Well, it’s been all
Hamlet, almost all of the time now!
I spent much of
January working on Hamlet’s Act III, which is the longest of the five, at least
as I’ll be performing them. As with all of my Fringe Festival shows, I’m
fighting to keep this show under 60 minutes, which means that Hamlet’s five
acts need to AVERAGE 12 minutes each.
Act III checks in at
around 18 minutes! But it’s where all the fireworks happen: From “To be or not
to be,” to “Get thee to a nunnery, to the “Advice to the Players,” to the
crucial play within the play, to the passed opportunity to kill Claudius (“Now
might I do it pat”) to the unfortunate killing of Polonius, to the reprimand of
Gertrude (“Oh, Shame, where is thy blush?”)… It all kind-of had to BE there in
order to tell this story. (In time since
January, I seem to have picked up the pace to get Act III down closer to 16
minutes, so there’s hope.)
I crossed my fingers
that Acts IV and V would be shorter.
I paused to do
another Pathways Weekend.
 |
| "Why so negative, man?" |
560,000 miles, 500+
performances,150,000+ students, and 7+ one-man plays later, I seem to still be at it.
Over the years, I’ve
gone back to Pathways, giving back for the great things I have received, and
getting a renewed focus and energy each time. I signed on as a Group Leader for
last January’s seminar.
With this new round
of inspiration, I dove into working out of my own apartment, improving my
voiceovers, recording my first book for an audio-book audience, chasing down
acting and literary agents… and working on Hamlet.
There was a moment of
honest inspiration this time around, when I found myself strongly moved by the
generosity of the students and the attendees at large, who stepped up
enthusiastically to support a friend in need.
Contemplating that
discovery (people are genuinely supportive), in light of the new project
(Hamlet) and the sticking point that I have found so challenging over the years
(working my way out from under all of the production, promotion and travel
expenses that my plays have demanded)… and the fact that I was reading Amanda
Palmer’s terrific book, “The Art of Asking…”
I realized that amid
my determination to make it all happen myself, as a “one-man show,” I was
stubbornly holding on to my need to demonstrate that I could do it all by
myself… to survive by work ethic and will power, perhaps embarrassed by any
need to turn to others. But clearly, over the years of doing this, I had the
work ethic and the will power, as well as a “base” of people who actively care
whether this work gets done. What I needed was support.
And, as Amanda Palmer
points out, amid issues of the modern predicament of downloading and cd
burning, the question is not “how to get people to pay for music,” but “how do
we let them?”
“The Hamlet Project”
became “Something about Hamlet,” which became “The One Man Hamlet,” which
became, and now is, “Breakneck Hamlet.” I was facing, once again, all of the
start-up costs that come with a new show… Normally, I would throw it all on the
credit card and hope to make it up over a year or so of performances.
But, given that I was
also working to develop a home base (i.e., maintaining rent for a space that I
might actually live in), with no immediate alternate source of income, might
there be a way of making this show happen without putting myself in the hole?
Might it be possible to actually secure the costume, the production, the
promotion, the tour IN ADVANCE? To support the birth of the new show with confirmed
resources, rather than doing it halfway, spending as LITTLE as possible on the
event?
The vision for the
Indiegogo campaign had begun to form, though it wasn’t quite there yet.
Because, I was back
on the road!
January 22, I was
performing “The Greatest Speech of All Time” for the Georgia Health Care
Association. Their Vice President had seen me perform “Criteria” for the
Georgia Theatre Conference last fall, and name-tagged me as a "Renowned Speaker."
January 23 I was back
in Greenwood, SC, where my good friend, Bess Park was directing my version of
“The Learned Ladies,” with a bunch of enthusiastic high school students. I sat
in on a rehearsal that night, and another rehearsal and a workshop the
following afternoon, pushing the boundaries of many of the stylized performance
techniques that I’d been exploring over the years. (I shortened my usual “three
second rule” to a “zero second rule,” so that the actors would sharply pivot to
look directly out at the audience every time they had a line. I haven’t laughed
that hard in a long time!)
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| Fringe Friend Charlie Bechtel, who showed up in Greenwood, SC |
That night I had a
performance of “Moliere than Thou” with a terrific audience, and a really nice
reception sponsored by the generous family of one of the actors in “Learned
Ladies.”
With a brief break
between shows, I zipped down to Florida, visiting with the Pergandes, and my
friend, Tisse, enjoying a bit of warm weather.
I was working on a last
minute “Romeo & Juliet” project. A woman from Charlotte Latin School had
contacted me some three weeks prior to ask if I might be able to do something
on “Romeo & Juliet” for her students. The main North Carolina touring Shakespeare
troupe had gone out of business, but they had funds set aside for programming
in support of R&J, which their students would be reading. By the time I’d
be passing through North Carolina, they would be somewhere around Act III in
their work. Might I be able to do a performance of material from the first
three acts?
 |
| The Lava Lamp B&B |
I sat down and edited
R&J down to it’s bare essentials, with my usual snarky narrative bridging through
the important speeches of the first three acts. My hosts would be forgiving if
I carried the script with me for this show, rather than performing “off-book,”
and, given that my January assignment (memorizing Act III of Hamlet) was
complete already, I gave myself a week to repeat all of this material some nine
times a day. I actually had a good grasp on it by the time I performed it, and
was able to get my eyes up off of the page for the majority of the show. It was
the first time I’d ever done anything in depth with “Romeo and Juliet” and I
was seeing it, almost for the first time, not so much for the plot, but for the
imagery that saturates the dialogue throughout. I was noticing “star-crossed”
themes of stars, light, the sun, the moon, the darkened night, sight and
blindness and their relation to love, riddled throughout the play.
It struck me that
this was a whole new opportunity: as long as I didn’t have to be word perfect
on the dialogue, I might be able to “channel” a dozen or so of Shakespeare’s
most in-demand plays, for schools like this, where the curriculum might be
centered around “Romeo & Juliet,” or “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Midsummer,”
“Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest,” “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure” “Much
Ado,” or “Shrew…” Of course, “Hamlet” was already well on its way, and I had
the “Histories” covered.
 |
| "... or we will send Jesus after you..." |
The next day I was
back to Duke University for a second performance. (I’d performed here perhaps
four years prior, with a nice audience and a fun reception following the show.)
This time the teacher and the facilty seemed overpressed for time, and while I
might get in to set up in advance, I wouldn’t have a technician, and the teacher
and her class (of perhaps a dozen) wouldn’t arrive until just before the
performance. They did, still, host a bit of a reception, and I secured a glass
of wine to keep as a prop, on stage with me, not indulging until the end of the
play. It was a quiet crowd, and I was surprised by the enthusiasm they
expressed after the show was done. (I generally interpret quiet as discomfort
or even hostility.)
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| 21?! How is this possible? |
Meanwhile, there were
some Significant Life Decisions pending…
The opportunity in
Annapolis seemed to be less focused on my work as an actor,
with very little money to earn once I might relocate out that way. In the
meantime, I picked up a new voiceover agency in Chicago, and seemed to be
making and reestablishing more connections in that area. Also, I was getting
more excited about “Hamlet.”
I made the decision
to nix relocation out east, and concentrate my efforts on “Hamlet” and Chicago.
And now that I had cleared my decks for the summer ahead of me, there was still
time to apply for some of my favorite Fringe Festivals: Kansas City,
Minneapolis and Indianapolis, thus premiering “Hamlet” in advance of offering
it on the road.
I’d planned to give
myself the month of February to memorize Act IV, and the month of March to
memorize Act V. But once I finished my work on Act IV I just kept going,
getting all five acts under my belt before February was through, and proceeding
to run the entire play on a daily basis.
Getting a play memorized
and getting it performance-ready are two very different things. Having “Hamlet”
memorized simply meant that I could somehow make my way through it, with a
modicum of accuracy, without looking at the script, even if, in those first run
throughs, it might take me 70 minutes to make it through a play that I needed
to be able to perform, ultimately, in 60. I often tell people that I memorized
my first one-man show in about 6 months, but it wasn’t until about 6 months
after that when I felt secure performing it. And so, my goal in subsequent
productions has been to start that six-month clock ticking as far in advance of
the first performance as possible!
With “Hamlet” mostly
secure, I directed my energy back onto “Shakespeare’s Histories; Ten Epic Plays
at a Breakneck Pace,” which I would be performing March 6 at the Southeast
Theatre Conference in Chattanooga.
 |
| If my sister ran a donut shop... |
The audition, itself,
seemed a bit of a bust. Given that the auditor was not listed as the director
of any of the plays in the coming season, and the questionnaire I filled out in
advance had queries such as “Would you be willing to understudy, even if not
cast?” I realized that exposure and/or income from this particular opportunity
would be minimal, at best.
For years I have
lectured students about “finding your light,” always using the audition session
as my extreme scenario, but since I haven’t auditioned in years, I generally
felt like I was mostly inventing the crazy situation where you find yourself
auditioning in a darkend room with only a single light giving you perhaps five
square feet of viable playing area. Well, that was pretty much exactly what I
had to work with at the Folger: it was a conference room with dim window
illumination, and only a couple of overhead “can” lights offering little spots
of light, only one of which was in any relation to the director’s table.
I did my “Comedy of
Errors” monologue right under that light, moving out of it only long enough for
Antipholus to say: “They fell upon me, bound me, bore me thence, and in a dark
and dankish vault at home, left me, and my man, both bound together, till,
gnawing with my teeth, my bonds in sunder, I gained my freedom…” and, finding
my way back into the light, I remained there for the rest of the speech.
From D.C., I raced on
to Harrisonburg, Virginia, meeting with my costume designer, Kathy Conery (she
did the cool “Lot o’ Shakespeare” costume) to talk “Hamlet,” and, from there,
worked my way to Chattanooga.
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| SETC Style Council |
It was good to be
back at SETC, which I’d missed the year prior, while performing “Scapin” in
Michigan. I got to visit with a bunch of old friends, and performed
“Shakespeare’s Histories” as part of their fringe festival. The show was very
well received by an audience of about 80, and extending the one-man show
metaphor, I also passed out programs prior to the start, and sold books as
people were leaving. My favorite comment from the audience that night was
“After seeing your Moliere play a few years back, I made a promise to myself to
never miss a Tim Mooney show…!”
Heading back towards
Chicago a few days later, there was very little snow left on the ground, but as
I passed through Kentucky, the many broken branches and fallen trees testified
to the massive weight of the snow that had descended along this highway!
Following one last
performance of “Shakespeare’s Histories” at Lewis University, I put myself
full-force into “Hamlet:” now entitled “Breakneck Hamlet,” a nod to the brand
that I had begun to establish with “Shakespeare’s Histories; Ten Epic Plays at
a Breakneck Pace!” Between that and “Hamlet” and the new “Romeo & Juliet”
presentation, the new brand was taking shape as “Breakneck Shakespeare,” which
seems to instantly dismiss our greatest fear surrounding Shakespeare: that we will
sit there for a long time with very little action.
I engaged Marcus
Fernando to do one of his fun photo compilations again, and with my usual
illustrator, Lee Rushton, unavailable, I chased down David Jensen, who had done
my original “Moliere than Thou” illustration 15 years before, to do a new piece
for “Breakneck Hamlet”. (It will make an amazing coffee mug; it reminds me of
how I feel just before that first cup of coffee.)
I started an on-line
“countdown” on Facebook, putting up sketches and photos as they came in,
beginning one week in advance of the anticipated “Indiegogo Breakneck Hamlet
Campaign!”
Once I had gone
“public” with the plans for the campaign, and a date for it to begin, suddenly,
I had to take the launch of the campaign VERY SERIOUSLY! I composed text for
the Indiegogo website, and repeatedly edited and re-edited a script for a video
in support of the campaign. The video script started out somewhere around ten
minutes long, carefully laying out all of the rationale and the need and the
benefits of this program, with lots of detail and lots of talk about swag or
“perks.” (I hate spelling the word this way, because perqs is actually short
for “perquisites,” but I think that people just assume that these are extra
things that “perk up” our interest.) 
Meanwhile, I was
researching successful campaigns, learning that videos really ought not be more
than three minutes long. (I continued cutting and cutting, and then memorizing
and memorizing…) I learned that the most successful day to start a campaign was
on a Monday (when people got back to work with a fresh start), and the most
successful day to end was on a Friday (when people got paid).
I was drawing and
redrawing the website plans, but was having a hard time “seeing” how it would
all look once it was officially launched. I noted that there seemed to be an
interim step, where I could put up a draft of the website, and go back and work
and rework it before officially setting the campaign in motion. There was a
“button” there in the set-up phase that seemed to enable that process.
After much back and
forth, I simply could not NOT work any further without seeing what this was
going to look like and on Friday, March 13, somewhere around 3 pm, I hit the
“LAUNCH” button.
Apparently, the button
that I had intended to click was the “PUBLISH” button.
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| The Perqs are arriving already! |
Three days early, the campaign was underway! There was no looking back, and there would be no
“getting it right.” If ever I would need to “go with the flow,” this was it.
(In fact, the surprise launch was probably going to work in my favor: it gave
me a story to tell about this adventure, and underlined the urgency of the
event. It also meant that the fundraiser would END three days early, too. So
much for wrapping things up on a Friday!)
Of course, if you
read my most recent edition of “The View From Here,” you know this already. If
not, this might be a good moment to track back to “Issue #165: The IndiegogoCampaign!”
I raced that edition
into publication that same night, all the while dashing off e-mails to my most
likely and loyal supporters. I believe I was up until about 3 am that night,
rather astonished at how quickly the contributions were coming in!
By the time I went to
bed that first night, we were just shy of the $1,000 needed to guarantee the
design/construction of Hamlet’s costume, and by the time I woke up the next
morning, we were there! I recorded a video to commemorate the successful reach
of the first goal, and turned my attention to the next major hurdle.
Raising the next
$3,500 would not be easy. I had set my easiest hurdle for the opening of the
campaign, since the costume was simply something that the show could not be
done without. This time, I was taking on Photos, Art, Web Design and Publicity:
less “sexy,” but very necessary. I was posting to Facebook repeatedly, creating
an Indiegogo Facebook event, to which I could “invite” people, and hitting up
good friends and family.
Early on, some $1,600
arrived via “snail mail” from friends who weren’t comfortable posting their
credit card info on-line. That gave us a confusion of tallies, with the
Indiegogo site reading one total, but with me knowing that we were
significantly farther along. By Thursday, March 19, our cumulative total
crossed the second goal, and I pulled together another video. (The videos were
a further enticement to donate… or at least to keep the narrative going, as I
promised to perform another monologue for each goal that we managed to pass.)
And there, the energy
dropped…! While the first four days of the campaign had averaged about $800
each day, the second full week of the campaign was almost entirely under $100.
(Only on that first day of that week did we reach $115.)
I started
transferring over the monies that had come in to the post office, so that the
success of the campaign would be reflected in the on-line totals, and potential
donors would realize we were on-track to make our goals.
I found that
campaigns that do, actually, reach their goals on Indiegogo, get to retain a
higher percentage of their donations, which would mean more than $500 going to
the cause, as long as we hit that magic number of $11,000.
I was biding my time
somewhat, keeping the campaign afloat long enough until that final week, where
a sense of “urgency” would once again, push the program forward. There is a
clear difference between telling someone that there are three weeks left to
contribute vs. ten days, vs. one week, vs. ONE DAY!
And as I post this, we are only SEVEN DAYS OUT from the exciting conclusion! We've leveled off at
$7,847 (averaging only $10 over the last three days). Actually reaching our
goal remains very much in doubt. The trending lines aren’t good at the moment.
It is still a HUGE
success, and I can’t deny that we’re doing MUCH BETTER than I’d dared to hope,
but hope is an addictive commodity. Poised, as we are, just shy of the goal,
I’m gearing up to take one more run at it, hoping that I haven’t alienated
everyone in my address book.
Of course, this is
the moment that I turn to you and ask for your support, either by going to http://igg.me/at/BreakneckHamlet with a donation, or sending word to your friends. I do
think that we will probably make it… though I don’t know quite how, quite yet.
And, just on the
offchance that those last minute donations do push us through Goal #3 (Fringe
Festival Tour) and Goal #4 (The Fall School Tour), I have begun work on a new
“Stretch Goal,” which is the creation of a book: “The Breakneck Hamlet
Companion,” in much the same style as last year’s “Shakespeare’s Histories”
book: with script on one side of each page, and discussion on the facing side. Each
time I rehearse these lines, I seem to think of new things I want to talk about
in such a “Companion” book, and over the weekend, I drew up a bunch of ideas for Act
I already. How cool would it be to hit the ground running with a fully
produced, publicized, funded and, now, annotated production?
Speaking of hitting
the ground running, the new “Swag/Perqs/Perks”, with t-shirts and coffee mugs
and sticker that making great use of the new illustration have begun to arrive!
These will be popular not only for the fundraiser, but for sale after
performances, as well.
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| YES, WE HAVE STICKERS! |
Yes, opening day just
crept up about SIX WEEKS EARLIER than planned!
Good thing I’ve been
drilling those lines!
Love,
Tim
Discoveries: People
are genuinely supportive. * My need to demonstrate that I can survive by work
ethic and will power, cuts me off from the potential of support. * Securing the
production needs of the play in ADVANCE of the first performance is a radical
idea, whose time has come. * My formula for “Shakespeare’s Histories” and
“Hamlet” could be applied to a dozen or so Shakespeare plays, opening up the
possibility of many exciting presentations, as long as I let go of the need to
memorize each one of them to perfection. * What seems like discomfort or
hostility from the stage, may simply be “awe” from the audience. * Getting a
play memorized is one thing; getting it performance-ready quite another. * Our
mistakes sometimes make great stories, which lead to unexpected success. * Hope
is an addictive commodity. * Just when it looks like you could never possibly
achieve your goal is when you should figure out what you will do next once you
DO.
Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre
Tour Schedule
(Available dates in CAPITAL LETTERS; Already-booked
dates in GREEN;
Pending bookings in BLUE; Festival opportunities in RED)
MTT = “Moliere than Thou”; LoS = “Lot o’ Shakespeare; GSAT =
“Greatest Speech of All Time”
SUMMER, 2015
7/16-26 Kansas City Fringe Festival
7/30-8/9 Minnesota Fringe Festival
8/13-23 Indy Fringe Festival
FALL, 2015
9/1-4 ILLINOIS
9/8-11 IOWA / WISCONSIN / MINNESOTA / NORTH & SOUTH DAKOTA
9/14-18 NEBRASKA / COLORADO / WYOMING / UTAH
/ MONTANA
9/17 Snow College? (LoS)
9/21-25 IDAHO / WASHINGTON / OREGON
9/28-10/2 CALIFORNIA / NEVADA
10/5-9 ARIZONA / NEW MEXICO / TEXAS
10/9-10 Laredo Community College? (Hamlet & Criteria)
10/12-16 TEXAS / OKLAHOMA / LOUISIANA / ARKANSAS /
KANSAS
10/14 Texas Wesleyan University (MTT)
10/18-23 MISSOURI /
MISSISSIPPI / ALABAMA / TENNESSEE / KENTUCKY
10/25-30 FLORIDA / GEORGIA / SOUTH CAROLINA / NORTH
CAROLINA
11/2-6 VIRGINIA / WEST VIRGINIA / MARYLAND / DELAWARE / DC / NEW JERSEY
11/9-13 PENNSYLVANIA / NEW YORK / NEW
ENGLAND
11/16-20 OHIO / INDIANA / MICHIGAN / ILLINOIS
11/19-20 Southern Illinois University (MTT)
11/23-12/4 ILLINOIS
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