always teaching, dealing with spring fever and senioritis. Then there are the Hawks’ sprinters and hurdlers to train with an eye on the last three weeks of May, when the big medals are handed out.
Next month Alex will further divide his attention as his play “Onto Infinity” is performed at the Bowen Park Theater Center in the Jack Benny Center for the Performing Arts in Waukegan. The play is about a mathematician who searches for a higher level of infinity but loses touch with the real world, which includes his love for his dying wife.
Does this sound like any math teacher or coach you’ve ever known?
Alex graduated from Bowling Green with a double major in math and literature, two things that are rarely linked. Most writers I know have a rough time balancing their checkbooks, let alone mastering basic algebra or anything tougher.
“You’re either left-brained or right-brained,” Alex said. “I might be no-brained.”
He started writing plays more than 20 years ago and has written eight full-length plays and about a dozen one-act plays. Several have been produced or read at theaters, including Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater. One was produced off-Broadway. This is not a passing thing. He also directs the fall play at Hoffman Estates, including some of his own work.
Alex has always been a writer and got into playwriting to develop his dialogue skills. Playwriting has now taken on a life of its own. When he retires from teaching and coaching at the end of next school year, he will become a full-time writer.
“I’m going to continue to write plays,” he said. “I’m not going into screenwriting–that’s too much who you know. I might write some essays, but I’m going to be writing full time.”
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Ideas come from newspapers and personal experience. Characters in his plays sometimes from real life, like the two runners who are friends of the main character in “Onto Infinity.” There is a lot of Alex in his writing.
“You can’t keep yourself out of it,” said Alex, whose latest play “Eroica”–from the title of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3–is about a small town basketball coach in the late 1960s who faked an injury to avoid the draft. Alex’s involvement in writing is not as puzzling as his being a track coach. He was not an athlete at Niles West in the early 1960s or at Bowling Green. But as a teacher he felt he could study track and get the point across to students even if it dealt with trail legs instead of p.s.i.
“I’d always enjoyed running,” said Alex, who coached Pierre Leinbach to state championships in the high and intermediate hurdles in 1997. “Jim Swift was our first coach and was looking for someone who was enthusiastic and eager to learn. A lot of coaches coach the way they were coached. The good habits they picked up, they maintained. The bad habits they also maintained. With me, I had a lack of experience, but I had no bad habits.”
Hoffman Estates head track coach Pete Reiff, who has worked with Alex for more than 20 years, appreciates Alex’s coaching methods and his relationship with athletes.
“He’s a great coach,” said Reiff, who was coached in high school by the legendary Joe Newton at York. “I’ve coached with him for 23 years. I was surprised to learn he didn’t run in school, but he makes up for it by being a great teacher. He taught himself everything about the events. He’s probably the only intellectual I know. We’ve had a lot of success working together.”
While it might seem that coaching and playwriting have little in common, the fact is Alex can see similarity in sending an athlete to the starting line and writing lines that an actor will recite.
“Once an athlete is on the track, you can’t run for him,” Alex said. “When an actor is on the stage, you can’t get up there and say, `Say it like this.’ What you have to do is trust your director. You don’t have as much input as you do as a coach with your athlete, working with him all the time.
“There is a nervous excitement with both. [In track] it’s a very exciting time. It’s in his hands. You did what you could and the athlete goes to the line. The difference is the athlete does as well as he could. I’m just as proud of an athlete who improved and took 7th in conference. They compete against themselves. With a play, it’s not so much a competition. They do as well as they can. If they couldn’t do the job, the director would have selected someone else. With a team, you play with the hand you’re dealt.”
The next month will be pretty hectic for Alex. “Onto Infinity” will be performed the first three weekends in May. Show times are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays. The track season will be at its height, and the spring semester will be coming to a close.
“Ever since I found out sleep was not needed things have been fine,” Alex said. “The crunch does get there. It’s not always that crunch. The thing that’s saved me is my running in the morning. It’s like a shot of adrenaline. That’s what keeps you going.”
Typical playwright-math teacher.