This year’s BorderLight Festival features more than 130 performances in and around Playhouse Square, from an immersive murder mystery to confessional one-person show. One of the latter is Kevin Gladish’s “A Secret in Plain Sight.”
The Garfield Heights native grew up in what he calls a traditional family.
“My dad was a firefighter and a paramedic,” he said. “My mom was mostly a stay-at-home mom.”
Yet there was a family secret which he learned only recently, at age 43.
“I had suspected it my entire life,” he said. “I kind of just buried it from my mind, which is what I discuss a lot of in the show.”
After his father passed away, Gladish learned he was adopted.
“At first, you feel like this joke is on you; everybody knew but me,” he said. “It kind of threw my world into a spin for a while. I started asking all kinds of questions.”
He channeled that into a blog, “A Story with No Beginning,” which led to his one-man show at BorderLight. It premiered during the pandemic as part of a virtual festival in Chicago. Gladish moved there in the 1990s to work as an editor and in theater. He eventually found his calling at storytelling events such as The Moth. His first time out, the topic was “near death experiences.” He spoke about taking a wrong turn and finding himself biking on Lake Shore Drive — the expressway along Lake Michigan.
“I won that night and I was addicted,” he said.
From there his pieces have ranged from humorous to the more serious, such as “A Secret in Plain Sight,” which is also his first full-length work. Gladish credits Adoption Network Cleveland for providing support to people in his situation.
“There's no handbook on how to deal with this,” he said. “People are finding out that their father is not their father, or this is showing me a different nationality than they thought. A lot of people have a similar reaction of just kind of being disoriented and bewildered and feeling betrayed.”
Adoption Network Cleveland will hold a talkback session about the show after Gladish’s final BorderLight performance on Saturday night.
