Tim Mooney, writes about life on the road, performing one-man plays, and sharing thoughts on acting and classical theatre. Tim is author of "Breakneck Hamlet," "Breakneck Julius Caesar," "Shakespeare's Histories," "Moliere than Thou," "Lot o' Shakespeare," "The Greatest Speech of All Time," "Criteria," and his newest, "Man Cave, a One-man Sci-fi Climate Change Tragicomedy!" Tim is also author of 17 new Moliere adaptations, and the acting text, "Acting at the Speed of Life!"
It’s been a surprisingly full summer, and while I thought I’d have plenty of time to add to my blog, the time whipped by unnoticed.
The bad news: Mom had a stroke about 10 days ago. She’s out of the hospital and in a rehab facility now, but its not likely that life will ever look quite like it did before.
Where did the time go? The projects were relentless and demanding. Perhaps the main one was the acting text. I started back sometime in 2002, and have continued to re-draft and re-draw it. This may be the first time that I’ve done two drafts back-to-back, and I begin to feel like I’ve finally got a handle on the thing, either to chase the awkward phrasings from the page, or to cut loose from the threads of conversation that don’t seem to connect to anything at the other end. I’ve resolved to self-publish it, at least for now.
As soon as I decided that self-publishing was the way to go, I felt a new power over the text. I was no longer waiting for some all-knowing corporation to tell me the direction that they wanted my writing to take, but rather I would need to satisfy myself. I was no longer trying to write for a generic all-things-to-all-people audience, but for my own satisfaction. I also now have a hand, or THE hand, in the tiniest decisions, such as the font size, and the page layout, and rather than leaving it in a rather unwieldy double-spaced 500+ pages, I’ve got it down below 300, and much friendlier to the eyes.
Meanwhile, I opened a new show. About a year ago, I’d put a series of monologues onto paper, and combined those with some songs I’d written some eight years before, and discovered I had something rather potent in hand. I didn’t think I’d have a chance, or the guts, to perform the thing, particularly when I came up last on the Minnesota Fringe waiting list, but on a lark, I submitted a last-minute application to the Kansas City Fringe, and I got in. I had a friend in Kansas City who was already familiar to the material, and so I knew I’d have at least one sympathetic audience member, and I figured … WTF?
The folks at the KC Fringe were accommodating and encouraging, and I worked out on a daily basis, and ran my lines three times a day. I had a stage manager who really seemed to enjoy the show, and was happy to make changes in the music and light cues till we seemed to have the thing in a shape that really worked.
And so, now I’ve got a new show in my back pocket, which I never thought to try to sell to a venue anywhere, if only because just getting the guts to perform it was as much as I imagined I’d be able to do.
The other project, which is the main project of every summer of the last seven years, is the dogged pursuit of the next year’s bookings, exploiting every mailing list and every odd connection that I have come across. This year I faced a double challenge, with a mega-recession which seemed to hit everywhere simultaneously, combined with my next uptick in prices, as I struggle to hit a balance which enables me to dream of putting a little something away, either for a new car, or a place that I can call my own.
For a long time, the bookings seemed much fewer and further between than ever before … but as the middle of August came on, and teachers got back to their posts, and perhaps found out how much money their various legislatures had assigned to their schools, the bookings started to show up.
Meanwhile, my old high school friend Kirsten has surfaced as a benefactor in support of the show, offering matching grants to schools that otherwise might not afford the experience. It’s taken about 8 months since we first discussed the possibility, but at last a couple of schools have followed through on the program, and my first performance of the season (tomorrow, as I write this), is made possible by a generous grant from Kirsten.
Another big event this summer was bringing Isaac out from Detroit to attend a Pathways Seminar in June. It was a terrific weekend together, as I was a group-leader for the experience, and felt increasingly closer to him as the weekend went on. (He also seemed to meet a girl that he liked, there, so that didn’t hurt his take on the experience.) A month or so later, the class was having its “Fifth Day” celebration, and he asked if he could come back out for that weekend. He even suggested that if I picked him up and drove him from Detroit and back, that the twelve hours in the car might be a good “bonding experience.” Which it was.
Isaac is now 6 foot 2 (maybe 6-3, by the time you read this), and in pretty good shape as a swimmer. He’s also in driver’s ed, which meant that he could take the wheel for a couple of those hours.
Speaking of Pathways, I am once again going to be Emceeing the Pathways Scholarship Fundraiser, also known as “Pathways Idol,” a karaoke competition in which the tips to the singers count as points toward winning. Those tips then become de facto donations to the scholarship fund, and between that, and a silent auction, and a raffle, we’re looking to bring in some $20,000 this year! The event is on September 26, and is open to Pathways grads, as well as the general public (21 and over). More info (and some video) is available at: https://www.pathwaysseminars.com/pathways_idol.php
Finally, I’ve been musing for over two years now, about the Shakespeare show that I’ve want to create, collecting a monologue from every Shakespeare play, and then spinning a roulette wheel to choose which ones to do (or drawing them from a hat or somesuch). Well, somebody was listening last spring, and actually took me seriously! The folks at Auburn University-Montgomery wanted to book me for their Liberal Arts Conference for the second year in a row, but since they’ve seen my Moliere show already, they wanted to book that Shakespeare show that I’d been talking about doing.
“Oh, sure! THAT one! Yeah, I ‘spect that’ll be ready by then!”
Sometimes the most inspiring thing about preparing a show is having a booking! Much like having the Kansas City Fringe scheduled made me work up my latest one, having the Auburn U of Montgomery booking is going to push me into completing this one.
This will be one-man show number FIVE, and it may well end up being the most popular of the bunch. There was a time when I was astounded by the notion that an actor could carry around an ENTIRE PLAY in his head. Now, I’m up to five! It just proves my occasional point: You never know what you’re capable of until you find out.
Finally (I think I said finally before, but I forgot about this:) I’ve got more plays published! Playscripts, Inc. has now added my “Miser” and my “Schemings of Scapin” in both full-length and forty-minute versions to its collection. This makes for a total of eleven scripts, and I’ve been quite delighted to see productions getting scheduled on a fairly regular basis. I think there are at least a half dozen on the calendar for the coming fall.
Including, a production of “Tartuffe” that I’ll be directing at Lake Forest College this winter! (Okay, another thing I forgot, prior to saying “finally.”) I’ve already cast the show, and am really, really excited about this project. The students are not only talented, but playing roles that really play up to their talents. I haven’t directed this script since my very first Moliere attempt, back in 1997, and I’ve learned quite a bit about Moliere, and about my own directorial sensibility since then, and fully expect that this’ll be an exciting show.
That’s it! Show in Indianapolis in the morning! I won’t get this blog posted until after then (internet doesn’t seem to be working in this hotel), but I’ll save reporting on this show for the next blog, and promise not to wait so long before that one.
By the way, I believe that this is my first blog entry (after 139 blog entries) that is NOT written in chronological order! I kind of enjoyed that aspect of it. Less pressure to touch all the bases as you round them. (You probably also guessed, by now, that the photos are not in any particular relation to the text ... they're mostly ones I had lying about from my last two trips to the west coast!)
Break a leg, everybody, Love, Tim Miles on the Vibe: 329,500
Temperature: 80 degrees F
Discoveries: When I take control of my artistic product, I also take responsibility for every stage of production, and I get much more specific with my choices. * Having an opening night on the calendar is the greatest motivating factor in bringing a show to fruition.
Next Performances: September 15, Indianapolis; September 17, Rochester, NY; September 24, Roanoke, VA
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.
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 Schoolbefore 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...)
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. *
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.)
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
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.
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;
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:
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.
Where did the time go? The projects were relentless and demanding. Perhaps the main one was the acting text. I started back sometime in 2002, and have continued to re-draft and re-draw it. This may be the first time that I’ve done two drafts back-to-back, and I begin to feel like I’ve finally got a handle on the thing, 
either to chase the awkward phrasings from the page, or to cut loose from the threads of conversation that don’t seem to connect to anything at the other end. I’ve resolved to self-publish it, at least for now. 
I also now have a hand, or THE hand, in the tiniest decisions, such as the font size, and the page layout, and rather than leaving it in a rather unwieldy double-spaced 500+ pages, I’ve got it down below 300, and much friendlier to the eyes.
I had a friend in Kansas City who was already familiar to the material, and so I knew I’d have at least one sympathetic audience member, and I figured … WTF?
And so, now I’ve got a new show in my back pocket, which I never thought to try to sell to a venue anywhere, if only because just getting the guts to perform it was as much as I imagined I’d be able to do. 
This year I faced a double challenge, with a mega-recession which seemed to hit everywhere simultaneously, combined with my next uptick in prices, as I struggle to hit a balance which enables me to dream of putting a little something away, either for a new car, or a place that I can call my own. 
Meanwhile, my old high school friend Kirsten has surfaced as a benefactor in support of the show, offering matching grants to schools that otherwise might not afford the experience. It’s taken about 8 months since we first discussed the possibility, but at last a couple of schools have followed through on the program, and my first performance of the season (tomorrow, as I write this), is made possible by a generous grant from Kirsten. 
Isaac is now 6 foot 2 (maybe 6-3, by the time you read this), and in pretty good shape as a swimmer. He’s also in driver’s ed, which meant that he could take the wheel for a couple of those hours. 
Finally, I’ve been musing for over two years now, about the Shakespeare show that I’ve want to create, collecting a monologue from every Shakespeare play, and then spinning a roulette wheel to choose which ones to do (or drawing them from a hat or somesuch). Well, somebody was listening last spring, and actually took me seriously! The folks at Auburn University-Montgomery wanted to book me for their Liberal Arts Conference for the second year in a row, 
but since they’ve seen my Moliere show already, they wanted to book that Shakespeare show that I’d been talking about doing. 
Sometimes the most inspiring thing about preparing a show is having a booking! Much like having the Kansas City Fringe scheduled made me work up my latest one, having the Auburn U of Montgomery booking is going to push me into completing this one. 
This will be one-man show number FIVE, and it may well end up being the most popular of the bunch. There was a time when I was astounded by the notion that an actor could carry around an ENTIRE PLAY in his head. Now, I’m up to five! It just proves my occasional point: You never know what you’re capable of until you find out.
Finally (I think I said finally before, but I forgot about this:) I’ve got more plays published! Playscripts, Inc. has now added my “Miser” and my “Schemings of Scapin” in both full-length and forty-minute versions to its collection. This makes for a total of eleven scripts, and I’ve been quite delighted to see productions getting scheduled on a fairly regular basis. I think there are at least a half dozen on the calendar for the coming fall. 
Including, a production of “Tartuffe” that I’ll be directing at Lake Forest College this winter! (Okay, another thing I forgot, prior to saying “finally.”) I’ve already cast the show, and am really, really excited about this project. The students are not only talented, but playing roles that really play up to their talents. 
I haven’t directed this script since my very first Moliere attempt, back in 1997, and I’ve learned quite a bit about Moliere, and about my own directorial sensibility since then, and fully expect that this’ll be an exciting show.
but I’ll save reporting on this show for the next blog, and promise not to wait so long before that one.
