Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre

July 18-19 at Skokie Theatre still on!

2009-07-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

A Special Heads-Up To My Chicago Area Friends!

Just a quick update! There were no pre-sales for the first weekend of performances at the Skokie Theatre and so we've cancelled those performances. There HAVE, however, been a few nice preview mentions in local papers today ... so next weekend will be a definite "go". Hope to see you there!

"Moliere Than Thou" with "Criteria"
Skokie Theatre http://www.skokietheatre.org
7924 N. Lincoln Ave
Skokie, IL 60077
Tickets: 847-677-7761

Saturday, July 18, 8pm
Sunday, July 19, 2pm

Tim

The View From Here #139: Greenwood, SC, Wingate, NC, Geneva, IL, Minneapolis, MN, Moscow, ID, Los Angeles, CA, Boulder, CO, Crown Point, IN, Orlando,

2009-06-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

Important Notices:
I’ll be group-leading once again for the Pathways Basic Seminar, later this month: June 25-28! If you’re up for “changing your life in a weekend,” please sign on and come join me! You can find info at www.pathwaysseminars.org .

I’m also emceeing the Pathways Scholarship Fundraiser, “Pathways Idol II” and recently recorded a brief promo video.

I’ve got one of my rare Chicago Area performances coming up: this time it’s a series of performances at the Skokie Theatre, Saturdays and Sundays, July 11-19. (Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays at 2 pm) I’ll be doing BOTH “Moliere Than Thou” and “Criteria” on each night, leading off with Moliere, taking an intermission and then moving from 300 years in the past to 300 years in the future with “Criteria!”

“The Misanthrope” was a big hit at Greenwood Community Theatre! While they’d planned for the show to take a bit of a loss, assuming that people were not that “into” classical theatre, we had great word of mouth from the outset. (Misanthrope photos, below, by Lynn Mcjunkin Photography.) In addition to the review (quoted in the last “View From Here”) , which, while positive, had one of the WORST headlines ever ("'Misanthrope' an unlikely candidate for entertaining evening, but is") there was an e-mail campaign, with Jean Park (Bess’ mom) circulating her own rave response, and others adding their own enthusiastic commentary. Jean circulated the following:

I have just watched a rehearsal of "The Misanthrope" by Moliere and … I am so afraid that the fact that it is a classic play will scare some people off---- BUT IT IS HILARIOUS!!!

Tim Mooney, the young playwright, has been in Greenwood directing the play and plays the leading role. HE IS ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL! You will not see acting such as his outside of the big cities----but here it is in Greenwood and I do pray you will take advantage of this once in a lifetime chance.

Our Greenwood actors and actresses have never done a play like this before, but he has created from our local talent a polished cast. They perform well, and they are having a ball doing it. He has written every line of dialogue in the play IN RHYME!!

I will tell you this. Do not go to the play with a lazy brain. You will want to listen to every word that is spoken to get the fun of those rhymes. It is a brilliant use of the English language and as witty as it can be. Please do not miss it.

This rave was further circulated by local bon vivant, Jack K. Jennings, who added his own two cents to Jean’s commentary:

Well, I have just gotten home and believe I must forward AGAIN the memo from Jean Park to encourage all of you to make an effort to enjoy this play! One patron, that has sufficient opportunity to visit and attend plays in New York City, told me after the play she was glad she had been in the Greenwood Community Theater TONIGHT.

If you don't think you'll be going to New York any time soon then treat yourselves for less than the cost of the taxi (in NYC) to enjoy one of the quality performances this weekend. Even the set design made me believe we were seeing a marbled garden in France--- and I won't be touring there this year either.

It was a delightful five days of performance, darkened only by my fears that my voice might give out at any moment. This 90-minute show featured about 45 minutes of the sound of my own voice, and my need to drill my lines about three times a day in preparation, in a dusty, moldy theatre, had my voice coming in and out of tune throughout the weekend.

I was particularly impressed (as was most of the audience) with the way that the four high-schoolers in the show, all of whom were handling substantial roles, stepped up in the course of the rehearsals and performances. Following the one bit of recasting we had to do (an actor who was chronically late and unmemorized), everyone seemed to realize that they were going to be held accountable for the quality of their work, and surpassed all of my expectations. The actor who joined the show with only two weeks remaining did a particularly outstanding job, and I pointed to his work repeatedly, as a challenge for those who had been cast way back in January.

An old friend from a performance that I gave back in Alabama in 2004 drove all the way out to see the show, and wrote the following:

Okay. Superlatives fail me. The production was outstanding, exceptional, superb. Marge and I could not stop talking about it and we agreed that it would have done any stage in the world proud. The final casting of the play was excellent, and the stage direction extremely pleasing to this non-professional. … The exaggerated posing done by the two marquis was also a deliciously funny commentary on the artificial facades created by polite society in Moliere's day. I loved every shift of pose! … I was transported back in time. I was no longer in the Greenwood Community Theatre but rather at the Palais Royal in the late 1660s. Tim and Isaac disappeared for a moment and Moliere and LaGrange reappeared in their place. … Your translations are magical. You somehow manage to capture not just the meaning of the original French but the joy, the energy and the outrageous FUN of the original French. (Jenny Moody)

I recruited Hollys, our understudy, to videotape the show, knowing that she would be the most familiar with where we moved, and when, and she showed up for Saturday’s show. While the show got off to a good start, I was a little frustrated with some gaffes I found myself making as the show went on, so I was relieved when she suggested she wanted to come back for Sunday’s show to take another shot at it.

Sunday’s show got off to a rough start (as we … okay, I, was still recovering from the cast party), but as we hit the second act we found our stride. Knowing that this was the last time I would have to put my voice through these particular paces, I was able to loosen the reins a bit more, and I could sense that we were turning in our best performance. And so, I spliced the two video recordings together, using Act I from Saturday and Acts II-V from Sunday.

I then proceeded to >post the entire play on YouTube!

Given that I was dealing with my own words, and the non-equity cast was happy to have their performances on-line, that meant that I could post what may be the only viewable full-length version of “The Misanthrope” on-line (in 10-minute increments, as demanded by the YouTube format).

Which means that this may well function as a teaching tool for Theatre and French students and faculty for years to come, and provide significant exposure to my version of the play. I spent about a week cutting and rendering and posting scenes from the show on-line, and if you want, you can watch the entire play here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=BAF0FBB8A121B846 .

The next day I was off to a show at Wingate University in North Carolina.
Two months after the performance (aside from the fact that they were terrific hosts, with a really slick brochure, and that they asked me for an autographed headshot for their wall, there’s very little that I actually remember from the Wingate performance. Except I do remember the sequence in which Tartuffe approaches a woman in the front row of the audience for his first “seduction monologue.” The woman had a sly smile on her face, but she kept holding up her ring finger to indicate to either Tartuffe, or to Moliere, or to Tim, that she was in fact married. Tim and Moliere were, of course, fully buried inside Tartuffe’s character at that point, and no wedding ring was going to slow him down!

A couple days later I heard from the host of the show:

Once again, it was really nice to meet you, and you brought the stage to life with your protrayal of Moliere. I think some of the kids might have left that night thinking, "Man, I really need to read that more closely!"

With a few days in Chicago, I continued the video posting, and geared up for a performance at Geneva High School. The technician didn’t arrive until about 50 minutes before showtime. I did what I could to talk her through the show, or at least what cues might still be possible to set up in our limited working time.

The show was still well received, and a dozen or so theatre students lingered afterwards to ask me questions, and get me to sign autographs. One of the teachers bought a bunch of t-shirts to sell to her students after the fact, and I left feeling very good about the event.

The next day, I made an afternoon stop at Lake Forest College, where I had an interview with the Dean, who was offering me a position to direct “Tartuffe” next winter! I hadn’t actually interviewed for a “teaching” job for about 20 years, and I dug out my old “vitae” which detailed all of the courses I had taught. I haven’t actually checked it for about 20 years! (It was printed on a dot-matrix printer!)

Since I’m probably as familiar with “Tartuffe” as anyone in the United States, I wasn’t nervous about this interview, and we had a nice conversation. I was actually more concerned about the following appearance I had in the dramaturgy class, which had been researching “Tartuffe” all semester long, and wanted my input on the upcoming production. (As well as I know the show, I hadn’t had any down time to envision what my concept ought to be.) We did, however, have an informative conversation regarding what I felt was and was not a relevant approach for “Tartuffe” in this modern era.

Immediately afterwards, I was off to Minneapolis/St. Paul, where I was due to give a workshop and a performance the following day at St. Joseph’s/St. Catherine’s College. Driving straight through, I pulled into St. Paul around 10 pm, and had a brief visit with Alina, the Moliere fan I’d bumped into months before at the Theatre de Juene Lune rummage sale.

It was a theatre department fallen on hard times, as the St. Joseph's campus had just cut out their theatre department. (I was shocked that they still had funds to bring me in!) They’d requested an acting workshop focusing on Commedia performance, and I continued developing a thesis I’d been working on, that explored Moliere’s characters as caricatures, and examining how and why a playwright might more aptly use a caricature than a fully fleshed out, naturalistic character. It went over quite well, and I returned that evening to perform the show in a small recital hall. One of the most memorable moments of that performance may well have been when a group of tap-dancers, who were performing in a dance event in another part of the building opened the door to the backstage in the middle of the performance. This spooked Moliere, and while you can't quite see the tap dancers in this video, you can get a sense of Moliere's, and the audience's reaction.

Several of my Minnesota Fringe friends showed up for the performance, as well as Alina, and Cynthia, who’d played Elmire in the very first production of the shortened version of my “Tartuffe.” (>Cynthia, the big fan mentioned several times in recent blogs, was quick to volunteer for Elmire.) There were also a couple of fellow playwrights who belonged, along with me, to the “playwright binge” listserv. Both reported generously on the show in subsequent days, with Claudia writing to the binge list, and James writing to both the list and his blog (quoting, below, from his blog):

"I had the good fortune to see Tim Mooney's MOLIERE THAN THOU. Was I ever pleased to be free when he was in town. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment - but the really happy thing is, my husband - who does not have a theatrical bent in his body (it makes our marriage work) also enjoyed it. So it's not just for theatricals! I've only had a few bites of Moliere and am used to the Richard Wilbur translation and I must say Tim's translation are so very accessible. And Tim just relishes the time onstage as I imagine Moilere would have!" Claudia Haas, Playwright

"The performance was brilliant. To start with the script was very well-done (a testament to Tim as a writer) with wonderful translations which gave evidence to Tim's deep knowledge of Moliere's works. As a performer Tim was filled with energy from start to finish, dashing around the stage and climbing around the theater as he moved from play to play. He reminded me of a young Hugh Laurie (from the likes of Jeeves and Wooster (especially in his facial movements; I've never seen someone act so much with their tongue). What held my attention the most was Tim's complete dedication to what he was doing. The script was enjoyable, the translations excellent, but it was the actor, throwing himself completely into the part, that pulled the whole show together. All in all it was a brilliant piece of work. I'm glad I was able to catch it, and it makes me sorry I've missed Tim's other shows at the Fringe." T. James Belich, Playwright

I joined several of my Fringe/St. Thomas friends for an evening at the karaoke bar before pushing on the next day, working my way west. I made better time than anticipated and had an evening in Missoula, MT to visit with my old prof, Joe Proctor, and even had a swing through Coeur d’alene, where I’ve lectured variously and where they’d produced my “Doctor in Spite of Himself” earlier in the semester (cool photos if you follow the link). I got a chance to visit with the girl we casually refer to as my “Idaho Girlfriend” (I signed her “Moliere Than Thou” t-shirt a year back … while she was wearing it) who I usually pick on as the volunteer for many of my Moliere scenes.
Dropping south an hour or two, I arrived in Moscow… Moscow, Idaho, of course. In the school paper, the following preview awaited:

Timothy Mooney: keeping Moliere alive
Timothy Mooney is keeping Moliere alive and funny as ever. With his one-man performance, “Moliere Than Thou,” Mooney has travelled all over the U.S. and Europe to preserve Moliere’s wit and humor.

Mooney views Moliere as the second-best playwright to ever have lived, behind only Shakespeare, and has translated and re-written 15 Molière plays and incorporated them into his 90-minute one-man act.

Some of Moliere’s humor and wit had been lost in previous translations, but French professor Sarah Nelson said Mooney has managed to keep the humor and verse in his translation.

Last summer, Nelson attended the American Association of Teachers of French in Belgium where she saw Mooney’s performance and has since been the contact to bring him to University of Idaho.

…“I really want people to show up, because it’s a very entertaining show,” she said. “It’s well done, very entertaining and informative. It’s social commentary — funny criticism of Moliere’s society — but it works for today’s society, too.”

In the performance, Mooney appears as Moliere himself, adopting his complex language and witty commentary. “Moliere Than Thou” revives the age of Louis XIV and the beloved plays of the “French Shakespeare.” The play explores relations between man and woman, master and servant and pokes fun at the rich and the pompous.

“People generally find it much better than they thought it would be,” Nelson said.

And that evening, they threw a great dinner party for me, with several of the faculty welcoming me to town. The spring weather had turned gorgeous, and when I arrived on campus, I discovered quite a few of the students were more interested in sunning themselves than studying. The show itself, though, was really packed, and the responses were terrific. Driving south the next day, messages came in from the U of Idaho faculty:

Everywhere I go, people are exclaiming about how great the show was last night, Tim. Thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU! And thank you, also, for your willingness to meet and mingle with people all through your short stay here in Moscow--it's been lovely having the chance to get to know you a little, in addition to having the pleasure of your performance. Sarah Nelson, Associate Professor of French, University of Idaho

What a grand success the Runstad Lecture was last night! Congratulations. As you can see from the pictures we had a packed room for Moliere Than Thou. It was a delight! The spectacle was awe inspiring – one of our first sunny days of the year just a few weeks before the end of the semester and, rather than Frisbee throwing and skateboarding (and studying), UI students and Moscow/Pullman community members PACKED into the Admin Auditorium to laugh, applaud (and cavort!) for an hour and a half with a 17th century French playwright. He was hysterical. I went home laughing and repeating “stop – thief!” (nearly every one of them stayed the full time, skateboards idling in the aisles!). Sarah, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve copied our guest, the most memorable and magical Tim Mooney, on this note. Thank you monsieur! Jean M. Henscheid, Ph.D., Director, Core Curriculum

I was at the U of I performance (I was actually the volunteer for Elmire) and I just wanted to thank you for coming to the middle of nowhere to perform. I enjoyed it so much. I don't think that Moliere gets enough credit nowadays. Thanks again, Kristin

In quick order, I dropped down to Reno, Nevada, and then on to Fresno, visiting Airplane Jayne, and Santa Rosita with Kirsten (who wanted to watch the DVD of “The Misanthrope”). The next morning I went on to L.A. where I performed at Mount Saint Mary’s College (the school website refers to it as a "brilliant one man show"). I had a brief interview before the show, with Buzzine, which printed a very nice article about the show.

What could have been a daunting feat becomes an energetically engaging and enthralling event. Mooney ... seamlessly shifts from one character to another with an exchange of wig or waistcoat whilst maintaining an ongoing narration that keeps us so involved that we don’t even notice…until there’s a new character — until “he” starts to talk to us through the monologue. (Melissa Berry, Buzzine.com)

Kirsten ran the video camera, capturing some cool footage. (It was an all-girls school, which tends to amplify the giggling.)

The teacher took Kirsten and I out to eat at a fabulous restaurant, and we joked and told stories well into the night.

The next day I was on to Las Vegas, meeting up with Klee (who I’d just seen in Minneapolis several days before), before pushing through to Grand Junction, Colorado, where I caught up with one of my former hosts at a karaoke bar. Working my way through the Glenville Canyon, I pulled out my video camera to capture the shifting scenery of my favorite stretch of highway. The glare and the pock-marks on the windshield may have been a bit much to get a great view of the landscape, but I think you can still get a good sense of it from this. (I gave it a soundtrack of a couple of songs from “Karaoke Knights”.)

A friend of a friend brought me in for an event at the University of Colorado, which began with an acting workshop (I was late because I couldn’t find parking!), followed by fun performance. My friend, Tricia, from the University of Denver, who’d previously hosted my show, but never saw it, came up to catch it, and most of the DU faculty were present, laughing boisterously.

The next day I stopped in Lincoln, Nebraska, visiting Dave Landis and Bob Hall, and then pushed on home.

At home I dove in to work on a new Moliere script, “The Critique of the School for Wives,” and made one final stop out for a performance at Crown Point High School before declaring the semester officially complete.

After a week at home, I drove down to the Orlando Fringe Festival, where I was performing “Moliere Than Thou” once again. I’d done “MTT” at this festival back in 2003, and I keep getting asked when I was going to bring it back again. This time around I was staying with Al and Gale, who have a swimming pool out back. Alas, it rained nearly every day of the festival. I spent most of my time on completing “The Critique of the School for Wives.”

Attendance at the festival was pretty thin early on, with my first four shows averaging about 20 per performance. “Word of mouth” was good though, and I kept distributing flyers and meeting people in the halls, and attending a few shows here and there. I particularly enjoyed a one-man presentation of “The Seven Samaraui,” as well as “The Bridesmaid” and “Wanderlust.” My fellow billeter at Al & Gale’s house, Tommy Nugent had a fun show, “Burning Man and the Reverend Nuge,” and we hung out by the pool now and then. Also, my new friend, John Heffner had a show called “How Hefnerian,” and he was being escorted around the festival by a two-woman “entourage.” The three of them came to see my show twice through the course of the run, and I borrowed his “entourage” to be my volunteers for the performances they attended.

The reviews were slight while I was there, with the only quotable line from Elizabeth Maupin’s review suggesting that “Mooney goes from character to character by changing a coat, a vest or a wig, and the minimum of fuss with which he does it could be a lesson to some other Fringe performers.” Though there was a nice feature story in the Orlando Sentinel:

Fringe: The man who's mastering Moliere
By Dewayne Bevil | Sentinel Staff Writer

What brings a man to be so devoted to Moliere that his license plates are a shout-out to the 17th century actor/playwright?

Timothy Mooney, actor/playwright for "Moliere Than Thou" and owner of a MOLIERE plate, says it all started when he was running a theater company in the suburbs of Chicago. …

Like many one-man shows, it's wordy. But "Than Thou" also has a distinct meter and rhyme to it.

"In the Olympics, they would call it 'the level of difficulty,' " Mooney says. "It done by the syllable, what I'm doing. I can't improvise around it."
SIDENOTE: Who says Fringe isn't educational. According to the program for "Moliere Than Thou," the playwright died in 1673 after the fourth performance of his "The Imaginary Invalid." He collapsed during the show's finale, and no doctor would attend to him because he had skewered the medical profession in many instances. ("He really showed what a sham medicine was at that time," Mooney says).

So, he didn't exactly die for his craft, but it wasn't a great health plan, either.

By the end of the run, I was getting audiences of 35, 55 and 75 all told, and a local photographer (www.TisseArt.com) showed up for my final performance. Amid that show, a fuse blew, and the lights suddenly went out on me. Eventually, the technician flipped on the room’s fluorescent lighting, under which I finished the show’s final scenes.

The next day, I drove back to Greenwood, SC, getting a quick visit in with Bess and some of the cast and crew of Misanthrope before pushing on home.

At home I spent about four days cleaning up the hundreds of e-mails that had accumulated over recent months, and assessing the schools that were on my “maybe” list. I then restructured my schedule to accommodate where I thought I had the best chance of getting booked, before diving in to the “Big Promotional Campaign.” This is the BIG list that I send to twice a year, as I work my way, alphabetically, through the states, ultimately sending out about 5000 e-mails to Theatre, French, English and History Faculty. As I write this, I have made it through the state of Oregon, with 13 states left to go, trying to get them done before Pathways, this weekend.

And amid all of that, I’ve completed the final proofing on two versions of “The Miser” and two versions of “The Schemings of Scapin” which should be available via this website: http://www.playscripts.com/author.php3?authorid=451 any day now!

And while that's the good publishing news, word has come back to me that Ray Bradbury is not interested in having an adaptation of "All Summer in a Day" (which I rewrote as a musical) published. Airplane Jayne's high school students in Fresno have been doing some work on it, and were disappointed. And yet ... I met the Editor from Dramatic Publishing for dinner the other night, and she still thinks she might be able to get him to OK a single production. (we'll keep you posted on that...)

Miles on the Vibe: 299,999 plus 20,000

Temperature: 70s

Attendance: 50 + 50 + 100 + 150 + 350 + 50 + 300 + 200 + 70 + 75 + 20 + 20 + 20 + 20 + 35 + 55 + 75 = 1640

Discoveries: I work especially well directing students … which I haven’t done for a while now. * People don’t “expect” Moliere to be as immensely entertaining as he is, and I have largely ignored (or been offended by) the task of overcoming the inertia of people who assume it won’t be any good. Lines like "an unlikely candidate for entertaining evening, but is", “it might scare some people off” and “It’s not just for theatricals,” or “People generally find it much better than they thought it would be,” seem to be “condemning it with faint praise.” My fears of saying “It’s better than you think it is, may keep me from building as big an audience as I might. * There’s a connection between the art of the caricature and commedia del’ arte which really helps make sense of the style of Moliere. *

In heavy rotation: watching the previous night’s “Countdown,” “The Rachel Maddow Show”, “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” while sending out my thousands of e-mails.

Next Performances: July 2-5: American Association of Teachers of French (San Jose); July 11-19: Skokie Theatre, Double Feature: "Moliere" and "Criteria" (Skokie, IL)

Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre Tour Schedule
(Available dates in CAPITAL LETTERS; Already-booked dates in lower case)

SUMMER, 09
7/2-5 American Association of Teachers of French, San Jose, CA
7/11-19 Skokie Theatre; Skokie, IL (Moliere and Criteria)
7/19-26 Kansas City Fringe Festival

FALL, ‘09
9/3-5 “Tartuffe” Auditions, Lake Forest College
9/8-13 ILLINOIS
9/14 INDIANA / MICHIGAN
9/15 OHIO
9/16 PENNSYLVANIA / NEW YORK / NEW JERSEY
9/17 NEW JERSEY / NEW YORK / NEW ENGLAND
9/18-21 NEW ENGLAND
9/22 NEW YORK
9/23 OHIO
9/24 INDIANA / MICHIGAN
9/25 ILLINOIS
9/26 “Pathways” Karaoke Competition (“Pathways Idol”)
9/28 IOWA / MISSOURI
9/29 NEBRASKA / KANSAS
9/30-10/1 COLORADO
10/2 KANSAS / NEW MEXICO / ARIZONA / NEVADA
10/3-8 TEXAS
10/9 TEXAS / OKLAHOMA / KANSAS / ARKANSAS / LOUISIANA / MISSISSIPPI
10/10-12 LOUISIANA / MISSOURI / ARKANSAS
10/13 Cabot High School, Cabot, AR
10/14 ARKANSAS / W. TENNESSEE / SE MISSOURI
10/15 Murray State University, Murray, KY
10/16 TENNESSEE / ALABAMA / GEORGIA
10/17-18 GEORGIA / TENNESSEE / VIRGINIA
10/19 Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
10/20 VIRGINIA / TENNESSEE
10/21-22 SOUTH CAROLINA / GEORGIA / FLORIDA
10/23-24 NORTH CAROLINA
10/25-27 VIRGINIA / MARYLAND / DELAWARE
10/28 MARYLAND / DELAWARE / PENNSYLVANIA
10/29 St. Francis University, Loretto, PA
10/30 PENNSYLVANIA / NEW YORK / NEW JERSEY
10/31-11/2 PENNSYLVANIA / WEST VIRGINIA / KENTUCKY / OHIO
11/3 INDIANA / OHIO / MICHIGAN
11/4-5 Private Party (Tim Turns 50)
11/6 Libertyville High School, Libertyville, IL
11/7-8 ILLINOIS
11/9 College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL
11/10-11 WISCONSIN / MINNESOTA
11/12 SOUTH/NORTH DAKOTA / IOWA / NEBRASKA
11/13 SOUTH/NORTH DAKOTA / MONTANA
11/14 MONTANA
11/15 North Idaho College, Coeur d’Alene, ID
11/16 IDAHO / WASHINGTON
11/17 OREGON
11/18 CALIFORNIA
11/19 California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA
11/20 CALIFORNIA
11/20-22 ACTFL, San Diego, CA
11/22 CALIFORNIA / ARIZONA
11/23 ARIZONA
11/24 NEW MEXICO / NEVADA
11/25 COLORADO / KANSAS
11/26-28 Thanksgiving Break
11/28-12/8 Lake Forest College (Rehearsals for “Tartuffe”)
11/28-12/8 CHICAGO-AREA (DAYTIME)

WINTER/SPRING 2010
1/7-10 ACTF Region III
1/1-13 Lake Forest College (Rehearsals for “Tartuffe”)
1/14-17 TETA, Dallas, TX
1/18-2/13 Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL (Directing “Tartuffe”)
2/14 S. ILLINOIS / MISSOURI
2/15 LOUISIANA / ARKANSAS / OKLAHOMA
2/16-18 TEXAS
2/19 W. TEXAS / NEW MEXICO
2/20 NEW MEXICO
2/21 ARIZONA
2/22 ARIZONA / S. CALIFORNIA / NEVADA
2/23 CALIFORNIA / NEVADA
2/24 UTAH / COLORADO
2/25-26 COLORADO
2/27 COLORADO / KANSAS / TEXAS (Panhandle)
2/28 KANSAS / OKLAHOMA
3/1 OKLAHOMA
3/2 ARKANSAS / TENNESSEE
3/3 TENNESSEE / KENTUCKY
3/4-6 SETC, Lexington, KY
3/7-8 TENNESSEE / GEORGIA / ALABAMA / MISSISSIPPI
3/9-12 GEORGIA / FLORIDA
3/13-15 SOUTH / NORTH CAROLINA
3/16-17 VIRGINIA / DELAWARE / MARYLAND
3/18 DELAWARE / PENNSYLVANIA / NEW JERSEY
3/19 PENNSYLVANIA / NEW YORK
3/20-23 NEW ENGLAND / NEW YORK
3/24 NEW YORK / PENNSYLVANIA
3/25 PENNSYLVANIA / WEST VIRGINIA
3/26-28 WEST VIRGINIA / OHIO / KENTUCKY
3/29 OHIO / KENTUCKY / MICHIGAN
3/30 INDIANA / MICHIGAN
3/31 INDIANA / ILLINOIS
4/1 Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, IL
4/2 IOWA
4/3-5 MISSOURI / KANSAS / COLORADO / NEBRASKA
4/6 COLORADO / UTAH / WYOMING
4/7 UTAH / WYOMING / NEVADA
4/8-9 CALIFORNIA / OREGON
4/10-13 OREGON / WASHINGTON
4/14 IDAHO
4/15-16 MONTANA
4/17-18 NORTH/SOUTH DAKOTA
4/19 NORTH/SOUTH DAKOTA / MINNESOTA
4/20 MINNESOTA / WISCONSIN
4/21 WISCONSIN
4/22 WISCONSIN / ILLINOIS
4/23 ILLINOIS
4/24-5/7 AVAILABLE BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

The View From Here #138: Monterey, CA; Springfield, MO; Auburn, AL; Rome, GA; Birmingham, AL; Slippery Rock, PA; Newberry & Greenwood, SC

2009-03-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple days visiting my old high school friend, Kirsten in Santa Clarita. Kirsten and I went to high school together, and we stumbled back across each other through friends of friends of friends. (She’s turned out to be an enthusiastic supporter of the Moliere tour.) From there it was on to visit “Airplane Jane” in Fresno (watching old episodes of “Battlestar Gallactica,” which just wrapped up it’s four-year series last week).

And then on to Monterey, where I was performing at Santa Catalina High School for an audience of about 200 girls who were fabulous gigglers. The teacher there had seen my show back in the Washington D.C. area, and remembered me when she returned to the west coast.

The performance was originally supposed to be an hour long, shortened to 50 minutes, and later cut to about 40 minutes. The teacher was signaling me active from the front of the auditorium before I even got to the “Precious Young Maidens” scene. Even without the climax of the show, a couple teachers suggested that it was the best assembly event of the year.

Everybody was positive about the show … The girls were generally "shocked" because of subject content and the power of theater ( you!) to create strong emotions! (Anne O’Dowd, French Teacher, Santa Catalina High School)

While I don't have copies of them to paste up here, you can see photos from the "Tartuffe" scene here and here.

The next day I started pushing my way back east again, with overnight stops in Arizona, New Mexico, the Texas panhandle and Missouri. In Springfield, MO, I spent quality time with the Ozarks Technical Community College, as they rehearsed my version of “Tartuffe”, giving them my acting workshop, a performance of “Moliere Than Thou” >along with a stop at rehearsal. They were working on a 60s version of “Tartuffe” (the 1960s, that is), and later produced a fun video promoting the show (along with a special appearance from myself). They were very, very happy to have me there, and at the end of my visit, most of them asked me to autograph their scripts. (One of them actually turned up on-line on the costumer’s website.)

[I must note that there was a dicey period right around here where there were three schools in a row that did not “have the check ready” when I was in town. Despite the fact that “payment is due on the date of performance”, people did not seem to be coming up with the goods in a timely fashion. I found myself contemplating notions of helplessness while wondering how to pay my bills with money that I’d earned but not received.]

[It was also about this time that I started to hear news of high schools that were producing shortened versions of my plays moving up in competition. Scituate High School in Massachusetts took “The Misanthrope” all the way to state semi-finals competition, while my “Imaginary Invalid,” produced by York High School in Virginia, was a State Finalist.]

From Springfield, I drove to Montgomery, Alabama, where I was brought in to present the show as part of a Humanities conference. The host had met me at the American Assn of Teachers of French conference last summer, and he introduced me to the theatre department at Auburn University-Montgomery. He gave me a tour of Montgomery, including Hank Williams (astroturfed) gravesite, and several civil rights historical sites.

The show was well received. The hosts wrote that:

“Your show and workshop were the hit of the conference. As well as the conference went overall, that's saying quite a lot.” (Steve Daniel, French Professor, Auburn University-Montgomery)

That was such a fun evening. Your talent and energy are amazing. I can't remember when I've seen an audience so engaged. (Katie Pearson, Theatre Coordinator, Auburn University-Montgomery)

I came in this morning to write you how much I enjoyed the performance/ Moliere (there just is not enough live Moliere in Montgomery!). Your zest for character and words is contagious--M. Poquelin would be so proud of the evening! (Susan Willis, Auburn University-Montgomery)

Meanwhile, a fan and friend from a previous performance at Auburn University wrote:

The performance was spectacular. I was surprised to find myself not shaking the entire time which was actually the case the first time, but I guess some of the anticipation was gone, knowing what was coming. Nevertheless, I laughed fully and deliciously and (as I'm sure you saw) even had eyes that looked like I'd been crying because of all the tears that come with real mccoy all-out laughter, and I had a ridiculously happy smile on my face whenever I was not actually laughing. (Jennifer Moody, Auburn University)

A show in Orlando, Florida had been cancelled, so I ran up to spend a weekend with Isaac in Detroit (his fifteenth birthday), before swinging back to Chicago for a few days.

Resuming the tour, I dropped down to Chattanooga, TN, visiting Sabra and her husband Paul (again we hit the Chattanooga karaoke bar, where we have been mostly famous ever since last year’s SETC conference). And again I pushed on to visit my friend, Lori, in Calhoun, GA for a couple days, before swinging back to Rome, Georgia for a show at Berry College.

Berry College apparently has the largest campus in the world, which seems to be just as populated by deer as it is by students. They put me up in a nice cottage setting, where the deer lingered nearby. The show itself really rocked, and I got some good footage out of it (which I quickly uploaded to YouTube). The French professor had seen me perform in Belgium last summer, and he was quoted in the press release for the show, saying:

Mooney really embodies Moliere’s spirit. You will become spellbound after only a few seconds of watching him. (Vincent Gregoire, French Professor, Berry College)

And another unsolicited note came in from an audience member:

Tim, your performance at Berry College was perfect antidote to winter doldrums. In awe of your talent, facial expressions, and word manipulation. (Susan Harvey, Georgia Artist)

I set out for Birmingham, where the Southeast Theatre Conference was meeting. This was my fifth year of attendance, and I spent the entire several days, running into one old friend after another. Kirsten flew out from L.A. to catch the performance I was giving at midnight as the opening event of the SETC “Fringe Festival.” While some 300 or more people had assured me that they wanted to catch the midnight show, never before was the phrase “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” more apropos. Perhaps 70 or so people attended the late-night show, and they were very enthusiastic, though they did seem to hit a wall somewhere around 1 a.m. (which meant that “Stop Thief” was showing diminishing returns over the fifteen times I repeat that particular line). On the up-side, though, I’d been invited to do a scene from the show as a part of the opening night reception, and about 500 people saw me do the “Stop Thief!” sequence from “Precious Young Maidens” in the open 16-story lobby of the Sheraton hotel. (People who were lying in bed in their rooms later reported having heart my voice booming through the hotel.)

There’s always the bar scene at these conference, and at one point, I found myself hanging with Kirsten, our mutual friend, Mark, and two of the “past presidents” of SETC (both of whose schools I’d performed at). One of these gentlemen actually blew off a performance of his state’s theatre contest winner to hang out and drink well into the night. (Apparently, hanging with Moliere takes a certain priority.)

The day after the conference, I was on to Greenwood, South Carolina. A couple of anticipated shows in the Northeast had fallen through, which meant that I got to commit more time to the Greenwood Community Theatre which had brought me in to direct and act in “The Misanthrope”. They had been rehearsing for a couple weeks up to this point, working off of blocking that I had drawn up on a ground plan, so that they could learn where they were supposed to stand, even before the director arrived in town.

As forced, and false and unnatural as that might sound, to me it felt right for this show, which was going to be reaching back to another era. I went so far as to plot out the blocking in color coordinated markers, using a different color for every character on stage. Perhaps I am the only one who may have thought of this as a thing of great beauty.

I spent three days in town, working through the show as well as giving them my acting workshop, before making a fast dash north to a single show in Slippery Rock, PA.

The trip to Slippery Rock gave me the opportunity to finish memorizing “Misanthrope”, and Moliere played very well in a conference room with some hundred chairs set up. Unfortunately the lighting was not so good (so the video we captured was not the best), but the audience, which included the Mayor of Slippery Rock (who also happened to be a retired member of the theatre faculty … how often does that happen?), loved the show lots. In fact, as is evident in this video: “They really enjoyed the show.”

Following another day’s drive, back down to Greenwood, we dove fully into rehearsals. We had to part ways with one actor, who was chronically late, and I could feel it sending a shock wave through the cast, who were suddenly conscious that there might be quality standards at play in this little “community theatre” show. As difficult a decision as that was to make, since then, I have observed the effort and enthusiasm of the cast spiraling upwards.

When we did run-throughs, we would videotape the rehearsal, so that I might be able to actually watch the show afterwards and type up notes for the cast. I was also able to cut some scenes together to put up on my YouTube site to help promote the performance:

and

I've been casually referring to the house that I’m staying in as “Suzy’s Puppet Place”, a comfortable home in which Suzy (who lives elsewhere), once upon a time, gave puppet performances. It features a couple of puppet stages, with large mirrors on the walls (to see the effects of the puppet movements during rehearsal), as well as all kinds of puppets, all over the house. (This can be a little spooky late at night, when I trip over a life-sized puppet’s feet on the way to the bathroom.) The mirrors on the wall were of great assistance when I was rehearsing “Karaoke Knights”, as I could see how each of the characters were coming across as I was performing them, and eventually I loaded in all of my amplification equipment, to remind myself of the tangle of wires that leads from DVD player to PA system to three separate microphones, and to the projector.

I ran off to perform “Karaoke Knights” at Newberry College. Newberry had hosted my “Criteria” a year before, and they’re talking about hosting “Moliere” next year. It took about a week to work “Karaoke Knights” back up to performance conditions, and I had very little sense of how it would go over, considering that I hadn’t performed it for a college crowd in years. The tech director there was extremely supportive in getting the show set up, and I did a run through with his technicians “playing” with the levels. When this didn’t quite have the desired effect, the techs spent another couple of hours re-gelling lights, and reworking the cues.

Ultimately, the play was quite well received, even with an audience of only thirty people or so, and I managed to post many of these scenes on-line. (The scenes looked and played much better on video that was shot in a theatre, rather than the noisy bar I’d performed at in Minneapolis last summer.)

Given this success, I headed on to a performance at Lander University (here in town where I’m working with the Greenwood Community Theatre) with some confidence. I would be on an even bigger stage, with better amplification and better lighting.

And yet, I was feeling less secure. The theatre’s booth was about fifty yards away, and from what I could see, they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the show. They hit “play” on the DVD early, so that when we started the play, we were already perhaps 15 seconds into the video. This meant that my opening monologue, which is timed down to the second, would need to be cut on-the-fly, though I didn’t know how much I would have to cut out in order to be in place in time for the opening number. Likewise, the stage had large barriers separating the audience from the stage, which meant that for any volunteers who would be coming up on-stage, they would need to first move away from the stage, up to the first landing, before turning to the side, and approaching the stage from a distant ramp. This meant that I was beginning two of the songs before I had even gotten the volunteers in place.

The audience was much larger than the Newberry crowd, but they were less attentive, and seemed to have arrived in the mood for a sing-along, not for a play. (Later, my theatre-department contact at Lander explained that this was the way that the publicity had circulated.) As such, I could feel a collective “hunh?” going up from the crowd, as I narrated/sang/danced my way through a supposed “karaoke competition,” in which I was the only participant.

With the conclusion of this performance, I decided that I am ready to be done performing “Karaoke Knights.” Over four years of hauling it out and around to perform, I seemed to have, at best, a 50% success record with the show. My vision has gone from that of a spoken-word poetry performance, to a “one-man rock opera”, to a collection of different karaoke-singing characters, to a series of songs bridged by popular karaoke numbers, to a narrated karaoke contest, to a full-out karaoke video, revealing the lyrics to all of the original songs, as well as the popular numbers, along with a disembodied, omnipresent karaoke narrator commenting on the performance and the content. This technological beast has resulted in several nightmare performances through the years, when videos broke down, or microphones didn’t work, or bar patrons were not only inattentive, but battling my sound system to be heard over me.

And now that I’ve got, at least one decent performance on video, one glimpse of what it might have been, when all the stars aligned, I’m ready to be done. There are too many projects waiting for my attention for me to spend a week or more preparing the next performance of the show, which may or may not result in theatrical genius, or perhaps, some sort of a lawsuit.

Feels rather like a load off of my back.

I went on to more successful events with Lander University, as I was the “Distinguished Speaker” for their lecture series. (I was quick to note that I’ve been called many things over the years, but “distinguished” has never been one of them. My parents would be so surprised.)

I also performed “Moliere Than Thou” for a combination of high school students, college kids and retirement community folks. I was forewarned that I should be on my best behavior (“This is the bible belt, and one of our schools attending is Greenwood Christian”), and the seventy or so in the audience seemed to be highly entertained.

And yet, at the end of the next-to-last scene, from Scapin, I was suddenly aware of a large cloud, coming, seemingly out of the “pit” underneath the stage. I had heard one of the technicians futzing around backstage, and apparently he had chosen this time to play with the “hazing machine”. From my perspective, it looked like someone was beating all of the dust out of a hundred rugs, sending this cloud into the audience and perhaps into my lungs. I kept acting, hoping that none of us were in any potential danger from this event, and knowing that if any damage were inflicted, it would be on the one who was using the most oxygen: myself.

I pitched a bit of a fit after the show.

So, here we are, with a show opening this week in Greenwood, running April 2-5. Tonight, there is a reviewer due to show up, even though the costumes are not done and the scenery is only halfway there. The actors, however, are ready, and I am delighted for the early motivation for them to throw that much more energy into their performance. It will be fun to revisit this favorite script of mine, originally produced about 9 years ago, in a performance that folks back in Chicago sometimes still talk about.

And already the "reviews" are coming in for "Misanthrope," as the Artistic Director's mom saw the show the other night, and e-mailed me this poem:

Ode to "The Misanthrope"

I seek a way to praise your play,
But the words are quite elusive.
It is brilliant, dazzling, amazing, and superb;
But I fear I become effusive!

I can't find the words---Oh, what a pity!
For this play so fabulous, remarkable, and witty.
So stunning, extraordinary, sensational, and glorious!
Bravo, Tim Mooney! As a playwright you're victorious!!!
(Jean Park)

Finally, I had an advance peek at the review for "The Misanthrope," and though I'll wait for it to be published to share the entire thing, I'll quote this much:

As Alceste, the protagonist whose rigid honesty makes him the Simon Cowell of 17th century France (at least when it comes to judging sonnets), Mooney brings a wit and style to the stage that easily resonates with contemporary audiences. Anyone who enjoys the television series House will certainly like this play with its clever word play and philosophical insights. (Virginia Dumont-Poston, Lander University)

Miles on the Vibe: 299,999 plus another 8,000 registered on the trip odometer, plus another 2,250 miles that I drove before realizing I could track my mileage on the trip odometer.

Discoveries: It’s not the lack of money that bothers me as much as the helplessness about when I can count on having it in the bank. * Midnight shows always sound like a good idea at the time, but in practicality, about 25% of the expected audience actually show up. * Actually drawing up blocking, in full color, has given the show a strong foundation to start from, even when it feels a little bit false at first. * Recasting a role when the commitment level wasn’t there has inspired much greater commitment from the actors who realize that there are, in fact, standards to which they will be held. * There comes a point when I can choose to continue attempting to bang a show into the shape that will work for an audience, and a time when I recognize that it no longer resembles the shape in which it was once envisioned, and no amount of re-molding the work will produce the vision that will ultimately satisfy my muse. As such, there is no lack of new visions that will occupy my muse in the years to come.

Temperature: Currently upper-50s/lower-60s in Greenwood, SC

On the DVD Player: Mostly “The Misanthrope” rehearsal videos

Attendance: 200 + 20 + 70 + 100 + 100 + 500 + 70 + 50 + 35 + 200 + 40 + 75 = 1460

Next Performance: April 2-5, Greenwood, SC

The View From Here #137: Moline, IL; Naperville, IL; New York, NY; Memphis & Henderson, TN; Cabot & Conway, AR; Hammond, LA

2009-02-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

I settled into my series of December projects, and with a dozen or so readers having signed up to receive serialized releases of “Love’s The Best Doctor,” I completed that in record time (I always do better when I know that somebody out there is actually anticipating the next chapter), and sent if on ahead to Playscripts, who are now considering it for publication.

I dove full-time into my annual family calendar project, assembling a calendar with photos in the squares of relatives’ birthdays, which went through repeated changes as new photos came in from various points.

On December 11, I made my way to the snowy Quad Cities: in this instance, Rock Island, Illinois, where Augustana College was producing my version of “The Learned Ladies,”(and where I managed to catch up with an old high school friend, Mary Jenks). They were bringing me in for a nice long residency of a week, featuring several rehearsal visits, a French class, a couple of Theatre classes (including a new workshop on Physical Performance), and a performance of “Moliere Than Thou”.

They put me up in the guest house on-campus. Which was, as these often are, probably the oldest building on the campus, which meant that the students all had stories about it being haunted, while the building itself was horribly drafty. It also had at least one mouse, irregular internet service and no toaster. (The lack of a toaster was relevant due to the fact that I burned my finger rather badly trying to toast bread in the oven.)

In the course of my visit, I was able to hear the text of “The Learned Ladies” aloud for the first time, somewhere other than the inside of my own head, and reworked about one or two percent of the dialogue.

The challenge was to “hear” where the problems with the dialogue were actor issues, or were Tim-issues. Some of the actors were more talented than others, and some of the better ones might have been compensating for mistakes I’d made, while others weren’t bringing quite the texture to the dialogue that was available. Working closely with the director, we made certain cuts, for the sake of this single performance, while other adjustments were for the final version.

I always resist "permanent" cuts in the script (unless I'm consciously working on a shortened version), as my scripts mirror Moliere's originals line-for-line. My feeling is that Moliere, at least, was a master of comic timing, and if the words aren't working, it's because I have not yet found the right ones.

(It was about this time that I got news that I’d be performing the opening event for the Southeast Theatre Conference “Fringe Festival” in Birmingham, Alabama this March.)

On the last day in town, I had a final workshop to give mid-afternoon, and, as it had done for much of my week in attendance, the snow continued to pour down. The theatre host called to tell me that they’d gone ahead and extended my stay in the guest apartment an extra day, and so I took advantage of the time to make one last visit to rehearsals.

Somewhere in there I discovered that my cell phone was missing.

In the course of getting into and out of my car a half dozen times that day, and scraping my windshield anew each time, the phone had fallen out somewhere. When all I really wanted to do was cuddle up in a blanket, I found myself tracing my way through snowbanks, hoping to uncover the telephone … to no avail.

I drove home without a phone, and had Sprint enable a back-up phone I’d gotten, while I waited for the first thaw in the Quad Cities.

Back home, I dove back into the new play, the calendar, the brochure and a revision of my promotional DVD. I’d done up a couple of variations of the DVD in the past, but every time I had to re-do it, I also had to re-learn how DVD’s work, and how you create menus in DVDs, and how you make the scrolling from one menu item to another work in such a way that it matches the instinctive scrolling that a video watcher does when they hit the up-down-left-right buttons.

I was going to swing out to Detroit to visit Isaac on Christmas Eve, but suddenly a deep snow was looming, leading me to put it off at the last minute. Christmas happened on-schedule for the family at home, and for the first time I had the final version of the calendar complete for distribution on Christmas Day.

It was the day after Christmas when I headed for Detroit, where Isaac and I partied for two days: eating out, working out, and picking up last minute presents. The day after Christmas was actually quite warm, and in a final desperation move, I called the Augustana College information line, speaking to a woman who acknowledged that “Yes, I’ve got your telephone right here in front of me.” Somehow it had melted its way out of the snowbank, though it was not the particular snowbank that I’d been searching. Either way, it was a valuable phone, and it was found ... and when it finally met me back in Chicago, even more astonishing: it worked!

I drove back to Chicago, rehearsing the lines for “Criteria”, which I hadn’t performed in perhaps nine months, but which I would be performing again at the end of January. Reciting the lines three times on the way to Detroit, and three times on the way back, I had it suddenly refreshed in my memory.

Much of the remainder of the year, and the first week of January was taken up with re-doing, and replicating the DVD, while sorting out my receipts from 2008 for my taxes, and re-packing the car (changing the oil, getting my fourth (!) set of tires, washing the car …). I also got a really enthusiastic fan-letter from a student who’d been my Tartuffe volunteer at an appearance last fall.

“I just wanted to let you know you are one of the many reasons why 2008 is a year I cant and wont ever want to forget. … You truly inspired me to pursue acting. Thank you for being Tim Mooney lol.” (Angelique Santiago)

January 7 I was back on the road. The first day I had a quick workshop at an all-boys academy in Aurora, Illinois (Marmion Academy, where apparently I got good reviews from the Abbot/President of the school), and a show in Naperville, IL at North Central College. The French teachers took me out to dinner, and explained that they’d actually seen me perform at North Park College several years before, and one of the teachers (Norval Bard) put out this collection of Moliere-related tidbits to the school:

About this week's Molière events, you may be wondering what this is about. Here are some numbers to help you...

The plays of Moliere are performed more often in France than those of any other playwright;

There are more streets named after Moliere than any other writer in France;

"Moliere" is often put in the titles chosen to name new businesses in Paris. So there are six cafés, brasseries, restaurants named "Molière", three hotels, 2 patisseries, and one institute of Yoga-Judo-and self-defense (!) among them!

There are at least 18 different brands of products (from chocolate to ink pens to notebooks) with the name "Molière" in them

For the production of only 20 of Moliere's plays in its repertoire, the Comédie Francaise has 600 costumes reserved just for his plays and another 10000 in reserve that they also consider eligible for his characters.

And, finally, the number of wigs known to have been created for his plays is currently over 1,550! (Source: Le Petit Molière: 1673-1973. Paris: Editions Guy Authier, 1973.)

That night’s show was quite well attended, with an audience that was buoyant and lively throughout, including my good friends Bryan and Chelsea, who’d never seen my show before (I dragged Chelsea up as the “Doctor” volunteer, and she gave me great feedback about how great it was to finally see “the essence of yourself,” as fully expressed through my performance.)

The next day, I gave a rather animated talk about Moliere to a handful of attendees, and the French teachers were more enthusiastic than before, and started floating ideas about a more elaborate engagement, which might actually feature me supporting one of their classes with my own Moliere/performance insights.

But once that was done, I was straight onto the highway, stopping in Toledo that night, Scranton the night after that, and on into New York City the following day, dodging snowfall as I went, and destroying any positive effects of the pre-tour car wash.

Listening to XM radio, I found myself wondering if they had listened carefully to their new motto/tag-line: "Everything worth listening to ..." Because every time I heard it, I heard "Everything worthless ..."

As always, I hemorrhage money in New York City, and this conference (Assn of Performing Arts Presenters) had already cost me a bundle. Between Conference membership, conference registration, Exhibit Hall space, Showcase purchase, and a hotel for three nights, I would need at least four bookings from this event just to break even. The parking alone was costing me $55 per night! It was a good incentive to eat light for three days, and I have decided to go vegetarian for a while. (Since doing so, I’ve steadily lost the six pounds I’ve been trying to get rid of for the last year or so.)

Moreover, the conference wanted to charge me an extra $200 for each person I might add to my exhibit booth, which meant that the friends who were making themselves available to help me get set up, or watch the booth while I was performing at a showcase, could not get in. (Thanks Kurt! Thanks Suzanne!)

I found a parking garage halfway between the Sheraton and the Hilton and unloaded my personal effects to the Sheraton while unloading my booth and showcase materials to the Hilton. Ultimately, all was unloaded and in place in time for the opening of the exhibit hall that afternoon, and I was at last ready to distribute my brand new brochures and my brand new DVDs.

Traffic was light at the booth, and even lighter at the showcases, and while the first showcase may have had 8 people in the audience, the second one had about 12 and the final one had perhaps 30. Those who attended were responsive, and a couple of old friends showed up in the various audiences, including Lindsay Reading Korth, who’d booked me for a workshop at Nazareth College last fall, and Patrick Spradlin, an old friend I hadn’t seen in over twenty years(!) who was now representing a college in Minnesota.

I also met up with a guy who was doing his own one-man show on the circuit, playing Edgar Allan Poe. He was impressed with some of my materials, but adamant that I wasn’t charging enough for my services, given that he was charging about five times what I was. (“Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re too expensive!” was his main advice to me.)

I probably came away from the event with about twenty prospects, reminding myself to follow up on them as soon as possible (he said, eyeing a long busy spring), and getting the heck out of town.

I went on a quick visiting tour, dropping in on my sister Maureen, and her husband Tim, in Baltimore, on Sandra-the-Vegan in Boone, NC, and meeting up with former French teacher, Lori Etheridge, who was on a trip with her kids to Athens, GA.

All of this positioned me for a drop-in to Greenwood, SC, where we held auditions for “The Misanthrope”, which is going into production later in the spring, with myself directing and playing the role of Alceste. Over two days of auditions, we seemed to have found an excellent cast, and I sped off again, this time to Memphis, Tennessee, where I had a week to rehearse and perform both “Moliere Than Thou” and “Criteria” as part of a single evening’s entertainment.

While doing both shows in a single night was a challenge, it was a huge luxury to have three days of rehearsal leading up to opening night, and my first night in town, I simply worked to set up the equipment and talk through the cues with the stage manager.

The next day was inauguration day, and I sat transfixed in front of the television most of the time, getting a little bit irritated when things started running late (“Why are we listening to this musical performance when it’s 12:01 already?”), but mostly glad for the end of an error. That night, after rehearsal, I went out to Beale Street in Memphis to absorb the celebratory mood, but the weather had turned cold, and nobody was left out actually celebrating … so I wound up in a karaoke bar, doing damage to my voice.

On Thursday, I actually had three shows to perform, starting with a show at a local high school in the morning. The school was unprepared to host a show. What occasionally happens is that the host is someone who has seen me performing at a conference somewhere, with no lights, sound or set-up time, and THAT is what they expect me to do at their high school. As usual, we pulled together what technical support we could in the very limited time that the auditorium was available to us, and I proceeded to perform for the 30 or so who’d come to see the show.

With two shows that night, I was focusing my energy relentlessly, making one problematic misstep: I had a cup of coffee about an hour before showtime.

By the time I had emerged on stage, my heart was racing, and my tongue was twisting its way magnificently through the complex rhymed verse, with nary a slip-up. I recognized the theatre’s Artistic Director in the audience, and I was entirely in control, and racing my way through the play … though I wasn’t exactly taking the audience with me. They seemed mildly amused at best. The volunteer scenes went extremely well, though.

Regardless, the next day, a professor at the U of Memphis sent this to his colleagues:

“Just wanted to let you know that Tim Mooney performed his one-man show, “Molière Than Thou” in Memphis last night and that he did a marvelous job. … His adaptations from L’Ecole des Femmes, Tartuffe, Dom Juan, Les Précieuses ridicules, Les Fourberies de Scapin, etc. were remarkable. His acting skills are exceptional and his translations (or adaptations) captured the depth and poetry of Molière’s theater. …Performing Molière, and doing it so well, allows 21st-century spectators to appreciate that the comic dramatist was much more than “le premier farceur de la France”!” (Ralph Albanese)

Backstage I regathered my energy and framed my mind for an entirely different performance, reemerging to perform “Criteria”, which I hadn’t done “live” for almost a year. I used all of my energy to hold my rather taciturn character in check, and perhaps especially because the audience knew of the hyperkinetic heights of which I was capable, they were sucked into this more tightly reined characterization. They laughed, but this time they laughed at realizations they were making in response to the story and the character; not because I was doing something funny. And so, exactly where “Moliere” had NOT worked for them, “Criteria” succeeded, and I began to hypothesize that audiences would tend to prefer one or the other, but rarely both.

The next night, the reverse was largely true. “Moliere” was the success, while the projector that we used for “Criteria” suddenly wasn’t actually projecting. The stage manager worked on it during intermission, and eventually I went out to work on it myself. While I hate to reveal myself out of character to the audience, they tend to love having that backstage peek, and so we quipped back and forth pleasantly before establishing that I was not going to get the system to work in this situation. Finally, I simply turned the laptop around so that the audience could follow the slides in miniature version, while I performed as if the several maps were blown up large on the screen behind me. It made a complex concept even more complex, but the audience didn’t seem to mind all that much. (Though they weren’t by any means the hanging-on-every word laughers from the night before.)

For Saturday night’s show, I had a decent audience, and finally both shows seemed to go well. My fabulous stage manager, Caren, was taking care of all the details for me. She set me up with hot tea and cough drops every night, and even “pimped” for me, locating apt volunteers out of the incoming audience for the infamous “Doctor in Spite of Himself” scene.

That night I received the following from a school I’d performed at last spring:

I felt that I should drop you a line to tell you that all of my third year students who saw you perform are now seniors in French 400. This winter they are required to perform a dramatic interpretation of a piece of French literature after having finished a survey of French Lit this fall. Over 30 kids fought each other for the right to do Moliere! Even though they had studied Moliere last year, so it was the least fresh in their minds, they all remembered the performance and said that they thought it was one of the funniest shows they had ever seen. I just wanted to let you know what an impact it had on them, and to thank you for bringing this great work to life! (Jenny Hallenbeck, Inglemoor High School)

Sunday’s matinee was another small audience, and they were probably Moliere enthusiasts, because after performing the first show for about 16 people, I returned to perform “Criteria” for about 10 people left in the auditorium. I found this distracting in the extreme, and I realize that the Moliere fans were perfectly happy with the first show, and didn’t feel the NEED to stay to see “Criteria,” but I couldn’t help seeing this show through the eyes of audience that remained, who might wonder what the people who left early might know about the quality of the show that they were now watching. As such, I stumbled on my lines a few times.

I had very little energy left in my voice and my knee at that point. Because my knee gets exposed in the course of “Criteria,” I was performing it without the knee brace I wear for support during “Moliere”. The night before I had felt a bit of a “pop” in my knee as I went through the running that the scene demands. And so, performing the ninth show in four days, I was running on fumes and string.

The next day I was pushing back east, to Henderson, Tennessee (stopped by a SPEED TRAP in Oakland, Tennessee!) for two workshops and a performance at Freed-Hardeman University. The theatre prof wanted me to talk to a class about playwriting, and address issues of business and career. I talked at some length about the many twists and turns that my career had taken over the years, and while I was dealing with it from a strategic point of view, the professor was more interested from an inspirational point of view, alerting his students that “they don’t have to wait for someone to come along and cast them; they can go out and create their own careers.”

That evening the school’s broadcasting department was videotaping my show. In an exchange for a discount on the show, the school was doing a three-camera shoot of the event.

The auditorium was huge, and would fit as many as 3000 people, if it were to fill, although they weren’t expecting more than 70 people or so. There was a cold fan on up above, which was sending a strong breeze across the stage, and adding a humming noise to the background which I was constantly aware of trying to outshout.

The show, itself, went well, and my knee and voice held up through the course of the show … but we’ll have to wait and see how the video comes out.

Meanwhile, I received news that a school in Yorktown, Virginia had taken first place in the “Virginia High School League One-Act Theatre Arts Festival” with my shortened version of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope!” (I believe this is actually the very first performance of this 40-minute version.) Fingers crossed for the next level of competition!

The next day, I was on to Cabot, Arkansas, driving on past Memphis again, giving an acting workshop to seventy or so theatre and French students, several of whom remembered me from my performance in Arkansas a year before. I pushed quickly on to Conway, Arkansas, where my high school performance had been cancelled, but where I’d already arranged to perform at the University, again as part of a videotape/broadcasting arrangement.

This time, the show was being performed and recorded in a tiny studio theatre, essentially a small classroom, for an audience of perhaps 25. This time, with little effort my voice would fill the entire space, and the cameras couldn’t possibly miss a flutter of a muscle.

I worked with the TV team to arrange the chairs closely, which ultimately made a virtue of the small audience, which looked not only intimate, but full on camera. Only at one point during the performance, did I find myself staring down into the dark abyss of the camera’s eye, and spacing out my lines for several seconds. (The director assured me he could edit that part out.)

One of the faculty wrote me later to note:

“Outstanding show, Tim. I really enjoyed it and will never look at Moliere the same way. I wished all of my movement students had been there to see in action all of the things I talk about: specificity, full-body connection, 3-d characterization etc. i was so impressed by how in control you were that you could get a laugh with your knee or with a raised eyebrow. Fun to watch!” (Matt Chiorini)

And so, now, I’ll have two videos to work with in the coming months, both for dissemination on YouTube, and to use as sales tools for a potential future PBS programming campaign.

The next day I dropped south, discovering with some anxiety that my voice was getting worse. Somewhat absent-mindedly, I had been applying Ben Gay to my knee to rejuvenate it somewhat, forgetting that in the past, the menthol fumes that Ben Gay gives off tend to evaporate the protection coating my throat. And my tone was worsening quickly.

SIGN SEEN ON THE DRIVE SOUTH: "BBQ SO GOOD YOU'LL WANT TO SLAP YOUR MAMA!"

On the bright side, I was driving, finally, into much warmer weather, and Hammond Louisiana was in the 60-degree range when I arrived. My stay had been arranged at a bed and breakfast, however, and when I left my room to make a run to the store, I went to lock my door and the key broke off in the lock. An hour or so later, the management had broken the lock off of the door, reentered my room through the window, and relocated me to a room across the hall.

By the following morning, I was sounding even more like a frog, and somehow, when my voice is at its worst, and most painful to speak, that seems to be the time when people most enjoy asking me questions, or remark how much they actually like the sound of my voice.

My voice was actually the only bad thing about the performance that morning, and I was the only one who expressed any disappointment with my inability to provide more than the frog croaks that all of my characters were now imbued with. Otherwise, the enthusiasm was as strong as ever (I sold 5 t-shirts), with one e-mail showing up suggesting:

“I was fortunate enough to see your performance at my university this morning. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It was extremely clever and well-written! Twenty years ago I took a course in 17th century French classicism as part of my French major. I have read every play that you performed, but I had forgotten how truly good they were. Thank you so much for reminding me! They are classics for a reason. All of the witticisms, double entendres, and just general cleverness were preserved beautifully!” (Michele Burns)

This particular school had been very labor intensive, with about 30 e-mails traded back and forth, and demands for original signed contracts, as opposed to the faxed versions we might usually shoot back and forth. Even so, everyone was ultimately satisfied, and the school was already discussing bringing me back to perform again the following year.

I dropped south to New Orleans that afternoon, finding a nice bed and breakfast with a hot tub, and enjoying a couple of “hurricanes” that evening. The proprietor was a really wonderful man who fixed me up with tea, directions for anything I might want, and an offer to share my promotional materials with the nearby New Orleans school of the arts.

The next morning, with little voice left, I drove west, pausing after about 80 miles to shoot a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYtCAts-Hg4

(It's actually probably preferable to go to the YouTube site at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYtCAts-Hg4 and watch it in the "HD" option for it to actually make sense.)

As you can see, my long-monitored Pontiac Vibe odometer stopped working, live on tape! I had reached the precipice of 300,000 miles, and was denied entry. As a result, I am, even more ambitiously cataloguing this tour, taking photos of all of the places that my car has managed to visit, all while registering 299,999 miles.

299,999 Miles!
299,999 Miles!
299,999 Miles!

It’s a very existential feeling. If my car keeps traversing the world, and doesn’t register any miles, have I really traveled there? How do I eventually prove that I have the most traveled Pontiac Vibe in the world? And why can’t Pontiac have invested the extra five cents to provide a digital read out which would also shift to “3” at the appropriate time? Or have they planned too far in advance for the strategic breakdown of their vehicles. Just how much borrowed time am I currently living on? And why am I suddenly conscious of the scent of anti-freeze in the cabin of my car?

I continued west, visiting cousins Kathy and Larry in San Antonio, watching the Super Bowl in El Paso, and pushing on to Phoenix and Los Angeles, with my voice finally restoring itself. Another few days of visiting in the west before a show in Monterey, and making the push back in the opposite direction once more.

Finally, I end, roughly where I began. While I’ve been running all over the country, the school that I worked with back in early December was staying home to work on my version of “The Learned Ladies.” And while the reviewer had mixed responses with some of the choices that the director and actors had made, he did happen to mention my text, suggesting:

“... I'm betting it'd be a lot of fun to read, as Timothy Mooney's rhyme-scheme adaptation of the material - completed this past December - is really quite good. (And this from someone who is, by nature, averse to theatrical rhyme scheme.)” (Mike Schulz, River Cities Reader)

Miles on the Vibe: 299,999!

Discoveries: Moliere, at least, was a master of comic timing, and if the words aren't working, it's because I have not yet found the right ones. * The reason that I do what I do, and why it feels so right, is because theatrical performance is my access to my ultimate expression of my true self, and aspects of my character or being which are only hinted at in "real life," are fully expressed on stage. * My show is actually very, very inexpensive! * Teachers who first get exposed to my work in conferences and meeting rooms need added input so that they know that the show is much more than just me showing up and doing my thing. * No caffeine before a show! I have to trust that my energy will rise to the surface in response to the audience! * No Ben Gay! Use Tiger Balm instead! * Sometimes what looks like a cold is really the result of chemicals drying out the throat, and treating it as if it were a cold would only make the throat dryer and the condition worsen. Simply talking less and drinking water cures the throat faster than anything.

Temperature: 75 Degrees (in L.A.)

Attendance: 15 + 15 + 200 + 15 + 75 + 150 + 8 + 12 + 35 + 25 + 12 + 24 +22 + 16 + 25 + 10 + 75 + 50 + 25 + 200 = 1009

Next Performance: 2/9/09: Monterey, CA

The View From Here #136: Buckhannon, WV; Roanoke, VA; St. Louis & Maryville, MO; Chicago, IL; Sarasota, FL; Green Bay, WI

2008-12-07T14:56:00.000-08:00

Anonymous Feel Good comment on my last blog entry: “People like you that work hard to live their dream inspire many people to do the same. I love the fact that you dont only act because you love it but you act also to make people laugh and have fun!! I have yet found someone or have yet met anyone who can make me laugh as much as you did.”

Recent trend: My Moliere adaptations in competitions. My “Imaginary Invalid” will be at the Virginia High School League One-Act Play Competition, while my “Misanthrope” will be at the Massachusetts Drama Festival.

The folks at West Virginia Wesleyan had booked me once before, and brought me in at a discount, since I was nearby to do the West Virginia Theatre Conference. They put me up in the school’s guest house, which had about a half-dozen bedrooms to choose from, and I joked with my hosts that I was going to get up several times in the middle of the night, just to change beds.

I got a lot of work done, including updating these pages, from the guest house, while closely following the political race coming down to the wire. Of course no one knew, at that moment in time, just how close the vote might turn out to be, or how outrageously off the polls were. [FYI: www.fivethirtyeight.com proved to be the most accurate polling site.] And it looks like the state of Minnesota turned out to be this year’s Florida/Ohio, as even now, more than a month later, the votes continue to be counted.

The show went fairly well before a small audience, though without quite the dynamic that I’d felt in the Theatre Conference performance two nights before. Speaking of which, I have since received an e-mail from the Conference President with the following quotable quote:

"Mooney's performance is certainly energizing for a general audience, but if you put him in a room with about 90 theatre people, the event becomes electrifying. I've never seen young actors from different schools so mesmerized by a single performer." (Dennis Wemm, Glenville State University)

In addition to being election day, the next day was my birthday, and I’d planned a leisurely drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is one of the most beautiful drives I’ve stumbled across in my travels. Also, I figured that the leaves would be just about perfect for photos by then.

What I didn’t calculate was that it would take a good three hours just to get TO the Blue Ridge Parkway (crossing the West Virginia Appalacians into Virginia), and by the time I got there, I was driving through low clouds and drizzle most of the day. This, along with the fact that the speed limit was lower and the parkway would bend a mile laterally for every two miles it went forward, it all proved to be extremely slow-going. As I’d planned to watch election returns from a hotel near Boone, North Carolina, I eventually got back off the parkway and onto the Interstate, pushing on through.

I met my friend Sandra the Vegan in Boone, and we didn’t have to wait long to get the big election result. As soon as they called Ohio for Obama, I knew it was over, but that didn’t undercut the big emotional response when the polls closed on the west coast and the networks anointed Obama as the “President Elect.” Perhaps the most moving sight was the face of Jesse Jackson, who’d weathered the civil rights struggle over many decades, and whose face was awash in tears at the result.

The next day, I headed north once more, this time capturing good pics in better weather from the Blue Ridge Parkway, and listening to the celebratory radio broadcasts on Air America. And while most of the enthusiasm was good natured, I must admit that there are a few nyeah-nyeah liberals out there who are “bad winners.”

I checked into the hotel in Roanoake, where the next day, I performed for a good 400 or so students. About four years before, this school district had brought me in to perform to a crowd of 700 or so, and they were, in fact, the only venue over the years that had complained of not being able to hear me well enough. This time around, the numbers were lower, and I overworked my articulators to the point that they would understand everything.

They might have actually understood too much, as it turns out, for while the response from these high school students was fairly sensational, the teacher later called to not that she’d gotten some complaints from parents about just how risqué the event was. (Between focusing on my volume, and a series of recent performances for colleges and more liberal parts of the country, I think I let my guard down on this one.)

I had long weekend break, and swung through Chattanooga, Tennessee, visiting Sabra, along with her new husband, Paul, and headed out to a recent haunt, the Red Lantern, where the karaoke was jumping once again. I also managed to catch some photos of a sunset from a Chattnooga bridge.
Heading west once again, I worked my way to St. Louis, where I caught up with one of my old NIU students, Marty Stanberry, who is now running a small theatre company of his own.

I had a performance that day at the Priory School, at none other than the “Kevin Kline Theatre.” Unfortunately, no one informed me that Interstate 64 was entirely shut down for construction work, and what I thought would be a quick 10-minute ride to the theatre took longer than an hour, as the technicians awaited my arrival. (My lone contact was unreachable, as she’d left her cell phone at home with her husband.) Upon arrival we pulled the show together in less than an hour, and launched into the performance.

The place was packed and the hosts had added 100 folding seats to the 200 permanent seats. Unfortunately, the 100 extra seats had a bad view any time I got down off of the stage to approach the front row, so I stuck to the stage more than I generally tend to. My cousins, Peg and Jeff, and their son, Doug, were in attendance, and they’d never seen me perform before (this was my first show near St. Louis), and we had a quick visit afterwards. (I had a bunch of “fans” approaching me for photos and hugs throughout the visit, which always helps make me look like a Big Deal when old friends or relatives are around.)

The next morning, it was an early drive out to Northwest Missouri State, with a mid-afternoon acting workshop, and a fun performance in their large auditorium. The faculty, at least one of whom was a fellow U-Nebraska grad, were particularly responsive, and were hinting that they might be considering a full Moliere production in the coming years. This host wrote:

We thoroughly enjoyed your visit. The workshop received rave reviews from all participants, and I know what was learned will be put to great use. I've also heard wonderful responses to your show, and I personally loved it. It was an excellent experience all around and one I will certainly highly recommend.

Finally, I got to turn my car towards home, heading back for Chicago once more.

It was a brief stop, with a performance at North Park University, where they had me performing in the “chapel.” The professor was working to build her French program, inviting High Schools from all over the area, and there were 250 or so in the auditorium.

I decided to try something radically different this time, making my initial entrance from the organ loft, far above the stage, and then racing down the steps, out of sight of the audience, in the middle of the opening speech. Yet, when I opened my mouth for my first line, my voice croaked out the first couple of words, and I realized that this would be a vocal challenge throughout. Luckily, the chapel, itself, had good acoustics.

I jumped onto the highway for a quick run to Minneapolis. A group of students from University of St. Thomas, who were seeing the theatre program getting cut from their curriculum, decided to put on my 40-minute version of “Tartuffe” as a class project. While no one was actually able to “bring me in” for a paid appearance, I couldn’t resist the enthusiasm that this cast and director had obviously thrown into this effort, considering that I kept appearing on the blog of the woman who was playing Elmire.

I arrived at the theatre just in time, and the director and “Elmire,” tending the box office, reacted as if a rock star had just walked in. Somehow, even before the show got underway, she got on-line and broadcast:

Opening night!!
Tim Mooney, Tim Mooney! He's here, and I got to hug him! He's going to watch the play!

The show was lots of fun, and held together fairly well, considering that I’d cut about half the dialogue from this version to bring it in under 40 minutes. I was timing each act fairly carefully though, and ultimately it ran 44 minutes.

I met up with a couple Minnesota Fringe friends while I was in town, and caught wind that the recently closed Theatre de la Jeune Lune was selling its stock at a rummage sale the next morning. Given that Jeune Lune has produced a lot of Moliere over the years, I decided to see if there were a costume piece or two that I might use. I came across a vest or two that might work, and a pair of colorful baggy pants that I have since integrated into the Scapin scene.

The check out line in the theatre lobby was about a half hour long, so I struck up a brief conversation with the woman standing in front of me, who was apparently buying the hats she was carrying for personal use, rather than a show. I turned to the girls behind me who were buying a drape as a photographic backdrop. When they asked about my purchases, I explained that I was buying stuff for my one-man show about Moliere.

Overhearing this, the woman in front of me turned back around and asked: “Are you Tim Mooney?”

I was immediately impressed with myself for my seeming popularity, and assumed that this girl must have seen me at the Minnesota fringe in the past year or two, but as it turned out, she’d remembered me from having seen me perform in Denver four years ago! We traded e-mail addresses, and corresponding ever since, as she’s been reading through my acting textbook, and I have found myself wondering how many people like her, over the years, I might have had such an impact upon.

That night, I returned for the closing night of “Tartuffe,” and the show earned a standing ovation this time around. The cast called me up onstage to join the curtain call, and presented me with a University of St. Thomas teddy bear and blanket as thank you gifts. I returned the favor with “Moliere Than Thou” t-shirts for Callie, the director, and Cindy, the blogging dramaturg-turned-Elmire, who later blogged: "Today has been one of the most absolutely greatest days of my life. And I have photographic and video evidence that I met Tim Mooney. I can check that off of my "To Do Before I Die" list." [Curtain call photos by Craig VanDerShaegen.]

I headed home for about 24 hours, and left directly from the dentist’s chair for the next leg of my tour. With Novocain wearing off as I drove, my tongue compulsively tested out (and shredded itself on) the temporary crown in my mouth.

I stopped in northern Georgia to visit with Lori, one of my hosts from the second season of my tour (five years ago!). She, and her late husband, Marc, had been among my best supporters early on, and I hadn’t seen her since Marc had passed away four years ago.

Following a nice reunion, I continued south to Sarasota, a much longer drive than one might guess. The hotel was comfy, and the show was well-received, with five t-shirts sold. The New College of Florida had been built onto the campus of the former Ringling Brothers School. It was the French teacher that had brought me in, and the venue was essentially a conference room with a stage at the far end. A bunch of high school students actually sat on the floor in front of the stage, which gave me some terrific opportunities for interaction throughout. (This "Tartuffe" volunteer was eager enough to get up on stage, but looked like she occasionally wanted to crawl out of her skin to get away.)

I took a few side trips on my way home, stopping first in Orlando, where the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages were holding a conference. I snuck into the exhibit hall, and visited around a bit, handing out a couple of brochures. I hung out at the bar for a few hours, but found it nearly impossible to distinguish the French teachers from any of the other teachers in attendance.

The next day, I continued on to South Carolina, sharing plans with Bess Park, the Artistic Director of the Greenwood Community Theatre, which is bringing me in to direct and act in “The Misanthrope” later this Winter.

Following one more side trip to Georgia, I raced north to meet with Isaac in Chicago. He was out of school for Thanksgiving week, but I still had one more performance before the break. Lewis University had me in to do a workshop as well as a show in Chicago’s southern Suburbs, and while Isaac had seen me perform before, he’d never seen me teach, and it was good for him to see this other side of his dad’s professional life. (He ran the camera, below.)

The show itself was a bit of a struggle for me, as the audience seemed to be perhaps divided between students with a genuine interest in the subject matter (Theatre/French students) and General Studies students who were there to get a credit for a class. And while they were respectful and responsive throughout the show, as soon as Moliere starts to wrap things up (“I would like to thank each and every …”) the students started reaching for their book bags and their jackets, which always leaves the curtain call feeling a little pathetic.

And yet, there was these responses from the host, and a student:

I heard, with a great deal of excitement, from students that the masterclass was “[expletive] mindblowingly awsome” (as one put it). Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the workshop, but the show was fantastic. You actively engaged an audience that is difficult to win over. On a personal note, you inspired me to revisit some of my favorite Moliere plays! I’m confident you inspired others to do the same. Your show and masterclass is exactly what our Arts&Ideas program strives to offer our students and community. (Mike McFerron, Lewis University)

Thank you, sir, for taking the time to share your incredible talent and wisdom with us. Your presence was greatly appreciated and I am very glad to have made your acquaintance! And even though sharing the stage with you brought set my cheeks ablaze, I enjoyed myself immensely. : ) (Natalie, Lewis U)

Isaac and I enjoyed about four days of video-watching and ping-pong, before he and his mom headed back for Detroit, and I headed north for a show in Green Bay.

The Green Bay folks had brought me in almost exactly a year before, and the Tech Director had a good memory of the show, which made our rehearsal a breeze. Unfortunately, while the French department had good attendance, the theatre department had scheduled “callbacks” for the same evening, which meant that some of the students who might’ve gotten the most out of the show were not present.

Apparently the French Club president, who was part of the play’s anticipated introduction, was late getting to the theatre, and the show was at least ten minutes late getting underway. Given the antsiness of the most recent audience, I made a quick decision to drop one of the less playful monologues out of the show and “cut to the chase” as it were. The French teacher had encouraged students to sit closer to the stage during her introductory remarks, and thankfully, at the last second she’d gotten four students to shift into the front row (at least one of whom was surreptitiously “texting” during the first monologue).

A brief rant about texting:

It is silently beginning to kill the theatre-going experience.

We (speaking collectively as theatre artists) need to address the issue of texting with the same aggressive repudiation with which we took on cell phones going off in the middle of a show. No one thinks that their one little text message is going to disrupt the show at large, but frankly, we are not far from a time in which half of the audience is spending more time looking at their laps than looking at the stage. At that point, the theatre is no longer a collective forum, communally examining humanity in action, but a single window on the screen of the audience’s attention span, easily clicked in and out of existence with the interruption of a single message.

We can drop “pagers” from the list of items that the audience needs to turn off during the opening announcement, but if we don’t double down on “texting” big time in the coming year, we’re lost. People may still show up and sit in the seats, but they’ll find themselves rather flummoxed about exactly why this was ever considered such a profound or moving experience to begin with.

I drove back to Chicago, where we celebrated Mom and Dad’s birthdays. While Mom’s remains a closely guarded secret, Dad just enjoyed his 80th birthday, with my brother Pat flying in with nephew Ryan, and cousins Maryellen and Rob and their spouses dropping by for the celebration.

Finally, I am knuckling down on a writing project. The good folks at Playscripts, Inc. have informed me that they’re interested in getting a new version of Moliere’s “Love’s the Best Doctor” into their catalogue, and I’m determined to write one before Christmas break is over! And so, I’m going to try an experiment! I'm going to paste my first draft of the opening scene below. And I will offer up new scenes as I write them, to anyone who wants to follow the show in its development.

In other words, IF YOU WANT TO READ ALONG, PLEASE SEND AN E-MAIL to tim_mooney@earthlink.net that says: "SUBSCRIBE: LBD", and I’ll send you new scenes in your e-mail!

I have discovered, in the past, that the best way to complete a project is to get as many people as I can interested in its my progress. The very publicness of this potential failure forbids me to sit idle on the project, but rather thrusts me into action. As long as I know that willing eyes are waiting to read the thing, I work more relentlessly to see the project through to fruition. Enjoy!

Love’s the Best Doctor
(1665)
by Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere

© December, 2008

Adaptation by:
Timothy Mooney
All Rights Reserved

DRAMATIS PERSONAESGANARELLE, father of Lucinde
LUCINDE, his daughter
CLITANDRE, her lover
AMINTE, a neighbor of Sganarelle
LUCRECE, niece to Sganarelle
LISETTE, servant to Lucinde
MONSIEUR GULLIAME, an upholsterer
MONSIEUR JOSSE, a jeweler
DOCTORS (TOMES, DES-FONADRES, MACROTIN, BAHRS, FILERIN)
NOTARY
CHAMPAGNE, Valet to Sganarelle

CHARACTERS IN THE BALLETS
CHAMPAGNE, DOCTORS
COMEDY, MUSIC, BALLET, LAUGHTER, PLEASURES

SCENEThe Scene is in Paris, in the home of Sganarelle

Prologue
COMEDY, MUSIC, BALLET

COMEDY
Leave off, I say leave off these reckless quarrels
No more dispute one talent over others;
As reaching solitary laurels
Can but diminish ‘mongst we brothers,
Let us, as one, let all three revels ring,
To serve the bliss of this world’s greatest King.

COMEDY, MUSIC, BALLET
Let us, as one, let all three revels ring,
To serve the bliss of this world’s greatest King.

COMEDY
What greater conquest might we ever boast
Than to divert our king from stately cares?
Might greater honor quite come close?
Might there be any joy that dares?

COMEDY, MUSIC, BALLET
Let us, as one, let all three revels ring,
To serve the bliss of this world’s greatest King.

Act One, Scene One
SGANARELLE, AMINTE, LUCRECE, GUILLAME, JOSSE

SGANARELLE
How strange life seems from in this head;
How right that great philosopher who said,
That with great having comes great grief
And woes come not alone, but in a sheaf.
I had but one wife, and now she is dead.

M. GUILLAME
And how many would you wish to have wed?

SGANARELLE
My friend, she’s dead; I feel it as an ache;
The tears come when abed, or when awake.
And while, while she was still alive and strong,
There were times when we’d not quite get along,
And said some things one ought not quite pronounce,
She’s dead now, and death settles all accounts.
Good Heaven gave us children, yet, what’s more,
A single daughter’s all I’ve left in store;
One daughter, who’s the source of all vexation,
For some disturbance, some preoccupation,
Some melancholic source I can’t quite factor,
Holds her in bonds from which I can’t extract her.
And all my efforts to conceive the cause
But further hides the source as ‘neath a gauze.
And, as I’ve come up empty, on these questions,
I’ve brought you here, my friends, for your suggestions.
Lucrece, my niece, Aminte, my thoughtful neighbor;
(To GUILLIAME and JOSSE:)
You, sirs, are both my friends in trade and labor:
I ask you, please, to frankly share your view:
Advise me what you think I ought to do.

MONSIEUR JOSSE
I find young women long for finer things
Like necklaces, or bracelets or for rings;
It’s this stuff with which you ought to surprise her:
She’ll lighten up if you accessorize her.

MONSIEUR GULLIAME
It’s her environment you must address;
Her very walls should stir her beating breast;
Give her some tapestries; give her a grand drape,
Adorned with figures, or perhaps a landscape.

AMINTE
Well, I’d take neither of these routes to please her,
I think it’s time that marriage ought to seize her,
And you could change her churlishness to cheer:
Give her that man that asked for her, last year.

LUCRECE
To bear a child in her most fragile state
Would make her prey to some most fatal fate;
It’s death that waits a wedding to some suitor,
And I believe a convent better suits her.

SGANARELLE
All this advice suggests such earnest wishes,
And yet I can’t help be somewhat suspicious.
Such wary thoughts, we find, one quickly quells,
Were it not your advice so suits yourselves!
You are, yourself, a goldsmith, Monsieur Josse,
And your prescription seems a precious dose,
And yet your tone takes just a slightish ring
Of one with too much backstock of such … bling.
And Monsieur Gulliame, your tapestries
Are well designed to decorate and please;
All tell of how they’re stitched and draped and painted,
Although, I sense they leave your counsel tainted.
The lenses that you wear, neighbor Aminte,
I fear are likewise touched with selfish tint,
The man you sought now seems to want my daughter
And you’d prefer to see some other caught her.
And as you know, my niece, I haven’t planned
That anyone should win my daughter’s hand,
My reasons are but mine, and mine alone,
And yet your motives, if we’d have them known,
Are not so purely drawn from convent’s prayer,
As how that might leave you my only heir!
And so, dear ladies, and kind gentlemen,
I’ll hesitate to take advice you’ve sent till when
It doesn’t seem to so befit yourself,
And so, for now, I’ll keep it on the shelf.

Miles on the Vibe: 294,500

Temperature: 20 degrees-ish

Discoveries: I need to keep checking student age/maturity/community standards as I shape the level of my performance. * Double and triple check the route to the school, and make sure that all the roads still work! * “Texting” is killing the theatre-going experience. * I do better at the French-Teacher conferences than at the general Language Teacher conferences, as the French Teachers at these don’t quite walk around with badges identifying themselves as such.
On the DVD Player: Battlestar Glactica again (listening to the podcast commentaries this time)
Attendence: 60 + 300 + 320 + 30 + 100 + 250 + 120 + 20 + 100 + 75 = 1,375
Next shows: A residency at Augustana College (Moline, IL), Dec 11-16. North Central College (Naperville, IL), January 7.

The View From Here #135: Coeur d’Alene, ID; Overland Park, KS; Northbrook, IL; Washington, PA; Rochester, NY; Manchester, NH; Glenville, WV

2008-11-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

... The Fall Colors Edition ...
Get out and vote, everybody! Take no state, nor district for granted! And then crack open a cold one to celebrate my birthday!

Twenty eight years ago my twenty-first birthday celebration was dampened. I look for the success of this year’s election to redeem those “lost years.”

Since the last computer crash … almost 8 months ago now, I never have gotten the chance to rebuild the document that captured my “Commedia del Arte” workshop. I have a hard copy of the material, but haven’t re-entered the stuff into a Microsoft Word or Power Point document. And since this is relatively new material, I continue to rearrange and reorder the lecture and exercises to improve the natural progression of the content.

Which means that I’m generally working by notes, by memory and by the seat of my pants. … Which actually helps, sometimes, since I’m not attached to a specific lecture, or a series of slides flashed up on a screen.

I gave this lecture in Coeur d’Alene, working and re-working the order, which seems to be settling into some sort of logical progression, and finding myself focusing more elaborately on the “What to do with the Dead Body?” lazzi, to which students seem to respond particularly well. (I do this one, along with the “Hiding the fingerprints” lazzi, and scenes from “The Misanthrope,” “The Flying Doctor” and “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” which are all fairly tried-and-true.

I said goodbye to Joe, my friend and host, as well as a couple of the students who I’ve now encountered over several visits to North Idaho College (where they’re producing my “Doctor in Spite of Himself” this winter), and raced off into Montana.

Stopping in Livingston, Montana, I awoke to find that an early Winter Storm had swept in during the night, with about five inches already on the ground and a total of twelve inches predicted.

I raced out as quickly as the conditions might allow, fighting snow and later rain most of the way through Wyoming, and pulling into Denver late that night.

In Denver, I camped out for about four days, visiting with my new friend, Trish, as well as Kelli, before pushing on to Overland Park, Kansas, where they had booked me for two workshops, a performance and a rehearsal of “The Comedy of Errors.”

While I’d done the usual preparation for the “Classical Acting” and the “Commedia/Lazzi” workshops (“what to do with the dead body” was way popular again), it was the “Comedy of Errors” rehearsal that I spent the most time getting ready for. I had no way of anticipating what kind of shape their show might be in, just how the director’s concept might impact my ability to contribute to the event, nor how far I might be able to get in boiling down my approach to the script in the context of my anticipated exploration.

I’d presented the idea for this rehearsal in the context of my projected “Shakespeare Monologues Project,” and pushed forward on the memorization of my Malvolio monologue as the assumed climax of the event.

But when I arrived, I found that Malvolio had only just been recast a couple of days before, and the actor now playing Malvolio wasn’t even going to be in attendance that night.

I improvised, covering much of the material in my “Classical Acting” workshop all over again (only two of the actors in this cast had attended the workshop the day before), and, with about an hour left, segueing into a deconstruction of the Malvolio letter speech. (In which he is tricked into believing that Olivia loves him.) We broke down the speech for words that were uncertain, and addressed what seem to be emerging as my most important steps in the rehearsal process: Answering “What is the essential transaction of the scene” and “How and when does the balance of power shift?”

I then finished off with a performance of the monologue: a 7 1/2 minute speech, which worked far and away, above my expectations. The actors were laughing at each little piece of the speech, and even the director was taking notes for bits she wanted to incorporate into the show (such as my arranging the prop letter in such a way that the postscript wound its way across the very bottom of the letter, up the right margin and across the top).

Afterwards the actors suggested that their biggest takeaway from this performance was that they could “go much farther” with their characters, “go way over the top” and “really take a chance with it.” I commented on how much more directors like to work with actors that they have to restrain, than actors that they have to drag more out of. About a dozen of the actors from my interaction with this group signed up for my blog, and three of them actually videotaped brief thank you’s following my show.

The next morning, I was up before dawn racing home. The Pathways Scholarship fundraiser was that night, and I was the emcee for the event.

I had no idea how this would go. I’d gotten a wild idea about a fundraiser where people get up to sing karaoke, and entice their friends to “vote” for them by tossing dollar bills into a bucket as “tips.” A small turn-out, or a limited willingness or ability to tip might dampen the success of the event. Meanwhile, I’d been out of town for a full month, and was entirely uncertain as to how complete the preparations would be. I walked in to find about 40 volunteers ready to go.

It was my job to share the “rules” of the game, and to encourage and incite the donation process, all the while making announcements about the ongoing silent auction, the availability of change at the back tables, the opening of the carving station, introducing the band, tallying and announcing the fundraising results. All of this had been predicated on the assumption that people would show up with money to spend … but would they get fired up with the enthusiasm I’d imagined?

Between event ticket sales (about 115 people), the silent auction and the tipping process (each of which brought in a roughly equivalent amount), the fundraiser essentially doubled our goals, bringing in about $10,000! When I was able to announce that we’d brought in $5,000, the crowd went wild. When we broke $7,500, they cheered even harder. We hadn’t quite tallied the final figure until the audience had gone home, but announcements were quickly circulated around the Pathways universe, and everyone was left satisfied that they’d made a significant contribution.

Briefly in town, I made a stop at the dentist, with a cleaning, x-rays and two fillings long overdue.

I pushed on to Washington, PA, where I did a workshop and a show for Washington & Jefferson College. There were only about four students in the workshop, so in some instances I had to get them to imagine what it might be like if there were many more voices contributing to the noise that this or that exercise was designed to create.

The show also went very well (clips, below, from the West Virginia performance), and I turned in early afterwards, with an early morning departure for Rochester the next day.

Somehow Mapquest had left me thinking that the trip to Rochester was about 7 hours, but in fact it was more like 5. Having gotten up at 4 am, the fatigue was getting the best of me, and though I arrived in time to meet the host for lunch, I begged off and checked into the hotel instead, catching a quick nap in advance of the events of the day.

That day I gave a quick “teaser” performance for a school assembly, followed by a workshop, a tech rehearsal and a performance. My grad-school friend, Lindsay was in attendance at the show, and though the audience was small, the attendees were very vocal, and a couple of strong gigglers kept the audience engaged.

The next morning, I was sitting in on a rehearsal of “Tartuffe”. They were performing my version of the script, and rehearsing Act V, when all of the excitement ratchets up to a fevered pitch. With permission of the director, I stopped the actors repeatedly, rearranging them on stage and placing the emphasis on the key speaker while encouraging them to take their responses higher into the emotional stratosphere. By the time we were done, I could feel a warm acceptance by the cast, and many of them have since “friended” me on my facebook page, with notes like ...

Hey Tim, I not only thought your show was cool but it was fun and you were hilarious lol. You made my day as soon as you walked on stage. … Your passion for what you do shined right through your eyes and it inspired me greatly to work harder on me being an actress as well. ... I miss you already and everytime i remeber being on stage with you i turn flush red lol it was my first time being on stage acting (Tartuffe is going to be my first play ever) and the fact i was on it with YOU made it a night i will never forget. …

And …

Monsieur Mooney, I just wanted to say thanks for the kick-ass show and workshop! … Thanks for bringing an entirely new creative force to our show, you really helped us a lot in the few hours we got to spend with you. Break legs the rest of your tour!

And …

… Thanks so much for everything you helped us with when you came to Rochester. The workshop was a great experience for me and all of my Tartuffe cast mates and we thank you very much!!

And …

I think your show was pretty darn great! People around harley are still talking about it, I'M still talking about it!! Thanks so much for the workshop/performing your show/helping us with act five of tartuffe (the chance to work with the writer of such a great piece of work really meant alot to me!)

And ...

I dont know how to put into words how happy i am to have met you!! ... I noticed every since you left i cant get the show "Moilere Than thou" out of my head. During rehersal or even when I walk with my friends through the hall ways at school I often stop and say "I contaplated here" and "Stop Theif"lol. I wish you never left :( ... Today I told my dad about when i went on stage with you but dont worry i made it clear you were acting lol... I went on youtube and showed my dad who you were and showed scenes from "Moilere than thou" and your other shows and he thought you were hilarious!!

I also got a really nice letter from a student’s mom:

This is Edith's mom, Laura, and I am thrilled that Edith had the wonderful opportunity to work with you...what a creative and alive and skilled and thoughtful person...the work last night was magnificent. Timely, as you said to the kids and Edith … went home and wrote everything she could remember you said down...she said you were fun to be with and were brilliant … and just in general it was magic for her… i hope you know that you make a difference in the lives of these kids...Edith was radiating ...

I stuck around until Monday, doing yet another variation on my "Commedia/Lazzi" workshop for Lindsay's stage movement class before pushing on, I headed for Southern New Hampshire University. I stopped in Boston, to pick up Martha, a friend who wanted to catch the show, and pulled in to the University just as a crowd was gathering to hear Hillary Clinton speak. (While all indicators point to a big Obama win, John McCain does seem to have a “ground game” in New Hampshire, as about 90% of the yard signs in the neighborhood were in favor of him. -- Right outside the university, some intrepid campaigner had lined up about twenty “Democrat for McCain” signs.)

It took a bit of time to find parking, and eventually, we found the performance space and the host, and loaded in the show. Nosing around, I couldn’t help noticing that there were no flyers promoting the show in evidence. As I’d seen nothing about the show on the school’s website, I started to predict a turnout of about 20 people. (Given that this school didn’t have a full Theatre Department or French Department, and that this event was sponsored by the History Club, I probably should have given them more input on how to promote the show to the rest of the campus.)

About a half hour before the show, though, a busload of twenty high school kids arrived, and I was reminded that a group that was working on a presentation of “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” had inquired about coming to see the show, and their enthusiasm (and ability to fill up the first two rows) kept the show lively.

The next day, I dropped Martha back off in Boston, and she proceeded to share a review with the “Playwright Binge” listserv:

He was absolutely wonderful! He is extremely talented and so funny as an actor, and his adaptations of the speeches of Moliere were unexceptionable. I had so much fun seeing this one-man show, during which he invites members of the audience onstage to read scenes with him. Best of all was his lusty Tartuffe, creeping sideways towards a young female victim, while licking his chops, in an attempt to seduce her.

Not all of my reviews have been such “raves”, unfortunately. An inquiry on the Dramaturgy Listserv, from a dramaturg wanting to know if it might be worth booking me, drew a response from a student who had a couple of disparaging remarks about my contribution, particularly feeling like I had been “talking down” to the students in my workshop. (No matter how many enthusiastic reactions I hear, it’s the complaints that stick with me, and leave me questioning whether all the effort is, indeed, worth it, or whether my time might be better spent by taking the bulls-eye off of my chest, and hiding amid larger casts.)

The next couple of days were filled with quick visits, dropping in on my ex-roommate, Deb, for lunch in Connecticut, on my new French-Teacher friend, Susie, who Isaac and I met last summer in Belgium, for dinner in New York, and Playwright Mike Folie, whose wife, Frances, booked me last spring. Mike took me to meet several of his playwright-companions for breakfast the following morning, and I pushed on to Baltimore to visit my sister Maureen, and her husband, Tim, who celebrated my birthday early by fixing pizza in the cool brick oven they’ve built out in back of their house.

The next day it was on to Glenville, West Virginia, with a day to relax (and work on my blog!) before a performance Saturday night at the West Virginia Theatre Association conference. I had a terrific feeling about this show, as, demographically, the audience would be similar to the theatre-heavy-crowd I'd had at the Colorado Thespian Association, which really rocked. It was a tiny lecture hall/performance space, with only 80 seats, but I knew right away that the intimacy would help the show.

It rocked. There were also some "bigwigs" in the audience from Southeast Theatre Conference, and the American Community Theatre Association who were later brainstorming, variously, about involving me in their next conferences. Again the volunteers were terrific, and the "Tartuffe" volunteer was especially charming (she looked a little like a young Angelina Jolie), and the audience was downright giddy in response.

I actually had to "pull the reins" on some of the humor as the high school students were so responsive that they threatened to get out of hand (and I can never tell how that might be going over with some of their teachers).

I finish up these notes in Buckhannon, West Virginia, where I'm performing Monday night, with Tuesday off to celebrate my birthday and a landslide win for Barack Obama. My plan is to enjoy a leisurely drive down the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway (taking more pictures like these), stopping in Blowing Rock, NC to watch election returns late into the night. Hey, give me a call and sing me a round of "Happy birthday!"

Love,
Tim

Discoveries: I actually do some of my best work when I don't have detailed notes telling me exactly what to say. * This Shakespeare material really ... you know ... works. * Students need the example of someone who can burst past limitations and take a risk. * As many rave reviews and grateful e-mails as I get, it's the negative responses that get to me, and I'll be fighting that fight until I decide that what people want to say about me, one way or another, can't add or lessen the value of what it is that I do. * I've gotten fairly accurate in predicting attendance, just based on flyers and web presence. I should probably find a way of communicating that understanding to upcoming hosts.

Miles on the Vibe: 286,500

Attendance: 15 + 10 + 15 + 15 + 6 + 60 + 200 + 20 + 50 + 15 + 15 + 35 + 65 = 521

Temperature: Back up to Lower 60s, and clear.

Next Shows: November 5 in Roanoke, VA; November 10 in St. Louis, MO

The View From Here #134: Chicago, IL; Milwaukee, WI; Lake Forest, IL; Denver, CO; Galesburg, IL; Chickasha, OK; Kingsville, TX; Palo Alto, CA

2008-10-08T14:33:00.001-07:00

My “month off” in Chicago zoomed by so fast I can barely remember it. Mostly, I remember editing scripts for publication. Playscripts has contacted me again, with news that they now want to publish my versions of “The Miser” and “The Schemings of Scapin,” in both full-length and 40-minute versions. This will bring me up to eleven plays published through Playscripts, including double versions (full-length & one-act) of “Tartuffe,” “Imaginary Invalid,” and Doctor in Spite of Himself,” as well as the Full-length “Misanthrope,” all of which may now be found at http://www.playscripts.com/author.php3?authorid=451!

I spent some time working on a fundraiser for the Pathways Scholarship Fund, , which will find me racing back to Chicago on October 18 to perform as the Emcee at this Karaoke contest event. (Sign up and come join us!) Among the items available in the silent auction is a performance of the one-man play of your choice, at the venue of your choice! (Those of you who can’t afford my high, high prices, could get a bargain!)

Hurrying to get stuff done, I finally packed and set out on the road! None too soon! After a summer of earning nothing, I needed to start the income flowing in the opposite direction! This year I set out with 42 bookings already “on the books” which is more than I’ve ever started out the season with!

The first event was a local workshop at North Park College in Chicago, which is hosting me again on November 13 with a daytime performance of my show. The day after, I was off to Cardinal Stritch College, doing another workshop, where they’re also producing my versions of “Sganarelle” and “The Flying Doctor” October 10-19.

Back in Illinois the next day, I did two workshops with Lake Forest College, followed by a performance of “Moliere Than Thou” that evening. All went very well (the "Don Juan" scene, above, was interrupted by spontaneous applause), possibly with the exception of the “Doctor in Spite of Himself Scene,” in which the (prearranged) undergrad volunteer decided to play a very “heavy” response to the Doctor’s frisky advances. I could feel the audience “turning against me” and strove to win them back over with my affable innocence, and could sense that they were back on my side by the final monologue. Afterwards I sent a note to the hosts to reassure them that “No undergrads were harmed in the performing of this scene.”

Meanwhile, however, I got a delightful note from one of the other volunteers:

… After your performance last night, however, I was positively electrified. It was a thrill to watch (and to participate in) "Moliere Than Thou." Your energy and enthusiasm were contagious, and I left the theater absolutely elated. Not only did I laugh to the point where my cheeks ached, but I had a sort of refreshed excitement about theater, performance, and most especially, Moliere. I don't normally write to people I don't know, and letters like this are rare, but I felt I needed to tell you the effect your performance had on me. I had so much fun, and I felt so inspired. ...
Adrienne Peters

And then from the French teacher:

“I thought the performance was absolutely fabulous, and my students did too. I can't imagine how you were able to memorize so many lines! And the translation/adaptations are perfect. Bravo, bravo! Thanks for coming to class, students really enjoyed your insights and passion for what you do…”
Cynthia Hahn

I was left wondering whether the need to win them back over was just an imaginary voice in my head that sees everything that I do through hyper-critical lenses.

I caught a long weekend back at home with my sister, Maureen, in town for a visit (while Dad went to his high school reunion), and the skies opened up, pouring rain for three days and filling the back yard with a lake.

Monday, I set out for Denver, Colorado and, arriving with a couple of days to spare, visited with my friend, Kelli, and caught up with my new friend, Tricia, who I’d met at the outset of the Fall, 2007 tour, at the University of Denver, though I hadn’t managed to get back for another visit until now, a year later. We had a fine time, and even managed to squeeze in another date in advance of my performance at the Alliance for Colorado Theatres.

The ACT show went as well as any performance of “Moliere” that I can recall. There were about 70 theatre teachers squeezed into a small studio theatre, and they got everything! An old Nebraska friend, Mike Pearl, who has seen the show twice before, was in the audience, and I got him up onto the stage to do the Scapin scene with me.

This group burst with extended laughs at all of the theatre in-jokes, particularly on one, almost casual reference to a life in the theatre, as Moliere notes, at the end: “… and no one is happier than I to be able to carve a living out of this most unsavory vocation.”

Something in me suggested that I take an extra beat to pause at the end of that, and as I did, the audience responded with a nice little laugh. I held the pause for an extra moment, and the audience laughed more. As they did, I raised an eyebrow and smirked knowingly and the laughter grew even more. It was one of those shows where I could feel the audience “in the palm of my hand” as it were, getting everything, and going where I was directing them. (Unfortunately, I didn't capture this one on video, but here's a clip of that same speech at the Texas Educational Theatre Association conference last January.)

I followed the show with a workshop, and some thirty high school teachers showed up, enthusiastic about my work, and buying several t-shirts and scripts. (At one point, I was standing in the first floor hallway, and could actually overhear several people raving about my show who were passing by on the second floor, and who, due to the layout of the building, didn’t know that I was overhearing them.)

At least one theatre prof who I had been writing to for the past seven years was newly enthusiastic about bringing my show in, and a couple days later I got a note from the head of the “Colorado Thespians,” reporting that he’d gotten a “rousing recommendation” about my work.

That night, I drove to Kansas City, visiting with a new friend I'd made at a theatre workshop in Chicago (which started me writing on a new play). She and I went to a Sox/Royals game with her family, and the next day I pushed heading on to Galesburg, IL and two workshops and a performance at Knox College. They were preparing a performance of “Tartuffe”, and I had a fun show, followed by a visit to a rehearsal of “Tartuffe.” Even though they weren’t doing my version of the play, I was able to coach the actors into stagings that reflected some of the energies of my first production of the play, and brought out aspects of Moliere’s humor that were intrinsic to the situation, rhythms and action.

The only drawback to this show was that the check wasn’t ready when I was there, and it didn’t arrive for another several days. With bills pending, I was counting on each check arriving on time, and as busy as the coming semester promised to be, I was not quite yet “liquid”. Fortunately, the IRS is very slow about cashing their checks, and a quarterly payment that I’d sent them two weeks before had still not yet found its way to the bank.

Later, the professor sent me a link to the Knox school paper where the workshop and show were reviewed, complete with photos. ("Portraying one character can be difficult enough. However Tim Mooney, actor and playwright can perform a dozen with ease ...")

I dropped back south, this time to Chickasha (rhymes with “ricochet”), Oklahoma, where the theatre teacher at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma was trying to rebuild a program that had dwindled over recent years. She envisioned my show as a way to get students excited about the theatre, and I managed to set up a camera to capture some of the fun.

From Oklahoma, it was on south to Texas, and my third performance at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. The now-retired theatre teacher had brought me in to perform back in 2002, and the French teacher has brought me back twice since then. One of the students who was at that first performance (Michael) was now on the faculty, and he and I have continued to get together to celebrate after every show.

It so happens that I am signed up to receive “Google Alerts” every time particular words should appear on the internet. As such, I’ve indexed a lot of Moliere play titles, as well as my name. I then get an e-mail from “Google Alerts” to let me know when some relevant item is out there (such as news or reviews of someone presenting one of my plays), and so I was surprised when the following appeared in my mailbox, apparently entered into a blog by “Charlyn,” a student at TAMUK:

“I'm so excited tomorrow Timothy Mooney is coming to our campus to preform. My sister and I are going to go see him preform Moliere plays my french teachers says he's a really good performer and i think we'll enjoy it. ...”

This time around, the show was presented as a part of “Family Day” at TAMUK, which meant that this was a dinner-theatre event in one of the Student Center ballrooms, attended by a lot of people who had no interest in Moliere (they were there for the free spaghetti dinner), along with a few who did. Beyond this, I noticed that the student activities group had scheduled a free showing of “Kung Fu Panda” to begin an hour after my performance was scheduled to start! (“Oh, don’t worry about it,” they insisted. "We’ll just start the movie whenever you’re done, and they’ll just wait in the hallway when they arrive.” – I immediately started choosing which monologues to cut from the show.)

This performance was a major challenge, as I had to fill two ballrooms with my voice, and the second ballroom, off to my left was a continual annoyance, with servers clanking plates and dropping silverware, and others who assumed they were far enough out of the way to be able to chat casually without disturbing the event. As the show went on their disturbance increased, and I found myself shouting them down, particularly amid my performance of “Don Juan,” during which my host eventually took up the initiative to head over that way and shoo them off.

And while my focus was on overcoming the obstacles in the room, I must note that I am the only one who mentioned the issues surrounding the various disturbances and distractions. After the show, I got nothing but rave reviews from the audience, and some of the viewers cited “Don Juan” as their favorite monologue. Again, I was finding that the narrative going through my head did not necessarily jive with the perceptions of the people watching. While I was putting out every bit of energy that I might to outshout the disturbance, some people were actually listening for the content of the work, and all of the outshouting did, in fact overwhelm the disturbance.

During curtain call, the French club presented me with a bottle of French wine.

Michael and his friends joined myself and a couple of the students from the French club back at my guest apartment for a celebration, and a bunch of us finished off the evening at a local hangout.

The next morning, I was up early again, meeting up with cousins Kathy and Larry in San Antonio, before moving on west, with stops in Van Horn, Texas, and Silver City, New Mexico (visiting with a friend I met at the performance there last spring).

From Silver City, I pushed on west, with an extremely frustrating stay at a Motel 6 in Yuma, Arizona. (The wireless internet signal did not reach my room, and I wasted hours chasing around trying to get on line.) The Motel 6 folks put out absolutely no effort to help me get hooked up, nor did they refund any portion of the money I spent, so I have now, officially, sworn off of them for the remainder of this tour. (Avoid Motel 6!)

I dropped in on my friends Pete and Betty in San Diego, performing a couple of monologues for their daughter, Gemini, and her friends (Gemini still remembered my performance of “Stop Thief” from about three years ago, and was laughing so hard that her eyes were watering this time around.) I continued north for a visit with an old high school friend, Kirsten (who I had gotten reacquainted with due to one of those outrageous coincidences; mutual friends of friends), along with our mutual friend, Edwina. From there, I headed north to drop in on “Airplane Jayne” (with whom I enjoyed watching Joe Biden crush Sara Palin) before one further drive north to a show in Palo Alto.

The Palo Alto show came together at the last minute, with a church event that tied up the theatre until 90 minutes before showtime, and a technician who was another 15 minutes late. The audience was very, very quiet, and the teacher had requested the full 85-minute show, which meant that the very funny monologues wouldn’t kick in until about 15 minutes into the show. Little by little, the silence dissipated, and the audience figured out that this was, indeed, intended to be funny. And the way that I now have balanced the stage-scenes with the audience-participation scenes (my “Tartuffe” and “Scapin” volunteers were both adorably cute girls of eastern-Indian heritage) helps to build interest and keep the audience off balance, and enjoying the show more and more as it proceeds. By the time we reached “Stop Thief” I had won them over entirely, and they were laughing at everything.

From Palo Alto, it was on to Salem, Oregon, dropping in on my brother Pat, and family, and then further north, to North Idaho College, where I just lectured a couple of classes this morning, and am preparing a workshop on Commedia tomorrow.

Okay, so just as I was about to "publish" this view from here, another Google Alert came through my mail. This one may be my greatest review of all time. Since I don't have permission to reprint these words, I'll just refer you to the website: Live Journal. If I get permission later, I'll paste it in.

Ah! Permission arrived ... Here is as much of the posting as my ego will allow me to reprint:

The real truth:

Yes, I've said it before... and I will say it again:

I love Timothy Mooney.

Now, I hate translations of Molière. And I sure hate adaptations of Molière. And I hate abridged versions of Molière... But I love Mr. Mooney.

He is probably the only translator I've ever read who cares about Molière the man as well as Molière the playwright, plus the beauty of French language, some of which is inherently lost in translation. But this man? He gets it.

So when Roommate-the-Theatre-minor pitched to me the idea of being her stage manager for Tartuffe a few weeks ago, I almost winced. Almost. Then immediately did spring into my mind's eye the wonderful recollection of seeing clips of Tim Mooney performing scenes from Molière Than Thou on Youtube.

My heart skipped a beat. I gasped.

"CanwedoTimMooney'sversion?" tumbled the words from my mouth.

"Well," she said, "I was going to ask you, Miss French-Major-with-working-knowledge-and-three-semesters'-study-of-Tartuffe, to choose the best English translation."

I squeaked, "Tim Mooney!"

So we ordered the script for his 40 minute, shortened, English version of Tartuffe. Then I was cast as Elmire. So the more I read these lines, and not just the excerpts, the more I love his work.

Oh wait, but there is more! Our Orgon, my (Elmire's) husband, knows Tim Mooney. KNOWS HIM PERSONALLY! Possibly the only more exciting thing than knowing him would be knowing... .. . ... ... I.. .uh.... Adam West (yes yes, I am a Batman faaaaan. We already know this). And that's about it.

Wait. I don't actually think Adam West knows French, so never mind. ...

Love,
Tim

Discoveries: Perhaps I just imagine that I’m losing my audience from distractions or resentment, and that “voice in my head” has no connection to reality. … Or, perhaps it’s the energy that I put out to respond to the urgency of that voice in my head that is what makes me successful in countering the negativity that I imagine. * While I was putting out every bit of energy that I might to outshout the disturbance, some people were actually listening for the content of the work.

On TV: Lots of great shows these days: The Rachel Maddow Show has been amazing. Pushing Daisies is the best thing on TV this year, at least until Battlestar Gallatica comes back on. And the show SLINGS AND ARROWS (no longer on TV, but available on DVD) is maybe the best thing I've ever seen.

Temperature: 105 in southern Arizona, lower 50s in Idaho …

Attendance: 15 + 15 + 10 + 15 + 75 + 70 + 25 + 20 + 75 + 20 + 50 + 250 + 70 + 15 + 15 = 740

Next show: Johnson County Community College; Overland Park, KS, Oct 17, 7:30pm; Pathways Fundraiser: 7pm, Raddison Hotel, Northbrook, IL

Political Rant: The Obama offices are EVERYWHERE here on the west
coast, and late at night on Saturday night, it was as busy as a singles bar!

The View From Here #133: Liege, Belgium; Paris, France; Minneapolis, MN

2008-08-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

Quick announcement: My long-time friend, accountant, board member of the Stage Two Theatre and Mensa member, Terry Hall, is running for Illinois State Senate! Wouldn't it be great to have someone who can balance a budget in there? Check her out at www.voteterry.com, and float a couple bucks her way!

Returning from Lincoln, Nebraska, I threw myself into editing of my Moliere scripts for submission. I would do one “pass” through a script per day, along with a rehearsal or two of “Karaoke Knights.” With each day’s rehearsal, I would re-introduce elements of the play into the mix, such as the video, the costumes or the projector. With each step I would remind myself of another layer of the play’s demands, and adjust my performance accordingly.

Finally, I videotaped myself performing the show in the basement, and virtually had to chain myself to the computer to watch the video. I am often very uncomfortable watching myself on tape, but I diverted my discomfort through my notepad, taking notes on any problems that I observed, as if I was the director, watching someone ELSE perform.

Of course, as my own worst/best critic, I had lots of notes. Most of them had to do with instances of seeing “Tim” pop up inside the five characters who were “not-Tim.” I realized all the gestures that I was doing which were so indicative of “me,” and began work on a method which would “get me out of myself,” fashioning a “psychological gesture” for each of my several characters, and using that gesture to remind me of the embodiment of each individual. (This will ultimately be yet another chapter in my eventual acting textbook.)

On July 15, I broke off from the rehearsal process and drove to Detroit, where I met Isaac and the two of us flew to Belgium, for the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of French.

The big box of flyers, discs, costumes and banners I wanted to ship to meet me there was weighing in at about 40 pounds, and the FedEx guy was estimating a cost of $400 to send it to Belgium.

I decided there was no way of justifying spending $800 to ship this (round trip), and so I stripped away all but the bare necessities and found a smaller box that I could check as baggage on the airplane. Since it was holding banners that were 31 inches wide, this made for a long box, which was still rather heavy, and unwieldy in airports and on the street.

Isaac and I arrived with no problems (other than lack of sleep), and unloaded our stuff in Belgium with nary a question being asked (other than the purpose of our trip). A couple of familiar faces from the airplane directed us toward the train station, and we took one train directly from the airport to the first stop. (We were redirected by the conductor, who informed us that we’d inadvertently sat in first class, which Isaac noted, looked like a compartment out of Harry Potter). We arrived at an extremely confusing terminal with a dozen train platforms, none of which seemed to be directed toward our ultimate destination (all the while maneuvering luggage and a clumsy, heavy box up and down stairs and ramps).

Eventually the nice guy at the information booth directed us to a train which was destined to a town with an unfamiliar name. Belgium is a multi-lingual nation, and they cannot even agree on single names for given cities. Thus “Liege” is actually known as “Luik” if you are in a Flemmish region of Belgium.

We pulled in to Liege around noon and walked the luggage and ourselves the two kilometers to the conference hall. (At this point, I was economizing on taxis.) When the struggle with the extra bag got to be too much, I relied on my strapping young son to maneuver it for a block or two, and we traded off for the remainder of the walk.

At the conference center, we dropped off the box and its contents, setting up the booth in record time, before working our way towards the hotel, which was yet another kilometer or so away. But this time, at least, we were only maneuvering our own luggage, SANS the box of display stuff, though it did choose that moment to begin raining.

We paused for a bite in a local pub, in a cobblestone alley that reminded me of New Orleans, and had our first difficulty with translation. The guy at the bar did not want to respond to English. (I had poked my head in asking “Are you open?” before realizing that even if I did have the right French words, “Are you open” was probably idiomatic to English, and he might not recognize my intent.) Meanwhile Isaac was digging for the exact French words, and I convinced the guy to respond to my awful mash of French and English phrases, enabling us to order sandwiches and cokes, before moving on to the hotel.

By the time we got to the hotel, I had learned to ask, first, “Parlez-vous Anglais?” before launching into a conversation, and we got on much better. Isaac was disappointed that this circumvented his role as the official “translator,” though he later admitted that, after three years of middle-school French, “You know, Dad, I’m learning that the French that they teach you in school is crap.”

We had a tiny hotel room, and the internet service was non-functional. I paid for 60 minutes of connectivity, and managed to download my messages in about thirty seconds, but was unable to hook up again until after we left Liege, three days later.

After a much-needed nap, we returned to the conference center, and I donned the white coat and wig for the course of the exhibit hall soiree, which is usually my best sales opportunity of this conference. (Since everyone has a ticket for a free glass of wine in the exhibit hall, just about everyone shows up and wanders past the various booths.) I caught up with lots of old friends, and folks who’d booked me and who were looking to book me in the future. I managed to hook potential hosts up with previous hosts to testify about the quality of the show, and over the course of three days, I collected info on about 40 potential bookers.

The exhibit hall soiree segued into a “walking dinner” (i.e., tall tables with no chairs, so that the attendees would continue to circulate), and we visited lots of folks, all of whom were impressed by Isaac, his French interests, his intelligence his height, his willingness to be dragged halfway around the world... Given that we were in Belgium (where 14 is an acceptable drinking age), I indulged him in a glass of wine. (In my opinion, there’s lots less binge drinking in Europe because people don’t make such a big deal about it.)

We headed back to the hotel, struggled with the internet connection for an hour or so, and slept very deeply. The next day, I got to the exhibit hall at 9 a.m., and Isaac stumbled in around noon. It was a mostly quiet day, and I was preparing for a performance the following morning.

That day I woke up at around 5 a.m., and strolled the streets of Liege, looking for a coffee shop, drilling my lines the whole time. Isaac hadn’t seen a performance of my show for perhaps four or five years, and he arrived at the conference center about five minutes before I went on, performing to an audience of twenty or so.

I chose a woman in the second row to deliver my “Tartuffe” monologue to, and as she kept a mostly straight face through the performance, I was surprised when she volunteered to play the scene across from me. She did very well, and later I invited her to join Isaac and I and some friends to dinner.

The exhibit hall closed at noon, and we packed up rather quickly, hauling the now-marginally lighter box (having given away a few dozen brochures and discs) back to the hotel. We were joined by my old friend, Jose (who has made previous appearances in these pages from the days he used to live in New York), and along with Susie (the woman from the “Tartuffe” scene), we walked through Liege, taking photos and finding a restaurant. Susie encouraged all of Isaac’s worst impulses, as he ordered the snails. Ewwww.

The next day Jose drove us to his home in Ghent, which is on the Flemish side of Belgium, a rather dark, gothic city (though the sun did manage to break through). It was a big day for some sort of a Ghent beer festival … or it was at least a festival where beer was a prominent component, and we found a table along the river overlooking tour boats that arrived and departed every couple of minutes.

The next day, Jose put Isaac and I on a train which bulleted us from Brussells to Paris in about 75 minutes (at estimated speeds of 130 mph.) This time I invested in a taxi to take us to the hotel, which was about a mile southeast of the center of Paris.

I gave Isaac the first choice of what to do, and he voted for the Eiffel Tower. We waited in line for about 45 minutes before taking the elevators all the way to the top (where the battery of my camera gave out). While my fear-of-heights was present, it wasn’t as bad as I’d recalled from the time we’d visited the Statue of Liberty, and from above I was actually able to get a feel for the layout of Paris, as we marked the several sites we wanted to visit in our three-day stop.

I had no desire to take the subway, and I think we learned the city fairly well in three days by walking everywhere. We probably walked ten miles a day (and my knee was starting to make noise once again), but the sights were amazing. It was a much lighter, aesthetically pleasing city than Ghent, and we started to feel very much at home. (Even though Isaac mistakenly attempted to order some sort of grocery store for dinner.)

Our second day in Paris, we set out for the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery. There is a marker for the grave of Moliere, which probably does not actually contain his remains (the cemetery was built in 1804, and Moliere died in 1673). We also visited the grave of Jim Morrison, which was littered not only with flowers, but cigarette butts and at least one beer can.

Jumping forward for a moment, on the very day that I returned to the U.S., I downloaded an e-mail from a Canadian theatre teacher who reported the following:

“I just want you to know that I read your translation of Moliere's 'Doctor in spite of Himself' with my Ontario students in France. The kicker is that we sat around Moliere's grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery and read the whole thing aloud, to the amusement and bemusement of passers-by. Some stayed and listened. …”

I can only imagine the thrill that I would have felt if I had only stumbled across this group myself while I was touring the cemetery.

On our last full day in Paris, Isaac and I headed to the Comedie Francaise, where I had an appointment with the “Conservateur-archiviste de la Bibliothèque-Musée” to take a tour of the building. The fellow was extremely generous in showing me around the backstage areas, and I was amazed to see the many paintingsand busts that I had long been observing in books and on-line, in their original form. He even showed me the famous “Invalid chair” which Moliere himself had sat in as part of the production of “Le Malade Imaginaire” (The Imaginary Invalid) only hours before he died. (The chair, worn and splintering, is protected inside of a glass box.)

Unfortunately, I was not allowed to take photos, but the painting which most amazed me was a very large frescoe of the many characters of Moliere’s plays in various poses, as seen above.

By now, my Paris experience was complete, and we topped it off with a walk down the Champs Elysees that evening, to the Arc de Triomphe at the far end.

The next morning, we were up at 5 a.m. to catch the shuttle to the airport, and a flight directly to the Detroit Metro airport. The ticket clerk had gotten us seats by the exit door, which meant we had lots of leg room, and were much more comfortable on the flight home than we’d been going out. I said goodbye to Isaac in Detroit and continued the drive home.

Back home, I threw myself back into preparations for the Minnesota Fringe Festival. Some of the Chicago area actors who were touring to the festival had put together a Mini-Fringe, and we all did 20-30 minutes of our shows in a somewhat improvised space. Unfortunately, the space had a cement floor, and I think I AGAIN did a bit of damage to my knee during my brief performance.

I was writing and re-writing my DVD, cutting the karaoke interludes of my script entirely at one point, and while I’d been performing version 6.1 of the show for over two years, I quickly found myself drafting a new variation, almost on a daily basis, and was performing KK 10.0 by the time I arrived in Minnesota.

This time around, I’d arranged a BYOV (Bringe Your Own Venue) with the fringe, performing at an Irish Pub/Karaoke Bar called McMahon’s, which had the best stage of the venues I’d visited last December.

The negotiations with the bar had been somewhat strained and uncertain, and I never knew if the agreement would fall apart at any given hurdle. The “tech rehearsal” was a bit of a struggle as the handful of bar patrons seemed hostile to a play which was drowning out their jukebox.

The fringe Out-of-Towner Showcase was a lot of fun, visiting with lots of people that I’d met in recent years, and I was glad to be the second act performing out of some 15 theatre groups. Sitting backstage while other people are performing leads me to compare myself to them in all kinds of unhealthy ways, but when I got up early, I could feel that no one had quite depicted the style that I was performing in my song, “The Dreaming Tax” before I’d gotten up to take my turn.

The next night my stage manager, Andrea, and I set up at the bar, and did the show to about a dozen in the audience. Without the karaoke numbers, there was far less audience participation, as there were no cues for the audience to sing along. There were also patrons off to the side making their usual patron noise during the show itself, as well as waitresses working their way through the crowd, taking food and drink orders. During the last song, a bar patron with a VERY LOUD VOICE was holding forth on some topic while I was trying to perform.

Many in the audience seemed pleased with the show, but I was unsatisfied with the experience. I had a chat with the woman in charge, who promised to keep the bar patrons much quieter for future shows, and I decided to restore the karaoke numbers to the performance. This, of course, meant spending another full day with the DVD, returning to version 6.1 and reworking it into version 11.0, which would trim extraneous verses of the karaoke music, and fade them in more slowly, so I was only using about 15 seconds of material for the audience to sing along with, before cutting to my own, original stuff.

Meanwhile, the first review appeared on-line, suggesting:

“… And yet, he was a trooper. He sang and danced through it all anyway. Unfortunately, his dancing was campy, and his singing was mediocre. The premise of the show was interesting, but the execution left a lot to be desired. He tried too hard to be "deep" with the song lyrics; he tried too hard to be "funny" with the characters; he just tried too hard, and missed the mark as a result.” (Stef B)

It was about this time that I got a note from Playscripts, Inc., congratulating me on the opening of the show, and insisting that if I wanted my four latest script to go into their new cataologue, they would need the proofs by Monday. This proceeded to occupy the remainder of my weekend. (The plays are already published! Go here.)

Also, around this same time, I learned that my "Uncle Blanford" had died. Horace Blanford Mooney was my dad's older brother, and had always lived on the west coast (as long as I can remember), so I only rarely saw him, but his company was always warm, appreciative and encouraging.

More reviews were starting to come in, but after the first one went on at length about the venue, every subsequent reviewer seemed to need to argue this theme, pro and con. And thus, the “frame” of the discussion for this show had been drawn around the venue itself, which left very little room for commentary on the actual content of the play.

“Extraordinary character studies of karaoke contestants. Tim Mooney establishes characters in a few seconds so he can delve into the psyches of people you just met. Meanwhile, the karaoke teleprompter is kissin' cousins with "The Word" graphic on The Colbert Report. The karaoke contest is typical, but the songs that play inside Karaoke Knights are original and revealing. The venue is not ideal for the Fringe …” (Dave Romm)

“This is a good show in a tough location. Tim is great at delineating his five different characters through the original songs he gives them -- "Dreaming Tax" was a particular stand-out. I liked the karaoke machine's own comments on the songs …” (Delano duGarm)

“I'm kind of stunned that so many people are complaining about the venue, because I thought it was perfect -- public humiliation is the point of the show, and this wouldn't have anything like the same effect in a theatre space. Surprisingly vulnerable, and that's only wonderfully abetted by the bewilderment of the bar regulars. This is exactly the kind of bizarre experience I Fringe for.” (Phillip Low)

“Tim Mooney returns to the Fringe with 'Karaoke Knights', his most schizophrenic show yet. Tim, while adhering to the one-man show format, has decided that he needs a larger cast - and he's up to the task. 'Karaoke Knights' is a great ride, a journey through the minds of five contestants in a karaoke competition, delving into the reasons people go to bars, what they're hoping for on stage, and ultimately why they sing karaoke….” (Kale Ganann)

Meanwhile, the performances were improving (even as my knee was getting worse), and the reinsertion of the sing-along created the atmosphere of camaraderie I was looking for. Even so, the attendance remained very thin, with the audience numbers mostly fluctuating between ten and twenty. Late in the run, I had a performance with thirty in the house, and then for the final performance, there were 41 in the audience, which the box office workers declared to be our “sell-out” figure.

Knowing that this last show would be the best attended, I brought out my video camera, and enlisted my billeter’s brother (also in town from Chicago) to tape the show, proceeding thereafter to upload scene after scene to YouTube. (I was going to get my promotional fix out of this festival one way or another!) Considering that the most recent videotaping of this show was for an audience of only three people in Boulder, Colorado, 2005, this would prove to be an invaluable resource, demonstrating to potential bookers the style and quality of the work and the fun that the crowd was having in the process.

A fun alternative from the reviews were two on-line interviews that I did, both before and after the run of my show. You can find them at: Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine ... then proceed to click on the videos marked Minnesota Fringe Festival: Act I and Minnesota Fringe Festival: Act V.

Independent of the reception that the show was getting (by the end, I was hearing quite a number of people saying that they’d been hearing how good it was, which was validated by the final day’s attendance), I was enjoying the fringe society quite a bit. Every night, following an evening of show-going, a couple of hundred of us descended on “Fringe Central”, a theatre that had it’s own bar, including a rooftop patio, with a terrific view of downtown Minneapolis. I found myself circulating like a pinball, visiting people whose shows I’d liked, or who I’d met in previous years, or who I’d vaguely remembered from previous years.

Quite often it was they who remembered me, and there were several people who approached me to tell me how much they’d enjoyed “Criteria” which I’d performed at the Minneapolis Fringe back in 2006! It is perhaps the greatest satisfaction of what I do, to grasp the notion that some piece of who I am, or what I did, continues to mean something to people for years after I am gone. They may only come into contact with me for a single hour, but the memories of that hour make an impact that I will never quite be privy to.

Speaking of impact, my favorite production of the Minnesota Fringe this summer was a show called "The Pumpkin Pie Show," based on "Rest Area" by Clay McLeod Chapman (pictured right). Also fun were Shave & Reilly, who performed "The Department of Angels" (Caitlin Reilly is the volunteer that I grabbed for my "Bite My Tongue" video, above.")

The final night at the fringe found us partying, once more, at the First Avenue, the nightclub made somewhat famous by Prince and the movie “Purple Rain.” I managed to enjoy one last visit with friends, including the adorable stage manager from the show from "Red Tide," a show from Miami (pictured below). And while I had barely managed to get through the run of my show without damaging my knee, I couldn’t resist dancing a bit.

Monday, I was back on the road, and home in several hours. I now face a full month of time off between performances, and contemplate all the new projects that I will attempt to squeeze into that space: including three books about the theatre that are tossing around in my mind, particularly a study of Shakespeare’s most challenging soliloquies, which will also be occupying my time as I continue my attempt to memorize one monologue from each of Shakespeare’s plays! Then there’s editing more Moliere plays, possibly writing one more adaptation (of a very short one), and probably a few ventures to the karaoke bar.

Miles on the Vibe: 274,400

Temperature: A comfy 70 degrees.

Discoveries: I can make huge improvements if I can only get Tim-the-Actor to allow Tim-the-Director to contribute to the process. * While most of my acting efforts go towards unleashing my natural energy, the show grows just as much from efforts at restraint, keeping the Tim-gestures at bay, and enabling someone else to take over. * “Parlez-vous Anglais?” are probably the three most important words for a tourist to come armed with. * You can get to know a city better by walking through it than taking a taxi, or subway.* The “frame” that the first review or reviews put around your play becomes the prism through which subsequent viewers will perceive it, or at least find themselves forced to comment on someone else’s frame. * Some piece of who I am, or what I did, continues to mean something to people for years after I am gone.

Next performance: A workshop at North Park College (Sept 9), and another at Cardinal Stritch College (Sept 10), with a performance scheduled in Denver at the Alliance for Colorado Theatre Sept 19.

Political Rant: If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything around you starts looking like a nail. Apparently the only thing that John McCain sees as a cure-all to the nation's ills is to bomb the crap out of anything that doesn't toe the shifting line that lives in his feeble imagination. His answer: "Bomb Iraq." "Bomb Iran." "Surge Iraq." "Surge the Economy." Scorn his opponent for actually having done well in school!

The View From Here #132: Danville, KY; Lincoln, NE

2008-07-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

First the immediate news! In preparation for the Minnesota Fringe Festival, four Chicago-area theatre groups are holding a Fringe preview here in Chicago on Friday, July 25! This Mini-Minne Fringe will be a the Alogon Gallery, at 1049 N. Paulina 3R (Entrance on Cortez) Starting around 8pm. There’ll be four 30-minute performances, climaxing with six numbers from “Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera!” (Admission will be $10, and there’ll be beer available.)

Next: Moliere is hipper than hip! We now have MOLIERE RINGTONES available! Be the first in your class to have your phone ring with the mellifluous “Stop, thief!” Or, for that special someone, “I’m Looking For a Groupie!” Click below to test them out!

Well, it’s been a long slog since my last blog entry, and I won’t bore you with too much of a play-by-play.

The show that concluded the Spring tour at Centre College was a blast. First of all, they designed the best poster I’ve ever seen for the show (see below), and the woman who designed the poster was generous enough to let me use it for my own purposes, including passing it on to other schools, for their publicity purposes.

My host also wrote a rather brilliant promotional e-mail to the school’s distribution, and the following went out:

Dear Colleagues and Students,

Here's an invitation to Molière Than Thou. It is a Convocation, a one-man show done superbly by Tim Mooney. Tim performs at the Combs Warehouse on this Thursday evening, April 24th, at 7:00 p.m.

If you are suffering from Molière deficiency--the basic symptoms of which are
--atrophy of the ability to distinguish between sincerity and hypocrisy,
--obsession with money and savings,
--compulsion to sacrifice friends and loved ones to grand ideas,
--and delusions of grandeur
--then Tim Mooney is the remedy you need! Get well.

Ken Keffer
Chair French

There were all sorts of difficulties with the venue, where I ended up performing on an 8x8 platform, set on a diagonal, to give me a slight more vertical and horizontal distance to travel (high school geometry was coming back to me, and memories of the calculation of the hypotenuse). The room was hot, and I was sweating under unfiltered lights … But the room was packed! We’d set up about 100 chairs, and well over 150 people showed up. I could see people watching from a staircase from at least 100 feet away. Again, the volunteers were a blast, most notably the “Doctor” volunteer, and the host was quite pleased with the results.

Racing home, I dove full time into my e-mail campaign for the 09-10 season. I spent the entire month of May sending out to Theatre, French, History and English profs. Since the theft of my computers, this was the third such mailing to this particular list, and the repetition, along with the early start this year, seems to have made a big difference. While last year I had perhaps 12 bookings on the schedule by June 1, this year I was up to 23! Six weeks further along, I’m at 34 bookings, which is quickly approaching the total set up for the whole of last year!

In the course of my massive e-mailing, a few reviews found their way back my way. This letter from the production of my version of "Imaginary Invalid" in California, where the director wrote "The show is going extremely well. Sold out nearly every performance":

I want to let you know that a large group of satisfied viewers saw THE IMAGINARY INVALID yesterday and came away with admiration and pleasure. We saw a professional production with outstanding actors in a play that seldom gets onto our stage. Imagine, a rhymed version of a French play that, in the original, was not rhymed at all! BRAVO! (Dr. Nathan and Evelyn Kravetz)

This from the Illinois Wesleyan Argus:

Mooney owns the stage in "Moliere Than Thou"
...Mooney's energy was immediately felt throughout the room the moment he took the stage. His enthusiasm quickly drew in the audience's attention, and his talent for comedic timing was nothing short of hilarious. ... [The almost bare set]allowed Mooney to fill the stage with his presence. It was all that was needed as Mooney's characters filled in what was left to the imagination.
... The audience participation made for a more intimate scene and setting, and at times it made those audience members who were not singled out laugh their hardest. ... He was infectious, causing the audience to follow his lead, getting everyone to let loose and just enjoy the show. ... Mooney [transformed] the 17th century literature into something accessible in modern times. "Moliere Than Thou" proved to be a hilariously entertaining performance, bringing the audience back in time for a brief escape from the realities of everyday life." (Allegra Gallian)

At the beginning of June, I paused for a quick trip out to Detroit for Isaac's graduation. Isaac is now, officially, taller than me ... at the age of 14!

In addition to the push for bookings, I took a weekend to work as a Pathways group leader, which was, as always, inspiring and encouraging. I threw myself back into my writing, adding more chapters to the directing book I’ve been formulating, and editing some more of my Moliere scripts into 40-Minute variations for high school competitive use. Late in June I attended the International Thespian Festival, and found myself making some terrific connections with the publishers in the exhibit hall. There was a new guy sitting at the Playscripts booth, and when I introduced myself as one of the Playscripts authors, he immediately lit up, having read several of my scripts in recent years. He was extremely encouraging, and given the fact that I had my mornings free while at this conference, I went back and edited some of the scripts that I’d been sitting on, and e-mailed them to Playscripts.

Since that conference, I have, in fact, dug out three more scripts, which I’ve been working on for publication, and between full-lengths and 40-minute variations, I could have as many as 20 plays published before long!

Meanwhile, I met up with the Acquisitions Editor at Dramatic Publishing, who I’ve been sending stuff to for over 10 years now. (I’d gotten to know her cohort, who usually runs the booth, but this time she was there.) She reminded me that they’ve been holding one of my scripts for a couple years now (an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story), and inquired about obtaining the rights!

I also got to visit with my old friend David Landis, who put me up in his lake house while I was in Lincoln. I wish I could have stayed there more, but the evenings’ schedules were filled with receptions, and I felt it was more important to be available with brocures in hand. Inevitably, if I left my room without brochures, I would immediately meet somebody who was interested in booking me!

Meanwhile, I was doing two workshops a day, and while the attendance was thin, the enthusiasm was high, with responses such as:

"The classical acting class I took from you is phenomenal and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to participate in it." (Greg Prusiewicz)

My brother Pat came out for a visit in early June, and I began planning for the mid-July American Association of Teachers of French conference, which this year is happening in Belgium! Since my son, Isaac, has been studying French for three years now, I invited him to join me and, following the conference, he and I will swing down to Paris for three days, visiting the Moliere memorials, Versailles, the Eiffel tower, and the Comedie Francaise.

I seemingly blew out my knee when jogging last spring, and it’s been a long time getting back up to speed. Ready or not, though, when July 1 hit, I had to dive back into rehearsals for “Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera,” which will be opening in a bar in Minneapolis on July 31. All has gone well, and I’m starting to get some “lift” in my grande jettes again. The show seems to be moving forward nicely, and though I’ll soon be taking a week off when I head off to Belgium, I’ll still have about a week to work on it when I get back to Chicago.

The next few days will be caught up in posters, press releases (for Minneapolis) and shipping stuff off to Belgium for the conference. I’ve invested in some new banners for my booth, and the huge copies of the publicity shots, as well as the fun poster from Centre College, should make my booth twice as eye-catching.

Miles on the Vibe: 274,000

Temperature: 50s-90s

Discoveries: People who come up with really creative ideas (posters, publicity blurbs) are more than happy to see their work live beyond the single-day’s impact. * Marketing campaigns have a cumulative impact, and the willingness to repeat my approach to the same e-mailing list gets more response with each successive assault. * I am my own worst critic, and past rejections lead me to imagine that my play submissions are an imposition, rather than a fun opportunity. * Don’t go anywhere without brochures … or business cards, for that matter. *
On the i-pod: Mastering French, discs 2-13

Next Performance: Karaoke Knights, July 25 (Chicago) and July 30-Aug 9 (Minneapolis).

Political Comment: Anybody know which of our bill of rights is still in effect?

The View From Here #131: Lake Travis, TX; Silver City, NM; Kenmore & Spokane, WA; Bristol, RI; Hempstead, NY; Paramus, NJ

2008-04-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

I’m getting ready for the Pathways weekend, May 1-4! I did Pathways back in 2000, and proceeded to get beyond my day job, take my show on the road and enjoy the many adventures you’ve seen here. Come join me and “change your life in a weekend.”
(http://www.pathwaysseminars.com/)

I hung out in Lewisville, Texas for a couple of days, working on bringing the new computer up to speed, before dropping south to the Austin area, where I had an acting workshop at Lake Travis High School. The theatre was working on a production of “Tartuffe” (not mine, unfortunately), and I gave a two hour acting workshop, and then responded to a run-through of their performance.

The folks who put me up were great (their son wants to be an actor), and the girl playing Elmire wrote to say “I still can't believe we had the pleasure of getting your advice, probably the best we could hope for!”

And from the theatre teacher:

You were soooo helpful! We advanced yesterday with high praise from the judge, he loved us! AND, we won a ton of individual acting awards also!

(I have to include these unsolicited responses, just in case some producer reading this, is on the fence about hiring me … it’s not bragging; it’s marketing.)

From Lake Travis I drove west, with a night in El Paso, and continuing to Silver City, New Mexico, a good hour off of the beaten path of the interstate amid the mountains. The gig at Western New Mexico U had gotten cancelled in past semesters, but persistent follow up (Thanks April!) got the deal done.

The professor had neoclassical scenery already in place from a recent production. The small theatre space held about 80 in the audience, and the performance was very well received, as was an acting workshop that I gave for a much smaller group the next day. People were even buying t-shirts!

I was just getting ready to leave town when I noticed that Diana Jones, who I’d met in Tennessee, was performing in this same out-of-the-the way town, this same night. I stuck around and caught her show. She was, once again, excellent, and I particularly enjoyed her not-yet-published song about mountaintop removal. (“Appalacia”)

It was a long drive to the next performance (in Seattle), and I went by way of Los Angeles, where I was promptly invited to Easter dinner by my new friend Edwina (where a friend of hers happened to know a friend of mine from High School (Kirsten Moomey) who I hadn't seen in 30 years!), visited with my old Nebraska friends, Mari Weiss and Crystal Carson (pictured), headed through Fresno, dropping in on Rogue Theatre Fest director, “Airplane Jayne”, up through Oregon, dropping in on my brother, Pat and his family, and staying at David Yeaworth’s house in Seattle, where we visited until late in the evening. I also got a chance to visit with my good friends, and fellow playwrights, Jorj Savage and Babs Lindsay (pictured).

Inglemoor High School was hosting me on a Saturday evening, which is pretty rare for a high school, so I was really surprised when a hundred or so students came out. The show was extremely well received, and the Tartuffe volunteer was a flirtatious minx, who, at one point, wrapped her leg around mine (out of sight of the camera, though you can hear the audience reacting (clip below)). The teacher sent a collection of student responses after the fact. Here’s a very small fraction of them:

Thank you for coming to Inglemoor. You really helped me understand Moliere, I didn’t understand it at all at first. You were really funny too. And I didn’t think Moliere could be that entertaining, so THANKS!
Amanda Hall

Thank you so much for coming to Inglemoor and presenting Moliere! It was amazing and really entertaining! I enjoyed it so much! I really loved how you took skits that were written in 1600 and adapted them to make people (mainly teenagers) love it! I really think you are amazing at changing characters and an amazing actor!
Jessica Eberhardt

Your show was amazing. The way you made the plays your own was amazing and I LOVED when you came into the crowd! Great job.
(heart)
Kierra Adams

I’ve never been to such a great show such as this. Amazing performance. It’s crazy that you do a show like every night in places all over the states. You’re an amazing actor and your interpretation is hilarious. Thanks for the show!
Alex Cotige

We don’t normally get opportunities for events like this right at school, and it was a nice change. As for the performance, it was amazing! I was up front, and I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in a long time.
Thomas Mooney-Meyers [No relation]

Thanks for coming to our high school and performing a great show. I can’t think of any other way I would rather spend a Saturday night. The show was fabulous.
Noah Eakman

Thank you so much for performing for us! It was a great show and I laughed so hard. My favorite part was the “Stop Thief” part at the end. The whole show was amazing...
Kelsey Jones

Whitworth University in Spokane had hosted me six years ago, when this tour first got underway. That time, they’d put me in their hundred-seat downstairs venue. This time around, they graduated me to the big space, with over a thousand seats. There was a fifteen-foot throw, just to the first row of seats, and we worked out the lighting so that I could abandon the stage to approach the first row, and remain lit.

My friend, Joe Jacoby, who teaches theatre across the Idaho border, brought 13 of his students to see the show, many of whom had seen bits of my workshops in Joe’s classes in previous visits. Between them, and the Whitworth students who’d just performed “Tartuffe” there were great laughs throughout the show. One of the students from the previous show in Seattle, also happened to be a Whitworth student, and showed up to this show as well, asking me to autograph the t-shirt she’d bought, which in turn, gave a couple of Joe’s students the idea to pick up their own.

The theatre professor, who’d actually missed my show six years before, wrote me later to say:

I love the show – your translations, editings, segues – all work so well and do such a nice job of introducing and honoring Moliere, his works, his intentions.

I proceeded to drive from Spokane to Chicago in three days (with a brief stop in Minneapolis, to check the venue I’ll be performing at for the Minnesota Fringe) and visit with some Fringe friends, and then continued on to Rhode Island, where my next show was at Roger Williams University.

Meanwhile, a show got cancelled. Purchase College dropped me a note to indicate that they hadn’t gotten any high schools to sign on to a show they’d booked for the coming week. This made for the fourth cancellation since the beginning of the Spring semester, making it perhaps the worst semester of the tour in that regard. (This was the low point of this tour, and I started formulating incentives and disincentives to put into the contract to encourage faculty to perform the necessary follow through.)

Roger Williams had tried to host me before, but I was always across the country somewhere when they’d tried to book me. It wasn’t until after the Theatre Chair (who had wanted to book me previously) had retired, that they were actually able to work out a visit.

It turned out that only about twenty people showed up for the performance, which suggested to me that, though the retired Chair had put in a great word for the show, not everybody on the faculty was rallying behind the project. (Though my tech guy and one of the acting faculty were both enthusiastic.)

Volunteers were slow in coming, and eventually a somewhat older woman put her hand up, making for a much different scene than what we’ve seen in the past. (This pattern repeated in the very next show at Hofstra University.)

The next day, the retired chair wrote:

Terrific job last night! All those small nuances polished to perfection... and no nonsense, like hiding while doning wigs, surprising us with magical costume changes, etc. You were, in fact, just as fine and honest a performer as I supposed you'd be five or six years ago when I first hoped to employ you. ... But where were the 50 or so theatre majors? only Danya was there to represent them. I retired a year too early, I guess. BUT you didn't let that throw you; I was proud of your determination and cheered by your splendid performance.

With a couple days to spare, I dropped in on my friends, the Curtins, in New Jersey, and I introduced Dick Curtain to the Battlestar Gallactica dvd’s that I was working my way through. (BG has just begun it’s final season and I’m now caught up on episodes.)

I paused on my drive to Hofstra, to listen to a radio program, but when I went to start the car again, the battery was drained. I’ve had pretty good luck with my car over these six years of the tour, so I really don’t resent when it gives me trouble. In point of fact, it was a beautiful day, and I had plenty of time to wait for Triple-A to send a truck to give me a jump. (I suspected that, with over 200,000 miles on the car, that I might actually need that AAA membership.)

Hofstra was hosting a conference on Humor in Romance Language Literature, and I did two morning workshops on Moliere, Theatre History and Commedia. That night there were practically 200 people in the audience, and the show was fun again. Afterwards, I posted video from both the “Tartuffe” scene and the “Doctor” scene on-line, and was surprised to see the numbers of “hits” to the Doctor scene climbing sharply. Within two days, over 100 people had viewed the video, and while it was fun, it wasn’t particularly more salacious or hilarious than previous postings of the scene. Just to cover my tracks, I wrote to the host, asking him to get the volunteer’s okay. (Just in case the student was reluctant to have her image posted, I didn’t want the video to “go viral” until I had written confirmation.) She wrote me directly to say that she’d already noticed the video, and had pointed it out to a few of her friends (explaining the sudden rush of “hits”). (Yipes! It's already gotten over 1500 hits!)

This note from the workshop host to the fellow who’d coordinated the performance:

… His presentation had wit, wisdom, variety, and humor, and served the purposes of both my History of Drama class and my Intro to Theatre. His insights and comments on asides and soliloquies as well as his demonstration of commedia lazzi were very clear (and very funny), and both groups of students--when queried in Monday's classes—spoke positively of the experience.

I drove to Baltimore and hung out with my sister, Maureen, and her husband, Tim for a few days, and worked on editing new, shortened versions of my “The Misanthrope” and “Doctor in Spite of Himself,” getting both of them down to 40 minutes, which I’ll be sharing as an alternate publication with the folks at Playscripts, Inc, who are publishing my full-length versions of these plays.

Back north in New Jersey, I performed at Paramus Catholic High School. This one was arranged by the spouses of two good friends in the New York area, as the wife of playwright Michael T. Folie (whose plays I’ve produced twice in the past) teaches English, and the husband of my New York City stage manager, Suzanne DuCharme teaches Theatre, both at Parmaus. Everyone saw to it that I was well taken care of in my brief visit, but I found myself struggling through the course of the show. Among the four to five hundred or so students in attendance, there seemed to be only a handful of chaperones, and some students were chatting. (I was beginning to realize that rather than suggesting a certain ratio of chaperones in my “hosting hints,” I need to put that up front in the contract.)

I used just about every trick in my bag, including pausing, staring down the vociferous students, talking quietly to make them listen, and then talking loudly to wake them up, but by the time I got to the last monologue, there was little attention left to be paid. Later on I looked at the video of the show, shot from behind the students by Lynn Curtin (who’d come to see the show for her third or fourth time), and I had to wince at the fact that a girl in the back row turned to talk with her friend as often as she watched what was going on onstage.

The “Tartuffe” sequence was, however, a big hit with the kids, probably too big. Although the scene is thick with double-entendre, it seems they were only hearing the words’ secondary meanings. I did everything I could to pull the reins on this scene, even dropping out some of my favorite lines, just to prevent these Catholic students from turning the show into a riot of raging hormones.

That night I drove in to New York City, catching dinner with the hilarious Tom X. Chao, and enjoying the first preview of my friend Yvonne’s new show, “The Devil and Tom Walker.” (Somehow, it seems that every time I’m passing through New York, Yvonne has a show about to open.)

I headed southwest, where I look forward to wrapping up the spring tour at Centre College in Kentucky.

It will be good to get home again. And unpack the car.

Miles on the Vibe: 268,000
Temperature: Approaching mid-seventies
Discoveries: While I’ve tried to keep the performance contract as simple as possible in the past (I’ve prided myself in keeping it to a single page), it’s probably time for me to make the demands I need to guarantee the best experience I can to the hosts, as well as guaranteeing my on ability to survive from semester to semester. This is not “being a diva” but ensuring the necessary conditions for the best experience possible.
On the i-pod: Podcasts of the Rachel Maddow Show
Next performance: Centre College, Danville, IL, April 24.

The View From Here #130: Ann Arbor, MI; Bloomington, IL; Chattanooga, TN; Bristol, TN; Newberry, SC; Oklahoma City, OK

2008-03-15T14:09:00.000-07:00

EDITOR’S NOTE: Once again, a computer crash has wiped some e-mail addresses from my memory. If you know of someone who ought to be receiving these posts, but is not, please put them in touch with me at tim_mooney@earthlink.net.

I had the first half of February at home, following through, mostly, on an e-mailing project begun in Hawaii. I was writing to the list gathered over the summer, of 11,000 Theatre, French, English and History profs, generally targeting two states per day, working my way, “virtually,” across the country.

I stumbled across news that Brother Robert Ruhl, my High School Advanced Placement English teacher, had died. While I have had teachers that I may have liked more (I was always a bit intimidated by Brother Ruhl), I must say that perhaps the measure of a great teacher is just how much that teacher’s voice remains in your head, in the years to follow. I hear Brother Ruhl’s voice repeatedly, particularly when I’m writing. Brother Ruhl ran a one-man campaign against clichés, and I have to credit him for my current unwillingness to settle for easy, flip descriptions of idiosyncratic ideas or situations. Every time I hear someone use the phrase, “Needless to say …” I have to bite back the urge to say, as Brother Ruhl did so many times “… then why say it?” I am grateful for his relentless tyranny over lazy wordsmithing.

I managed to wrap up my e-mailing a couple days before I was due to hit the road again. By this time, there were almost 75 inquiries pending for the coming year. I don’t usually track things this early, but this strikes me as nearly double the usual.

I drove to Detroit, celebrating Isaac’s birthday (14 now, and taller than I am), and continued to Ann Arbor, where I was performing at the U of Michigan’s “Residential College,” a self-contained college-within-the-university, one square block of campus containing both student housing as well as classrooms and administration. The Theatre, as well as the French faculty, had teamed up to bring me in, and I enjoyed hanging out with both for coffee before the show and beer and pizza afterwards.

I gave a commedia acting workshop in the afternoon and a performance that night. I’d wanted to videotape it, but my camera (perhaps frozen from sitting in the car while I was in Hawaii?) was suddenly not powering up. It was a nice crowd of perhaps a hundred, but a quiet-ish group. The faculty still seemed quite taken with the show, and after a very cold night in Michigan, I began to inch my way southward, this time to Bloomington, Illinois.

I’d performed at Illinois Wesleyan two years before, and I continue to make use of an unequivocally enthusiastic quote from their French professor in my advertising. (He now tells me that the show was so good that “I found myself forgetting that you were speaking in English!”) He was hosting me for a workshop, but it seemed to fall outside of their normal class schedule, and ultimately three students showed up. Attendance that evening was likewise, less than three years before (a packed house), but it so happened that I’d recruited much of the audience myself. I’d written some of the local professors at Illinois State, who sent over a contingent of students working on a production of “Tartuffe,” as well as a local high school French teacher.

It so happened that the high school group had also come to the show three years previously, and some students who were Freshmen that first time around, were now Seniors, and determined to get up for the volunteer scenes this time around.

I managed to grab a few stills from the volunteer scenes to send the high school teacher the next day. (She wrote back that her students were thrilled.) And, in a bit of a coincidence, it turned out that the woman to whom I delivered my “Tartuffe” monologue was, in fact, playing Elmire in the Illinois State “Tartuffe!”

At last I found myself driving into warm weather, and it was a relief to be able to peel off a couple of layers.

In Chattanooga, I was hosted by another French teacher who had seen my show at the conference in Baton Rouge last summer. Ginnie and her husband put me up in a gorgeous house on Signal Mountain, and I managed to get a little jogging in on the morning of the show.

The show is rarely scheduled on Sundays, and I had little expectation for a large turnout, but ultimately 75 or so came out for the show, including some big laughers, particularly Ginnie’s husband, who was an English teacher at the same school. Everything was running smoothly until the last scene, during which the lights all went into a sudden blackout! Moliere noted that “It seems that a brisk wind has suddenly blown all of the candles out …” The audience remained remarkably quiet until the lights came back on about 30 seconds later.

Ginnie has since sent along a series of enthusiastic reports from her students, including ...

• You have an amazing gift for acting and you use it for the right reasons.

• … I have never seen anyone contort their face in such ways yet still manage to portray an accurate message. …

• Bravo! Your acting performance and skills were wonderful. I especially loved the audience interaction. I also enjoyed your improvation when the lights went out! You were constantly entertaining and a thrill to watch!

• Meci beaucoup! You were fantastic and hilarious! I’m so glad you came because my weekend was boring! My favorite scene was when you were the kid with the funky hat. It was so funny how you came up into the audience and your hat was absolutely amazing! …

• … I’ve never seen a one-man show, but am glad your’s was my first. The interactions you made with the audience were hilarious … even more so because of the apparent discomfort (in a good way) you caused them. Please come back for a second performance soon! Stop thief!

• … Very many times one-man shows can become tedious and long-winded, but Moliere Than Thou was entertaining and hilarious throughout the performance …

• … I’m between two scenes to pick as my favorite. Although I think I enjoyed the love scene with Forrest’s mom. …

• … You were an incredible actor. Your use of the audience (Including my mother and me) was especially cool. My favorite scene (and maybe yours?) was the “stop thief” scene. It was a great experience to read those lines on the same stage, too. Your stage presence is amazing. …

Immediately following the show (and the brief reception that followed), I raced north once again. I had a show the next morning (and a second show the next evening) at King College in Bristol, Tennessee.

I was a bit apprehensive about this performance, perhaps most specifically because the fellow who had booked me was the college “Chaplain.” When I inquired about their tolerance-level, he laughed and told me that, while they were a rather conservative group, they had been receptive to a wide variety of performers, encouraging me to go ahead with the “PG-13” version of the show.

There were about 100 students for the morning show, and I played the first “Tartuffe” scene to a theatre student in the front row, and later pulled her up on stage for the two-person scene. During the “Scapin” scene, I found myself climbing over the pews of the chapel, and where I normally look for a student holding a program to represent the “transcription,” I realized that these students had not been provided with programs, and none of them seemed to have loose papers or a notebook in hand. I found a hymnal on the back of a seat, and cracked that open to “transcribe” upon.

I was later informed that the woman whose lap Scapin sits upon during his pass through the audience, was in fact the chaplin’s wife … who seemed to be enjoying the show just fine.

During the evening show, I spied a cute student in the second row, to whom I delivered the first “Tartuffe” scene (climbing over the front row pew), and while that played to an uproarious response, when I enlisted that same student for the scene on-stage, she was a bit too freaked out for it to be much fun. I did, however, bring the much more responsive theatre department student, who’d come back to see it again, for the “Doctor” scene.

Newberry College (in South Carolina) was bringing me in to perform the rarely-booked “Criteria,” and I was feeling pretty good about the show following a successful performances in Hawaii and Texas. My host was meticulous in getting the stage and the lighting ready for the show though, unfortunately, the fellow who headed the department was stuck at home with a sick daughter that night. I had worked the show back up to speed, and again made special arrangements to get this one videotaped, since I had so little useable footage of this performance.

I emerged and began the show, performing to perhaps 50 people in the darkened auditorium. I came on strong, pushing the action forward. But I could feel that the audience wasn’t coming with me. The occasional in-jokes of the show … wry ironic observations that are funny in the context of “what really happens” 300 years into our future, went seemingly unnoticed.

They were distanced, almost as if they were watching a movie rather than a live human being. I began getting apprehensive, and dropped a line. I paused, checked back with the book that I keep on stage with me, and resumed. Later, again, I found myself farther out on the thrust stage than expected, and a quirk of the acoustics distracted me with a sudden echo. Again, I faltered in my delivery and continued, but this time perhaps half-a-page ahead of the spot that I’d left off. This would be confusing with the guy in the booth, but thankfully unnoticible to the audience.

After the show, I met with some of the theatre students, whose typical response was that “That was really … interesting!”

The next day, I was off to Greenwood, where my friend Bess was booking me to direct and act in “The Misanthrope” next March, and we pieced together a formula which would enable me to afford the extended visit, as I would earn income from three distinct sources, with one third of the money coming from the community theatre, another third from the local college, and the final third from bookings arranged with nearby schools.

With a few extra days before heading back to Chattanooga for the Southeast Theatre Conference, and no bookings to keep me afloat, I plotted stops in towns where I figured the hotels would be relatively cheap. My first stop was in Spartanburg, SC, where there just happened to be a karaoke bar in the hotel. It turned out to be perhaps one of the liveliest karaoke bars I’ve visited (their favorite song was by Rodney Carrington, with memorable audience participation).

From there, I continued to Asheville, meeting for lunch with our good friend Sandra-the-Vegan, before pushing on to Knoxville, where I spent three days getting work done, and, in anticipation of another weekend of group-leading with my Pathways (http://www.pathwaysseminars.com/) friends in early May (May 1-4 for anyone who wants to join us), I turned my attention toward a project I’ve done two or three times in years past:

I wrote out 100 goals.

In the past, this project has been extremely revealing, as I get a look at projects unwittingly set aside. Eight years ago, while doing this, I noticed that I held the conflicting goals of quitting my day job, and getting two root-canals done. Since the day-job was necessary for the dental benefits (which made the root canals possible), my squeamishness around getting this work done was effectively keeping me from committing full time to my work. (Less than a week of completing the root canals, a call came in with an offer to direct a show!)

I found my goals fell into five separate “buckets”:

Things I can do today (Stuff like clearing out space on my hard drive, or adjusting the volume on my Preview DVD)
Things I can do in less than a single day (Like upload more scenes to YouTube, or trim “Tartuffe” down to 40 minutes)
Long projects, ranging from several days to a year (Like burn 100 Preview DVDs, or finish writing my adaptation of “Amphitryon”)
Ongoing projects that demand daily effort (Such as “Exercise Daily,” “Memorize Shakespeare Monologues,” “Work on My French”)
Eternal projects which will never be quite complete. (“End Global Warming,” or “End Torture,” or “Find Inner Peace”)

And then, as these categories surfaced, I also noted four “game changers,” goals which, if accomplished, would change the very landscape of the playing field for me.

• Publishing my collection of “Moliere Monologues”
• Getting “Moliere Than Thou” featured on a “Great Performances”-type program
• Publishing “Acting at the Speed of Life”
• Relocating to Los Angeles

In Chattanooga, at the Southeast Theatre Conference, I met up with April, who drove down to help me out. She brought down the display items for my booth, as well as my latest bit of “swag:” Moliere T-Shirts! We’ve created a new Moliere T-Shirt, with the “Moliere Bowing” logo stretched across the chest, and the “Moliere Than Thou” calligraphy on the back. Please buy one off of me the next time I’m in town!

April and I met up with my dear friend, Sabra, and her new husband, Paul, for karaoke our first night in town. We then spent Wednesday morning pulling together the last of the DVDs and creating further documentation for the exhibit booth.

However much I may prepare for a conference, different agendas arise, and about half of the pre-work goes for naught, while other things become much more important. Just about everybody, though, was quite pleased to take a brochure and a promotional DVD. And, the brochures almost ran out as the weekend continued. (The t-shirt were not especially popular, but I had actually created them so that the conference attendees might actually recognize Moliere-staff members who weren’t me.)

The booth traffic was great this year. I collected lots of business cards, lots of e-mail addresses, gave out perhaps 150 brochures and DVDs, and chatted with dozens of people interested in booking the show.

[About this time I received confirmation that I'm getting publshed again! Playscripts, Inc. has written to inform me that they'll be publishing my versions of "The Misanthrope", "The Doctor in Spite of Himself" and my 40-minute version of "Imaginary Invalid"!]

The biggest issue was that there was no self-evident watering hole where all the faculty would gather to schmooze. I happened to overhear, though, that there was a karaoke bar just a block away, and so I ended up hanging out there every night. By the end of the weekend, I had made several friends at this place, and gave one of the better singers there a Moliere T-shirt, which he proceeded to have all of the actors autograph.

Given my “Game-Changing Goals” list, I found myself focusing on the publishers who had booths in the exhibit hall, and casually asked the Samuel French representative (with whom I had a cordial saying-hello acquaintance over several of these conferences) whether they published any monologue collections (“Yes.”), and whether he might be willing to take a look at my book proposal. He said yes, and I e-mailed it to him the next morning. (It didn’t hurt that I’d enlisted April to help watch his booth while he was out speaking on a panel.)

While I was on that roll, I asked the fellows at the neighboring booth, who handle musicals, if they’d be willing to give a read/listen to my musical adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day.” (Another affirmative.)

April and I packed up the booth (all the while running into old theatre friends) and headed out shopping.

I had decided it was time to get a new laptop. With the bookings rolling in, and the hard drive of my old laptop filling up (dabbling in video was using massive globs of memory), I was starting to eye new machines that could hold nearly twice as much as my current laptop. And April could translate all of the computereez that the spec sheets were describing. I ultimately settled on a Sony (Vaio), with 3 gigabytes of memory and 250 gig of storage.

And then the old computer crashed.

With astounding timing, the old computer crashed and would not revive, before I could manage to transfer over the memory from one computer to the other.

Fortunately, since the last such disaster, I’ve managed to back up my documents on a fairly regular basis. I’m now working to reconstruct information that I’d gathered since February 25 (my last back-up), but the damage done is nothing compared to the theft of two computers and a hard drive backup in the summer of 2006.

I headed west, stopping in Little Rock and Norman, Oklahoma … all the while downloading and updating and memorizing. I did a workshop at Norman North High School, where they were working on Romeo and Juliet. In anticipation, I’d been working on the Mercutio “Queen Mab” speech (one of my goals is to memorize one monologue from every Shakespeare play), and had some fun working through my insights around this piece with the students.

I continued up to Oklahoma City, where there was some last minute confusion. They thought I was supposed to be performing for them on Friday, while I was certain we’d scheduled for a Thursday show. My host quickly realized that a Thursday performance would be much better than a Friday show, considering that Spring Break began on Saturday. With less than 24 hours advance notice, he pulled together a Thursday show, and about 40-50 theatre majors showed up. … and were a FABULOUS audience.

I was in a tight, tiny thrust arrangement, with students to either side of me, as I played in between banks of audience, packed in elbow-to-elbow. In this intimate arena, they responded hysterically every time I singled one of them out as the object of a given character’s derisive reference.

I wrapped up the show, headed back to the swank hotel they had me in, and am now heading south, with a weekend in Dallas, ahead of a workshop in Austin on Monday. With two days to hole up in a hotel, I’m hoping to get these words posted, download some pics and videos, and rebuild my distribution list.

Miles on the Vibe: 260,000

In the DVD Player: Battlestar Gallactica, Season One (The best “Season One” I’ve seen since the first season of “24”)

Discoveries: The measure of a great teacher is just how much that teacher’s voice remains in your head, in the years to follow. * Scanning the student responses, the vast majority cite the “audience interaction” as being their favorite part. I need to keep that in mind when arranging the performances, so that the hosts put a priority on finding an intimate setting over a vast proscenium space. * There are projects that I have unwittingly set aside in recent years, and the dreams of accomplishing them are lying dormant just beneath the surface. * Amongst my goals are certain “game changers” which may not be as difficult or as time-consuming as the rest of my goals, but which may change the entire landscape. * However much I may prepare for a conference, about half of the pre-work goes for naught, while other things become much more important.

Temperature: 78 Degrees (in Dallas)

Quick Plug for a Friend: Risa Kaparo, who I've been coaching on her one woman show is a finalist for the John Lennon Songwriting contest! Please go to http://www.jlsc.com/vote.php and vote for her song, "The Bible, Before!" It takes about two minutes to register and you can vote once a day if you are so inclined!

Political Rant: The US Treasury is being fleeced by contractors like KBR, who, under the "cost plus" arrangement (arranged by their former CEO), have the incentive to increase their costs any way they can. As such, they triple the cost of white towels by adding embroidering with the company logo on them, thereby earning themselves triple the commission by flaunting their advertisement in the face of low-level soldiers, who get not "cost-plussed" but "stop-lossed." They used to have a phrase for it, and "war profiteering" used to be considered one step away from treason. (I wonder if the towels were made of fleece?)

Next Performance: Western New Mexico University, March 19

The View From Here #129: Kaua'i, HI; Dallas, TX; Point Lookout, MO & Shreveport, LA

2008-02-02T18:09:00.001-08:00

Getting home from the fall tour, I started by throwing myself into the writing project that I’d begun envisioning in Iowa. This would be a directing textbook which would continue on in the same tone as “Acting at the Speed of Life” (which I continue to shop around to publishers).

The first few chapters came naturally to me, but I soon found myself on a tangent that I hadn’t anticipated: I started looking at the history of directing as expressed through reviews of “Hamlet.” I’m fascinated by the way that every era has its own great Hamlet, whether it be Richard Burbage, John Barrymore or Lawrence Olivier, and they all tend to describe them in the same way (except for Burbage, who was the first Hamlet). They all tend to say just how much “truer” this new great Hamlet is, compared to the one before who was (choose one) too bombastic, flat, effete, sophisticated, etc.

What this tells me is that it is, in fact, the nature of TRUTH which continues to shift from one generation to another. And wouldn’t it be fascinating glimpse of history, and the history of directing through that lens. (The history of “Hamlet” also happens to have a lot of fun anecdotes attached to it, too, particularly the chapter surrounding that rake, John Barrymore.)

So, I diverted to start thinking about this new project, when yet ANOTHER idea came to mind.

My several auditions for professional theatres and Shakespeare Festivals during the fall had me thinking about firming up some Shakespeare monologues (in addition to the Moliere monologues that I could whip out at a moment’s notice). Noticing the wide variety of Shakespeare plays being produced, I started thinking about what an advantage it would be to be able to instantly pull out a monologue from whatever play was being produced. (“Oh, you’re doing ‘Coriolanus?’ Here, lemme do this one for you …”)

And so … memorizing some thirty-six monologues by Shakespeare. It could provide the opportunity to demonstrate the acting theories that I’ve begun to put forward in my acting text with a practical demonostration that would work through Shakespeare’s catalogue.

So, I’ve started memorizing. Currently working on the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech from “Julius Caesar.” Probably one of the greatest speeches of all time. This project will be at least a year in the works.

And then, with Christmas approaching, I got back to work on three more projects:

A) I produced my annual “family calendar,” a power point document that featured old family photos of relatives in the individual squares of the dates of their birth. Since I do this while tinkering in a rather clumsy “Power Point” program, it’s rather rough hewn, and occasionally, I create a month with 31 days where only 30 days are required, or vice versa. (But the family is always very generous and appreciative.) This year I stumbled across a treasure trove of old family photo albums, so there were some great surprises to be included.

B) Since the calendar project would demand getting some printing done, I decided to rework my brochure, updating my prices (which go up a bit every January 1), and finally working my new publicity photos in. This printing job would be on Adobe Illustrator, which I’m less adept at working, but which creates a much sharper finished product. I worked and re-worked the layout, trying to get it to make visual sense, all the while continually re-editing the material, until I got what I felt was the strongest possible message. (If anybody out there wants to book the show, please let me know and I’ll send you the new brochure.)

C) I re-did my business cards, going back to the very popular “Moliere bowing” image.

This all kept me very busy, right up until Christmas, at which point Isaac arrived from Michigan, and I forced myself to take time off of work, limiting myself to reading the occasional Shakespeare play.

Isaac and I enjoyed the occasional ping-pong game, movie or Chicago-style pizza, and as he headed back to Detroit with Jo (his mom), I threw myself into the next phase of my work: figuring my taxes.

Usually I save starting my taxes until January 1, as a good way of spending the day when nothing but parades and football games are on TV, but I was anticipating a January 3 departure for Hawaii, so this time around, I was actually done with my taxes on the first of the year, e-mailing the documentation to Terry Hall (my accountant) on what must be a record: January 1.

In the pre-dawn dark of January 3, I loaded my suitcase into my dad’s car, banging the heck out of my shin in the process, and he drove me to the airport. About 14 hours later, I was on the island of Kaua’i (aka, “The Garden Island”). I’ve been working with my friend, Risa on developing a one-woman show based on her music, and we worked out an exchange, with a place for me to stay in Hawaii while I coached her on her show.

I arrived to temperatures in the mid-70s to mid-80s, delicious food, a beautiful view out the back window, fabulous walks along the beach, fun nights at the karaoke bar, and a fair amount of work, as well, working through my winter e-mailing campaign to schools.

Risa would occasionally take me out to meet her friends (she hangs out with a lot of tango dancers) and many of them wanted to see me perform. We made arrangements with a coffee house in town, and I worked up a performance of “Criteria” for them. (I hadn’t done “Criteria” publically for over a year, not counting shows in my living room, and so I ran my lines on a daily basis for about a week in advance of the show.) It was an interesting venue, and as the action developed, the distraction of the espresso machine diminished, until, by the end, the store manager said that he’d never seen people so quiet in the shop.

We went on a number of expeditions through Kaua’i, walking to the “Queen’s Bath” in Princeville, a small cove sheltered by lava, which was occasionally splashed over by strong waves and on a long hike along a mountain ridge surrounded by green upon green. (I’m sure you’ve figured out that most of these photos were from this.)

I also took the opportunity to fly over to Maui for a day, and while I remembered my camera, I forgot my camera’s battery, which I’d left in the recharger. And so I took advantage of the opportunity to buy a new Canon camera (Canon was listed first among environmentally friendly companies by “Climate Counts”). Digital cameras have gotten cheaper and better since the first one I bought five years ago, and hopefully that will show in my pics. I visited with my old buddy, Ray, who has gotten a job doing electrical work in the middle of paradise. He took me over to a fire dance on the beach, and drove me to drop in on an agent I’d been chatting with a year ago, about the possibility of representing me.

Back on Kaua’i, I had another week in the sun before it was time to say goodbye, and Risa took me to the airport. This time it was an overnight flight coming back, and I lazily watched the video programming, while trying to drop off to sleep.

The airline was repeating a movie on the way back that they’d also shown on the way out (though I wasn’t watching it then), but this time around, they added a short feature of “Ebert and Roper” which discussed the movie we were about to see. The problem was that Roper, at least, HATED the movie we were about to see. I’d pretty much figured that it was a crappy movie, but do you really want somebody telling you what an awful movie you’re about to see in a situation where you can’t escape?

A day after landing, I was heading south again, this time driving to Dallas. The Texas Educational Theatre Association was bringing me in as a featured guest artist this year, which meant that they were putting me up at the very nice hotel, as well as giving me a stipend, while scheduling me to do a TON of work.

I was still on “Hawaii time” and was having a hard time adjusting (It just felt right to stay up until 2 a.m. most nights), but I was up at 6 a.m. on the first day of the Texas conference for a 7:30 rehearsal, and a 9 a.m. show. The rehearsal was disrupted by the student rock band they’d scheduled to play as the audience was coming in. They’d promised that the band rehearsal wouldn’t interrupt our tech rehearsal, but there were clearly more people who were overly concerned about tweaking the details of the band’s sound, and my show was taking a back seat. I concentrated on working with the lighting technician.

“Moliere Than Thou” was the “student convocation” of the conference. Things were clicking very well, and the students were responding. There may have been a dozen people walking out after the steamy “Tartuffe” monologue (there were no complaints reported back to me, so who knows what that was about). As I passed through the audience during the Scapin scene, I went to sit on a girl’s lap as I often do during the “… or else some woman that the man intends to…” sequence, and the girl was more receptive than most. (I kind of hated to head back to the stage.) As the weekend proceeded, she came back to see my workshop and a performance of Criteria, and later she e-mailed:

I just wanted to tell you that i totally adored your show!!! It was a wonderful experience since i am from the country of Panama and theatre is not very big down there. I'd have loved to stay longer to see the complete show at night but we had to leave after Criteria. :(

I was supposed to speak for the 30-minute balance of time following my show, but between the rock band, the preliminary welcome, the introductions, and my performance running long, I had less than fifteen minutes left by then. I ditched my prepared remarks and opened the floor to questions immediately. Of course the first question that came across was “How did you end up doing what it is that you do?” (which was what I had prepared my remarks about anyway). This allowed me to speak very cleverly on the topic, seeming to shoot from the hip while quoting mostly things I’d planned to say anyway.

At 10:30 that morning, I was sitting on a panel, the topic of which was “Writing the one-man play.” To either side were a couple of “heavyweights”: Tony/Obie/Pulitzer winner Doug Wright, (“Quills” and “I Am My Own Wife”), Richard Kornberg, (Public Relations rep for “Hairspray”, “Rent” and the NY Shakespeare Fest), as well as Paul J. Williams a stand up-comic who has been getting raves for his one-man show “Dishing it Out”. It was a lively conversation among four guys who are generally accustomed to dominating the conversation themselves. This was my “break”.

From there I rushed to a 12 noon workshop on “The Life of Moliere,” and, while I was in town, the conference director had recruited me to give that same workshop to the French students at his high school, about 25 minutes away. Did I mention that I hadn’t had time for breakfast that morning? By now I was feeling it, and when I finally got back to the hotel, I stuffed myself on the most fattening hamburger I could order. I went back to the room, taking naps and hot baths to allow my energy to regenerate before my rehearsal for “Criteria” that evening.

The next day I caught Richard Kornberg’s publicity workshop at 10:30, performed by my own acting workshop at noon followed by a performance of “Criteria.” Doing “Criteria” to perhaps 100 people in a huge ballroom of about 800 seats, I let them hook me up to a microphone, which I have never done for a show before. While my voice could have filled the space, the acoustics of the room had an echo which would have slowed me down greatly in the process. They had to strap the radio pack underneath my shirt, which created rather an odd lump.

I was noticing a lot of the same people at my workshops and shows, and swinging by the exhibit hall, I discovered that the folks at the Playscripts booth (who published my “Tartuffe” and “Imaginary Invalid”) had sold out the couple copies of my scripts that they’d brought, and so I offered them the copies I was carrying around to sell (they sold another five by the end of the weekend).

I finished day two of the conference with one more performance of “Moliere Than Thou”. I’d been trying to capture video on several of the events through the weekend, but this was the first one close enough to the action. This show was working magically, with the audience laughing in all the right places. The volunteer for “Tartuffe” was wearing a thick sweater over her shirt, and amid his seduction, Tartuffe would draw it smoothly just off of her shoulder. Every time Tartuffe turned away, the volunteer would sneak the sweater back up into place, and of course Tartuffe could not resist fixing it back to the new position, and it became a separate game playing underneath the scene.

I wandered into a danger zone as the volunteer for “Doctor in Spite” who claimed to be over 18 admitted after the show that she was only actually 15. The “Stop Thief” song drew spontaneous applause, and the show ended with an enthusiastic standing ovation, and I loaded the trunk out to the car (with help from my friend Nancy Jo, who had come to see the show for perhaps the fourth or fifth time). I recconoitered back to the bar, meeting up with some of my new friends, including a particular couple from a community theatre in the Houston area who had come to see nearly all of my events.

The next morning I loaded up the car, and every time I passed through the lobby, it seemed, someone would flag me down with thoughts about my show, or questions about Moliere or booking. I realized that I had been rushing about so much all weekend long, that no one actually COULD have approached me about a booking if they had wanted to! I decided to simply hang out and make myself available for a couple of hours before getting back onto the road and driving north. (I think I initiated conversations about at least three bookings that morning.)

In the days that followed I received more feedback via e-mail:

Bonjour Monsieur,
I am a high school student who just recently attended the TETA conference and was fortunate enough to sit in on your classical theatre workshop. Your advice was invaluable and I cannot thank you enough for your time. Also your performances were astounding. I am attempting to perform a monologue from "The Blunderer" for college auditions, and your interpretations of Moliere's various characters has helped me in many ways. Hopefully I will be able to see you somewhere else around the country.
Thank you again ...

And ...

Recently at the TETA conference you pulled me up on stage one morning during "Moliere Than Thou".I believe it was during Scapin's spiel. It was an experience I will never forget. I was so awestruck by your impressive acting ability, and it was truly a joy to be on stage with you. As a matter of fact, you inspired me to write a one-man show myself. Then in the process of creating that script, another idea has taken flight. You Sir truly are an inspiration and an amazing author and actor.
Thank you ...

I headed for Point Lookout, Missouri, which actually turns out to be a town comprised exclusively of the College of the Ozarks, overlooking Branson, Missouri. (I’ve never been to Branson before, but it strikes me as a cross between Orlando and Las Vegas.) I was a bit concerned about this show, because the school was clearly very conservative, which left me wonering why they’d chosen me to appear there, but my host was very friendly, and I worked out ways to take some of the “edge” off of the more salacious material.

It actually worked very well for the show, as I continued to ride the edge of some of the bawdier humor, which kept a level of tension present throughout. (The audience continues to wonder, “Did he really mean it in the way that I think he said it?”) Afterwards the theater faculty were very enthusiastic about the show, particularly glad to be able to demonstrate to their kids just how well they can make themselves be heard, even without a microphone.

The next morning was a quick drop south once again, this time to Shreveport, with a show booked by a high school teacher at a local youth center. She was only expecting about fifty students in attendance, and that was almost exactly how many showed up. I was working without music, and with only basic lighting in a former church space. I was waiting to come on from backstage, and didn’t actually hear the teacher giving her introduction. Eventually, I heard a tapping at the door, and heard her asking if I was ready to come on. “Yes, of course,” I responded and immediately made my entrance. But I could tell from the general lack of energy in the audience that they had actually been awaiting my entrance for some time by then.

This crowd’s response was very quiet, and only gradually did they warm up to the show. The applause after the initial monologues was muted, and only with the audience interactive scenes did they seem to be “getting” the humor. Afterwards, however, a dozen or so students lingered to tell me just how much they’d enjoyed themselves, and how amazed they were at my performance and my memory. One rather attractive black girl said to me, “Wow, you have got a really big ... vocabulary!”

That night, the following showed up in my inbox:

I just saw your play today with my French club...
And totally loved it.
Sure, i felt kinda violated. :D
But it was hilarious.
And really, I love guys with long black hair and ruffly shirts :D
My only regret is that all my friends weren't there to see it!
My friend Jeremy and I thought the show was AWESOME!!!
So I'm definately a fan now. :)
<3 Amanda Rivers
P.S. Sureeee there's like a 30 year age difference between us, but when I turn 18 next year, we can still totally get married, right? :DDD
Thanks for comin to Louisiana!

My host was quite pleased with how the show went, and we went out for a bite to eat afterwards, where a couple from the audience were by then finishing up dinner. One of them was a French teacher on a local college faculty, and he was quite enthusiastic, with thoughts of bringing the show back again sometime.

I headed on to my hotel and got a good night’s sleep (finally, my system was back on “Midwest time” rather than Hawaii time), and I raced back home, just ahead of a huge snowstorm, and now I’ve got about two weeks to finish my winter mailing before jumping back onto the road for another two months of the tour.

Aloha!
Tim

Miles on the Car: 256,000

Attendance: 40 + 200 + 25 + 50 + 75 + 60 + 100 + 200 + 300 + 50 = 1100

Temperature: 0-90 (Chicago and Hawaii, respectively)

Discoveries: Somehow the tangents from any given writing project seem much more interesting than the original composition. * The nature of TRUTH continues to shift from one generation to another. * Do you really want somebody telling you what an awful movie you’re about to see in a situation where you can’t escape? * Allowing the audience to ask the first question makes me look much more spontaneously clever. * Respond to everything the volunteer does! * There are people waiting to ask me about booking my show, if I’ll just slow down long enough to let them catch up to me. * Holding back on some of the more overt innuendo actually helps to maintain the tension through the course of the scene.

Next Performance: February 19 (Isaac's birthday) at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)

Political Sentiment: I’m hereby endorsing Barack Obama! -- The rap on Obama is that he is "just" an inspirational speaker. But the very fact of his inspirational speaking gives him the ability to make a transformational shift in our thoughts and actions. Whereas Reagan might have been able to make people think that what was in their own best interests would probably be in the country's best interest, Obama has the ability to enable people to believe that what is in the country's best interest is, in fact, in their own best interest. While Hillary might be able to nibble away at the edges of policy arguments, in the face of opposition that has hardened against her, Obama has the transcendent ability to rearrange our point of view.

Reading: "The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman

On the I-Pod: "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse

The View From Here #128: Highland Heights, KY; Spartanburg & Charleston, SC; Charlotte, NC; Steubenville & Delaware, OH; LaGrange, IL & Green Bay, WI

2007-12-07T20:10:00.000-08:00

The semester closes in a rush, with lots of shows, lots of driving and little time to think in-between.

From Memphis I drove to Northern Kentucky, spending my birthday weekend with a book and a karaoke bar (all the while trying to upload the last edition of “The View Fro Here”). [Most scenic pics from this posting are from Charlotte, SC (with the exception of the two River Pictures taken across from Cincinnati, and the tall buildings in Charlotte).]

Meanwhile, even more reviews from Arkansas: For the French among us:

C'etait absolument magnifique ! Merci encore - infiniment! … Mes étudiants étaient enchantés avec la pièce, si on peut l'appeler une pièce. Tim a joué ses rôles variées avec facilité, et d'une façon amusante. Et quel triomphe d'avoir jouer deux scenes avec les jeunes gens. Bravo, Tim! Ça valait la peine, bien sûr! (Jane McGregor RHS)

I saw your show in Conway this week — fantastic. I love how well you use the entire body in your performance — something our students have difficulty doing. At first I was saying to myself (very American): "He's clowning, he's not really becoming some of these characters." Then I realized: "Wait a minute; these are Moliere's farce plays, and they came right from Commedia — it's brazenly theatrical! Plus, when he's Moliere, he's extremely genuine." I love it when my biases are exposed like that! Anyway, it was extremely entertaining, and to captivate ninth-graders with material from the 17th Century — hooray! I hope you are able to come back. (Kevin T. Browne, U of Central Arkansas)

And, while I’m at it, responses were following me from the workshop in Phoenix a week before.

The kids are showing so much improvement since your visit. They are so motivated to put on a show that will really live up to standards!! … I was in awe of how well, yet delicately you pushed the envelope. The students have really made a 360 degree turn around since your visit. Much more dedication, enthusiasm, and investment in their roles/characters. What they need now is an audience to feed off of. It is getting harder and harder for them to stay motivated with the same audience feedback night after night that they received from me, stage managers and techies. Teenagers are so instant gratification, it’s harder everyday to keep going. (JinHee Rhodes, Bourgade High School)

“I also need to extend my sincerest gratitudes all to you. Without your workshop, I don't think I would have done any better. I took into consideration of making Argan as ugly, boisterous, and... "spitful?" as possible. My mother couldn't stop laughing! PLus, another thank you I owe to you, Is for without this show, I would never have gotten an audition at …” (Eric Johnson, Bourgade High School)

I had an afternoon show at Northern Kentucky University, which drew audience from the greater Cincinnati area. It was the second NKU show in two years, this one somewhat better attended than the first. The show was followed by my Moliere lecture, to which an old friend arrived thinking that it was the performance that had been scheduled for 1 pm, and not the lecture. (I squeezed as much performing as I could into that lecture.)

Dropping south I popped in on my cousin George (the other actor of the family), catching him amid “tech week” for the big musical, having been up building the set into the wee hours the night before. I continued south through Knoxville (where a teacher at UTK had forgotten our 3pm appointment), and on down to Cleveland, TN, where I crashed at Sabra’s house. (In preparation for her recent wedding, Sabra was actually away when I arrived, but let me have the run of the place while she was gone.)

From there, I continued on to Marietta, GA, where Linda and her husband David were starting to consider escape routes, should the drought in the southeast continue on much longer, and then on to Spartansburg, where the South Carolina Theatre Association was meeting.

There I caught up with Bess Park (and her friend, David), who are planning to bring me down to South Carolina to direct/perform in “The Misanthrope” in the Spring of 09... We strategized about publicizing the event, and my availability for tour during that visit, and hit the karaoke contest in the hotel (I won a couple of gift certificates; Bess and David seem to be good luck for me). I set up a booth in the conference’s display area, sharing stickers and flyers with students and faculty, and tracking down a sexy-looking “volunteer” for my Sunday morning show.

The Sunday performance was actually after most of the conference attendees had gone, and perhaps 50 people showed up for the performance, mostly sitting far away from the stage, in the second tier of the auditorium seating. As such, the performance felt rather lackluster to me (visiting the “hospitality suite” the night before might have had something to do with it), though the response after the show was good, with a couple of the students seeming quite star-struck afterwards.

I grabbed lunch with Bess and David, and headed yet further south, to Charleston, South Carolina. The College of Charleston put me up in a nice guest house, and my host took me to dinner the night before. They supplied me with lots of assistance when it came time for the show, and I employed a couple of the extra girls who’d been assigned to my show, to run on an errand to pick up a couple of fresh pairs of tights at the drug store (I always feel weird buying these for myself), and to videotape the performance. There were a couple of burned out lightbulbs which threatened to severely darken the performance, until such time as the technician discovered a follow-spot up in the booth, and managed to integrate its use into the show.

The daytime performance was very well attended, and I searched the audience for any of the girls I’d met at the conference the previous weekend, who’d promised to be my volunteer for the “Doctor” scene. None were evident.

The show was, however, going extremely well (with the exception of the moment in which the French Department Chair’s cell phone went off; he proceeded to take the call, and carry on a conversation while the show proceeded.) Just as I was introducing the “Doctor” scene, one student let out a hysterical laugh, and I decided to take a chance on bringing her up to volunteer. She was a terrific “victim” and the laughs continued to escalate. Making my pass through the audience during the “Scapin” scene, when I normally swipe a program out of someone’s hands, I instead grabbed a notebook off of the lap of a girl in the audience. As I looked down at the notebook in my hand, I realized that it was covered with notes about my performance. I read the first one aloud: “He is so in character!” before the girl grabbed it back out of my hands, while the audience burst into laughter.

The show ended with a good rendition of the “Precious Young Maidens” scene, and I was glad to have captured that performance on video, but even as I changed out of my costume backstage, I could hear the voices of the audience walking by on the opposite side of the wall, raving about the show. In that moment, I realized: THAT’s the sort of reaction that I ought to be capturing on video. While the comments from faculty are all supportive after the fact, I need to get people in the midst of their enthusiasm in order to convey the actual impact of the show. (Some of these reactions, captured from the last three shows of the season, are up on YouTube now, as well.)

[In fact; ruh-roh! "Blogger" will take direct links from "YouTube" and post them. Which means that I can include the YouTube pieces inside this blog! And when the scene has completed, YouTube will immediately offer you more options of videos of mine, that you can watch without even leaving this site! Better settle in for the duration!]

The next day, I was off, north, to Charlotte, stopping for a brief tour of the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, before continuing to the Charlotte Latin School.

This was a very rich school on a huge K-12 campus, and I would be performing to a group of 80 students in a conference room adjacent to the library. While I had just done a show for 800 high school kids in Arkansas, these 80 were a much tougher crowd. I could feel them resisting me at every step, and several times I would “stare down” a disruptive student in the midst of a monologue. Of course, the troublemakers were probably no more than 10% of the audience, while there may well have been another 10% in the room who were entirely captivated at the other end of the spectrum. That’s one of those things I’ll never know.

After the show, I’d been hired to do a brief after-school workshop for theatre students. Three students came out. Regardless, the theatre teacher was very enthused, and reinforced some of the issues I’ve been ranting about for years, particularly with regard to students wearing microphones. (The richer the school, the more they inhibit the good speech of their students by putting a microphone in front of their mouths any time they’re on stage.)

Heading north, I spun through Knoxville again, this time catching up with the teacher I’d planned to meet with previously, and sharing perhaps a half-dozen of my scenes with him. I continued on to Wheeling, West Virginia. I had a weekend to waste, while awaiting a performance in Steubenville, so I got a cheap hotel room and read books for a couple of days, all the while thinning out my e-mail inbox and editing my Acting Textbook.

In Steubenville, I noted that they were performing “Mary Stuart” the Sunday afternoon that I arrived in town, and I nosed in to watch the first act, continuing to be reminded of some of the stage movement theories I was building upon in my book.

I did not capture a video of this particular performance, though I wished that I might have. The laughs were terrific, and one gentleman, off to the side had a terrific laugh. When I went to approach a woman in the second row during the initial “Tartuffe” monologue, she practically JUMPED up out of her seat (picking herself up at least a foot off of the seat itself!) when Tartuffe climbed over the front row of seats to perform in front of her.

The gentleman with the infectious laugh volunteered for the Scapin scene, and I later found out he was a local critic. About a week later, I received an e-mail from him, commending me on my “sharp and fast-paced production,” even as he took a couple of sideways shots at the performances that he usually sees at the school. Of course, I assumed that this would imply that his review of my show was entirely enthusiastic. However, out of a three paragraph review, one entire paragraph was as follows:

“The show’s only weakness is the same as any Moliere translation that insists on retaining the playwright’s annoying end-rhymed couplets in English. While the device might have worked in the original French (I don’t know because I don’t speak French), in English it’s an unremitting irritation, reminiscent of bad greeting card verse or Edward Guest’s doggerel. Can’t someone translate Moliere into unrhymed iambic pentameter or, better yet, prose?”

The word “curmudgeon” comes to mind.

At least one of the students who was in attendance (at both the show and my acting workshop) has written me since then, insisting:

"You’re this week’s most quoted person in our theatre department, thought you’d like to know!” Later she explained “Your ‘stop thief’ is extremely popular,” and that “Imitating your facial expressions is becoming a requirement for all drama majors here."

Interestingly, one of the students from the big show in Arkansas (In fact, it was the "Tartuffe" volunteer) also wrote, indicating:

"I would like to take a moment to thank you so much on behalf of my entire troupe for your splendid performance on Oct 31 in Conway. All of my friends enjoyed it, and are still to this day saying "STOP THIEF" in class. It serves as our own private joke outside the drama room. (Excluding all of the non thespians is almost a hobby for us.) As a serious student of theater, I was thoroughly impressed with your high energy, and even more so with your ability to captivate a packed theater of ADD high school students."

I continued on to spend Thanksgiving in Detroit with Isaac and Jo, before doubling back to Ohio with a show at Ohio Wesleyan University. While the show played fairly well, my new experiment with trying to capture audience reaction after the show was limited by the voice of the camera operator who, in addition to asking “What did you think of the show” would also ask “Wasn’t that a great show?” In addition to being too “leading” of a question, it doesn’t leave much room for the audience to respond, and when their response to this question was an indifferent shrug, I felt more than slightly embarrassed.

At last, I could drive home to Chicago, spending all of one night at the old homestead, before zipping down to a performance at Lyons Township High School, in the western suburb of La Grange.

This time the show came off extremely well, and the open space in front of the stage enabled me to get down, close to the audience of 650 students several times. Again, I managed to capture videotape, and this time the operator allowed the audience the space to respond however they liked. Of course this also meant seeing some responses that were coolly indifferent, as well as the ones who were eager and enthusiastic. The teachers actually provided some of the best responses, as they talked about how effective the show was in supporting their curricular needs.

The next day, I was off to Green Bay, Wisconsin, with a mid-day Moliere lecture with the French Department. The temperature had plummeted since those warm days in Charleston, South Carolina (I was still carrying around clothes originally packed in August!), and I tried catching a nap in the hotel prior to that night’s show.

At the theatre, no one was expecting a big turnout, as the Green Bay Packers had a Thursday night game. Even my technician, dressed in a #4 Green Bay Jersey, was planning to TiVo the game and go home to watch it right after the show. (I couldn’t help but wonder whether there was some resentment among the Theatre faculty who’d accommodated the French Department by hosting this show.) Having learned my lesson from the South Carolina conference, I encouraged them to push all the audience to the front tier of seating, where the laughs were infectious.

I managed to hire a student to run the video camera, and the technicians did a terrific job setting up and running the lights. There was a row of mostly girls in the second row, and again, there was an easy climb over the first row to perform much of the Tartuffe monologue in their laps, which set off a great chain reaction of laughs. When it came time for the volunteer scene, the student that I’d delivered the “School for Wives” monologue to got up to participate, which I can’t recall ever happening before. She was not an actress, but seemed rather smolderingly attracted to Tartuffe as the scene proceeded.

A young boy who’d attempted to volunteer for the “Tartuffe” scene, this time around was right for the “Scapin” scene. He was hilarious (the scene is up on YouTube), getting applause from the audience with his very first line. The video operator captured him afterwards saying it was “the best show ever” with his mom (the French teacher) bubbling with enthusiasm. We also captured the Tartuffe volunteer’s friends teasing her about now being “in love with the theatre.”

I spent the next morning editing video, and got on the road to Minneapolis in time to catch a Fringe Festival fundraising event, along with Erika and Julie (two friends from last summer). I spent four more days in Minneapolis scouting out karaoke bars with Erika’s assistance, as well as my billeting hosts, Klee and Dave, looking for a venue where I might perform “Karaoke Knights” if I should end up in the Minneapolis Fringe next summer.

Over those four days, Minneapolis was socked in with a snow emergency, and I spent my days editing on the acting textbook, and writing to the several theatres I’d auditioned for this past fall. I wanted to get them on board in the coming month, before distributing my schedule to the 10,000 or so teachers I’d e-mailed in the past summer. I wouldn’t have to look up all of their e-mail addresses this year, though the process of sending out that many e-mails would probably take me a month, all by itself. I wanted to have the available dates very clear before disseminating my stuff far and wide.

I headed southwest into Iowa. My performance season was over, but there was a student at Northwest College (where my friends Jeff and Karen teach) who was directing my version of “Sganarelle” for her directing class project, so I drove down to see the eight or so directors’ presentations over the course of an evening.

I was slated to drop in on Jeff’s directing class the next morning, and so I took notes through the course of the shows, just in case they might be looking for some feedback. The shows were mostly a lot of fun, and I enjoyed being reminded of the “Sganarelle” script. I’d been performing a cutting from this play for the past seven years, but had largely forgotten the context of the script. It played well, though I doubted, in several instances, whether all of the words were actually making sense to the audience.

Jeff had reminded me of a directing textbook he’d been encouraging me to write. (He’d remembered a directing lecture that I’d given over twenty years ago!) It brought back a particular point of view I’d had about this craft, which was significantly distinct from my acting textbook. Given the several notes I’d now accumulated about a variety of individual directors’ efforts, I realized that I was beginning to accumulate a substantive collection of ideas about what young directors needed to learn in becoming more effective. And meanwhile, I’d been wondering just what I’d be doing for my “December project” this year, now that the Fall tour was done. And so, I sat down the next morning and examined the notes I’d taken, beginning to identify important chapters for the new book I would work on in the coming month.

Sitting in on the directing class that afternoon, Jeff had no particular agenda for my contribution to the class, and when I suggested I could share my feedback from the night before, their eyebrows raised with interest, and I did a quick once-over of my several reactions.

After about 45 minutes of this, Jeff needed to get back to wrapping up the class, and I needed to get back onto the road. The snow had been flurrying through most of the morning, and it was a long slog across southern Minnesota, through Wisconsin, and back into Illinois.

Where I now type these words, and look forward to diving into the latest creative endeavor.

Love,
Tim

Miles on the Vibe: 252,500

In the I-Pod: Evanescence, Joe Cocker and Donovan

Temperature: 80s (South Carolina) to single digits (Minneapolis)

Reading: The “Bean Series” of books from Ender Scott Card

Discoveries: When the audience sits far away, the students who don’t really want to get involved, don’t, but those who do, enjoy the show on an intellectual level … which doesn’t manifest itself in any response that I might be conscious of until after the performance. * It’s the reaction immediately AFTER the performance which will most effectively convey the audience’s enthusiasm and the actual impact of the show. * The richer the school, the more they inhibit the good speech of their students by putting a microphone in front of their mouths any time they’re on stage. * I have a whole distinct set of opinions to share with directors about the challenges that face directors, early in their careers.

Attendance: 60 + 40 + 35 + 60 + 80 + 4 + 60 + 50 + 650 + 40 + 70 = 1,439

Political commentary: If Obama or Edwards wins a significant victory over the other in Iowa, watch for the Anyone-But-Hillary vote to shift strongly onto one or the other.

Next performances: Texas Educational Theatre Festival, Dallas, TX, 1/25-26.

The View From Here #127: Phoenix, AZ; Siloam Springs, Little Rock & Conway, AR

2007-11-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

In the few weeks since I started the Moliere YouTube channel: it’s gotten lots of hits, with over 650 videos watched! Please check them out and rate them highly! (Somebody went through early on and rated a bunch of them at 1-star, so I could use all the help I can get to bring up my GPA!)

Hey! Happy birthday to me (3rd from left)!

It’s not my birthday as I write this episode, but I’m hoping I’ll get this issue out by then! By the time you read this I will be 48 years old! Every once in a while I pause to note “I’m getting too old for this sh*t!”

But then I have a fantastic performance, or twist of good karma and I dive right back in.

In this case, what’s working for me is the little extras that I’ve added to the tour: auditions and meet-ups with theatre professionals and faculty when I happen to be “in the neighborhood.” I’ve had a couple of great auditions lately: San Diego, Little Rock and Memphis, and one (Dallas) which seemed to fall flat.

But as the quote from Thomas Watson goes: “Defeat is not failure unless you quit. If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

I spent a weekend in San Diego, with a quick trip across the border to see Tijuana while I was there, just as the California fires were stoked into high gear. I smelled like I’d been standing next to a bonfire for a long time, and I’m still trying to get rid of the cough.

I’ve now passed through cities in advance of most of the major disasters of the last six years. I was in Florida before the hurricanes swept through (2003 & 2004), in New Orleans prior to Katrina, arriving in Minneapolis just before the bridge collapsed, and escaping San Diego amid the forest fires. I’m thinking of re-titling my blog, “One Step Ahead of the Apocolypse.”

The audition at the San Diego Rep went very well, and the guy there suggested that they try to book a one-person show into a fall spot annually, and were looking at the possibility of bringing me in for a 3 1/2 -week run of “Moliere Than Thou.”

In Phoenix, Bourgade High School was working on my version of “Imaginary Invalid,” and the students were really, really excited to have me visit. They gave me an ovation just for walking in the door!

I proceeded to do my 2-hour acting workshop with them, culminating in one of the squirmiest performances of the “Tartuffe” monologue ever! The girl who volunteered as my “victim” couldn’t look me in the eyes, laughed hysterically, and looked around to her fellow students to bail her out.

At the end of the session, a half-dozen actors lingered to ask questions about their particular characters, and I gave them what answers I could before rushing off to put some miles under my tires before calling it a night in Tucson. One of the students later wrote:

“Just wanted to say thanks so much for coming to our school! Things like that never happen for our theatre program, and I think it really helped give us some attention that was well deserved. I learned alot from your instructions, and hope to utilize them all in our show tomarrow night!”

From Tucson, I continued through Roswell, New Mexico (where the aliens landed) to Lubbock, Texas (where Bobby Knight landed). I met up with a member of the Texas Tech theatre faculty and continued to Brownwood, where I caught up with Nancy Jo Humfeld once again. Pushing on to Dallas, I did an audition with [a theatre in Dallas]. The two auditors showed up about twenty minutes late, and I did “School for Wives” and “Tartuffe” for them. For the latter, I used the woman who’d arranged the audition as my point of focus, and immediately felt it was a mistake. In the close quarters of this conference room, with her sitting less than ten feet away, I was overlarge and imposing. At the end of the audition, their overly-sincere “THANK you so MUCH for COMING OUT!” clued me in that we were done.

I dropped down to Waco, visiting with a couple of the theatre faculty there who were undecided about which version of “Tartuffe” they would be presenting this spring, but seemed to be very much persuaded when I did my monologue for them. The department chair is a dramaturg, who seemed to “get” the several levels of allusions that float through that monologue. A day or two later, I discovered that she had recommended me to perform at the Texas Educational Theatre Association this January, and they are now talking about having me do the “keynote address” for the students at the festival. And so, you never know what opportunities might arise from an extra little bit of reaching out.

Simultaneous to these arrangements, I’ve also been pulling together last second arrangements to appear at the South Carolina Theatre Association, where I’ll be performing as the “closing event” to their conference on November 11. As my friend Bess Park is looking to bring me in for an extended stay in South Carolina in Spring, 2009, we’ll be working together to solicit more performances with South Carolina schools during this period to make the event manageable.

I visited with Katie Crandall, a friend I’d met in Norman, OK who lives in Waco. Katie helped me redesign my MySpace page while I was there, and I continued north to Norman, Oklahoma, catching breakfast with Susan, who had directed the Moliere plays back in January. With a quick stop in Tulsa to catch lunch with Dave and Helga Hirsch, I was finally on to Siloam Springs, Arkansas, for my first performance of the show in twenty days! (The last one being way back in McMinnville, Oregon!)

I did my usual workshop with these folks, which went very well, and after a quick dinner break, came back for the show. This time, no one sat in the front row of the theatre, and the whole audience seemed to band into rows two through five. There was a little two-foot wall delineating the stage from the audience, and occasionally I would climb out onto it as I approached the audience, variously.

The show played great, finishing to a standing ovation, and the host was already eyeing my other two shows, aiming to bring me back to perform again in subsequent years. I had to pack up and drive off rather quickly, for a performance the next morning, but within perhaps 30 minutes, I noticed my phone flashing with a text message: “You are an incredibly gifted performer. Thanks for taking time for our tiny little campus.”
The adrenaline from the performance kept me driving all the way to Little Rock, three hours down the road. I checked in to the hotel after midnight and asked for a 7 a.m. wakeup call to get up for an 8 a.m. tech and a 9:30 show.

Before getting to sleep, I checked my bank balance on-line, and noticed that the deposits from some recent shows had finally showed up in my account. Checking this against my credit card statement, I realized that I finally had enough to pay off my credit card, once and for all! Boom. With a couple of keystrokes, my balance was down to zero, and while this sent my checking balance way down, I was gearing up to perform three shows in three days, with a corresponding three checks due to arrive.

And so, for the first time since, perhaps, the mid-80s, I have no debt. Suddenly, I was struck by the awareness that I was now working, exclusively, for myself.

The technician didn’t show up until after 8:30, and rather than try to teach him any internal cues (other than bringing up the houselights when I leave the stage), we refocused some lights so that I could use the wide expanse of area between the stage and the first row of seats. There was no dressing room, so I had to have Jennifer, my host, hold the audience out in the lobby while I snuck in and out of one of the bathrooms, got makeup and costume on, and slipped backstage. Almost 300 students piled in, packing the mid-sized community room, with no empty seats left over. Again, the show went extremely well.

I was eyeing a woman in the audience who was sitting next to a much older woman, wondering if she might be disapproving of some of the show’s friskier moments, but later I met the younger of the two at dinner: she was a French teacher who had brought her 82 year-old mother, Mary Francis, and her mother’s quote was “I’ve never seen an actor say more with his eyes and his fingers.”

Meanwhile, there was some controversy coming from a teacher from an extremely conservative school who noted that some of her students were “creeped out” by my “licking of the lips type thing.” Jennifer circulated this to the other teachers and it quickly turned into a forum, with responses such as:

“For Moliere, Tim’s performance was TONED DOWN” and “The ‘lip licking’ character was SUPPOSED to creep you out, that was the point, that character and others like him are sleezeballs that Moliere is holding up to ridicule because of their sleezyness!!! We thought ALL of it was hilarious …”

"I'm sorry that the students from the [conservative school] could not quite grasp and appreciate your beautiful interpretation of Moliere's characters. My students and I found your interpretation to be great and very entertaining. Bravo!!!!!”

“My students enjoyed him very much. Even though they were prepared, the language/prose was still above most of their heads. It was the experience of watching something like this that I wanted them to appreciate. And, they did. Tim is amazing! He so captured the essence of what I envisioned Moliere to have been like!”

My host went on to assert that her older kids, especially, enjoyed the show, as did the literature teacher (who wanted to see the “non-toned-down version sometime”).

My own response to this was to suggest: “I’m speaking 10,000 words in ninety minutes! I’ve got to lick my lips sometime!”

After packing up from the show, I made a quick stop back at the hotel, getting back into my suit for my audition with the Arkansas Rep. This time it was the Producing Artistic Director I was meeting up with, and while he was running late, the Literary Manager showed me around the facility in the meantime (a great theatre space inside a deceptively worn façade).

Once again I performed “School for Wives” and “Tartuffe,” this time being sure not to deliver the monologues AT either of the auditors. I could feel their attention to the language and the performance, and repeatedly forced myself to let go of whatever judgement I might be making about whatever judgement they might be making, and to reinvigorate the performance with my own internal impulses. This time, when I was done, the Literary Manager had to bow out to head to another meeting, but the Director remained to chat at some length.

He seemed impressed, and much of our discussion seemed to center around how much I might make myself available for: was I only interested in performing in Moliere plays, or would I be available for Shakespeare? He noted my facility for complex language, and suggested the possibility of casting me in any number of shows that had that kind of a challenge. And … hmm was it perhaps, time for them to produce some Moliere?

I walked out of that audition on a high that lasted the rest of the day.

The next morning, I drove to Conway, Arkansas, where I was performing in the Reynolds Performing Hall, a major (1200 seat) venue on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas (Scottie Pippen’s alma mater). I had had virtually NO correspondence about a technical rehearsal for the show, and couldn’t find any of my e-mails that might have clarified this. I made a couple of calls, but couldn’t get hold of anyone who knew about the plans, and so I just showed up at the venue. Most of the doors were locked, but when I went around to the loading dock, I found an open door, and on the stage there were two technicians awaiting my arrival.

They proceeded to refocus lights and set levels and I sat back to let them work, while trying to spare my voice (which was worn down from two shows and a workshop in the past 36 hours). Eventually, I went back to the dressing room to get into makeup and costume, and rumor came to me of a rather large audience arriving.

It seemed that no one knew what the actual total attendance would be (or they were keeping the figure from me so that I wouldn’t freak out). But by show time there were about 800 students in the house.

I started out playing broadly, projecting both vocally and physically to the far reaches of the auditorium. It was an immense group of people with a diverse character that manifested in pockets of individual groups, as broken down by schools, or by race, or simply by distance from the stage. It was impossible to “commune” with each attendee in the way that I often do when the audience total is less than 50. Generally, with a small audience I feel like I have “connected” with each one by the end of the show. In this setting that would be impossible.

When it came to monologues that I delivered to specific individuals, I focused mostly on the first row, with students who would respond to the immediacy of my proximity. Their response would at least “read” to the students around them, and the amusement of those students would communicate to the auditorium at large.

When it came time to request a volunteer for “Tartuffe,” there were quickly many hands up in the air, but before I had even finished my request, one pretty young student had gotten up out of her seat (towards the back) and was assertively making her way toward the stage.

She was very self-possessed and a really responsive scene partner. I wish that I’d had a camera running for this show, simply to capture her reactions. The one that I specifically remember was when I had her in under my arm, as I said “This talk of your affection lends me strength / But only going to a greater … length …” she slowly shifted in her stance to pull her hips back away from mine, as the audience laughed once at the twist of words, and a loud, long second time at her twist of her posture.

The Scapin volunteer was less adept, but we got lots of laughs anyway. There was one occasion where the young actor turned to face me as he delivered his line (clearly upstaging himself), and I took him by the shoulders to reposition him facing the audience. After seeing me playing presentationally through the past hour of the performance, everyone “got” that this actor had violated the “rules” of the world he had entered, and laughed loudly.

As I shifted into “Precious Young Maidens,” I could feel the audience’s energy fading. I no longer had any interactive tricks to pull back out of my bag, and had to sell the scene on its own merits. By this time, though, I had been playing the show “at 10” for over an hour, simply to be seen and heard in the far reaches of the auditorium, and there was little in the way of subtlety that could hold their attention. I could hear the rumblings of a bit of chatter in some of the pockets of individual groups.

Once again, I was conscious of the size of the crowd. While I had distracted myself by focusing on a few individuals, the immensity of the group was daunting … not in a “stage fright” sort of way, but in the challenge of getting through to each individual. Fortunately, the series of “Stop, thief”s managed to bring a lot of them back into the “muse” of the scene, and when I took my final bows, all 800 of them stood up to applaud.

I escaped through the curtain, and didn’t want to risk another bow, with the likelihood that I might return to find that the standing audience had turned into a standing-to-leave audience, but a student had quickly run up on stage, poking her head through the curtain, asking me to return. A cheer went up from the kids as the girl presented me with a special gift. I gave her a hug, waved and went back to change before coming back for photos.

Backstage, I found that the gift was a t-shirt from their high school, and I changed into that, and slipped my Moliere coat over the shirt, and went back onto the stage, where a hundred or so kids remained for photos and autographs.

Two days later, a review appeared in the Conway paper (edited, here, for length):

The many Mooney Moliere faces at UCA
By Jessica Bauer, Log Cabin Staff Writer

One man managed to single-handedly, not to mention successfully, perform several 17th-century plays in front of a crowd of high school students on the University of Central Arkansas campus Wednesday morning. French, English, drama and oral communications students from across Arkansas, including Conway High School and St. Joseph High School, attended Timothy Mooney's one-man play, "Molire Than Thou." … Mooney acted as several different characters who starred in comedies ranging from "Tartuffe" to "Don Juan" and had the high school crowd erupting with laughter the entire time.

According to Melinda Francis, an English teacher at St. Joseph High School, her students were very impressed with Mooney's interpretations of Molire. She added the students she brought to the performance just finished their senior play and said they felt a connection to Mooney. "They just finished learning all their lines and they realized how hard that is and were really impressed that this guy does it all on his own," Francis said. "And we just had juniors and seniors there, and they were able to really get the humor of the performance."

One of Francis' senior students, Caleb Seiter, was one of the two contributing actors Mooney, as Molire, chose from the audience to assist him with his act. "I was so proud of him to get up there," Francis said. "And after he was finished, he said he wasn't nervous until he got up on stage and looked out to see the audience staring back at him, but we think he did a great job." … "When kids think of the Renaissance period, they automatically think of Shakespeare and not any of the other playwrights at that time," Francis said. "So the other English teachers and I just wanted the kids to see that it is not just Shakespeare out there." Francis added several of the students who attended the play are interested in studying drama and she felt it was a good opportunity for the students who were curious about one-man acts see one brought to life.

A.J. Spiridigliozzi, an oral communications teacher on the east campus of Conway High School, brought a group of drama students to the performance Wednesday, and he said they loved every minute of it. "I knew a lot of the kids didn't know Molire, but they still got something out of it and because he had a lot of gusto, the show was very attractive to them," Spiridigliozzi said.

Another group from both campuses of Conway High School were the French students who were excited to see the works of the French playwright they had been studying in their classes. "The students really enjoyed it and they are all hoping he will come again next year," Stephanie Lamar, French teacher at Conway High School East, said. "They thought he was hilarious and were telling their friends about it all day long." …

And just as this issue was going "to press," another article appeared in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

Performance brings Molière to life
Cabot High School Students experience French playwright
By Jeremy Peppas STAFF WRITER

LITTLE ROCK — Cabot French teacher Kristie Robinson was impressed by the crowd.

“I was keeping an eye on them,” Robinson said, “and they laughed when they were supposed to laugh. It wasn’t that they were laughing at his gestures. They were laughing at what he was saying. I also saw that they jumped out of their seats to give him a standing ovation.”

All the laughter was for Tim Mooney’s performance Oct. 25 of a selection of plays by French playwright Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molière at Reynolds Performance Hall on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

Robinson estimated the crowd to be between 800 and 850 students from high school campuses around the state.

The students who were there were impressed by what they saw.

“It was really interesting to see how he brought it to life,” Cabot senior Whitney Dodson said. “It was funny on paper, but the way he interpreted it, it was so weird. With the script you can adapt it anyway you want, it’s so open-ended. The way he did it though, I never would have thought of it that way.”...

Brittany Cliff is another senior at Cabot and has also been studying French for three years. Her plan is to be a French teacher.

“It was interesting,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t have made it as risqué as he did, but he made it humorous for high school students and it kept them interested. I think everyone really enjoyed it.”

Robinson agreed.

“I think my students would want to come again,” she said....”

Packing up, I caught a quick lunch with Kristie and her husband before popping the checks into the mail, and hurrying off to Memphis.

I’d traded e-mails with the head of Memphis’ Playhouse on the Square, and I wanted to get there before he left for the evening. I managed to pull into town at about 4:30, finding my way to the theatre and his office. He was extremely generous with his time, giving me an overview of the 35+ year history of the company (which I’m sure he’s given a million times over the years), and explaining the various seasons and theatre spaces that the company runs.

He led me over to see a smaller, studio space, explaining that, as they were preparing to move into a brand new space in another year, they were looking at programming some one-person shows, probably in January and July of ’09, to lighten their load. He seemed very interested in “Moliere Than Thou” for that event, and perhaps even one of my other two shows, but didn’t feel any need to see an audition piece from me. (Apparently he sees quite enough of those, given that they run the “Unified Professional Theatre Auditions.”)

That night I met up with Sarah Brown, the professor who’d brought me in to perform at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette last winter, who had landed with the University of Memphis this year, and proceeded to continue on to Nashville and Cincinnati over two days of driving.

Lots of wheels were now turning. My series of auditions had left me with the impression that I could end up with as many as five longer-term guest artist gigs in the coming year, which means entirely re-drawing the schedule that I’d just established for 08-09. (Even though none of these new dates were confirmed, I had to create the space where they could happen so that I wouldn’t be booking and signing contracts that would prevent them from happening.) I plotted out new dates as I drove. Likewise, my new featured positions in theatre conferences would throw me back in promotional mode, as I attempt to capitalize on the increased popularity, even as I have FEWER dates to offer interested venues. Whereas in the past I’ve tried to offer up my services at least twice a year to each of the contiguous 48 states (driving two “laps” of the country each year), it may well be that most of them will only have one shot at booking me.

I am reminded of the principle that once made Beanie Babies so valuable: Scarcity.

I’ll be available less, which will actually make the show more valuable.

Looks like it’s just about time for another price increase.

Love,
Tim (Bottom row, left)

Miles on the Vibe: 247,500

Temperature: 60 degrees

Reading: “Ender’s Shadow” by Orson Scott Card

Attendance: 20 + 45 + 300 + 800 = 1165

Discoveries: “Defeat is not failure unless you quit. If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” * Allow directors to have the aesthetic distance of observing the monologue, without placing them in the scene with you. * You never know what opportunities might arise from an extra little bit of reaching out. * I might well have gotten down about my lack of bookings through the latter half of October, but it was that very lack of bookings that set me in motion to line up an entirely new direction to the tour, and meet people who could make a huge difference for my career. * It feels good to be working for yourself, rather than the bank. * Moliere is still stirring people up more than 300 years later, and some people are getting stirred up simply by seeing me licking my lips! * I need to let go of whatever judgement I might be making about whatever judgement they might be making. * When I play the show at “10” throughout, by the last monologue, there is little left that I can do to hold the audience’s attention. * I now face the leap of faith of creating openings on my schedule for long-term guest artist stays, even before those events are confirmed.

Political Commentary: Waterboarding has been used as torture since the Spanish Inquisition. The current administration is desparate not to acknowledge that fact largely because such an admission would make war criminals of our highest officers of state.

Next Performance: November 5, Northern Kentucky University

The View From Here #126: Colorado Springs & Denver, CO; Coeur d'Alene, ID & McMinnville, OR

2007-10-19T13:11:00.001-07:00

Forsyth’s daughters Mary and Anna are recovering well! Thanks for all your generous thoughts and concerns! (Anna has needed further back surgery, but she is effectively out of the danger zone!)

QUICK HEADS UP! I am caught up to the 21st Century and am now up on YouTube! Check out http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=molierelover ! There, you’ll find several clips from recent shows! Go take a look! (I'll wait.) Rate them as generously as your conscience will allow! Add me as a “Favorite”! Or “Subscribe!”

A new game seems to be afoot.

While I’m every bit as busy as I’ve ever been (the exception being the 20 days I seem to have off between my last performance and my next one), I’ve added a new mission to the mix. Performances are now mixed with audtions, and I’m doing more advance work in setting up meetings and get-togethers with old friends along the way. Somewhere, a lightbulb went off over my head, and I realized that I would be wasting the time and promotional effort I had exerted in getting to the neighborhoods of some highly regarded theatres if I went through without reaching out to make contact with the directors working there.

For instance, I’ve had some contact with the leadership of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and they know of my work, but have never seen, nor (of course) booked my show. Stopping in to share a couple of monologues with them might drive home the value of my particular adaptations of these plays. Whether or not they cast me in a play, Shakespeare, Moliere or otherwise, was less relevant in light of the exposure that I and my work would be getting. If, however, someone wanted to produce a Moliere play, AND wanted me to come in and perform the show as well, then so much the better.

It’s interesting that when it comes to taking such a proactive step in my acting career, the fear of rejection leads me to hesitate. When the process of pushing my personality on people also gets my text out in front of people, I’m much more aggressive. Perhaps it’s a matter of being able to objectify the value of my words, which live outside of myself, on the page, much better than I can objectify the value of my performances which live in-the-moment and are then gone. Rejection of my acting work is less daunting when my real goal is to promote my scripts.

In Lincoln, I met with the University of Nebraska department chair, and the Artistic Director, as well as Bob Hall, who wrote “The Passion of Dracula,” my first show at UNL as a grad student back in 1982. Paul, the department chair was getting ready for the grand opening of the refurbished theatre space, complete with fancy new lobby, the result of a last-minute grant from Johnny Carson (before his death in 2005).

On to Kearney, Nebraska, I visited with Janice Fronczak, who has settled further into her role with the University of Nebraska-Kearney, and moved into a terrific house out in the country with her artist-husband, Jeff. Janice is ALSO talking about bringing me in for a guest artist gig, perhaps in the coming year, so I’m trying to strategize how I might stack a pair of guest artist visits in Nebraska, should both schools want to bring me in. (I was also hearing from Bess in South Carolina about a similar gig!)

I pulled in to Boulder for my audition with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. I did my “School for Wives” and my “Tartuffe” for them, and they seemed nicely impressed. I continued down to Colorado Springs, where Colorado College had me in a terrific hotel. The French teacher had brought me in for this performance, and I showed up for a French class, where, as this was an informal gathering, I did not tease them with a sample of the show as I usually do. (All were promising to show up for the evening’s event, so I didn’t want to give anything away.)

After the class, I noticed a running store, where I broke down and bought some “real” running shoes, significantly lighter than the ones I’d been running in. I took them back to the hotel and ran on the treadmill in the fitness center, which faced the impressive “front range” of the Rocky Mountains just across the way. Before the show, I spotted a theatre professor, who was coming to watch the performance, but it turned out that he was a visiting prof, on loan from a school in Pittsburgh, and was amazed that I was still dawdling about in the lobby a half-hour in advance of the show.

The performance had me up on a stage, elevated over the audience, and so I took what opportunities I could to get down into the space in front of the first row. The audience, which filled only, perhaps, fifteen percent of the seats, were slow starters, particularly in the first monologue, which cued me once more to skip the “Misanthrope” scene and go straight to “School for Wives,” performed virtually in the lap of the audience, drawing lots of titters. Likewise, “Tartuffe” and “Doctor” and “Scapin” won increasingly squealing approval and cheers, and by the end, the audience belonged to me. The theatre professor stuck around afterwards, enthused about the possibility of bringing me to his school in Pittsburgh.

The University of Denver had been in constant contact to be sure that I had everything I needed for the next day’s show: parking pass, directions, hotel reservations. I did my rarely-performed workshop on Commedia (“Lots of Lazzi”), which was significantly better than the one I’d given at the Texas Theatre conference a year ago.

This show was the most expensive “Moliere Than Thou” ticket to date. While the Theatre students got in free, the public was paying $100 a pop. And while the audience was very thin, they were indeed committed, and the laughs were thick and hearty. I had, once again, set up my video camera to capture this particular performance, and the theatre found a volunteer to work the camera, which gave me one of the clearer captures of a performance than I’d acquired yet. [Clips now up on YouTube!]

Perhaps the funniest part was during the “Doctor” scene, when a group of the students who were sitting off to the side could see what my chararacter was doing with the volunteer from behind his back, laughing hilariously while the rest of the audience wondered what it was they were missing.
Afterwards, the theatre threw a reception for the $100 per ticket guests, and in anticipation of the special attention they were giving me, I changed into the suit that I had packed for the occasion.

I was receiving inquiries from my old buddy Joe Jacoby about bringing me in for class appearances at North Idaho College the following Monday. I set off early the next day, driving north from Colorado into Wyoming and Montana, pausing in Livingston, Montana for the night (there was a karoke bar right next to a hotel). By Sunday night I was in Coeur d’Alene, visiting with Joe, and crashing early for a full day of classes and driving on Monday.

At Joe’s 7 am intro to theatre class, I assembled a quick variation of my classical acting workshop, which I repeated again for the 9 am class and as usual they responded enthusiastically to the material, particularly the “Tartuffe” monologue. I was also exploring a performance of a “Hamlet” monologue, which I’d been working up for my upcoming auditions.

It was the 1 pm acting class, however, which really rocked. Word had spread beyond the class itself, and several students from previous classes returned to sit in on this class, with some (knowing what was coming in the “Tartuffe” demonstration) camping out in the front row. (One girl said, “I could watch that scene a dozen times!”)

Joe later wrote:

“Several of the students have enthusiastically thanked me for having you here. When I met with my Intermediate Acting students today and asked about what sorts of things they learned from watching you, the first response had to do with working the consonants to connect to the character, and the student clearly was surprised at its effectiveness (I've been touting that to them, but seeing it in such evident action is so terrific). He also was impressed with your idea of consonants as obstacles to the vowel's objectives. It was a wonderful visit all around. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to visit and loved watching you interact and share with the students. Thanks so much for taking the time and going so far out of your way.”

On to Oregon: I drove to McMinnville in about five hours. Fortunately the sky was overcast, so I didn’t have the challenge of having the sun setting in the same direction I was driving. I was having trouble with my neck, which has been bothering me for more than a month now. Between sitting at the computer, driving for hours and sleeping with unfamiliar pillows, my neck has gotten out of whack. I picked up a special pillow at Sharper Image to support my cervical vertebrae. Little by little, my neck was stretching out and recovering, but I made the mistake of working some Ben Gay into the muscles, which seemed to be loosening it up … However, the vapors that come with that particular product were also drying out my sinuses and the back of my throat, and I was feeling the early signs of a cold. (An early morning run through McMinnville, trying out my new shoes outside, probably didn’t help.)

I was performing in the Linfield College black box theatre, positioned on the stage floor, with about 75 seats set up, also on the floor. The faculty (two of whom I knew from SIU back in the early 80s) were uncertain about how many people might show up for an event like this, and in such a case, I usually assume that I’ll see a dozen or so in the audience, but I was surprised to see ushers grabbing more chairs and setting up more rows at the back. By the time the show got underway there may have been about 120 people in the audience. Including my brother Pat, who hadn’t seen me perform in about seven years! Between his presence, the packed house and the videotaping, I was really charged to give one of my best shows.

It’s sometimes funny to look at videotape from early performances of “Moliere Than Thou” versus the latest shows. There are moments that I’ve learned to milk, longer and longer, such as the pauses before “Stop, thief!” which I have filled with more and more mugging, as my lips purse and rearrange variously … a quirk that several people were imitating and laughing about after the show.

The staff of the theatre were extremely supportive, and the costume designer even offered to launder some of my costumes overnight, while the hosts were already thinking about bringing me back for future performances, and perhaps even a guest artist visit. The next day, I did my workshop for the acting students. They had put us in an art gallery (they were building a set in the theatre), and I’d inquired if our level of noise might bother anyone around us. The answer was, of course, “no,” but when we reached the heights of our “Hamlet” exercise, someone peeked their head in, asking if we might finish up the workshop outside. This did break our stride a bit, but we got back into it outside, and later came back in to finish up our conversation.

The next day I was on the road, heading south. The cold was starting to catch up to me, which seems to be a recurring byproduct of me having time off. With twenty days before my next shows, in Arkansas, my body apparently felt that it could shut down, and I worked to counter the cold with extra doses of Re-Liv.

I got a hotel about a hundred miles north of Sacramento, and rather than continuing in to San Francisco the next day, I lingered for 24 hours to let the cold work its way out of my system (and to do laundry and get an oil change). By the time I was driving in to San Francisco the next day, the cold was well on its way out, and I got to visit with my old friends Steven and Kajsa, and their cute toddler, Anya (which was the reason I waited for my cold to pass). Steven and I caught up on his plans to take his show (“Adventures of a Substitute Teacher”) to an educators’ convention, and I gave him some input on my experiences in conference-world.

That night, Steven and Kajsa brought me along to a 50th birthday party for a friend (where I met another friend of theirs, coincidentally named Pat Mooney), and I later caught a bus downtown to join Todd Pickering’s masquerade birthday party (Todd also went to University of Nebraska).

The next day, Steven’s friend Edwina arranged for an extra ticket for me to join them at a concert fundraiser for San Francisco’s “Pets Unlimited,” where her amazing daughter was singing, and I crashed in Todd’s apartment (while Todd was off celebrating his birthday in a fancy hotel).

Unfortunately, the only downtown parking space I could find Sunday night demanded that I move my car by 7 a.m. the next morning, so I was up early on Monday, and off to Fresno, meeting up with Jayne, one of the organizers of the Rogue Performance Festival.

Tuesday found me heading in to Los Angeles, where I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the Hollywood Video store. Somehow, I would have thought that the “Hollywood” brand would be much less impressive to people who lived in the shadow of the famous “Hollywood” sign year round. I caught dinner with Tony and Donna, two friends from the ‘06 Minnesota Fringe, and headed over to visit Michael Hofacre, who had saved me a spot on his couch. Michael was another old Nebraska friend, who now works as editor of indy films and assistant editor of some major titles (currently working on the latest Will Ferrell vehicle). With all of this time off, I was chipping away at a few projects. I was working the e-mails in my inbox down to a manageable level (struggling to hold it under 400 messages at the moment), and committing an hour a day to writing original material. I’ve had a bunch of short story ideas that usually die on the vine from a lack of follow-through, but looking lengthwise at a long time off, I realized that there was the opportunity to add some substance to my body of work, if I chained myself to the computer through the layoff period.

On Wednesday I drove out to Claremont College, where they were rehearsing a musical version of “The Miser” which used my verses for the songs. The sound was lush, and I was amazed that the composer had retained the original iambic pentameter for the most part, and still made it work musically. It was wild to hear words that I’d written in the middle of the night over ten years ago being sung in 6-part harmony by about 15 voices! Later that night, I met up with more fellow Nebraska Alums, Todd Nelson (now working for CBS) and the adorable Crystal Carson (now teaching Acting). Today I catch up with Todd and Mari Weiss (who’s doing great with voiceover these days) before heading for an audition at the San Diego Rep on Monday, and a last-minute-arranged workshop in Phoenix on Tuesday.

Miles on the car: 244,000

Discoveries: I would be wasting the time and promotional effort I had exerted in getting to the neighborhoods of some highly regarded theatres if I went through without reaching out to make contact with the directors working there. * Rejection of my acting work is less daunting when my real goal is to promote my scripts. * A “committed” audience is much more vocal, intent on getting their money’s worth. * Go easy on products that come with their own “vapor action.” * A significant body of “time off”, gives me the perfect opportunity to make headway on writing projects.

Attendance: 70 + 40 + 15 + 20 + 35 + 125 + 15 = 320

On the I-Pod: Best of Bread (New songs for “Charles” to sing) and “Seder on Sundays” (Air America Radio)

Next Performance: Siloam Springs, AR (10/29), Little Rock, AR (10/30) and Conway, AR (10/31).

Political Commentary: George Bush’s approval rating has now dropped to the level of Richard Nixon, the day he was driven from office.

The View From Here #125: Summit, NJ; Florence, SC; Glenville, WV; Bowling Green, KY; Detroit, MI

2007-09-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Forsyth, in North Carolina has always kept a couch available for my use on my passes through Raleigh, and this recent pass-through was no exception. Sadly, her daughters Anna and Mary were rear-ended by a drunken driver traveling over 100 mph last Saturday. They have survived the accident, but are still in intensive care as of this writing. Please send your thoughts and prayers of healing, warmth, love and recovery to Raleigh, NC.

The two final Minnesota Fringe shows were a blast, though the attendance showed a sharp drop for both Sunday performances (a second one being added with the designation of the “Encore” show). I had a few second-time, and even a third-time attendee, and the excitement of the final day was followed with a fun wrap-up party, in a bar apparently made famous by Prince’s movie, “Purple Rain.” We took lots of pictures with some of my new friends at least one of whom (Katherine) turned out to live only blocks away from where I was staying in Evanston. She and I managed to hang out together for a few days as she prepared for trips to Europe and South America, while I geared up for my move out of the sublet and onto the highway once again.

It was then that news came in about the death of Ray (Lewis) Pickens, and my blog entry in memoriam has received more replies (including friends and relatives of Ray who had found me on-line) than any previous entry.

I pushed through the final efforts of the summer’s e-mailing campaign, with promos going out to those final states of the alphabet (Tennessee to Wyoming) which ultimately tallied to over eleven thousand e-mails! At last I moved back out of my summer sublet, rotated my tires, washed my car and took to the road with more performances already on the books (twenty-nine) than any previous touring season.

Following a brief stop to visit Isaac in Detroit, I pushed on to New Jersey, where Summit High School was planning a Moliere play for the coming semester. Anne, the teacher, was trying to choose between “Imaginary Invalid” and “Tartuffe,” but when she heard that I’d created a 40-minute version of “Invalid” for high school use in Texas, and that I was interested in creating the same for “Tartuffe”, she decided to produce both plays as part of an evening of Moliere. (I’m currently finishing up the “Tartuffe” cutting.)

I did a two-hour after school workshop for a group of perhaps thirty kids, and Anne, who had booked me four years ago sent along a collection of thank-yous from her students, who raved about “The Tim Mooney Three-Second Rule,” my three Hamlet exercises (“Rattle the lights!” “Make ugly faces!” and “Spit!”) and my brief performance of “Tartuffe.” (One tenth-grader wrote: “Your special section on the seduction in Tartuf helped me see that I shouldn’t be afraid to go all the way.”) (Public service message to the girls at Summit High School: Watch out for Michael Gorman!)

That night I continued south, listening to the books-on-disc version of “Ender’s Game” (and eventually, “Speaker for the Dead”) by Orson Scott Card, dropping in on Maureen and Tim in the suburbs of Baltimore (who proudly showed me the amazing fish pond they are building in their back yard), before pushing on through to Raleigh where I stayed, once again, with Forsyth, Mary and Anna, for an evening of making fun of the cop shows on TV.

I continued to Francis Marion University in South Carolina, a booking that had been arranged by a playwright whose work I’d produced back in the halcyon days of Stage Two.
Jon Tuttle’s “The Hammerstone” was a brilliant and hilarious piece of theatre, but he and I had never actually met, and I wished I’d reread the play before meeting him, as details of the work were coming back to me in dribs and drabs as we spoke.

Booking an outside show was a new experience for Jon, and he had no idea what to expect, attendance-wise. Fortunately, the turn-out was good, with a fair number of French students and faculty coming out. The lighting technician was a theatre professor who knew what he was doing (and even took a couple pics from the booth) and all went without a hitch.
I was just learning about how the tweaks from the Minnesota performance impacted the rest of the show when performing the full-length version. With a new, extended version of the “Don Juan” monologue, I could feel some of the gas going out of the performance towards the end.
By the time we got to the several repetitions of “Stop Thief,” most of the laughter had been wrung out of the audience. I’d planned for a return bow in the curtain call, but about half of the audience was already getting up and heading out by then.

The several faculty members, however, were very impressed and Jon gave me the idea of relocating the “Imaginary Cuckold” monologue (which seemed to have killed the laughter late in the show) to earlier on. Perhaps seven years ago I’d initially put “Cuckold” late in the play to ease the costume transition between “Imaginary Invalid” and “Scapin,” but that consideration was largely irrelevant by now.

I had a few days to spare before my next show in West Virginia, and I took the time to plot out NEXT year’s tour, so that I could circulate word of the 08-09 schedule (at the end of this blog entry) to those folks who plan a year in advance. While most of my business has come from people who book the show perhaps the semester prior, there are “presenters” whose very job it is to assemble a full season for the coming year. As such, they go to work on next year just as soon as the current year is up and running. And so, my schedule is already laid out through May of 2009!

I drove a couple of hours to Greenwood, South Carolina, where Bess Park (who once brought me in to perform at West Virginia Wesleyan) now runs the Greenwood Community Theatre. Coincidentally, Bess’ gentleman friend, David, was hosting a karaoke contest at the Chili’s restaurant that night. I explained to them that “karaoke was kind of my thing,” but I don’t think they quite understood what I meant until I performed. David took to introducing me as coming “all the way from Chicago,” and the crowd warmed up to me with each subsequent song.

At the end of the night, they presented me with a $50 gift certificate (which was good for this particular Chili’s only, and only for the next ninety days). I passed it on for David to put to good use, and he asked me to come back on a night he was running the karaoke show again.

That weekend, I met up with Sandra (better known in these pages as “Sandra the Vegan”) who has recently relocated from Orlando to Boone, North Carolina where she works for Appalacian Voices to end mountaintop removal (www.ilovemountains.org). Sandra was working a table at the “Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion,” a mostly-bluegrass festival that takes over several blocks of downtown Bristol, a city that straddles the state line separating Tennessee and Virginia.

During the day, she would work the table (I witnessed her at one point deftly responding to a couple of coal miners who clearly did not agree with her point of view), while I mostly worked on mailings, and during the evening we watched some of the musicians. Our favorite was Diana Jones, who performed in a coffee shop without a microphone. Her rich alto voice was warm and powerful, and I could feel it vibrating the whole room, even as I discovered that I wasn’t listening to the lyrics at all.
After the show, we said hello, and when Diana discovered that Sandra was with Appalacian Voices, she gave us an impromptu performance of a couple of songs that she had only recently developed about mountaintop removal. (By now, she’s over in Europe getting ready to open for Richard Thompson’s tour.)

On to West Virginia, with a performance at Glenville State College. (West Virginia is actually gorgeous when you get off of the interstate … or at least it is when the trees still have leaves; it seems the only time I’ve raced through, the hills have seemed stark and barren.) I passed a couple of politicians’ billboards proclaiming themselves as being “a Friend of Coal,” and my host in Glenville quickly passed me a bumper sticker from the opposing side which declared me a “Friend of Mountains.”
The next morning I met with a creative writing class, where I told the tale of “my life as a writer” or at least as much of it as I could fit into 75 minutes. The climax, though, was a performance of the old, reliable “Tartuffe” monologue, which suddenly took my conversation from the theoretical, abstractly waxing on about writing and creativity, to the practical, where discussion of rhymed, iambic pentameter verses gave way to a densely layered, hilarious seduction scene. Suddenly the few students who had been nodding were fully alert.

That night was another performance of the show, and when I saw that they had drawn up their own programs for the event, I took advantage of the opportunity to rearrange the order of the monologues.

Previously, by the time “Imaginary Cuckold” would come up as the third scene from the end, the audience was only looking for the broad, overt gestures rather than the witty dialogue. With “Cuckold” as the third monologue in the series, people were actually listening to it in a new way. This time the audience was still able to discern and appreciate the many double entendres that run through that piece and, removed from its previous, late introduction, it wouldn’t detract from the climax.

This was also a venue where I was easily able to perform off the stage, on the same level as the audience, and when I approached a woman in the second row during “Tartuffe,” she absolutely convulsed with laughter, even throwing in the occasional “Oh, my God!” when I came in close in to whisper in her ear. The second half of the “Tartuffe” scene worked extremely well, with a generously-built volunteer that no one from the theatre department seemed to know, followed by the new, extended, “Don Juan” scene, the new, audience-participatory “Doctor” scene, the audience-climbing “Scapin”
scene, and finally, “Precious Young Maidens.” “PYM” was not quite the climax that it has been in previous performances (as measured by the laughs during “Stop, Thief!”), but the faculty appreciated it for its meta-theatrical qualities, and the performance was deemed a great successs.

I had a show at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, and I spent a lot of time at the hotel working through mailing lists. I was de-constructing the 11,000 piece mailing list to pull out the Performance Series Directors, Student Activity Coordinators, Deans of Students and Vice Presidents for Student Affairs, for whom I compiled yet another e-mailing announcing the 08-09 season (sent to 1,100 people this time).

I led two workshops: my usual “Life of Moliere” workshop for a French class, and another on my development as an actor-of-one-man-shows. They were interested mostly in the aesthetic principles which guided me (yes, there are some), as well as my personal history. Once again, however, it was the performance of the “Tartuffe” scene to a seated volunteer which made the “light bulb” go on for them, and they laughed at each nuance and entendre. When I finished with this seduction scene, a cute girl in the class jumped up and ran over to where her friend sat, calling out “My turn! I’m next!”

The Western Kentucky performance was the only one that had been booked from a Campus Activities conference I’d attended last spring (where my 20-minute preview had mostly bombed), and I was concerned that this group might well be more accustomed to stand-up comics and rock bands. They’d estimated that the crowd might be forty to fifty people, and we were all greatly surprised when 150 people showed up, laughing throughout. Again, I was able to redistribute the monologues to my liking, and I brought that afternoon’s nicely-built “Tartuffe” victim back up to play the Doctor’s patient with all it’s touchy-feely hilarity.

I stopped in Louisville, checking out the Louisville Slugger museum, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville, before visiting with a new friend, Colleen, who I’d first met when she’d shown up at a performance of “Criteria” in Evanston last summer.

I pushed on to Detroit, but Isaac was now out of town, on a camping field trip in West Virginia of all places. I had a show the next day for the Detroit Alliance Francaise, where I performed in a musty old club, complete with a fireplace at one end, old sofas and easy chairs as well as a bunch of wooden captain’s chairs. The lighting in the room was terrible, so I rearranged the space to place myself opposite from the windows. It would make for a wide stage running most of the length of the room, but it enabled them to see me without strain. As I returned from hauling the trunk up the several flights of stairs, I found Corinne Stavish, who’d directed me in “Harvey” back in the mid-80s!

There were at least fifty in attendance, with a wine and cheese reception preceding the event, and I milled about in street clothes assessing the audience. All but one seemed to be well over the age of forty, and so I quietly approached the young woman who affirmed her willingness to do the “Doctor” scene with me, and then slipped backstage to get into costume.

This show started slowly. These French speakers and natives may not have approved of this buffo performance of their nation’s greatest author. The elbow-to-elbow proximity was very tight and the laughs gradually started to trickle in during “School for Wives.” The chuckles increased with “Bourgeois Gentleman” and began to burst with “Tartuffe.” I was choosing good volunteers to play to, and the first “Tartuffe” victim was blushing vividly, brushing his hair out of her face as I stooped over to whisper in her ear.

From there, the response continued to build, with great response to “Don Juan” and “Imaginary Invalid,” an exciting “Doctor” scene (the bewildered young woman won the audience’s sympathy and delight), and this time “Precious Young Maidens” returned to its former success. getting bigger laughs. The audience interrupted my closing speech with applause, and when I headed off backstage, they simply continued clapping. Having been burned before for trying to stretch two bows out of one, I hesitated, but they cheered their approval when I returned for a final curtain call. Afterwards, several of them wanted to get my contact info for possible future bookings, and I visited at length with Corinne, who fixed me dinner as we recounted events of the last twenty years.

I hustled on home, where I have finally put out the huge e-mailing, and managed to assemble my thoughts as I ready yet another assault on the road, this one a much longer, protracted tour of the west and south, with no end in sight until sometime in December.

Miles on the car: 240,000

In the CD Player: Books on CD: “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead.”

On the I-Pod: Diane Jones, Roy Zimmermanand The Prince Myshkins.

Discoveries: Subtle material works early in the show; broader later. * Enable people to do their job (in booking me) before they’ve filled their dance card for the coming year. * Get off the stage and into the audience as early and often as possible. * Keep business cards inside the trunk for when people want to ask about booking the show.

Next Performance: September 28: The Aliance Francaise of Chicago.

Political Commentary: Did anyone notice that the occasion of Alberto Gonzales FINALLY resigning was driven from the headlines almost immediately by the implosion of Senator Larry Craig? Did anyone wonder who might have thought to leak that information? Or consider that the almost overlooked guilty plea by a US Senator might not have been overlooked by the Attorney General’s office? The result was that Gonzalez resignation was a single-day’s story, not even mentioned on most of the Bobblehead Sunday Talk Shows that very weekend. (Thanks to Sam Seder of Air America for use of the term "bobblehead.")

The View From Here: Remembering Ray Pickens

2007-08-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

From the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: “Ray Lewis Pickens passed away unexpectedly August 12, 2007. He is survived by his wife, Alice (Kanack) Pickens; children, Daphne & Alexander; parents, Homer & Norma Pickens; brother, Drew (Jill) Pickens; nieces, Laura, Beth & Kate Pickens. He is also survived by Alice's parents; brothers; sisters; nieces, nephews and dear friends.”

I got a call Wednesday night from Alice Pickens. Going through Ray’s things, she had come across my business card, and was reminded of Ray’s work on several of my projects. He had written music to perhaps twenty of my pop songs, many of which were used in “Karaoke Knights,” wrote incidental music for my Cleveland production of “Imaginary Invalid” and a full score for my yet unproduced adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day.”

Ray was a brilliant composer, and wrote in every imaginable genre. He was educated at the Eastman School of Music (where he was the winner of their concerto competition), and was a fellow at Tanglewood and Yaddo. In New York, Ray had a very successful career composing, singing, playing on, and producing national television and radio commercials, as well as playing piano and singing in clubs and restaurants and performing with the Metropolian Opera Orchestra. In Rochester, where he and Alice were to settle, Ray had an opera of his performed to much acclaim, and taught piano and composition, playing for several schools and many stage productions.

Ray found me on my website on-line, looking to create a musical of Moliere material, and for a time, I was exploring Moliere’s “Amphitryon” as a possible musical, though I found myself continually reverting to my familiar iambic pentameter, which was not particularly condusive to musical composition.

Ray did, however enjoy my collection of original lyrics, and through an amazingly productive period of perhaps six months, he churned out one tune after another, the result of which I occasionally get to perform as “Karaoke Knights, a One-Man Rock Opera”. It was Rays blues-tinged composition of “The Dreaming Tax” that gave me the idea for my “Charles” character, which was to lead me to the plot concept of the show, featuring five distinct characters vying for the karaoke competition prize.

Ray had his good days, as well as his bad, and his death comes at the conclusion of what was seemingly a troubled time. I think what amazed me most about him was that, on the rare occasion that his music did NOT capture the spirit of the song as I'd intended to perform it, the very next day, there would appear in my inbox a completely different interpretation of the song, crossing genres as disparate as Rap, Tango, Blues, Folk, Techno, and Tin-Pan Alley, along with the occasional nods to Elton John and Kurt Weill.

I performed the show in my living room last night for a couple of friends, just to connect once more to the spirit that Ray left behind, something I hope to continue to do for many years to come, and couldn’t help but think of him in the middle of the performance of this favorite song. Perhaps some of you will remember the fast and furious tune that Ray provided:

NEXT

I’m on top of the heap I’ve been climbing
And I’m proud of these muscles I’ve flexed
My success somehow needs better timing
Cause already I’m on to the next.

I spend much of my lifetime frustrated,
Chagrined and decidedly vexed.
Such feelings are never abated
When their owner moves on to the next

There is always a next:
It comes on with a burst
And somehow I am cursed
With not getting immersed
With the thing that comes first
It’s as if I rehearsed
Fearing if I dispersed
All my words sharp and terse
All my fears would be nursed
And my life would turn out for the worst.
There is always a next.

I stop out at the bar for a nightcap
And I sing as a lady inspects
She leans over to give me a light tap
But already I’m on to the next.

Such romantic pursuits light my fires
And some guess that I’m just oversexed
But I never fulfill those desires
Cause I keep moving on to the next

There is always a next,
It comes on with a burst
And somehow I am cursed
With not getting immersed
With the thing that comes first
It’s as if I rehearsed
Fearing if I dispersed
All my words sharp and terse
All my fears would be nursed
And my life would turn out for the worst.
There is always a next.

If a Greek tragedy was in store here
And I found I’d been Oedipus Rexed
Would I put out my eyes from the horror
Or would I just head on to the next?

When it all falls apart at the ending
See the good part’s not getting perplexed
‘Cause you can’t upset someone who’s sending
All his hopes down the line to the next.

There is always a next,
It comes on with a burst
And somehow I am cursed
With not getting immersed
With the thing that comes first
It’s as if I rehearsed
Fearing if I dispersed
All my words sharp and terse
All my fears would be nursed
And my life would turn out for the worst.
There is always a next.

I will die; there’s no getting around it
And when people all pay their respects
They will say I left life like I found it
Cause by then I’ll be on to the next.

There is always a next:
It comes on with a burst
And somehow I am cursed
With not getting immersed
With the thing that comes first
It’s as if I rehearsed
Fearing if I dispersed
All my words sharp and terse
All my fears would be nursed
And my life would turn out for the worst.
There is always a next.
There is always a next.
There is always a next!