And so, we steer another year of the View From Here to the end … I fear.
It’s now been four years on the road. Four years smacks of the academic calendar, and I hereby declare my graduation with a Masters in Touring. (Technically, I began all of this in September of 2002, but I’ve progressed through four “school years” in the process.) I have spent the last week re-reading the entirety of the “View From Here,” struck, repeatedly, by how often I have managed to make the same, banal, observations, over and over again. But I’ll get to that, soon.
My final day in Scotland featured a visit to Edinburgh, getting info from the Fringe Headquarters (Edinburgh hosts the granddaddy of all fringes), and scoping out possible venues. It was a cloudy day, so the photos may not be spectacular, but I managed to pick up a few souvenirs, including a tartan scarf for mother’s day, in the plaid pattern of the MacKays, which I’m told are close relations to the McGees, which is Mom’s side of the family.
After one more dinner out, in Stirling, Martin, Liz and I called it a night early. Driving back to Kippen, I am reminded of another dialect quirk: People who cut you off in traffic are “Cheeky!” Usually “Cheeky” is followed by some sort of a noun.
Back at Martin and Liz’ house, a thank you card awaited me from the cast, along with a bottle of “Aberlour” a single-malt Scotch whiskey.
The next morning, Martin and I were up at 3 a.m., on our way to the airport. He sent me off with one final Scottish figure of speech: “Haste ye back.”
Following a short hop to Amsterdam, I boarded the flight to Chicago. The sun was up already, and would remain up throughout, so I put on my sleep mask and tried to catch a few winks. There was an Indian couple sitting next to me, but as I wanted to get all the sleep I could, I didn’t strike up any conversation. As I started to doze, I noted a scent in the air. The woman next to me was applying some sort of “Vapor-Rub,” which I could feel burning the back of my throat.
(I’ve heard of people getting upset about peanuts being served on a flight, but I can imagine little worse than Vapo-Rub amid the recirculated air of a plane cabin.)
In my half-asleep state, I didn’t want to wake myself further with the commotion of trying to relocate, so I simply tried breathing less. Upon reflection, probably not the best idea.
I arrived in Chicago, released quickly through customs, but there was no sign of my dad, who was to pick me up. I checked the baggage claim at another terminal, and then doubled back to find Dad and Mom, watching the passengers emerging. Apparently they were unable to get short-term parking at O’Hare, so it was another tram ride, followed by a bus to the parking lot, and a protracted search for the car in the long-term lot. It was about an hour after landing, that we were on the road again, heading home. I spent about 10 minutes throwing luggage into the car, and raced off on my way, stopping only at April’s house, to send off the most recent edition of the View From Here.
I was slowed for about an hour in traffic on the Dan Ryan not-so-expressway, making my way into southern Indiana, where I slept, finally, before continuing on to Lexington the next morning.
In Lexington, I was performing in what was essentially the lobby/foyer of a private school. I was suddenly anxious upon seeing the hustle of between-class foot traffic, swarming through the space where I would soon be performing. They assured me that, since all the kids in the school would be attending (with 100 or so chairs to be set up in the lobby), there wouldn’t be any such traffic during my show.
Meanwhile, they were concerned that my show, which cannot possibly be done in less than 55 minutes, would run over the time scheduled, particularly as the students each had to return to their home room to cast a student council vote before proceeding to the performance.
While I’d brought my projector, the school already had a projector and a screen set up in the foyer, which would dominate the background, casting images ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide behind me. It took me most of the hour leading up to my show to figure out how I would stage the thing without getting caught in the glare of the projector. I had to stand a good 7 feet downstage of the screen, which put me very close to the students, forcing them to adjust their chairs backwards.
When the students came in to sit down, they didn’t all sit in the chairs, but on the staircase, up on the second floor, looking down at me over, or through a railing, and wrapping around to my sides, upstage left and right of my position. I was essentially performing the show in about 270 degrees, to an audience that was both on my own level, and one floor above me. It was disorienting.
Also, once I began the show, I could feel just how much vocal strength it would take to “fill” this particular space. Even though the students were all within about 50 feet, the space was not confined, and the voice would trail off down adjacent corridors. Anything delivered under my breath would be lost on most of the students.
And so, it was a long improvisation, creating a style of delivery to fit this odd environment.
The kids took it very seriously. Which isn’t to say that they took me very seriously (a couple in the first row seemed to be having a laugh early on at my running pantomime), but they took the plot seriously. I saw a couple of teachers who appreciated the fact that the dialogue was “winking” beneath the stern attitude of the character, but the students didn’t “get” any of it until the diner scene was well underway, about 25 minutes into the show.
I kept the prop script very close this time, allowing my character to turn pages in the early scenes, as insurance against getting lost. (The setting was so unusual that I thought it would be worth the slight distraction of turning pages in order to make sure I didn’t have to stop dead.) I gathered confidence as I went, and by the time the diner scene came up, I didn’t look back, even though I may have ad-libbed my way out of a couple of jams. The final scene demanded an intensity and vocal output that was extreme, and I sensed that I “had them.”
I finished, walked off, returning for a quick bow. I exited to the classroom from which I’d entered, and the applause kept coming. I flirted with the idea of returning, but felt that the applause would die the moment I committed to another bow, and so I stayed offstage.
I packed up my props and went to lunch with my host, all the while being congratulated by students who anointed the show as “awesome.”
I continued south, into Tennessee, catching up once more on e-mails, and hitting a karaoke bar with Sabra. We returned to a place where the response had been lukewarm on my last pass through, but this time we were the only ones singing, and eventually the crowd was chanting “Ti-im! Ti-im! Ti-im!” As much as I enjoyed the attention, the smoke was killing my already tired voice, and we continued on to a much quieter joint, where the bartender and the only three patrons remembered us from the last visit. They had no “KJ” in place, but I figured out how to start up the machine, and we had a real game of “karaoke roulette,” as three of us would jump up to sing along, every time we recognized a song. In this fashion I sang “American Pie” for the first, and hopefully only time ever. I also sang the Olivia Newton John song, “I Honestly Love You,” in the style of Tom Waits, or, as he’s known in my play, “Charles.” When I announce that I’m doing the Tom Waits version of the song, everyone assumes that Tom Waits must have done some obscure cover version on one of his many albums. It’s pretty hilarious.
Saturday I worked, once again on the “Karaoke Knights” DVD. I had a performance coming up in Texas in a few days, and I wanted to readjust some volume levels, as well as put “chapter headings” into the disc. This way, if I should screw up a number somehow, I would be able to skip back or forward just to the beginning of this particular song, without starting the whole disc over. The process demanded that I go all the way back to the start, fixing the mp3, making that into a “wav” file, which I then apply to the “cdg,” which I make into an “avi”. I then “render” the avi’s into a DVD, and “burn” the DVD. It took all day on Saturday, but I finally came up with a finished product at around midnight, and just to be sure, I burned 5 more copies of “Version 6.2” of the disc, as backups. (I’ve been walking a tightrope with a single copy for too dangerously long!)
Meanwhile, I was negotiating a schedule via e-mail. My Monday gig in Richardson, Texas had written to say that my show would start at 12:30, and that I could do the tech rehearsal any time that morning. It gradually dawned on me that if I were rehearsing in the morning, and performing from 12:30-2 pm, then when, exactly, would I do the workshop we’d arranged?
Apparently they wanted a 2-hour acting workshop AFTER the show, during a time that I’d planned to make the 3-hour-20-minute trip to Brownwood for a 7:30 performance of “Karaoke Knights.” (I’d never had a high school gig go this late, and had felt somewhat secure in arranging the Brownwood performance, which by now had been plastered on posters and into the newspaper.)
Eventually, I got Richardson to settle for a 1-hour workshop (with a significant discount), and Brownwood agreed to start as late as 8 pm, if necessary.
They put me up in a terrific hotel in Richardson. Monday morning I rehearsed “Karaoke Knights” with the new disc, and headed in to the school, performing Moliere to about 70 kids, as well as my old friend, Kevin Page. (Given the interaction that I have with High School girls, Kevin writes that he wants to be me when he grows up … of course, he didn’t use those exact words.)
Changing costumes quickly, I repacked my trunk and addressed the theatre students. I took them through the first half of my workshop, with the “Hamlet” exercise, and though the hour had expired (with me doing further damage to my throat), I stayed just a little longer for a brief Q&A with the students.
I loaded back up and jumped on the road, racing out of the Dallas/Fort Worth area as quickly as I could, with only the slightest of slowdowns as rush hour approached. From then on it was clear sailing, and I raced west and then south, sucking on cough drops all the way.
With the help of Nancy Jo’s best tech student, James, I unloaded the car and set everything up in record time. We were actually able to open the house by 7:30, but only after making the unfortunate discovery that my separate Karaoke DVD, featuring 15 songs for the audience to sing along with, had warped in the car in recent months.
This meant that any Karaoke Warm-Up Event, which had been advertised in the newspaper already, would need to be a cappella. I did the two songs I knew by heart, “Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk,” and launched into the play. (Nancy Jo later got hassled by her administration when a student apparently complained about the song “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”)
The rest of the show went well, and I somehow managed to sing through the entire show, with James improvising on the lights as we proceeded.
The next day, I did an acting workshop, which again taxed my voice to the limit, and returned for a final performance of “Karaoke Knights” that night, after building a few karaoke videos that I could actually play through my computer for the advertised “warm up,” keeping us away from the scandalous, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
From there, it was south to Houston, where high school teacher Nancy Varga had arranged a living room party performance of Moliere as a preview for local high school teachers. Unfortunately no local high school teachers were available, so she populated the living room with her friends, her kids, and their friends, all of whom contributed a few bucks into the basket for gas money.
With the spring semester hereby complete, I drove east to New Orleans once more. I gave myself two days to relax and enjoy the sights. Sabra had likewise come down on a break, and Playwright Gil Martin was in town, too, working on the relief effort. We hung out at the Cat’s Meow, drinking hurricanes, singing and collecting beads. My voice had begun the recovery process, but I now had weeks before the next scheduled performance. For the moment, it was hard to imagine ever being able to pull off the “One-Man One-Man Theatre Festival” in a single night, but perhaps by late June, I’ll be there.
Word comes in from the University of Oklahoma: They want to hire me to perform in “Precious Young Maidens” and “School for Husbands” next January/February.
Sign seen in Arkansas: “CRETIN HOMES.”
Word from Grande Prairie, Alberta: They spotted an open weekend on my schedule between the Edmonton Fringe and the Vancouver Fringe, and have requested that I come to them to perform “The One-Man Fringe Festival” with all three of my plays in a single weekend.
Meanwhile, I’ve committed to group leading for the Pathways weekend coming up June 8-11, and as a part of my objective-setting exercise, I’m committing to having my four books complete by that time. I’ve spent the last week at home rereading this entire collection of “letters home,” getting 530 pages of “The View From Here” down to 323 pages. I am shocked at how many times, through the course of the last four years, I have repeated the same damn thing over and over again, and am especially impressed at the tolerance you all seem to have for me doing so.
I realize that you may not need to be reminded after every performance that the audience “enjoyed” “Moliere Than Thou”, and perhaps that continuous reassertion is mostly about me assuring myself. Certainly you’ve read more than enough about how the various “volunteer scenes” play, and of course you know that I spend a lot of my time e-mailing, if only to make all of these bookings possible, and a lot of time driving, elsewise, how would I be earning this living? (I’m working on extracting some percentage of these tired references from the book.) And while, by now you all know that Isaac is in Detroit, Maureen is in Baltimore, Pat is in Salem, and Forsyth is in North Carolina, I may take some of these names and episodes “as read.”
For what it’s worth, I’m declaring this the end of the book. Of course the process never ends, and any beginning or ending is pretty arbitrary, and sequels are always possible but four years of school performances seems to make a punctuation mark of some sorts. With the recent addition of European travel, pending publications, and longer-term performance bookings, as well as a very busy Fall on the horizon, the nature of the thing seems to be making a sea change, of sorts. And since there is really no one to insist otherwise, I hereby assert that I have graduated, and wherever it is that I go next will be the “next level.”
Time to declare victory and go home.
Haste ye back.
Love,
Tim
Attendance: 90 + 70 + 60 + 30 + 25 + 18 = 293
Temperature: 70s
In the CD Player: Le Grande Debacle
Discoveries: I have managed to make the same, banal, observations, over and over again. * I have graduated, and am moving up to the next level.
Miles on the Vibe: 187,000
Next Performance: June 30, Chattanooga (The One-Man One-Man Play Festival)
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
The View From Here #111: Carbondale & Chicago, IL; Pitlochry, Scotland
So, cutting to the chase, two things that you may want to know:
I did, in fact, go to Scotland.
The Fintry Amateur Dramatic Society production of “The Doctor In Spite of Himself” did, in fact, win Third Place in the Scottish Community Theatre Association Finals.
Getting home from the quick westward swing, on April 9, I dove back into the usual self-promotional program, continuing work on editing a version of “The View From Here,” a version of “Moliere Monologues,” my acting book, “Acting at the Speed of Life” and my self-help book, “Currency.” Mostly, though, it was bookings for the show, focusing on Florida and Georgia, with several inquiries coming in for next fall and winter.
I also investigated flight schedules to and from Scotland, and found that, as my April 27 performance at DePaul was set for 6:00, I would be done by 7:30, which arguably left me with enough time to catch a 9:50 flight to Scotland.
My general sense is that if Fate has arranged events in such a way that they CAN be done, then really they MUST be done, even if I don’t fully understand the reason, or even if the action is not self-evidently the most sound financial move.
Amid this break, I paused, of course, to sing karaoke, and celebrate April’s 50th birthday party. (April has been invaluable the last few years, helping me with mail pick-ups, and faxes and bank deposits when I’m not around to attend to such matters.) (Not to mention that she has recorded almost every installment of “24” that I have missed!)
April 17, I headed down to Carbondale, where the Southern Illinois Theatre Department had just celebrated their 40th anniversary. I was unable to attend the party, but they saved me a goodie bag, and brought me in to do a workshop and a performance of “Criteria.” I, of course, graduated from SIU, way back in 1981, but, as they’d hosted “Moliere Than Thou” three years ago, most of them still remembered me, and we all seemed to feel like the last visit had been much more recent than all that.
Their coordination of my visit, was as effective as the last time, and I was readily checked into the hotel, set up with a parking pass, and shifted into the performance and workshop space. They had an enormous poster up, featuring my face in the “Criteria” publicity photo, and smaller flyers scattered throughout the theater building. The Tuesday workshop was well received. (My “Writing, Producing and Touring the One-Man Show” workshop has stretched to two hours, and now integrates bits of all three of my shows (with very little on “Criteria,” as I would be performing it the following night). The benefit of including teasers from all of the shows is that it gives the host venue ideas about hosting another one of the shows on a subsequent edition of the tour.
I had the night and the next day mostly to myself to attend to more e-mails and rehearse, and I returned the next afternoon to run a tech rehearsal for “Criteria” and perform the next night.
I never know how many people to expect, and the SIU studio theatre holds about 100 people in a three-quarters arrangement. My show is designed for a proscenium setting, but just in case some audience should choose to sit in the farthest upstage arms of house-right and house-left, I pushed the projection screen, and my main acting area upstage as far as I could. This turned out to be a good thing, as the house was entirely full.
I changed the opening of the show, slightly, making an entrance to start the “Power Point Show” which now runs parallel to my performance. Whereas previously, I had flipped through placards that the audience could read, I now integrated the projection unit to show the images from those same placards, but in a much larger version, which can be read from much farther away. I had spent the afternoon timing out the changing of the slides, but knowing that performing in front of an audience always adds time to the process. I was hitting the spots within 15 to 30 seconds of the intended changeover, which was close enough for all practical purposes, though the hardest change to time out, the final one, which brought the audience back to the initial screen, was always switching over during some climactic moment, when I most wanted the audience to remain focused.
For the opening, though, I walked out, pressed the button on the computer which started the process of the slides changing. This cued the stage manager to play the opening song, “What Will The Martians Think?” I gave the audience a stern stare, which got a laugh, and returned backstage, coming back on as the song had faded out.
They were a terrific house, laughing in odd places, which threw me off once early on, forcing me to check my script, but hanging in there through the rest, and responding vigorously at the curtain call. The faculty lingered afterwards for a visit, and I was surprised to see Dawn, my host from a Tennessee Moliere performance last fall, was in attendance. She had also seen “Karaoke Knights” at SETC in Orlando, which means that not only is she one of the very few people who has seen all three of my one-person shows (She reports “Criteria” is her favorite), but has seen each show in an entirely different venue. And state!
The next morning, I headed on to Tennessee. In Cookeville, Tennessee, I visited, once again, with Sabra, my Mensa friend, who has been helping me arrange for an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee (the “One-Man One-Man Play Festival”). We relaxed for a couple of days, hit the karaoke bar, which I was unable to do on my last pass through, as I was suffering from a sore throat at the time, and went down to Chattanooga to look over the theatre space and plot out our plans.
Sunday morning, I raced north, dropping in on Cousin George, who has finally moved into his beautiful new Kentucky home on a hill overlooking Georgetown, who insisted that I had to drop in on our Irish cousins while I was overseas, supplying me with their phone and address information. [Info that I neglected to pack when traveling overseas.] And from there, it was on to Detroit, where Isaac and I went out to dinner, and watched television. The next day I drove him to school, got more work done, and picked him up again, grabbing dinner and picking up a video. We watched “Brassed Off,” which is an old favorite of mine, reminding me of the upcoming competition in Scotland.
Tuesday I headed home, stopping at April’s to try to figure out how to rework the “Karaoke Knights” video, with no luck. On Wednesday morning, the article about me appeared on line, and I distributed the address for that one (http://www.beepcentral.com/story.aspx?story=2699) far and wide. I had a workshop and a performance of Moliere at North Park University. I was being hosted by the French teacher, and the deal had almost fallen apart at the last minute because their auditorium was in use that night, but they’d found available space in a very large chapel, and the show worked very well there. While there were only about 40 or 50 in attendance (the small audience probably due to the uncertainty of the venue), this performance was attended by the president of the American Association of Teachers of French, who teaches out of Northwestern, and who I see every summer at the conferences, though she’s always too busy to attend the events that I perform there.
Also in attendance was Patty Lahey, one of my students from when I used to teach at NIU (She’s now an event coordinator at U of Chicago), Ted Banks, from Kraft Foods, who’d edited the Law Textbook which was actually my very first publication credit (“The Use of the Dramatization in Teaching Legal Compliance,” which I’m told is the funniest chapter in that particular book) and Bill Nicholson, a friend and former roommate from SIU, back in 1981, who’d just recently found me on-line. Finally, there was the author of the Daily Herald/Beep article, who’d seen me do Karaoke Knights before, but had not seen “Moliere Than Thou.” She came with a friend, and the three of us went out to sing karaoke afterwards.
I headed home, early, for me, as an enormously big day was ahead of me.
I struggled to work my way through business early in the day, and only barely got a start on laundry and packing before discovering that I was running late for my workshop at DePaul. The traffic was terrible, and the parking was worse, but I managed to make it to the classroom just two minutes late. The students were not especially responsive to the “Life of Moliere” workshop, and I later discovered that they were largely a general-education class. I headed back home (after taking a quick peek at the performance venue, a lecture hall), and resumed packing. I was packing, essentially, for two trips, one to Scotland, and another two-week driving tour that I would set off on, almost immediately after my return. (I’m due in Lexington the following day.)
While I’d hoped to check my luggage and get my boarding pass before the DePaul performance, I found that traffic was once again clogged, and I could barely get into the venue an hour in advance of the show.
In attendance at this one was Claudia Anderson, my fellow teacher from the days at NIU (she now teaches at DePaul), my friend Rita McConville, and another friend, Deb, who I managed to coax up on-stage to play out the “Tartuffe” scene with me.
The show went very well, though there were, again, only about 40 people in attendance. I think my motor was really running, both from having such good friends in the crowd, and knowing that immediately afterwards, I’d be racing to the airport.
The show was done and packed up in near-record time. The host was very gracious about helping me on my way, and I was very concerned that I not short-change his event, even though I was concentrating so much on getting to Scotland. I visited briefly with my friends, as I repacked the trunk, and then ran off to get my car from the parking garage. By the time I got back, my Dad, and brother Kevin were waiting and the three of us caravanned out to the airport. By this time, the traffic had cleared and we made the trip in record time. Dad switched out to drive my car back to the house, and I went through the airline check in (with no line) and the security check (with virtually no line), and was at the gate ninety minutes in advance of the flight.
It was almost as if I’d been struggling against the tide for the past two days, trying to get a million things done, with the constant fear that I would miss the flight, but when the moment arrived, to mix my metaphor, the clouds parted and I passed right through with no struggle.
Someone had alerted me to the effectiveness of Dramamine, in enabling one to sleep on a long flight, so I took a couple of those as the boarding time neared, and another one, with my on-flight meal, and I could feel myself getting drowsy. I had, however, brought my lap-top bag on board with me, storing it under the seat in front of me, which made it very difficult to stretch out and relax. I watched the television embedded in the seat in front of me, and eyed the progression of the flight detailed on the big screen at the front of the cabin, as it traced its way northeast, over Ontario and Nova Scotia. Eventually, I nodded for perhaps an hour. Woke up again for a bit, as the sun rose outside the plane at what was, to me, still about 2 a.m., and dropped off for perhaps two hours after that. My blissful repose was interrupted by neighboring passengers who needed to get to the bathroom. I didn’t mind that so much, but they seemed to be hanging out in the back, chatting with the flight attendant for about an hour, and I couldn’t get back to sleep, knowing that I would likely be interrupted the moment that I dropped off again.
Eventually, we landed at Heathrow Airport, which is a confusing rabbits’ warren of hallways, staircases and tunnels, seeming to double back on themselves again and again, always uncertain if this was indeed the direction that I needed to be going. The name “Heathrow Airport” has always had a romantic air to it, if only because it is the gateway to arriving in London. I’d imagined it to be sleek and sophisticated, but in actuality, it’s pretty much a dump; dirty and grimy, with a carpet that smells of mold.
I passed through security once again, and headed to the ticket counter, which then directed me on to the customs agent. While this gentleman was polite to begin with, he stumped me with the question of what address I’d be staying at during my visit. I knew that the competition was in Pitlochry, and the theatre group was from Fintry, but I’d never actually obtained the specific address of my hosts. In fact, under pressure, I could barely recall the fellow’s name. I remembered “Martin” but hesitated on the surname. This enabled the agent to go into a well-rehearsed lecture of how one is supposed to know the address of the place one is going when entering a foreign country. (On at least three passes, he repeated the line “You’re going into a foreign country …”) I offered to crack open my laptop to call up the name and e-mails of my host, when I recalled the last name, “Turner.” This seemed to placate the agent, who continued to mutter about “You’re going into a foreign country …” and then remarked, offhand, what seemed to be the real issue, which was that apparently the US Customs agents are delaying British travelers at great length, and that they could, if they wanted, have tied me up for a couple of hours while checking on my story.
Off I went, with a brief flight to Edinburgh, and as I emerged into the luggage area, there stood Martin’s wife, Liz, holding a sign saying “Tim Mooney”. We got my luggage, changed over some money (which I’d failed to do in London, so I’d gone a bit hungry in the interim), and headed onto the road.
It took some time before I got accustomed to the car being on the left side of the road, particularly when the traffic was two-way, as I found that we were dependent upon the social contract that we will all drive on the left side at all times, which means that should someone, such as myself, forget that contract for the briefest moment, that would be the end of us.
Liz and I proceeded north to their beautiful home in the village of Kippen, surrounded by sheep farms and overlooking a valley stretching many miles into the distance. At the far edge of the valley is a tower known as the Wallace Monument (in the town of Stirling), but more on that later. After a quick shower, we pushed on north to Pitlochry, where the competition was being produced at the local theatre. My presence was being kept a secret from the cast, and we didn’t want word of my arrival to reach them backstage from a slip of the tongue, so I adopted the name “Angus” for the moment, when being introduced to friends of the director.
I settled into the lobby with a bottle of good Scottish beer, and we went inside to watch the first show in the series of three being performed that night. Performed in a heavy Scottish brogue, it was almost unintelligible to me, and the frustrating thing was always the fact that the audience was getting jokes that I was not. More than once have I heard the old saw about the British and Americans being “two peoples separated by a common language.”
Next up was “The Doctor in Spite of Himself,” and the cast dove into the action and the dialogue with relish. While the words were sometimes a little uncertain from my listening point, the Scottish brogue actually worked extremely well with my dialogue. Seven years ago, when I wrote this, I’d instinctively written certain characters with a touch of cockney or Scottish brogue, as they tossed in the occasional “Cor!” and “Aye …”.
More than this, though, the actors had penetrated through the formality of the verse dialogue to find the very ribald, lusty, boisterous action beneath. When we’d first produced this show, in 2001, the director that Stage Two (and I) had brought in, struggled throughout with the script, trying to keep it workable for a modern, politically correct world, filled with rules of behavior that probably would have confounded Moliere. This cast was having none of that, throwing themselves mightily into the action, with husband spanking wife, wife slapping husband, and woodcutter-turned-phony-doctor groping at, and nuzzling the nursemaid, again, and again, and again. No one in the audience could miss the implications of the action, and they all laughed boisterously.
Afterwards, I followed the director into the hallway, backstage at the theatre, leading me into the dressing room. As I awaited, just outside the door, I could hear him say, “You know how I told you that ‘Tim Mooney was here with us tonight?’ Well, I wasn’t just being metaphorical when I said that. In fact, he’s right here!” At which point the door was opened and I entered to see the surprised, delighted faces of the actors. I went around hugging and shaking hands and congratulating them all on a “terrific” “brilliant” job.
Martin, Liz and I ditched out on the last play of the series and went out for dinner, joined by the fellow who’d played Sganarelle, still in full costume. We went back to the theatre for the adjudication, and sat in the back row while a feisty Irish gentleman led the audience through a series of rhetorical questions as he talked of the various performances … “A fantastic set … was it not?” He seemed especially taken with “The Doctor in Spite of Himself,” and acknowledged the fact that “The Adaptor, Timothy Mooney (“Brilliant dialogue, was it not?”) had flown over from the United States, arriving this very day … let’s give him a big Scottish welcome, shall we not?” And the crowd of 500 responded dutifully with a big round of applause.
To give a taste of the response, the very first adjudicator’s response, from the District finals, was given to me and it noted: “Very assured direction. A cracking pace established and maintained throughout, with clear verse dialogue, good timing, excellent use of pause and emphasis. … Excellent teamwork, with unselfish playing and excellent reactions; unfailingly excellent facial and physical reactions … an exceptional production in every way. I’m sure Moliere would have loved it!” (Winner of the Munro Trophy.)
We stayed out at the theatre, toasting and drinking until perhaps 1 a.m., with Liz, who was our designated driver for the evening, driving us home as I dropped off sleepily in the car.
The next day, I slept in until 11:30, and following breakfast and lunch, we headed in to Stirling to visit the William Wallace Monument. William Wallace was the great Scottish hero depicted in “Braveheart” which led to the unfortunate by-product of a statue that had been added to the grounds carved with the image of Mel Gibson. Some of the gift shop chatchkis: key chains and fridge magnets also looked much more like Mel than the original Scottish hero, which struck me as rather a diminishment of the legend of a man that had inspired millions since the twelfth century.
We climbed to the top of the tower, probably the equivalent of a 15-story climb, where we could look out at the Scottish countryside, and see Stirling Castle in the distance. [Stirling Castle has recently been renovated leaving one cream-colored wing standing out like a sore thumb. It will take several hundred years for the weather to bring this wing of the castle into compliance with the overriding color scheme.] My fear-of-heights kicked in for a few minutes until I got somewhat accustomed to being at the top of the tower, and then climbed back down, continuing on to the final night of performances at the play competition.
The last set of three plays included a dull Hugh Leonard production (“Roman Fever”) and a very sharp 4-woman ensemble piece (“Shakers Re-Stirred”) which was disappointingly good. Disappointing because, as far as we knew, then, “Doctor” had been in the lead of the competition. The four women were choreographed with great detail, and there was no significant lapse in the production itself. While I may not have entirely understood every line, clearly the rest of the audience did, and it seemed likely that this group would take home the trophy. They were followed by a production of Brian Friel’s “Winners,” an Irish play of which I have seen at least two full productions, and which I have worked on, myself, in classroom projects. As such, it strikes me as a tired acting exercise, and however good the performance was, there are no surprises left in it for me.
After a break, the adjudicator got up and engaged the audience, once again, in his rhetorical by-play, “didn’t he?” He clearly enjoyed “Shakers” quite a bit, and the only question left, was “how much?” There was another break, and the award process eventually began, with everyone who had participated in any part of the process thanked and congratulated, and awards given for best original play, best stage décor, best “Scottish life and character” and highest production marks. “Doctor in Spite of Himself” was given honorable mentions in both the stage décor and production marks categories, so we knew that we were in the running, but when they turned to announce third place, we were a little disappointed to hear “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” read out so early. None of us had seen the third play in Friday night’s line up (we’d gone out to dinner then), and a Harold Pinter play (“Celebration”) had moved into the second spot. Meanwhile, of course, none of us could argue with the selection of “Shakers” as the eventual winner, though we might have wished for a different result.
Regardless, “Doctor” had placed third out of a field of one hundred sixty-nine total plays, nine of which had gone on to this week’s finals competition, and though spirits were somewhat dampened for the evening, it was clear that this was a success, especially considering that this was the only classical work that we’d seen in the finals, at least, and the nine performers were attempting something that they’d imagined to be well above their heads.
They closed up the theatre bar early that night, and we continued on home. The next day, Martin arranged for a flying tour of Scotland with a friend who belonged to the Glasgow flying club, and I was a little nervous about going up in a 4-seater. While the weather had been exquisite the first two days of my visit, the clouds had begun to move in and there was rain in the forecast for the next two days, so the best time for a flight was probably that afternoon.
The airplane was a tiny propeller-driven item, and the pilot, was a short, grinning fellow who was just as quick to joke about the condition of the craft as we were. He primed the pump with a device that seemed much like a device on my Dad’s lawnmower, and he suggested that was where he’d gotten it from. My biggest concern was that they’d put me up in the co-pilot’s seat, and if any tragedy should ensue to our pilot in the air, I would suddenly be responsible for getting us down. We queued up to take off in between the large 747-type craft that were flying in and out, and I found that we were airloft within seconds, perhaps after less than 30 yards of taxiing.
We climbed to perhaps 2500 feet, looking down over the Clyde River, and Loch Lomand (Scotland’s longest “loch”), but stopped short of the hoped-for trip up past the western islands, which are reportedly beautiful, as the clouds seemed lower and denser on the western shore. Instead, we turned east, toward Stirling, passing over Martin’s home, and continuing on to take more photos of the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle, before turning back to Glasgow. They pointed out to me Lake of Menteith, Scotland’s only “lake”. I, of course, asked what the difference was between a “lock and a lake,” and both Martin and the pilot shrugged and admitted that they didn’t know.
That night was the cast party, for which Liz had spent the past two days cooking and preparing. Forty people were expected, and I’d offered to perform “Moliere Than Thou” for them. I wanted to give them a little more of the flavor of how I work with the words and the style of performance, but also I wanted to lay the groundwork for a future appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previous to this I hadn’t imagined the possibility of doing Edinburgh, as it seemed to be quite a risk in a city where no one knew me, but if I could start some buzz circulating a year or two in advance, then perhaps I might have a core of support for an opening night.
It seemed that all forty people arrived between 7:30 and 8:30, and I held myself to a single beer, and resisted the buffet until after the performance. No one actually knew what I was going to do, so they looked at me a bit curiously when I didn’t fill a plate, but they accepted that I was probably up to something and left it at that.
Before long, they all gathered in the conservatory (a beautiful glassed-in area overlooking the valley), and some announcements and thanks and awards were given. John, the fellow who played Sganarelle, was given the award for best exemplifying the “woah factor” (all cheered “woooaaahhh”), with Rosellen, as the Nursemaid, Jacqueline, a close second.
Martin proceeded to get up to thank everyone who had contributed to the show, and following a brief bathroom break, introduced me, in my guise as Moliere. I anchored myself at one end of the room, along with a couple of costume pieces from their production, and worked my way through the show. It was an audience that “got” all of the backstage humor, as well as the ribald innuendo, though I occasionally wondered whether they might not prefer to be socializing with each other at this point of the evening.
The “Tartuffe” monologue woke things up a bit, and I was later told that the woman I chose to deliver it to was a well-known sportscaster in the area, and when I needed a volunteer, Rosellen was nominated by popular acclamation.
When it came to the monologue from “Doctor in Spite of Himself,” I could sense everyone listening in an entirely different way, as they were mostly hearing words that they already knew very well, and I wondered whether I was being a bit presumptive in performing a speech that a member of the company was already delivering as a part of the show. The last segment, however, was from a portion of the monologue that had been cut in the process of bringing their production in under an hour, and they laughed boisterously at Sganarelle’s “… as tested ‘gainst control group of castrati!”
I pushed forward towards the end, with the fellow who had played Geronte volunteering as Argante in the Scapin scene, and finishing it off with the “Precious Young Maidens” “Stop thief” monologue. Following Moliere’s thanks to the audience, I took a moment to thank my hosts and the entire company, especially for having given me their attention as I commandeered the party. John (Sganarelle) rose to commend me, suggesting that this was an hour of theatre that none of them would ever forget.
“Back to the beer!” I called, and we resumed the party. Guitar and violin were produced and many of the company engaged in singing for the remainder of the evening, mixing popular songs with traditional Scottish Folk Songs. I threw in “Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “I’m Looking for a Groupie” in the process, and the party continued on until perhaps 3 a.m.
Monday was a quiet day. I worked on my script for “Doctor” a bit, with an eye toward submitting it to the publisher as soon as I got back to the states, and I added into the prefatory notes the cast information for this latest production, knowing that it would tickle my new friends to be included in the published version. I typed up these notes of the last few weeks for a bit, before heading off to a local pub late in the evening.
A couple of Martin’s friends were there, and I made some notes to myself of their particular dialect. I note that the Scottish use “wee” in almost every possible context. You can have a “wee bit of beer,” drive a “wee car”, fly in a “wee airplane” or have a “wee bit of a lie down” (a nap). But when a fellow mentioned “the wee fat one”, I couldn’t help laughing out loud. As last call was announced, Martin went for one more round of beers, and offered to get this fellow a half-pint (as his pint was still relatively full), the fellow responded “Onyago, aye,” and Martin immediately understood this as a “yes.” I inquired, and the gentleman insisted that “On ya go” would have been sufficient to indicate the affirmative, but that he’d thrown in “aye” as a bit of a redundancy.
Other Scottish quirks: “Is this a queue?” is a question to be asked of anyone standing outside of a bathroom. It means, “Must I wait to go in until after you’ve gone?” They have “Roundabouts” everywhere! Traffic does not travel in neat north/south, east/west patterns. You proceed to a roundabout and then angle off in the general direction of the next roundabout which will send you heading toward your ultimate destination.
Traffic signs in construction zones apologize “Sorry for the delay,” rather than “Thanks for your patience,” which strikes me as much more apt, considering that the American sign assumes that I have, indeed, been patient. Finally, signs warn of “Contraflow” where what they really mean is “Two-way traffic.”
By the way, my Scottish accent is terrible. While I may be able to imitate individual voices and intonations, any time I try to ad-lib anything in Scottish, they immediately turn up their noses and indicate “That’s Irish.”
Back at home, Martin and I watched the final couple of games of the world-wide snooker tournament, with a Scotsman firmly in the lead. While I’d never understood snooker before, Martin quickly explained the rules, to the point that before the game tournament was over, I was criticizing the players for lousy shots and bonehead moves.
And today, it’s Tuesday. Martin, Liz and I are going in to Edinburgh to see the castle, do a bit of shopping and nose about at the Fringe headquarters, and check out a couple of venues. The weather, which has been thoroughly agreeable up until now, has turned rainy and windy, and my departure is pending tomorrow, demanding a 3 a.m. trip to the airport. As I’ve slept in until 11 or noon most days of this visit, I’m not sure what condition I’ll be in that early in the morning. Nor do I have any sense of what kind of sleep I might catch on the plane, but almost as soon as I land, I’ll be off for a performance in Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’ll try to hook up to get this missive into the e-mail before then, and jet lag will probably necessitate a couple of naps at rest stops along the way.
Temperature: 40s-60s
Attendance: 8 + 50 + 12 + 40 + 40 (not including the 500 who saw “Doctor” in the festival) = 150
Discoveries: if Fate has arranged events in such a way that they CAN be done, then really they MUST be done, even if I don’t fully understand the reason, or even if the action is not self-evidently the most sound financial move. * While I may feel as if I am struggling against the tide, trying to get a million things done, as long as I continue to believe in my plan, when the moment arrives, the clouds part and the struggle relents. * Moliere works best unburdened by any of the politically correct assumptions of the modern age, and “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” is a lot funnier than I recall. *
Next Performance: May 4, Lexington, Kentucky, (Criteria)
I did, in fact, go to Scotland.
The Fintry Amateur Dramatic Society production of “The Doctor In Spite of Himself” did, in fact, win Third Place in the Scottish Community Theatre Association Finals.
Getting home from the quick westward swing, on April 9, I dove back into the usual self-promotional program, continuing work on editing a version of “The View From Here,” a version of “Moliere Monologues,” my acting book, “Acting at the Speed of Life” and my self-help book, “Currency.” Mostly, though, it was bookings for the show, focusing on Florida and Georgia, with several inquiries coming in for next fall and winter.
I also investigated flight schedules to and from Scotland, and found that, as my April 27 performance at DePaul was set for 6:00, I would be done by 7:30, which arguably left me with enough time to catch a 9:50 flight to Scotland.
My general sense is that if Fate has arranged events in such a way that they CAN be done, then really they MUST be done, even if I don’t fully understand the reason, or even if the action is not self-evidently the most sound financial move.
Amid this break, I paused, of course, to sing karaoke, and celebrate April’s 50th birthday party. (April has been invaluable the last few years, helping me with mail pick-ups, and faxes and bank deposits when I’m not around to attend to such matters.) (Not to mention that she has recorded almost every installment of “24” that I have missed!)
April 17, I headed down to Carbondale, where the Southern Illinois Theatre Department had just celebrated their 40th anniversary. I was unable to attend the party, but they saved me a goodie bag, and brought me in to do a workshop and a performance of “Criteria.” I, of course, graduated from SIU, way back in 1981, but, as they’d hosted “Moliere Than Thou” three years ago, most of them still remembered me, and we all seemed to feel like the last visit had been much more recent than all that.
Their coordination of my visit, was as effective as the last time, and I was readily checked into the hotel, set up with a parking pass, and shifted into the performance and workshop space. They had an enormous poster up, featuring my face in the “Criteria” publicity photo, and smaller flyers scattered throughout the theater building. The Tuesday workshop was well received. (My “Writing, Producing and Touring the One-Man Show” workshop has stretched to two hours, and now integrates bits of all three of my shows (with very little on “Criteria,” as I would be performing it the following night). The benefit of including teasers from all of the shows is that it gives the host venue ideas about hosting another one of the shows on a subsequent edition of the tour.
I had the night and the next day mostly to myself to attend to more e-mails and rehearse, and I returned the next afternoon to run a tech rehearsal for “Criteria” and perform the next night.
I never know how many people to expect, and the SIU studio theatre holds about 100 people in a three-quarters arrangement. My show is designed for a proscenium setting, but just in case some audience should choose to sit in the farthest upstage arms of house-right and house-left, I pushed the projection screen, and my main acting area upstage as far as I could. This turned out to be a good thing, as the house was entirely full.
I changed the opening of the show, slightly, making an entrance to start the “Power Point Show” which now runs parallel to my performance. Whereas previously, I had flipped through placards that the audience could read, I now integrated the projection unit to show the images from those same placards, but in a much larger version, which can be read from much farther away. I had spent the afternoon timing out the changing of the slides, but knowing that performing in front of an audience always adds time to the process. I was hitting the spots within 15 to 30 seconds of the intended changeover, which was close enough for all practical purposes, though the hardest change to time out, the final one, which brought the audience back to the initial screen, was always switching over during some climactic moment, when I most wanted the audience to remain focused.
For the opening, though, I walked out, pressed the button on the computer which started the process of the slides changing. This cued the stage manager to play the opening song, “What Will The Martians Think?” I gave the audience a stern stare, which got a laugh, and returned backstage, coming back on as the song had faded out.
They were a terrific house, laughing in odd places, which threw me off once early on, forcing me to check my script, but hanging in there through the rest, and responding vigorously at the curtain call. The faculty lingered afterwards for a visit, and I was surprised to see Dawn, my host from a Tennessee Moliere performance last fall, was in attendance. She had also seen “Karaoke Knights” at SETC in Orlando, which means that not only is she one of the very few people who has seen all three of my one-person shows (She reports “Criteria” is her favorite), but has seen each show in an entirely different venue. And state!
The next morning, I headed on to Tennessee. In Cookeville, Tennessee, I visited, once again, with Sabra, my Mensa friend, who has been helping me arrange for an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee (the “One-Man One-Man Play Festival”). We relaxed for a couple of days, hit the karaoke bar, which I was unable to do on my last pass through, as I was suffering from a sore throat at the time, and went down to Chattanooga to look over the theatre space and plot out our plans.
Sunday morning, I raced north, dropping in on Cousin George, who has finally moved into his beautiful new Kentucky home on a hill overlooking Georgetown, who insisted that I had to drop in on our Irish cousins while I was overseas, supplying me with their phone and address information. [Info that I neglected to pack when traveling overseas.] And from there, it was on to Detroit, where Isaac and I went out to dinner, and watched television. The next day I drove him to school, got more work done, and picked him up again, grabbing dinner and picking up a video. We watched “Brassed Off,” which is an old favorite of mine, reminding me of the upcoming competition in Scotland.
Tuesday I headed home, stopping at April’s to try to figure out how to rework the “Karaoke Knights” video, with no luck. On Wednesday morning, the article about me appeared on line, and I distributed the address for that one (http://www.beepcentral.com/story.aspx?story=2699) far and wide. I had a workshop and a performance of Moliere at North Park University. I was being hosted by the French teacher, and the deal had almost fallen apart at the last minute because their auditorium was in use that night, but they’d found available space in a very large chapel, and the show worked very well there. While there were only about 40 or 50 in attendance (the small audience probably due to the uncertainty of the venue), this performance was attended by the president of the American Association of Teachers of French, who teaches out of Northwestern, and who I see every summer at the conferences, though she’s always too busy to attend the events that I perform there.
Also in attendance was Patty Lahey, one of my students from when I used to teach at NIU (She’s now an event coordinator at U of Chicago), Ted Banks, from Kraft Foods, who’d edited the Law Textbook which was actually my very first publication credit (“The Use of the Dramatization in Teaching Legal Compliance,” which I’m told is the funniest chapter in that particular book) and Bill Nicholson, a friend and former roommate from SIU, back in 1981, who’d just recently found me on-line. Finally, there was the author of the Daily Herald/Beep article, who’d seen me do Karaoke Knights before, but had not seen “Moliere Than Thou.” She came with a friend, and the three of us went out to sing karaoke afterwards.
I headed home, early, for me, as an enormously big day was ahead of me.
I struggled to work my way through business early in the day, and only barely got a start on laundry and packing before discovering that I was running late for my workshop at DePaul. The traffic was terrible, and the parking was worse, but I managed to make it to the classroom just two minutes late. The students were not especially responsive to the “Life of Moliere” workshop, and I later discovered that they were largely a general-education class. I headed back home (after taking a quick peek at the performance venue, a lecture hall), and resumed packing. I was packing, essentially, for two trips, one to Scotland, and another two-week driving tour that I would set off on, almost immediately after my return. (I’m due in Lexington the following day.)
While I’d hoped to check my luggage and get my boarding pass before the DePaul performance, I found that traffic was once again clogged, and I could barely get into the venue an hour in advance of the show.
In attendance at this one was Claudia Anderson, my fellow teacher from the days at NIU (she now teaches at DePaul), my friend Rita McConville, and another friend, Deb, who I managed to coax up on-stage to play out the “Tartuffe” scene with me.
The show went very well, though there were, again, only about 40 people in attendance. I think my motor was really running, both from having such good friends in the crowd, and knowing that immediately afterwards, I’d be racing to the airport.
The show was done and packed up in near-record time. The host was very gracious about helping me on my way, and I was very concerned that I not short-change his event, even though I was concentrating so much on getting to Scotland. I visited briefly with my friends, as I repacked the trunk, and then ran off to get my car from the parking garage. By the time I got back, my Dad, and brother Kevin were waiting and the three of us caravanned out to the airport. By this time, the traffic had cleared and we made the trip in record time. Dad switched out to drive my car back to the house, and I went through the airline check in (with no line) and the security check (with virtually no line), and was at the gate ninety minutes in advance of the flight.
It was almost as if I’d been struggling against the tide for the past two days, trying to get a million things done, with the constant fear that I would miss the flight, but when the moment arrived, to mix my metaphor, the clouds parted and I passed right through with no struggle.
Someone had alerted me to the effectiveness of Dramamine, in enabling one to sleep on a long flight, so I took a couple of those as the boarding time neared, and another one, with my on-flight meal, and I could feel myself getting drowsy. I had, however, brought my lap-top bag on board with me, storing it under the seat in front of me, which made it very difficult to stretch out and relax. I watched the television embedded in the seat in front of me, and eyed the progression of the flight detailed on the big screen at the front of the cabin, as it traced its way northeast, over Ontario and Nova Scotia. Eventually, I nodded for perhaps an hour. Woke up again for a bit, as the sun rose outside the plane at what was, to me, still about 2 a.m., and dropped off for perhaps two hours after that. My blissful repose was interrupted by neighboring passengers who needed to get to the bathroom. I didn’t mind that so much, but they seemed to be hanging out in the back, chatting with the flight attendant for about an hour, and I couldn’t get back to sleep, knowing that I would likely be interrupted the moment that I dropped off again.
Eventually, we landed at Heathrow Airport, which is a confusing rabbits’ warren of hallways, staircases and tunnels, seeming to double back on themselves again and again, always uncertain if this was indeed the direction that I needed to be going. The name “Heathrow Airport” has always had a romantic air to it, if only because it is the gateway to arriving in London. I’d imagined it to be sleek and sophisticated, but in actuality, it’s pretty much a dump; dirty and grimy, with a carpet that smells of mold.
I passed through security once again, and headed to the ticket counter, which then directed me on to the customs agent. While this gentleman was polite to begin with, he stumped me with the question of what address I’d be staying at during my visit. I knew that the competition was in Pitlochry, and the theatre group was from Fintry, but I’d never actually obtained the specific address of my hosts. In fact, under pressure, I could barely recall the fellow’s name. I remembered “Martin” but hesitated on the surname. This enabled the agent to go into a well-rehearsed lecture of how one is supposed to know the address of the place one is going when entering a foreign country. (On at least three passes, he repeated the line “You’re going into a foreign country …”) I offered to crack open my laptop to call up the name and e-mails of my host, when I recalled the last name, “Turner.” This seemed to placate the agent, who continued to mutter about “You’re going into a foreign country …” and then remarked, offhand, what seemed to be the real issue, which was that apparently the US Customs agents are delaying British travelers at great length, and that they could, if they wanted, have tied me up for a couple of hours while checking on my story.
Off I went, with a brief flight to Edinburgh, and as I emerged into the luggage area, there stood Martin’s wife, Liz, holding a sign saying “Tim Mooney”. We got my luggage, changed over some money (which I’d failed to do in London, so I’d gone a bit hungry in the interim), and headed onto the road.
It took some time before I got accustomed to the car being on the left side of the road, particularly when the traffic was two-way, as I found that we were dependent upon the social contract that we will all drive on the left side at all times, which means that should someone, such as myself, forget that contract for the briefest moment, that would be the end of us.
Liz and I proceeded north to their beautiful home in the village of Kippen, surrounded by sheep farms and overlooking a valley stretching many miles into the distance. At the far edge of the valley is a tower known as the Wallace Monument (in the town of Stirling), but more on that later. After a quick shower, we pushed on north to Pitlochry, where the competition was being produced at the local theatre. My presence was being kept a secret from the cast, and we didn’t want word of my arrival to reach them backstage from a slip of the tongue, so I adopted the name “Angus” for the moment, when being introduced to friends of the director.
I settled into the lobby with a bottle of good Scottish beer, and we went inside to watch the first show in the series of three being performed that night. Performed in a heavy Scottish brogue, it was almost unintelligible to me, and the frustrating thing was always the fact that the audience was getting jokes that I was not. More than once have I heard the old saw about the British and Americans being “two peoples separated by a common language.”
Next up was “The Doctor in Spite of Himself,” and the cast dove into the action and the dialogue with relish. While the words were sometimes a little uncertain from my listening point, the Scottish brogue actually worked extremely well with my dialogue. Seven years ago, when I wrote this, I’d instinctively written certain characters with a touch of cockney or Scottish brogue, as they tossed in the occasional “Cor!” and “Aye …”.
More than this, though, the actors had penetrated through the formality of the verse dialogue to find the very ribald, lusty, boisterous action beneath. When we’d first produced this show, in 2001, the director that Stage Two (and I) had brought in, struggled throughout with the script, trying to keep it workable for a modern, politically correct world, filled with rules of behavior that probably would have confounded Moliere. This cast was having none of that, throwing themselves mightily into the action, with husband spanking wife, wife slapping husband, and woodcutter-turned-phony-doctor groping at, and nuzzling the nursemaid, again, and again, and again. No one in the audience could miss the implications of the action, and they all laughed boisterously.
Afterwards, I followed the director into the hallway, backstage at the theatre, leading me into the dressing room. As I awaited, just outside the door, I could hear him say, “You know how I told you that ‘Tim Mooney was here with us tonight?’ Well, I wasn’t just being metaphorical when I said that. In fact, he’s right here!” At which point the door was opened and I entered to see the surprised, delighted faces of the actors. I went around hugging and shaking hands and congratulating them all on a “terrific” “brilliant” job.
Martin, Liz and I ditched out on the last play of the series and went out for dinner, joined by the fellow who’d played Sganarelle, still in full costume. We went back to the theatre for the adjudication, and sat in the back row while a feisty Irish gentleman led the audience through a series of rhetorical questions as he talked of the various performances … “A fantastic set … was it not?” He seemed especially taken with “The Doctor in Spite of Himself,” and acknowledged the fact that “The Adaptor, Timothy Mooney (“Brilliant dialogue, was it not?”) had flown over from the United States, arriving this very day … let’s give him a big Scottish welcome, shall we not?” And the crowd of 500 responded dutifully with a big round of applause.
To give a taste of the response, the very first adjudicator’s response, from the District finals, was given to me and it noted: “Very assured direction. A cracking pace established and maintained throughout, with clear verse dialogue, good timing, excellent use of pause and emphasis. … Excellent teamwork, with unselfish playing and excellent reactions; unfailingly excellent facial and physical reactions … an exceptional production in every way. I’m sure Moliere would have loved it!” (Winner of the Munro Trophy.)
We stayed out at the theatre, toasting and drinking until perhaps 1 a.m., with Liz, who was our designated driver for the evening, driving us home as I dropped off sleepily in the car.
The next day, I slept in until 11:30, and following breakfast and lunch, we headed in to Stirling to visit the William Wallace Monument. William Wallace was the great Scottish hero depicted in “Braveheart” which led to the unfortunate by-product of a statue that had been added to the grounds carved with the image of Mel Gibson. Some of the gift shop chatchkis: key chains and fridge magnets also looked much more like Mel than the original Scottish hero, which struck me as rather a diminishment of the legend of a man that had inspired millions since the twelfth century.
We climbed to the top of the tower, probably the equivalent of a 15-story climb, where we could look out at the Scottish countryside, and see Stirling Castle in the distance. [Stirling Castle has recently been renovated leaving one cream-colored wing standing out like a sore thumb. It will take several hundred years for the weather to bring this wing of the castle into compliance with the overriding color scheme.] My fear-of-heights kicked in for a few minutes until I got somewhat accustomed to being at the top of the tower, and then climbed back down, continuing on to the final night of performances at the play competition.
The last set of three plays included a dull Hugh Leonard production (“Roman Fever”) and a very sharp 4-woman ensemble piece (“Shakers Re-Stirred”) which was disappointingly good. Disappointing because, as far as we knew, then, “Doctor” had been in the lead of the competition. The four women were choreographed with great detail, and there was no significant lapse in the production itself. While I may not have entirely understood every line, clearly the rest of the audience did, and it seemed likely that this group would take home the trophy. They were followed by a production of Brian Friel’s “Winners,” an Irish play of which I have seen at least two full productions, and which I have worked on, myself, in classroom projects. As such, it strikes me as a tired acting exercise, and however good the performance was, there are no surprises left in it for me.
After a break, the adjudicator got up and engaged the audience, once again, in his rhetorical by-play, “didn’t he?” He clearly enjoyed “Shakers” quite a bit, and the only question left, was “how much?” There was another break, and the award process eventually began, with everyone who had participated in any part of the process thanked and congratulated, and awards given for best original play, best stage décor, best “Scottish life and character” and highest production marks. “Doctor in Spite of Himself” was given honorable mentions in both the stage décor and production marks categories, so we knew that we were in the running, but when they turned to announce third place, we were a little disappointed to hear “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” read out so early. None of us had seen the third play in Friday night’s line up (we’d gone out to dinner then), and a Harold Pinter play (“Celebration”) had moved into the second spot. Meanwhile, of course, none of us could argue with the selection of “Shakers” as the eventual winner, though we might have wished for a different result.
Regardless, “Doctor” had placed third out of a field of one hundred sixty-nine total plays, nine of which had gone on to this week’s finals competition, and though spirits were somewhat dampened for the evening, it was clear that this was a success, especially considering that this was the only classical work that we’d seen in the finals, at least, and the nine performers were attempting something that they’d imagined to be well above their heads.
They closed up the theatre bar early that night, and we continued on home. The next day, Martin arranged for a flying tour of Scotland with a friend who belonged to the Glasgow flying club, and I was a little nervous about going up in a 4-seater. While the weather had been exquisite the first two days of my visit, the clouds had begun to move in and there was rain in the forecast for the next two days, so the best time for a flight was probably that afternoon.
The airplane was a tiny propeller-driven item, and the pilot, was a short, grinning fellow who was just as quick to joke about the condition of the craft as we were. He primed the pump with a device that seemed much like a device on my Dad’s lawnmower, and he suggested that was where he’d gotten it from. My biggest concern was that they’d put me up in the co-pilot’s seat, and if any tragedy should ensue to our pilot in the air, I would suddenly be responsible for getting us down. We queued up to take off in between the large 747-type craft that were flying in and out, and I found that we were airloft within seconds, perhaps after less than 30 yards of taxiing.
We climbed to perhaps 2500 feet, looking down over the Clyde River, and Loch Lomand (Scotland’s longest “loch”), but stopped short of the hoped-for trip up past the western islands, which are reportedly beautiful, as the clouds seemed lower and denser on the western shore. Instead, we turned east, toward Stirling, passing over Martin’s home, and continuing on to take more photos of the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle, before turning back to Glasgow. They pointed out to me Lake of Menteith, Scotland’s only “lake”. I, of course, asked what the difference was between a “lock and a lake,” and both Martin and the pilot shrugged and admitted that they didn’t know.
That night was the cast party, for which Liz had spent the past two days cooking and preparing. Forty people were expected, and I’d offered to perform “Moliere Than Thou” for them. I wanted to give them a little more of the flavor of how I work with the words and the style of performance, but also I wanted to lay the groundwork for a future appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Previous to this I hadn’t imagined the possibility of doing Edinburgh, as it seemed to be quite a risk in a city where no one knew me, but if I could start some buzz circulating a year or two in advance, then perhaps I might have a core of support for an opening night.
It seemed that all forty people arrived between 7:30 and 8:30, and I held myself to a single beer, and resisted the buffet until after the performance. No one actually knew what I was going to do, so they looked at me a bit curiously when I didn’t fill a plate, but they accepted that I was probably up to something and left it at that.
Before long, they all gathered in the conservatory (a beautiful glassed-in area overlooking the valley), and some announcements and thanks and awards were given. John, the fellow who played Sganarelle, was given the award for best exemplifying the “woah factor” (all cheered “woooaaahhh”), with Rosellen, as the Nursemaid, Jacqueline, a close second.
Martin proceeded to get up to thank everyone who had contributed to the show, and following a brief bathroom break, introduced me, in my guise as Moliere. I anchored myself at one end of the room, along with a couple of costume pieces from their production, and worked my way through the show. It was an audience that “got” all of the backstage humor, as well as the ribald innuendo, though I occasionally wondered whether they might not prefer to be socializing with each other at this point of the evening.
The “Tartuffe” monologue woke things up a bit, and I was later told that the woman I chose to deliver it to was a well-known sportscaster in the area, and when I needed a volunteer, Rosellen was nominated by popular acclamation.
When it came to the monologue from “Doctor in Spite of Himself,” I could sense everyone listening in an entirely different way, as they were mostly hearing words that they already knew very well, and I wondered whether I was being a bit presumptive in performing a speech that a member of the company was already delivering as a part of the show. The last segment, however, was from a portion of the monologue that had been cut in the process of bringing their production in under an hour, and they laughed boisterously at Sganarelle’s “… as tested ‘gainst control group of castrati!”
I pushed forward towards the end, with the fellow who had played Geronte volunteering as Argante in the Scapin scene, and finishing it off with the “Precious Young Maidens” “Stop thief” monologue. Following Moliere’s thanks to the audience, I took a moment to thank my hosts and the entire company, especially for having given me their attention as I commandeered the party. John (Sganarelle) rose to commend me, suggesting that this was an hour of theatre that none of them would ever forget.
“Back to the beer!” I called, and we resumed the party. Guitar and violin were produced and many of the company engaged in singing for the remainder of the evening, mixing popular songs with traditional Scottish Folk Songs. I threw in “Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “I’m Looking for a Groupie” in the process, and the party continued on until perhaps 3 a.m.
Monday was a quiet day. I worked on my script for “Doctor” a bit, with an eye toward submitting it to the publisher as soon as I got back to the states, and I added into the prefatory notes the cast information for this latest production, knowing that it would tickle my new friends to be included in the published version. I typed up these notes of the last few weeks for a bit, before heading off to a local pub late in the evening.
A couple of Martin’s friends were there, and I made some notes to myself of their particular dialect. I note that the Scottish use “wee” in almost every possible context. You can have a “wee bit of beer,” drive a “wee car”, fly in a “wee airplane” or have a “wee bit of a lie down” (a nap). But when a fellow mentioned “the wee fat one”, I couldn’t help laughing out loud. As last call was announced, Martin went for one more round of beers, and offered to get this fellow a half-pint (as his pint was still relatively full), the fellow responded “Onyago, aye,” and Martin immediately understood this as a “yes.” I inquired, and the gentleman insisted that “On ya go” would have been sufficient to indicate the affirmative, but that he’d thrown in “aye” as a bit of a redundancy.
Other Scottish quirks: “Is this a queue?” is a question to be asked of anyone standing outside of a bathroom. It means, “Must I wait to go in until after you’ve gone?” They have “Roundabouts” everywhere! Traffic does not travel in neat north/south, east/west patterns. You proceed to a roundabout and then angle off in the general direction of the next roundabout which will send you heading toward your ultimate destination.
Traffic signs in construction zones apologize “Sorry for the delay,” rather than “Thanks for your patience,” which strikes me as much more apt, considering that the American sign assumes that I have, indeed, been patient. Finally, signs warn of “Contraflow” where what they really mean is “Two-way traffic.”
By the way, my Scottish accent is terrible. While I may be able to imitate individual voices and intonations, any time I try to ad-lib anything in Scottish, they immediately turn up their noses and indicate “That’s Irish.”
Back at home, Martin and I watched the final couple of games of the world-wide snooker tournament, with a Scotsman firmly in the lead. While I’d never understood snooker before, Martin quickly explained the rules, to the point that before the game tournament was over, I was criticizing the players for lousy shots and bonehead moves.
And today, it’s Tuesday. Martin, Liz and I are going in to Edinburgh to see the castle, do a bit of shopping and nose about at the Fringe headquarters, and check out a couple of venues. The weather, which has been thoroughly agreeable up until now, has turned rainy and windy, and my departure is pending tomorrow, demanding a 3 a.m. trip to the airport. As I’ve slept in until 11 or noon most days of this visit, I’m not sure what condition I’ll be in that early in the morning. Nor do I have any sense of what kind of sleep I might catch on the plane, but almost as soon as I land, I’ll be off for a performance in Lexington, Kentucky the next day. I’ll try to hook up to get this missive into the e-mail before then, and jet lag will probably necessitate a couple of naps at rest stops along the way.
Temperature: 40s-60s
Attendance: 8 + 50 + 12 + 40 + 40 (not including the 500 who saw “Doctor” in the festival) = 150
Discoveries: if Fate has arranged events in such a way that they CAN be done, then really they MUST be done, even if I don’t fully understand the reason, or even if the action is not self-evidently the most sound financial move. * While I may feel as if I am struggling against the tide, trying to get a million things done, as long as I continue to believe in my plan, when the moment arrives, the clouds part and the struggle relents. * Moliere works best unburdened by any of the politically correct assumptions of the modern age, and “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” is a lot funnier than I recall. *
Next Performance: May 4, Lexington, Kentucky, (Criteria)
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
The View From Here #110: San Diego & Long Beach, CA; Gresham, OR
Three days in Brownwood enabled me to get about a thousand e-mails to a half-dozen or so states out into circulation, with lots of responses flowing in from faculty. I jumped on the road to El Paso, where I stayed with Jennifer, a friend formerly from British Columbia (who fortunately is also a "24" fan), before getting back on the road on Tuesday morning, racing through New Mexico and Arizona. I got a hotel in Yuma, Arizona, in order to let my e-mails flow in, and there were LOTS. I spent the rest of that
evening, and much of the next morning sorting through them and plotting out when I might be able to perform at which locations.
The next day it was on to San Diego, where my friends Betty and Pete live. I'd been out to visit them nearly two years before, shortly after they'd moved into this house, but this time around all the boxes were put away and everything was looking great. We rearranged their living room somewhat, and I did a performance of "Karaoke Knights" for about ten invited guests. It was a great chance to keep up my work on that show, given the fact that I hadn't performed it since the show at SETC in early March.
It was an odd arrangement of the living room, which had the video actually being projected behind me at the empty wall. Since I didn't want to block the video, that forced my performance forwards, and everyone was within about 10 feet of where I was standing. Since the show was created with a large auditorium in mind, it felt a little over-the-top but everyone said, afterwards, that they loved, it. A couple actually bought the CD, and others left a generous tip in the donation jar.
The next morning, I made a brief appearance in two of Betty's middle-school performance classes, doing a quickie introduction to Moliere and my work. The kids were responsive, but my voice was fading on me, so I was struggling with my natural impulse to give everything I've got, and my conscious understanding that I needed to conserve for a show later that afternoon.
I am reminded that at one of the workshops I attended at SETC, there was a strong smell of bleach in the room, and I find myself wondering if breathing that in for an hour had a greater impact on my throat than the cold that I came down with shortly thereafter.
I was off to Long Beach, where I'd performed a year before, and where the French teacher was a bit of a Moliere academic. He'd shared with me one of the papers he'd presented on Moliere, which even I (Moliere expert that I am) found a bit impenetrable.
Steve's professorial style, however, doesn't seem to keep him from enjoying Moliere. This time around, he ushered me to a room he'd booked in the Student Union. It was a small room, with perhaps 45 chairs set up, and I proceeded to clear space for my show. The furthest point in the room may have been no more than 18 feet from where I'd be performing. There was no way to make an "entrance" into this space, as even the wall facing out to the hallway was made of glass, so I got into costume and stood, in full view, to the side until Steve introduced me.
When I started the show, there may have been 3 or 4 seats empty, but people continued to enter as I worked, and most of them were left standing at the entrance. I encouraged them, between monologues, to come in and take the remaining seats, which some did, but there were at least ten people standing or sitting at the door-end of the room throughout the show.
Given this kind of a standing-room-only audience, the show played brilliantly, and everyone in the first row ended up being characters in my scenes, as I played to them throughout. There was a cute girl in the front row who I'd addressed in the Tartuffe monologue, who also got up to play the scene with me. Given that this was Long Beach, and people aren't bundled up quite the way that they are in the north, the woman, in a very light blouse, seemed more defenseless and vulnerable (and, therefore, funnier) than usual.
There'd been some confusion over the program, and while I'd intended to do the 75-minute version, we only had programs for the 60-minute show available, so I did a short Q&A with the students afterwards, and just for fun, threw in the "Doctor in Spite of Himself" monologue. Afterwards, Steve insisted that he wanted to host the show again next year, and help me line up some other west coast bookings as well.
I continued north, into Hollywood, where I stayed the night at the home of a former U-Nebraska friend, now film editor, Michael Hofacre. We got together with Charlie Bachmann (another U-Nebraska MFA), and went out for a bite to eat. I was feeling strangely tired, and eventually realized that I'd crossed through two time zones in two days (with two performances), and 11:00 was feeling like 1 a.m. to me.
The next day, I played catch-up with e-mails for a bit, before getting on the road to Fresno, where I met up with Michael Swanson. Michael has now booked my shows on two occasions, including my appearances at the Midwest ACTF Festival last January. We had a nice relaxed evening, going out for beer and pizza.
I made a stop in Sacramento, to meet with a French teacher from Sacramento State, and continue on my way north to Redding, California, before pushing ahead to Salem, Oregon, the next day. I took two days in Salem to relax and visit with my brother Pat and his family. His son, Michael had just had a birthday, and I got him a copy of the new "King Kong" movie. We hooked it up to the projector that I use in my show, so that we could watch it on the "big screen."
In Portland, I met up with my webmaster, Bruce, and his wife, for a brief evening of karaoke, in a very tacky tiki bar, and I settled in at my favorite hotel, McMenamin's Edgefield, where they have their own on-site brewery and winery. (I'd stayed there a year before, when I'd also been booked by Mount Hood Community College, and had been looking forward to this stop ever since.)
The next day, I met up with my host, Eric, and we took the trunk over to the performance space. The space, which was essentially a lecture hall, had improved since last year, and the pipe that had been jutting out of the floor was now gone. Unfortunately, the lighting of a lecture hall is always bad, and there were only a handful of lights that were illuminating the stage area. We struggled with the settings for about twenty minutes, but eventually I had to set up the show and get into costume and make-up. I took note of where the light was best, and I headed off.
Apparently, the audience took a long time to fill in, and we seemed to be about 15 minutes late in getting started, by which point I was getting much more pumped up than usual. When it was finally time to start, I noticed two things: The audience was much smaller than anticipated, with perhaps 70 people. And the lights that I'd planned on using were now turned off.
I was standing in a moody half-light, and there was actually a flood of light at my back ... unfortunately pointed at the upstage wall, for occasions when this space was used as an art gallery. This left me mostly in silhouette, with a dim, late-evening feel to the rest of the stage. Two lights illuminated the far right and far left areas of the stage.
For perhaps the second time in history, I actually paused my monologue to call back to my host, asking if perhaps some of these "candles" might be brought up to where they were when we rehearsed previously. The host scrambled around for a few minutes, flicking switches while I soldiered on, and some of the house lights went on and off, but no further result. Somewhere, the tech guy, who'd helped us get set up at the outset, had
disappeared.
I realize that I need to impress upon the hosts, even when I am playing without tech, in a lecture hall, the technical supervisor needs to stay available as the performance is beginning. Because there's absolutely nothing I can do otherwise. Moliere isn't supposed to know how to work a light board, and even if he did, he really can't leave the stage to work all that out.
I ended up playing the show all over the stage ... mostly working from the far stage right and the far stage left pools of light. By this time, I was so obsessed over the lighting, that I had no sense of what words were coming out of my mouth. And I was even more surprised that the audience was laughing along, hysterically, throughout the play. My friend Tina (who I'd met in Atlanta two summers ago) was in the audience leading the laughs, as was my playwright friend, Gil Martin.
I'd met Gil about fifteen years ago, when I produced his play, "The Last Rehearsal" with my old theatre, Stage Two. Around that time, I'd taken a trip out west with Jo (later known as "Isaac's Mom") and we dropped in on Gil and his wife and daughter at their Bed & Breakfast in Trout Lake, Washington. When I got to Portland, I remembered to call Gil (who I'd failed to hook up with almost four years before, as he was out fighting forest fires when I arrived at his B&B). Gil no longer runs the Bed & Breakfast, but he just happened to be there when I called, and he made it out to the show.
After the play, I changed quickly and returned to deliver a short version of my "The Life of Moliere" lecture to the twenty or so who remained, and then Gil and Tina and I headed off for lunch. (Tina seemed to be attending the show in the company of a young fellow, who I invited to join us for lunch, but it wasn't until later that I discovered that she'd just met him in the lobby before the show.) (Apparently, she makes friends quite readily.)
Over lunch, Gil noted that his adorable little four-year-old was now 18 and headed for college, and that he and his wife were separated. (The latter was not a particular surprise, I must say, since the female characters in Gil's plays always seemed to get short shrift in the midst of some dialogue that seems to vy with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" for antagonism.)
In the midst of all of this, I got a call from a reporter with the Mount Hood school paper, wanting to know my perspective on how the show had gone. I couldn't stop myself from sighing my complaint about the lights not working, and then realized that my reaction would end up in print, and that my response would undermine the perceived value of the show. While the lighting was certainly the big "issue" in the forefront of my mind, throughout the play, for the audience that may have been just 1 percent of the perceived experience. My complaint would only undermine their appreciation of what they had seen.
I enjoyed one more evening in the hotel, and their terrific wine bar, before heading reluctantly eastward. The first day I headed for Cour d'Alene, and a visit with Joe Jacoby, fellow theatre teacher and Loudon Wainwright fan. I offered to pop in on Joe's Theatre History classes the following morning, and Joe offered to put me up for the night.
The next night I continued on to Livingston, Montana (after dropping in on a former prof, Joe Proctor, in Missoula, where I'm negotiating to perform next fall). I had a date lined up with a painter in Livingston, and the two of us found a karaoke bar in Bozeman. It was the Lion's Club of Bozeman, and it was a pretty lively, if country-music-oriented, crowd. The Karaoke Jockey realized that I was a newbie at their bar, and when I got up to sing, I admitted that I was from Chicago, just passing through town, a fact she repeated each time I got back up to sing.
The crowd was extremely responsive, with much high-fiving on the way back to the table. And while my date was cheering and having fun, she also seemed to observe much of this with the clinical eye of the artist, intent on studying the people around us, perhaps much as she might observe the bears and coyotes that she photographs and paints in nearby Yellowstone Park.
From there it was on to Bismark, North Dakota, and I realized that I was retracing some of the steps that I had first taken, almost four years ago, when I first started this trip, driving from Chicago to Seattle. I passed performance venues in Dickinson, and Valley City, North Dakota, dropping a flyer off in Valley City, before continuing on to Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is on my agenda for the coming summer, with the Minnesota Fringe Festival in August, and Amy Salloway, who I'd met at the Cincinnati Fringe last year, and who, it turns out, seems to know just about everybody that I happen know, put me up for the night. When I arrived, I checked my e-mail and was delighted to receive this note from Scotland, where my version of "The Doctor in Spite of Himself" had progressed to the Regional Finals of the Scottish Community Drama Association competition.
"Hi Tim
"Well, I guess you want to now how we got on.........we won! Not only were we the festival winner but we won two other trophies, Best Comedy and Highest Points for Production (there's a convoluted scoring system where specifically production/direction is scored out of 35).
"What a night we had. The cast were superb, a flawless performance, they had the full house audience in raptures and in eager anticipation of the next twist. The adjudicator was fulsome in his praise and constructive in any criticism, although it was very little. . He recognized the challenge we had set ourselves in choosing this play, particularly the demands on actors of delivering dialogue in rhyme. I'll have his written report in about a
week.
"In winning we also eliminated two teams who are consistently prominent at the national finals, indeed both these teams have recent history of winning the whole thing.
"So, we now progress to the Scottish National Finals in Pitlochry 27-29th April, we perform on Friday 28th. Pitlochry is a beautifully scenic small town in the heart of Scotland and has a fantastic theatre. It's a much bigger venue with a vast stage so I'm planning some additional business.
"We will now get further press coverage which I'll copy and send to you.
"Thanks for providing us with such wonderful material. Hope all is well with you?
"... PS If you fancy a trip over I can guarantee you'll be very very well looked after!"
And so, now I'm home, trying to figure out how to get to Scotland on April 28.
By the way, I've now got two performances lined up in Chicago on April 26 (North Park College at 7:30) and 27 (DePaul University at 6 p.m.) (Thus the difficulty with the April 28 event in Scotland.) I'll send a separate posting on this around for the benefit of my Chicago friends, who probably aren't still reading, this long into the e-mail.
Also, I have been inspired to create yet another event.
Now that I have three one-man shows, all of which are fully performance ready, I am putting all three together into what I call "The One-Man, One-Man Theatre Festival," which will feature three performances in a single night ("Criteria" at 6, "Moliere" at 8, and "Karaoke Knights" at 10 p.m.)! Lately, I haven't had a lot of takers for the "three shows in three nights" promotion, as described in my brochure, but if I have the stamina to do all three in a single night, my feeling is that it will strike very high on the "outrageousness or level-of-difficulty quotient", while only tying a given theatre space up for a single day.
I'm currently negotiating with a theatre space in Tennessee to make this happen, perhaps as early as this June. But, hey, it's available to tour to your town! (Schedule below.)
Temperature: 70s
Miles on the Vibe: 181,000 (time for new tires)
In the CD Player: "Karaoke Knights"
Attendance: 12 + 30 + 20 + 60 + 60 = 182
Discoveries: Lighting in lecture halls is always bad. * Do not let the person who knows how to adjust the lights get away until after the show is safely up and running. * My seemingly huge complaints, may only represent a single percent of the perceived experience of my show from the audience's point of view. Expressing these complaints only undermines the perceived value of what an audience has observed.
Next Performance: April 19, Carbondale, IL
evening, and much of the next morning sorting through them and plotting out when I might be able to perform at which locations.
The next day it was on to San Diego, where my friends Betty and Pete live. I'd been out to visit them nearly two years before, shortly after they'd moved into this house, but this time around all the boxes were put away and everything was looking great. We rearranged their living room somewhat, and I did a performance of "Karaoke Knights" for about ten invited guests. It was a great chance to keep up my work on that show, given the fact that I hadn't performed it since the show at SETC in early March.
It was an odd arrangement of the living room, which had the video actually being projected behind me at the empty wall. Since I didn't want to block the video, that forced my performance forwards, and everyone was within about 10 feet of where I was standing. Since the show was created with a large auditorium in mind, it felt a little over-the-top but everyone said, afterwards, that they loved, it. A couple actually bought the CD, and others left a generous tip in the donation jar.
The next morning, I made a brief appearance in two of Betty's middle-school performance classes, doing a quickie introduction to Moliere and my work. The kids were responsive, but my voice was fading on me, so I was struggling with my natural impulse to give everything I've got, and my conscious understanding that I needed to conserve for a show later that afternoon.
I am reminded that at one of the workshops I attended at SETC, there was a strong smell of bleach in the room, and I find myself wondering if breathing that in for an hour had a greater impact on my throat than the cold that I came down with shortly thereafter.
I was off to Long Beach, where I'd performed a year before, and where the French teacher was a bit of a Moliere academic. He'd shared with me one of the papers he'd presented on Moliere, which even I (Moliere expert that I am) found a bit impenetrable.
Steve's professorial style, however, doesn't seem to keep him from enjoying Moliere. This time around, he ushered me to a room he'd booked in the Student Union. It was a small room, with perhaps 45 chairs set up, and I proceeded to clear space for my show. The furthest point in the room may have been no more than 18 feet from where I'd be performing. There was no way to make an "entrance" into this space, as even the wall facing out to the hallway was made of glass, so I got into costume and stood, in full view, to the side until Steve introduced me.
When I started the show, there may have been 3 or 4 seats empty, but people continued to enter as I worked, and most of them were left standing at the entrance. I encouraged them, between monologues, to come in and take the remaining seats, which some did, but there were at least ten people standing or sitting at the door-end of the room throughout the show.
Given this kind of a standing-room-only audience, the show played brilliantly, and everyone in the first row ended up being characters in my scenes, as I played to them throughout. There was a cute girl in the front row who I'd addressed in the Tartuffe monologue, who also got up to play the scene with me. Given that this was Long Beach, and people aren't bundled up quite the way that they are in the north, the woman, in a very light blouse, seemed more defenseless and vulnerable (and, therefore, funnier) than usual.
There'd been some confusion over the program, and while I'd intended to do the 75-minute version, we only had programs for the 60-minute show available, so I did a short Q&A with the students afterwards, and just for fun, threw in the "Doctor in Spite of Himself" monologue. Afterwards, Steve insisted that he wanted to host the show again next year, and help me line up some other west coast bookings as well.
I continued north, into Hollywood, where I stayed the night at the home of a former U-Nebraska friend, now film editor, Michael Hofacre. We got together with Charlie Bachmann (another U-Nebraska MFA), and went out for a bite to eat. I was feeling strangely tired, and eventually realized that I'd crossed through two time zones in two days (with two performances), and 11:00 was feeling like 1 a.m. to me.
The next day, I played catch-up with e-mails for a bit, before getting on the road to Fresno, where I met up with Michael Swanson. Michael has now booked my shows on two occasions, including my appearances at the Midwest ACTF Festival last January. We had a nice relaxed evening, going out for beer and pizza.
I made a stop in Sacramento, to meet with a French teacher from Sacramento State, and continue on my way north to Redding, California, before pushing ahead to Salem, Oregon, the next day. I took two days in Salem to relax and visit with my brother Pat and his family. His son, Michael had just had a birthday, and I got him a copy of the new "King Kong" movie. We hooked it up to the projector that I use in my show, so that we could watch it on the "big screen."
In Portland, I met up with my webmaster, Bruce, and his wife, for a brief evening of karaoke, in a very tacky tiki bar, and I settled in at my favorite hotel, McMenamin's Edgefield, where they have their own on-site brewery and winery. (I'd stayed there a year before, when I'd also been booked by Mount Hood Community College, and had been looking forward to this stop ever since.)
The next day, I met up with my host, Eric, and we took the trunk over to the performance space. The space, which was essentially a lecture hall, had improved since last year, and the pipe that had been jutting out of the floor was now gone. Unfortunately, the lighting of a lecture hall is always bad, and there were only a handful of lights that were illuminating the stage area. We struggled with the settings for about twenty minutes, but eventually I had to set up the show and get into costume and make-up. I took note of where the light was best, and I headed off.
Apparently, the audience took a long time to fill in, and we seemed to be about 15 minutes late in getting started, by which point I was getting much more pumped up than usual. When it was finally time to start, I noticed two things: The audience was much smaller than anticipated, with perhaps 70 people. And the lights that I'd planned on using were now turned off.
I was standing in a moody half-light, and there was actually a flood of light at my back ... unfortunately pointed at the upstage wall, for occasions when this space was used as an art gallery. This left me mostly in silhouette, with a dim, late-evening feel to the rest of the stage. Two lights illuminated the far right and far left areas of the stage.
For perhaps the second time in history, I actually paused my monologue to call back to my host, asking if perhaps some of these "candles" might be brought up to where they were when we rehearsed previously. The host scrambled around for a few minutes, flicking switches while I soldiered on, and some of the house lights went on and off, but no further result. Somewhere, the tech guy, who'd helped us get set up at the outset, had
disappeared.
I realize that I need to impress upon the hosts, even when I am playing without tech, in a lecture hall, the technical supervisor needs to stay available as the performance is beginning. Because there's absolutely nothing I can do otherwise. Moliere isn't supposed to know how to work a light board, and even if he did, he really can't leave the stage to work all that out.
I ended up playing the show all over the stage ... mostly working from the far stage right and the far stage left pools of light. By this time, I was so obsessed over the lighting, that I had no sense of what words were coming out of my mouth. And I was even more surprised that the audience was laughing along, hysterically, throughout the play. My friend Tina (who I'd met in Atlanta two summers ago) was in the audience leading the laughs, as was my playwright friend, Gil Martin.
I'd met Gil about fifteen years ago, when I produced his play, "The Last Rehearsal" with my old theatre, Stage Two. Around that time, I'd taken a trip out west with Jo (later known as "Isaac's Mom") and we dropped in on Gil and his wife and daughter at their Bed & Breakfast in Trout Lake, Washington. When I got to Portland, I remembered to call Gil (who I'd failed to hook up with almost four years before, as he was out fighting forest fires when I arrived at his B&B). Gil no longer runs the Bed & Breakfast, but he just happened to be there when I called, and he made it out to the show.
After the play, I changed quickly and returned to deliver a short version of my "The Life of Moliere" lecture to the twenty or so who remained, and then Gil and Tina and I headed off for lunch. (Tina seemed to be attending the show in the company of a young fellow, who I invited to join us for lunch, but it wasn't until later that I discovered that she'd just met him in the lobby before the show.) (Apparently, she makes friends quite readily.)
Over lunch, Gil noted that his adorable little four-year-old was now 18 and headed for college, and that he and his wife were separated. (The latter was not a particular surprise, I must say, since the female characters in Gil's plays always seemed to get short shrift in the midst of some dialogue that seems to vy with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" for antagonism.)
In the midst of all of this, I got a call from a reporter with the Mount Hood school paper, wanting to know my perspective on how the show had gone. I couldn't stop myself from sighing my complaint about the lights not working, and then realized that my reaction would end up in print, and that my response would undermine the perceived value of the show. While the lighting was certainly the big "issue" in the forefront of my mind, throughout the play, for the audience that may have been just 1 percent of the perceived experience. My complaint would only undermine their appreciation of what they had seen.
I enjoyed one more evening in the hotel, and their terrific wine bar, before heading reluctantly eastward. The first day I headed for Cour d'Alene, and a visit with Joe Jacoby, fellow theatre teacher and Loudon Wainwright fan. I offered to pop in on Joe's Theatre History classes the following morning, and Joe offered to put me up for the night.
The next night I continued on to Livingston, Montana (after dropping in on a former prof, Joe Proctor, in Missoula, where I'm negotiating to perform next fall). I had a date lined up with a painter in Livingston, and the two of us found a karaoke bar in Bozeman. It was the Lion's Club of Bozeman, and it was a pretty lively, if country-music-oriented, crowd. The Karaoke Jockey realized that I was a newbie at their bar, and when I got up to sing, I admitted that I was from Chicago, just passing through town, a fact she repeated each time I got back up to sing.
The crowd was extremely responsive, with much high-fiving on the way back to the table. And while my date was cheering and having fun, she also seemed to observe much of this with the clinical eye of the artist, intent on studying the people around us, perhaps much as she might observe the bears and coyotes that she photographs and paints in nearby Yellowstone Park.
From there it was on to Bismark, North Dakota, and I realized that I was retracing some of the steps that I had first taken, almost four years ago, when I first started this trip, driving from Chicago to Seattle. I passed performance venues in Dickinson, and Valley City, North Dakota, dropping a flyer off in Valley City, before continuing on to Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is on my agenda for the coming summer, with the Minnesota Fringe Festival in August, and Amy Salloway, who I'd met at the Cincinnati Fringe last year, and who, it turns out, seems to know just about everybody that I happen know, put me up for the night. When I arrived, I checked my e-mail and was delighted to receive this note from Scotland, where my version of "The Doctor in Spite of Himself" had progressed to the Regional Finals of the Scottish Community Drama Association competition.
"Hi Tim
"Well, I guess you want to now how we got on.........we won! Not only were we the festival winner but we won two other trophies, Best Comedy and Highest Points for Production (there's a convoluted scoring system where specifically production/direction is scored out of 35).
"What a night we had. The cast were superb, a flawless performance, they had the full house audience in raptures and in eager anticipation of the next twist. The adjudicator was fulsome in his praise and constructive in any criticism, although it was very little. . He recognized the challenge we had set ourselves in choosing this play, particularly the demands on actors of delivering dialogue in rhyme. I'll have his written report in about a
week.
"In winning we also eliminated two teams who are consistently prominent at the national finals, indeed both these teams have recent history of winning the whole thing.
"So, we now progress to the Scottish National Finals in Pitlochry 27-29th April, we perform on Friday 28th. Pitlochry is a beautifully scenic small town in the heart of Scotland and has a fantastic theatre. It's a much bigger venue with a vast stage so I'm planning some additional business.
"We will now get further press coverage which I'll copy and send to you.
"Thanks for providing us with such wonderful material. Hope all is well with you?
"... PS If you fancy a trip over I can guarantee you'll be very very well looked after!"
And so, now I'm home, trying to figure out how to get to Scotland on April 28.
By the way, I've now got two performances lined up in Chicago on April 26 (North Park College at 7:30) and 27 (DePaul University at 6 p.m.) (Thus the difficulty with the April 28 event in Scotland.) I'll send a separate posting on this around for the benefit of my Chicago friends, who probably aren't still reading, this long into the e-mail.
Also, I have been inspired to create yet another event.
Now that I have three one-man shows, all of which are fully performance ready, I am putting all three together into what I call "The One-Man, One-Man Theatre Festival," which will feature three performances in a single night ("Criteria" at 6, "Moliere" at 8, and "Karaoke Knights" at 10 p.m.)! Lately, I haven't had a lot of takers for the "three shows in three nights" promotion, as described in my brochure, but if I have the stamina to do all three in a single night, my feeling is that it will strike very high on the "outrageousness or level-of-difficulty quotient", while only tying a given theatre space up for a single day.
I'm currently negotiating with a theatre space in Tennessee to make this happen, perhaps as early as this June. But, hey, it's available to tour to your town! (Schedule below.)
Temperature: 70s
Miles on the Vibe: 181,000 (time for new tires)
In the CD Player: "Karaoke Knights"
Attendance: 12 + 30 + 20 + 60 + 60 = 182
Discoveries: Lighting in lecture halls is always bad. * Do not let the person who knows how to adjust the lights get away until after the show is safely up and running. * My seemingly huge complaints, may only represent a single percent of the perceived experience of my show from the audience's point of view. Expressing these complaints only undermines the perceived value of what an audience has observed.
Next Performance: April 19, Carbondale, IL
Friday, March 24, 2006
The View From Here #109: Norman, OK
I was coming down with my first cold in about 3 years. My luck on the road has been terrific, but there are two factors to which I attribute this latest ill fortune.
1) My body knows better than I how to take care of itself, and as long as I have a show coming up, I stay healthy. In thirty years of performing, I’ve never had to cancel a show.
2) I’ve been taking a nutritional drink, “Re-Liv” for the past three years, and I ran out about two weeks before coming down with the cold. I had been holding out to get more of the “stuff” (as Barry Bonds might call it) for when I got back in town, but I think the nonstop performing/workshopping/schmoozing/drinking of SETC had finally caught up with me.
I paused on my way back from Orlando, visiting with Sabra, a new friend I’d made at the last Mensa conference (where I’d performed “Criteria”). She went off to work during the day, while I hooked up to the internet and made great progress on the e-mailings. We had planned to hit a karaoke bar at some point, but with my throat the way it was I was even having trouble swallowing, so for the most part, in the evenings we just relaxed in front of the TV.
My friend Tanya, (from the Poor Yorick Shakespeare Catalogue) had given me the idea to hire some help to track down new venues, and within 90 minutes of putting out the e-mail, I had an actual employee, trained and ready to go. (Applications continued to come in, and I think I’ve heard from 25 or so since then.)
I continued, e-mailing the Texas schools, and while I was at it, I happened to hear back from Tennessee Tech University (which is in Cookeville), and met up with the director there, who was very interested in hosting Moliere for next fall.
Next fall, by the way, is looking very good, with a couple of bookings kicking off the tour within two days of the close of “Fringe Season” in Idaho and Montana. (Idaho and Montana are tough nuts for me to crack, and lining up shows there this far in advance is a great sign… assuming I haven’t maxed out the credit cards by then.)
After four days in Tennessee, with the cold finally starting to fade, I hit the road again, getting back to Chicago, and replenishing the “stuff.”
Back at home, I got back to work on my writing: I was editing my acting text, while also beginning a new project: I was tracking back through these editions of “The View From Here,” (reliving those heady early days on the road), looking to edit my 500-plus pages down to a hundred pages of my best stuff.
I had a hard time actually cutting anything. By the time I’d worked my way through the first fifty pages, I hadn’t even managed to cut five pages of material. The problem was that, on this pass through, I had no idea what key episodes of action and excitement I was working towards, or away from. And then an idea struck me. What if I changed my focuse to INcluding the really fun material, rather than working to EXclude the really crappy stuff? That way, when I came across a passage that I absolutely knew I wanted to keep, I would change the font color on the screen to red. Now when I’m done, all I’ll need to do is to figure out what portions absolutely need to be left in place in order to make sense of this “best stuff.”
I found myself in a sudden whirl of writing in the day and going out in the evenings: meeting up with people I’d meant to catch up with for some time. I went to my first Children’s Book Writers meeting in about three years (I get their e-mails, but I’m always out of town when they’re meeting.) Impulsively, I brought my musical adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day” to the meeting, and it was extremely well received by the group, which reminded me that I need to get that one back out in circulation.
I hit the karaoke joints a couple of times, went out to see “Pajama Men” and “Oleanna”, and the visit home was over already. I packed on Friday, and Saturday morning, I was back on the road.
It was a full day of driving, with a lunch stop in Springfield to visit my old college sweetheart, Abbe (and her daughter, Charlotte), and then on through the long haul to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I visited once again, with Dave and Helga. I ran lines for both “Criteria” and “Moliere Than Thou” twice, as I drove, as I had performances of both coming up in Oklahoma, and I hadn’t performed Moliere since mid-February, or “Criteria” since mid-January. The lines seemed surprisingly secure, but that feeling can be deceptive.
Following a Sunday breakfast excursion with Dave and Helga, I was on the road again, this time taking a short hop to Norman. I stopped, first, in Oklahoma City, for a look at the memorial to the victims of the bombing, and found it to be quite touching and surprisingly un-politicized: a loving tribute and a sincere stand against violence, with a beautiful reflecting pool between two impressive portals. Just outside was perhaps 50 feet of the original chain link fence that had surrounded the area, which had become a spontaneous repository of teddy bears, t-shirts, I.D. cards, caps and messages, still hanging on through all kinds of weather, more than ten years after the bombing.
In Norman, I met Matthew, my very helpful host for this visit, who brought me to a reception at one of the faculty homes. The reception was on behalf of myself and another guest artist who was visiting this week, but it seems that his plane was delayed because of the rainy Oklahoma weather (a desperately needed rain that put an end to a series of brush fires), and so I was the only guest of honor. Surprisingly, about 90% of the theatre faculty was present (most theatre faculties I know of could barely get 10% together for such an event, and can barely get 90% for the official faculty meetings). And the department chair, Tom, hinted at an interest in a longer visit next year, in which I might act in and co-direct one of my Moliere works, such as “Bourgeois Gentleman.”
On Monday, I sat in on Susan’s Shakespeare class (Susan was my host the last time I stopped at OU, two years ago), and I observed and responded to the student’s monologues. It was great to get a peek at their work, as it reminded me of my own feelings about Shakespearean performance, showed me where students tend to be in relation to my vision, which in turn has helped me articulate a new chapter for my acting text.
Later that day, I returned to lead my usual “Acting in the Classical Theatre” workshop, and though there were only ten or so in attendance, they seemed very responsive. The first student to raise her hand actually answered my “What are the two foremost responsibilities of the actor?” question perfectly, and it turns out that Susan has been teaching that perspective ever since my visit to OU two years ago.
I took a pass on observing a play rehearsal that night, so that I could go back to the hotel (and watch “24”) and get ready for the next day’s extremely full schedule.
I drilled my lines for “Criteria” and re-edited the material for my newest workshop: “Writing, Producing and Touring the One-Person Show” (kind of like a highly-edited version of these pages). I’ve delivered it twice before, but have never made it through the entire presentation, as each time I’ve had to jump ahead into my performance of “Criteria” before I had quite finished. This time, however, we’d planned for two-and-a-half hours, and I managed to cover all the material, and still preview two of the songs in “Karaoke Knights” for the group. I then shifted to perform “Criteria,” where I had a single line glitch early on … checked the script, and continued.
I think the cause of the glitch was the fact that they were such a responsive audience. There were about 30 of them, laughing at just about every ironic comment, and their laughter led me to point up the funnier stuff with some of my more exaggerated attitudes.
This play stands up to that kind of exaggeration better than I thought it would. While I think of this as being much more subtle than “Moliere,” when I allow the series of discoveries and transitions play freely across my face, the audience responds, seemingly grateful for knowing more clearly where they have the go-ahead to laugh.
As soon as “Criteria” concluded, we hustled down to the theatre space, where we conducted a quick tech rehearsal for “Moliere Than Thou.” And while I wanted to give my voice a needed rest, I just had to run the lines yet one more time before the evening show.
It was a small audience of big laughers, and when I know that each new take that I add to the mix is going to get a laugh, it stimulates a lot more mugging and posing. I noticed quickly that Tom was in the audience, and immediately realized that this would be my “audition” for “Bourgeois Gentleman” (or whatever Moliere project they wanted to do next year). Early on, amid the first monologue (from “Misanthrope”), I again had a memory glitch, but I “backed up” a half of a line, and this second time through, the words formed on my lips in just the moment I needed to remember them.
When it came time to get a female volunteer from the audience, one of Susan’s two daughters had her hand up. I was a little surprised, especially knowing that Susan had seen this play before, and had some sense of what I do to the volunteers! While “Miranda” seemed shy and quiet at first, she got louder as we got into it, but still seemed to panic, variously, about what I might be doing to her. Not only is this the best type of volunteer to get, as the audience identifies with her fears, but at least half of the audience had to be aware that this was Susan’s daughter, which seemed to double the outrageousness quotient.
After that, the rest of the show went great, with a surprisingly good undergrad volunteering and playing along for “Scapin” and big laughs throughout the “Precious Young Maidens” scene (aka “Stop Thief”).
Afterwards Matt and Tom and I stopped out for a couple of beers, further discussing a potential project for next year, and calling it a night. It had been a day filled with two line-throughs, one workshop and two shows, and my voice was pretty shot.
The next morning, I pulled my stuff together and met Susan for coffee. I think I nearly choked on my coffee when Susan answered that her daughter was only 14.
I headed south, meeting my old Nebraska friend, Kevin (formerly, “Ken”) Page in Dallas for lunch. Kevin has had some success in the movies, with parts in “Robocop,” “Seinfeld,” “Friday Night Lights” and “The Alamo,” and he told me the story of what a great movie “The Alamo” was (the only big question was whether it would win 11 or 13 Oscars) until Michael Eisner cut an hour or so of the best stuff out of it. Kevin’s stuff survived the cutting, but by this time it was no longer the ensemble film they thought they were working on. Given how famously that movie bombed, he made just as much for his three days of work on “Friday Night Lights” as he did for five months on the set of “The Alamo.”
And from Dallas, I headed along to Brownwood, Texas, home of Howard Payne University, and my good friend, Nancy Jo Humfeld. I made a quick appearance in Nancy Jo’s voice and diction class (performing a couple monologues, and discovering that my voice had not quite returned to me since my big day in Oklahoma). Nancy Jo has actually headed up to Commerce, Texas to do a little business, and has left me with the run of her place to get caught up on work. I’ve got almost a week now, before my next gig in California, so the plan is to work the bookings, drive west, work the bookings, drive west, work the bookings, drive west. Do a show, drive north.
Miles on the Vibe: 175,700
Attendance: 15, 10, 30, 50
Discoveries: I don’t have to do it all by myself. Isolating and distributing discrete parts of the work enables me to focus on the things that earn me the “big money.” * What seems to me to be exaggeration in the context of a realistic performance, usually plays to the audience as a helpful guide through the transitions and discoveries of the scene. * Focus on including the fun stuff rather than on excluding the crappy stuff. * Sitting in on a class really helps me to continue to define and articulate what I know for the developing textbook.
Temperature: Upper 30s
In the CD Player: “Karaoke Knights”
Next Performance: CSU-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA
1) My body knows better than I how to take care of itself, and as long as I have a show coming up, I stay healthy. In thirty years of performing, I’ve never had to cancel a show.
2) I’ve been taking a nutritional drink, “Re-Liv” for the past three years, and I ran out about two weeks before coming down with the cold. I had been holding out to get more of the “stuff” (as Barry Bonds might call it) for when I got back in town, but I think the nonstop performing/workshopping/schmoozing/drinking of SETC had finally caught up with me.
I paused on my way back from Orlando, visiting with Sabra, a new friend I’d made at the last Mensa conference (where I’d performed “Criteria”). She went off to work during the day, while I hooked up to the internet and made great progress on the e-mailings. We had planned to hit a karaoke bar at some point, but with my throat the way it was I was even having trouble swallowing, so for the most part, in the evenings we just relaxed in front of the TV.
My friend Tanya, (from the Poor Yorick Shakespeare Catalogue) had given me the idea to hire some help to track down new venues, and within 90 minutes of putting out the e-mail, I had an actual employee, trained and ready to go. (Applications continued to come in, and I think I’ve heard from 25 or so since then.)
I continued, e-mailing the Texas schools, and while I was at it, I happened to hear back from Tennessee Tech University (which is in Cookeville), and met up with the director there, who was very interested in hosting Moliere for next fall.
Next fall, by the way, is looking very good, with a couple of bookings kicking off the tour within two days of the close of “Fringe Season” in Idaho and Montana. (Idaho and Montana are tough nuts for me to crack, and lining up shows there this far in advance is a great sign… assuming I haven’t maxed out the credit cards by then.)
After four days in Tennessee, with the cold finally starting to fade, I hit the road again, getting back to Chicago, and replenishing the “stuff.”
Back at home, I got back to work on my writing: I was editing my acting text, while also beginning a new project: I was tracking back through these editions of “The View From Here,” (reliving those heady early days on the road), looking to edit my 500-plus pages down to a hundred pages of my best stuff.
I had a hard time actually cutting anything. By the time I’d worked my way through the first fifty pages, I hadn’t even managed to cut five pages of material. The problem was that, on this pass through, I had no idea what key episodes of action and excitement I was working towards, or away from. And then an idea struck me. What if I changed my focuse to INcluding the really fun material, rather than working to EXclude the really crappy stuff? That way, when I came across a passage that I absolutely knew I wanted to keep, I would change the font color on the screen to red. Now when I’m done, all I’ll need to do is to figure out what portions absolutely need to be left in place in order to make sense of this “best stuff.”
I found myself in a sudden whirl of writing in the day and going out in the evenings: meeting up with people I’d meant to catch up with for some time. I went to my first Children’s Book Writers meeting in about three years (I get their e-mails, but I’m always out of town when they’re meeting.) Impulsively, I brought my musical adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day” to the meeting, and it was extremely well received by the group, which reminded me that I need to get that one back out in circulation.
I hit the karaoke joints a couple of times, went out to see “Pajama Men” and “Oleanna”, and the visit home was over already. I packed on Friday, and Saturday morning, I was back on the road.
It was a full day of driving, with a lunch stop in Springfield to visit my old college sweetheart, Abbe (and her daughter, Charlotte), and then on through the long haul to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I visited once again, with Dave and Helga. I ran lines for both “Criteria” and “Moliere Than Thou” twice, as I drove, as I had performances of both coming up in Oklahoma, and I hadn’t performed Moliere since mid-February, or “Criteria” since mid-January. The lines seemed surprisingly secure, but that feeling can be deceptive.
Following a Sunday breakfast excursion with Dave and Helga, I was on the road again, this time taking a short hop to Norman. I stopped, first, in Oklahoma City, for a look at the memorial to the victims of the bombing, and found it to be quite touching and surprisingly un-politicized: a loving tribute and a sincere stand against violence, with a beautiful reflecting pool between two impressive portals. Just outside was perhaps 50 feet of the original chain link fence that had surrounded the area, which had become a spontaneous repository of teddy bears, t-shirts, I.D. cards, caps and messages, still hanging on through all kinds of weather, more than ten years after the bombing.
In Norman, I met Matthew, my very helpful host for this visit, who brought me to a reception at one of the faculty homes. The reception was on behalf of myself and another guest artist who was visiting this week, but it seems that his plane was delayed because of the rainy Oklahoma weather (a desperately needed rain that put an end to a series of brush fires), and so I was the only guest of honor. Surprisingly, about 90% of the theatre faculty was present (most theatre faculties I know of could barely get 10% together for such an event, and can barely get 90% for the official faculty meetings). And the department chair, Tom, hinted at an interest in a longer visit next year, in which I might act in and co-direct one of my Moliere works, such as “Bourgeois Gentleman.”
On Monday, I sat in on Susan’s Shakespeare class (Susan was my host the last time I stopped at OU, two years ago), and I observed and responded to the student’s monologues. It was great to get a peek at their work, as it reminded me of my own feelings about Shakespearean performance, showed me where students tend to be in relation to my vision, which in turn has helped me articulate a new chapter for my acting text.
Later that day, I returned to lead my usual “Acting in the Classical Theatre” workshop, and though there were only ten or so in attendance, they seemed very responsive. The first student to raise her hand actually answered my “What are the two foremost responsibilities of the actor?” question perfectly, and it turns out that Susan has been teaching that perspective ever since my visit to OU two years ago.
I took a pass on observing a play rehearsal that night, so that I could go back to the hotel (and watch “24”) and get ready for the next day’s extremely full schedule.
I drilled my lines for “Criteria” and re-edited the material for my newest workshop: “Writing, Producing and Touring the One-Person Show” (kind of like a highly-edited version of these pages). I’ve delivered it twice before, but have never made it through the entire presentation, as each time I’ve had to jump ahead into my performance of “Criteria” before I had quite finished. This time, however, we’d planned for two-and-a-half hours, and I managed to cover all the material, and still preview two of the songs in “Karaoke Knights” for the group. I then shifted to perform “Criteria,” where I had a single line glitch early on … checked the script, and continued.
I think the cause of the glitch was the fact that they were such a responsive audience. There were about 30 of them, laughing at just about every ironic comment, and their laughter led me to point up the funnier stuff with some of my more exaggerated attitudes.
This play stands up to that kind of exaggeration better than I thought it would. While I think of this as being much more subtle than “Moliere,” when I allow the series of discoveries and transitions play freely across my face, the audience responds, seemingly grateful for knowing more clearly where they have the go-ahead to laugh.
As soon as “Criteria” concluded, we hustled down to the theatre space, where we conducted a quick tech rehearsal for “Moliere Than Thou.” And while I wanted to give my voice a needed rest, I just had to run the lines yet one more time before the evening show.
It was a small audience of big laughers, and when I know that each new take that I add to the mix is going to get a laugh, it stimulates a lot more mugging and posing. I noticed quickly that Tom was in the audience, and immediately realized that this would be my “audition” for “Bourgeois Gentleman” (or whatever Moliere project they wanted to do next year). Early on, amid the first monologue (from “Misanthrope”), I again had a memory glitch, but I “backed up” a half of a line, and this second time through, the words formed on my lips in just the moment I needed to remember them.
When it came time to get a female volunteer from the audience, one of Susan’s two daughters had her hand up. I was a little surprised, especially knowing that Susan had seen this play before, and had some sense of what I do to the volunteers! While “Miranda” seemed shy and quiet at first, she got louder as we got into it, but still seemed to panic, variously, about what I might be doing to her. Not only is this the best type of volunteer to get, as the audience identifies with her fears, but at least half of the audience had to be aware that this was Susan’s daughter, which seemed to double the outrageousness quotient.
After that, the rest of the show went great, with a surprisingly good undergrad volunteering and playing along for “Scapin” and big laughs throughout the “Precious Young Maidens” scene (aka “Stop Thief”).
Afterwards Matt and Tom and I stopped out for a couple of beers, further discussing a potential project for next year, and calling it a night. It had been a day filled with two line-throughs, one workshop and two shows, and my voice was pretty shot.
The next morning, I pulled my stuff together and met Susan for coffee. I think I nearly choked on my coffee when Susan answered that her daughter was only 14.
I headed south, meeting my old Nebraska friend, Kevin (formerly, “Ken”) Page in Dallas for lunch. Kevin has had some success in the movies, with parts in “Robocop,” “Seinfeld,” “Friday Night Lights” and “The Alamo,” and he told me the story of what a great movie “The Alamo” was (the only big question was whether it would win 11 or 13 Oscars) until Michael Eisner cut an hour or so of the best stuff out of it. Kevin’s stuff survived the cutting, but by this time it was no longer the ensemble film they thought they were working on. Given how famously that movie bombed, he made just as much for his three days of work on “Friday Night Lights” as he did for five months on the set of “The Alamo.”
And from Dallas, I headed along to Brownwood, Texas, home of Howard Payne University, and my good friend, Nancy Jo Humfeld. I made a quick appearance in Nancy Jo’s voice and diction class (performing a couple monologues, and discovering that my voice had not quite returned to me since my big day in Oklahoma). Nancy Jo has actually headed up to Commerce, Texas to do a little business, and has left me with the run of her place to get caught up on work. I’ve got almost a week now, before my next gig in California, so the plan is to work the bookings, drive west, work the bookings, drive west, work the bookings, drive west. Do a show, drive north.
Miles on the Vibe: 175,700
Attendance: 15, 10, 30, 50
Discoveries: I don’t have to do it all by myself. Isolating and distributing discrete parts of the work enables me to focus on the things that earn me the “big money.” * What seems to me to be exaggeration in the context of a realistic performance, usually plays to the audience as a helpful guide through the transitions and discoveries of the scene. * Focus on including the fun stuff rather than on excluding the crappy stuff. * Sitting in on a class really helps me to continue to define and articulate what I know for the developing textbook.
Temperature: Upper 30s
In the CD Player: “Karaoke Knights”
Next Performance: CSU-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA
Saturday, March 11, 2006
The View From Here #108: Orlando, FL
“Karaoke Knights” rocks!
From Connecticut, I dropped down to Baltimore. Looking at the map, I saw that driving west of Manhattan, through Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, was more direct, as the crow flies, but traffic seemed much worse, even though I was passing through mid-day. And going from any one borough to another seems to demand the crossing of a bridge for which they will charge tolls as high as nine dollars!
I visited with my sister, Maureen, who had to watch the final episode of “The Bachelor” on one television, while I watched “24” on another. Thank god “The Bachelor” chose the right woman or it might have been a dark evening indeed.
From Baltimore, I raced south toward Savannah, but angled off slightly to get a hotel room in Hilton Head. (I figured it unlikely that I’ll get a booking in Hilton Head, and this might be my only chance to see that island.) Of course, I arrived after dark, and was in a hurry to leave the next morning, so I never even saw the ocean. I did, however, stumble upon a nice New Orleans-style restaurant decked out in Mardi Gras beads for this fat-Tuesday.
I hit Orlando around 5 p.m. the next day, and proceeded immediately to the Staples and the Kinkos, getting flyers and programs copied for my show. I dropped off my stuff at Al’s house (a.k.a., Carl F. Gauze), and headed for the conference center. I checked in moments before the registration desk closed for the night, snagging a program just in time to study it overnight.
The first thing I discovered was that “Karaoke Knights” was scheduled, not for FRIDAY night at midnight, but for THURSDAY night at midnight. The whole midnight thing was throwing me off, but the upshot was that I now had 24 hours less to prepare than previously anticipated. I called Kinkos, which had thankfully not yet printed up my flyers, and got them to make the change, and proceeded to return to Al’s house to step up my preparation.
I called my friend, April, and was noting that this was shaping up as a very “stressful” 24 hours … but there, I caught myself, and said instead: “I am going to have an AMAZING 24 hours.”
I am discovering that what you speak, you create … and did I really want to create any more stress for myself than was actually there?
Thursday morning, I picked up my corrected flyers and loaded the show in to the performance space. There was another show about to start, but the technician, who’d also run my shows the year before, was extremely attentive to my needs, and roped off a special area for my equipment.
I passed out a few flyers among the masses of people who were gathering at the conference (there were upwards of 4000), and found myself in a conversation with a man who looked familiar. He had run the session last year on the always-contentious topic of “making changes in the script,” and representatives of all of the major play publishing companies had attended. He was doing a variation of that same session in another 20 minutes, and I decided to attend.
Considering that he’d already met me, and knew my publisher, and also knew that the Playscripts Inc. guy was in attendance, he found himself using me as an example several times. “Can I pick on you?” he would ask. “Sure, bring it on.”
It turned out to be very nice exposure for me, particularly as there were reps for at least five different publishers in the audience (all of whom have rejected my work, variously, over the years). Between this session, and another session on Friday, they all now know who I am, have connected me as “that Moliere guy” in their minds, perhaps noted that I have okay hygiene, and have seen me be cordial and articulate under pressure. All of which means they have since felt comfortable chatting with me in the exhibit hall, and may give a little more consideration the next time a play of mine crosses their desk.
Afterwards I did a brief tech rehearsal. There was already a DVD/Projector set up in the room, with a projection screen that was as tall as myself. Whereas, I’d begun performing this show nine months before (also in Orlando) with the “karaoke interludes” on a TV screen, this time the screen would reveal lyrics to all of my songs, as well as an “omnipresent narrator” commenting on the songs during the introductions. All of this, on an enormous screen, forced the audience’s attention to dance between stage and screen, always engaged in SOMETHING. As I rehearsed the opening number (“Looking for a Groupie”) a technician, carrying stuff in and out of the hall, paused to laugh several times at the lyrics, and I gained a terrific lift in confidence.
I ran some final errands in preparation for the midnight performance, getting a haircut, picking up a copy of the game, “Twister” (I needed the spinner as a prop), and finally buying a coat tree to hold my costumes during the course of the show (something I should have done 9 months ago). It seems that coat trees are few and far between in Orlando … and it dawned on me that they don’t wear coats down here as much as we do in northern climes.
I returned to Al’s house for one last run-through, and everything was falling into place. I was in good voice and, now that I had a sense of the layout of the stage, the “blocking,” would hold no surprises. The KJ narration was still a little uncertain in the flurry of performance, and so I decided to bring the script on stage with me, propping it on a music stand, to my left, while the microphone stood to my right, and the coat tree behind me.
Back at the conference center, I attended a “brainstorming session” for the Acting/Directing specialists, mostly about what kind of workshop sessions they might want to include for next year’s conference. Everybody went around introducing themselves, and again, this was a good opportunity to establish my face alongside my name for the other attendees, most of whom had been receiving my e-mails for years. I was also surprised to see Frankie Day in attendance … who I hadn’t seen since my days as an undergrad (let’s just say, prior to the current century). And while other people were brainstorming about panels they might want to present, Frankie and I dredged up familiar names from years gone by.
It was getting uncomfortably close to curtain time, and my internal motor was starting to rev up. I left to load in the remaining props and promotional materials for my show. The conference allowed me a single table outside the hall to display brochures and videos and sell CDs, and I’d gotten my friend Patty to come out to the hotel late on a Thursday night to catch people who were coming out of the show, give them (or sell them) stuff, and have them sign my guest book.
Back in the auditorium, the critique of the 10-minute play festival was wrapping up, and I was a little dismayed to see that the packed house for the festival had greatly diminished for the critique. In all, perhaps a hundred people had stuck around to see “Karaoke Knights,” and in an audacious nod to the “one-person” show, I went around handing out programs, myself.
As soon as the critique finished, I loaded in my microphones and coat tree and music stand, carefully placing the cords where I needed them while Chad, the tech guy, set up the projector and screen. For the most part the entire audience had remained in their seats as this was going on, and I had to test the sound levels while they were already in the room. The opening strains of the first song started to play, full blast, through the speakers. The audience quieted, thinking that I was starting, and I had to direct them to pay no attention: “Don’t enjoy this!”
Finally all was in place, and I took the stage with a leap and a big bold “Welcome to the FRINGE FESTIVAL!” Everyone cheered, and I explained the need for their involvement with the show. I led them all, instead, in an a cappella version of “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” and encouraged them to get out their cell phones and wave them in the air (which many of them did!), and I could see that the rowdy crowd was sufficiently warmed up. This, I saw, was a group that appreciated the theatrical gesture strictly for the sake of something being a theatrical gesture, and they were ready to “get” the show on that level.
As the show opened, I could hear a bit of reverb in the “KJ” microphone (now entirely out of my control), and I knew it would be a clarity problem, particularly as I talk pretty fast. I redoubled my efforts toward articulation, and was glad to have the script on stage to keep me on track.
“Looking for a Groupie” started the show off with good laughs, as did the volunteer bit in “Too Real.” “Left To Say” got the crowd singing, and “Tempted to be Tempted” won them over with its mock-ballet. During “Forward Thinking,” I picked out a shy looking girl for the bondage parody, and the phrase “submit to more restriction,” amid the tangle of microphone cord, got big laughs. “Next,” got a whooping response at the end of the first rapid-fire chorus, and “Half a World Away,” a difficult song in the past, now seems to win them over, largely on account of a series of comic “footnotes” inserted into the video. The somewhat serious “Gravity’s Pull” and “Dreaming Tax” ratcheted the laughs back, while “Bite My Tongue,” “Say Goodnight” and “Taking Turns Leading” hammered home the comedy. I finished on a bittersweet note (“Say Goodnight”) and returned for an encore/finale, with a reprise of “Groupie.” Almost immediately, however, most of the audience was standing for an ovation, and the dance break of “Groupie” seemed to strain against their need to acknowledge the play (something to fix in later versions).
All in all, I came away immensely satisfied. The new video commentary gets laughs that I, amid my internal narrative, am not expecting at all (besides which, I’ve largely forgotten what is appearing on the screen). After the show, audience signed the guest book with: “Great.” “Yay!” “Whee! I (heart) it.” “Wonderful!” “Awsome!” and “Absolutely fabulous!” I was walkin’ on air, as they say, finally feeling like I had that elusive third show, which I could push, alongside my other two one-man shows, for full bookings.
The next morning, I gave my acting workshop. They’d placed me in a room perhaps suited for 30 people. Sixty or so showed up.
Actually, there were even more who simply could not have squeezed into the room. The air conditioner could not cool the room enough to make the experience comfortable, but the group was attentive and very responsive, as I went through my several exercises of “Misanthrope”, “Hamlet” and “Tartuffe.”
This workshop is getting great reviews of late. Several remembered it from last year’s conference. And a woman who’d just seen it in Williamsburg reported, “The students performed their Moliere scenes a few days after your show, and you could tell which ones had been to see your workshop, because their scenes were through the roof.”
With my contribution to the conference complete, I proceeded to drop in on other people’s events: “How to become a writer for ‘Southern Theatre’,” “Play Publishers Q & A,” “History/Theory/Criticism Board Meeting,” and the very funny “Who dressed you? Or don’t you have a mirror?” (a workshop about proper audition dress). Again, while my participation at these events was minimal, at each I seemed to find myself in yet another conversation about booking my work with someone who’d spotted my name.
Friday night I had dinner with Tania, who runs the “Poor Yorick” Shakespeare catalogue (www.PoorYorick.com). We’ve found ourselves attending six of these conferences together in the past, but had never had the chance to sit and visit (She’s always been running her booth, and I’m always shmoozing the crowd). She turns out to be an entrepreneur in much the same way that I am, but from the Shakespeare side of things, building up her business from scratch, and taking full advantage of the internet.
Afterwards, under the encouragement of one of the students who had loved my show, I crashed the UNC-Greensboro party, to say hello to the professor (who the kids are trying to get to book me).
The next day, the conference’s keynote speaker was Anne Bogart, whose work is increasingly celebrated in the theatre world. Eloquent and passionate, she told several terrific stories, with one, especially, about the movie “The Red Violin:”
She’d met the director of “The Red Violin” at a dinner party, and he spontaneously asked if she’d like to hear the story of his movie (this was before he’d shot any of it, and while he was still fundraising). The movie, of course, was later made, very successfully, and Anne noted that, “I don’t think it mattered to him who I was, when he offered to tell me the story of his movie. I think if anyone else had been sitting there next to him, he still would have turned to them and offered to tell them the story of his movie. I believe that the process of telling people about his movie enabled him to articulate that movie into existence.”
The conference continued, and I found myself just hanging out at the bar, with one conversation leading to another, and connections made between a series of people from whom I seemed to be just a single degree removed.
Late breaking news: Driving north, through Atlanta (stopping for a visit at Linda’s), and continuing through Chattanooga (checking in with a high school teacher who saw the show in Orlando), and into Sparta, Tennessee, I stop to check e-mails once more, and receive this notice from a producer in Scotland doing my “Doctor in Spite of Himself”:
“Hi Tim
“Thought you'd like to know the premier was a phenomenal success. We won the district festival and now progress to the regional festival which takes place in Edinburgh 6-8th April. It will be much tougher as we meet other district winners but we're up for it.
“The adjudicator, a theatre professional, was fulsome in his praise. He loved your script (it works well with the Scottish brogue) and thought it was an extremely bold choice of play, he thought the staging and creativity was superb and that the actors were positively sadistic, bawdy and un-inhibited!
“We should now receive some local press coverage and I'd be happy to send it if it is of interest.
“I'll keep you posted on any other developments.
“Best wishes
“Martin”
Temperature: 40s-80s
In the CD Player: Scissor Sisters
Attendance: 100 + 60 = 160
Miles on the Vibe: 173,300
Discoveries: Karaoke Knights rocks! * What you speak, you create, and you need to choose whether you want to be creating more stress or more success. * My name has become as effective as my costume in getting attention for my work. * Just being present at some of the workshops enables potential bookers or publishers to get comfortable with me as a collaborator. * People talk about me behind my back, and I’ve reached the tipping point, where third party conversations confirm the nature of my work with people who need to know whether they ought to book me or not. * Played with the proper amount of exuberance, an audience will appreciate the theatrical gesture for the sake of the gesture itself.
Next performance: Norman, OK (U of Oklahoma) March 19-20.
From Connecticut, I dropped down to Baltimore. Looking at the map, I saw that driving west of Manhattan, through Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, was more direct, as the crow flies, but traffic seemed much worse, even though I was passing through mid-day. And going from any one borough to another seems to demand the crossing of a bridge for which they will charge tolls as high as nine dollars!
I visited with my sister, Maureen, who had to watch the final episode of “The Bachelor” on one television, while I watched “24” on another. Thank god “The Bachelor” chose the right woman or it might have been a dark evening indeed.
From Baltimore, I raced south toward Savannah, but angled off slightly to get a hotel room in Hilton Head. (I figured it unlikely that I’ll get a booking in Hilton Head, and this might be my only chance to see that island.) Of course, I arrived after dark, and was in a hurry to leave the next morning, so I never even saw the ocean. I did, however, stumble upon a nice New Orleans-style restaurant decked out in Mardi Gras beads for this fat-Tuesday.
I hit Orlando around 5 p.m. the next day, and proceeded immediately to the Staples and the Kinkos, getting flyers and programs copied for my show. I dropped off my stuff at Al’s house (a.k.a., Carl F. Gauze), and headed for the conference center. I checked in moments before the registration desk closed for the night, snagging a program just in time to study it overnight.
The first thing I discovered was that “Karaoke Knights” was scheduled, not for FRIDAY night at midnight, but for THURSDAY night at midnight. The whole midnight thing was throwing me off, but the upshot was that I now had 24 hours less to prepare than previously anticipated. I called Kinkos, which had thankfully not yet printed up my flyers, and got them to make the change, and proceeded to return to Al’s house to step up my preparation.
I called my friend, April, and was noting that this was shaping up as a very “stressful” 24 hours … but there, I caught myself, and said instead: “I am going to have an AMAZING 24 hours.”
I am discovering that what you speak, you create … and did I really want to create any more stress for myself than was actually there?
Thursday morning, I picked up my corrected flyers and loaded the show in to the performance space. There was another show about to start, but the technician, who’d also run my shows the year before, was extremely attentive to my needs, and roped off a special area for my equipment.
I passed out a few flyers among the masses of people who were gathering at the conference (there were upwards of 4000), and found myself in a conversation with a man who looked familiar. He had run the session last year on the always-contentious topic of “making changes in the script,” and representatives of all of the major play publishing companies had attended. He was doing a variation of that same session in another 20 minutes, and I decided to attend.
Considering that he’d already met me, and knew my publisher, and also knew that the Playscripts Inc. guy was in attendance, he found himself using me as an example several times. “Can I pick on you?” he would ask. “Sure, bring it on.”
It turned out to be very nice exposure for me, particularly as there were reps for at least five different publishers in the audience (all of whom have rejected my work, variously, over the years). Between this session, and another session on Friday, they all now know who I am, have connected me as “that Moliere guy” in their minds, perhaps noted that I have okay hygiene, and have seen me be cordial and articulate under pressure. All of which means they have since felt comfortable chatting with me in the exhibit hall, and may give a little more consideration the next time a play of mine crosses their desk.
Afterwards I did a brief tech rehearsal. There was already a DVD/Projector set up in the room, with a projection screen that was as tall as myself. Whereas, I’d begun performing this show nine months before (also in Orlando) with the “karaoke interludes” on a TV screen, this time the screen would reveal lyrics to all of my songs, as well as an “omnipresent narrator” commenting on the songs during the introductions. All of this, on an enormous screen, forced the audience’s attention to dance between stage and screen, always engaged in SOMETHING. As I rehearsed the opening number (“Looking for a Groupie”) a technician, carrying stuff in and out of the hall, paused to laugh several times at the lyrics, and I gained a terrific lift in confidence.
I ran some final errands in preparation for the midnight performance, getting a haircut, picking up a copy of the game, “Twister” (I needed the spinner as a prop), and finally buying a coat tree to hold my costumes during the course of the show (something I should have done 9 months ago). It seems that coat trees are few and far between in Orlando … and it dawned on me that they don’t wear coats down here as much as we do in northern climes.
I returned to Al’s house for one last run-through, and everything was falling into place. I was in good voice and, now that I had a sense of the layout of the stage, the “blocking,” would hold no surprises. The KJ narration was still a little uncertain in the flurry of performance, and so I decided to bring the script on stage with me, propping it on a music stand, to my left, while the microphone stood to my right, and the coat tree behind me.
Back at the conference center, I attended a “brainstorming session” for the Acting/Directing specialists, mostly about what kind of workshop sessions they might want to include for next year’s conference. Everybody went around introducing themselves, and again, this was a good opportunity to establish my face alongside my name for the other attendees, most of whom had been receiving my e-mails for years. I was also surprised to see Frankie Day in attendance … who I hadn’t seen since my days as an undergrad (let’s just say, prior to the current century). And while other people were brainstorming about panels they might want to present, Frankie and I dredged up familiar names from years gone by.
It was getting uncomfortably close to curtain time, and my internal motor was starting to rev up. I left to load in the remaining props and promotional materials for my show. The conference allowed me a single table outside the hall to display brochures and videos and sell CDs, and I’d gotten my friend Patty to come out to the hotel late on a Thursday night to catch people who were coming out of the show, give them (or sell them) stuff, and have them sign my guest book.
Back in the auditorium, the critique of the 10-minute play festival was wrapping up, and I was a little dismayed to see that the packed house for the festival had greatly diminished for the critique. In all, perhaps a hundred people had stuck around to see “Karaoke Knights,” and in an audacious nod to the “one-person” show, I went around handing out programs, myself.
As soon as the critique finished, I loaded in my microphones and coat tree and music stand, carefully placing the cords where I needed them while Chad, the tech guy, set up the projector and screen. For the most part the entire audience had remained in their seats as this was going on, and I had to test the sound levels while they were already in the room. The opening strains of the first song started to play, full blast, through the speakers. The audience quieted, thinking that I was starting, and I had to direct them to pay no attention: “Don’t enjoy this!”
Finally all was in place, and I took the stage with a leap and a big bold “Welcome to the FRINGE FESTIVAL!” Everyone cheered, and I explained the need for their involvement with the show. I led them all, instead, in an a cappella version of “Why Don’t We Get Drunk” and encouraged them to get out their cell phones and wave them in the air (which many of them did!), and I could see that the rowdy crowd was sufficiently warmed up. This, I saw, was a group that appreciated the theatrical gesture strictly for the sake of something being a theatrical gesture, and they were ready to “get” the show on that level.
As the show opened, I could hear a bit of reverb in the “KJ” microphone (now entirely out of my control), and I knew it would be a clarity problem, particularly as I talk pretty fast. I redoubled my efforts toward articulation, and was glad to have the script on stage to keep me on track.
“Looking for a Groupie” started the show off with good laughs, as did the volunteer bit in “Too Real.” “Left To Say” got the crowd singing, and “Tempted to be Tempted” won them over with its mock-ballet. During “Forward Thinking,” I picked out a shy looking girl for the bondage parody, and the phrase “submit to more restriction,” amid the tangle of microphone cord, got big laughs. “Next,” got a whooping response at the end of the first rapid-fire chorus, and “Half a World Away,” a difficult song in the past, now seems to win them over, largely on account of a series of comic “footnotes” inserted into the video. The somewhat serious “Gravity’s Pull” and “Dreaming Tax” ratcheted the laughs back, while “Bite My Tongue,” “Say Goodnight” and “Taking Turns Leading” hammered home the comedy. I finished on a bittersweet note (“Say Goodnight”) and returned for an encore/finale, with a reprise of “Groupie.” Almost immediately, however, most of the audience was standing for an ovation, and the dance break of “Groupie” seemed to strain against their need to acknowledge the play (something to fix in later versions).
All in all, I came away immensely satisfied. The new video commentary gets laughs that I, amid my internal narrative, am not expecting at all (besides which, I’ve largely forgotten what is appearing on the screen). After the show, audience signed the guest book with: “Great.” “Yay!” “Whee! I (heart) it.” “Wonderful!” “Awsome!” and “Absolutely fabulous!” I was walkin’ on air, as they say, finally feeling like I had that elusive third show, which I could push, alongside my other two one-man shows, for full bookings.
The next morning, I gave my acting workshop. They’d placed me in a room perhaps suited for 30 people. Sixty or so showed up.
Actually, there were even more who simply could not have squeezed into the room. The air conditioner could not cool the room enough to make the experience comfortable, but the group was attentive and very responsive, as I went through my several exercises of “Misanthrope”, “Hamlet” and “Tartuffe.”
This workshop is getting great reviews of late. Several remembered it from last year’s conference. And a woman who’d just seen it in Williamsburg reported, “The students performed their Moliere scenes a few days after your show, and you could tell which ones had been to see your workshop, because their scenes were through the roof.”
With my contribution to the conference complete, I proceeded to drop in on other people’s events: “How to become a writer for ‘Southern Theatre’,” “Play Publishers Q & A,” “History/Theory/Criticism Board Meeting,” and the very funny “Who dressed you? Or don’t you have a mirror?” (a workshop about proper audition dress). Again, while my participation at these events was minimal, at each I seemed to find myself in yet another conversation about booking my work with someone who’d spotted my name.
Friday night I had dinner with Tania, who runs the “Poor Yorick” Shakespeare catalogue (www.PoorYorick.com). We’ve found ourselves attending six of these conferences together in the past, but had never had the chance to sit and visit (She’s always been running her booth, and I’m always shmoozing the crowd). She turns out to be an entrepreneur in much the same way that I am, but from the Shakespeare side of things, building up her business from scratch, and taking full advantage of the internet.
Afterwards, under the encouragement of one of the students who had loved my show, I crashed the UNC-Greensboro party, to say hello to the professor (who the kids are trying to get to book me).
The next day, the conference’s keynote speaker was Anne Bogart, whose work is increasingly celebrated in the theatre world. Eloquent and passionate, she told several terrific stories, with one, especially, about the movie “The Red Violin:”
She’d met the director of “The Red Violin” at a dinner party, and he spontaneously asked if she’d like to hear the story of his movie (this was before he’d shot any of it, and while he was still fundraising). The movie, of course, was later made, very successfully, and Anne noted that, “I don’t think it mattered to him who I was, when he offered to tell me the story of his movie. I think if anyone else had been sitting there next to him, he still would have turned to them and offered to tell them the story of his movie. I believe that the process of telling people about his movie enabled him to articulate that movie into existence.”
The conference continued, and I found myself just hanging out at the bar, with one conversation leading to another, and connections made between a series of people from whom I seemed to be just a single degree removed.
Late breaking news: Driving north, through Atlanta (stopping for a visit at Linda’s), and continuing through Chattanooga (checking in with a high school teacher who saw the show in Orlando), and into Sparta, Tennessee, I stop to check e-mails once more, and receive this notice from a producer in Scotland doing my “Doctor in Spite of Himself”:
“Hi Tim
“Thought you'd like to know the premier was a phenomenal success. We won the district festival and now progress to the regional festival which takes place in Edinburgh 6-8th April. It will be much tougher as we meet other district winners but we're up for it.
“The adjudicator, a theatre professional, was fulsome in his praise. He loved your script (it works well with the Scottish brogue) and thought it was an extremely bold choice of play, he thought the staging and creativity was superb and that the actors were positively sadistic, bawdy and un-inhibited!
“We should now receive some local press coverage and I'd be happy to send it if it is of interest.
“I'll keep you posted on any other developments.
“Best wishes
“Martin”
Temperature: 40s-80s
In the CD Player: Scissor Sisters
Attendance: 100 + 60 = 160
Miles on the Vibe: 173,300
Discoveries: Karaoke Knights rocks! * What you speak, you create, and you need to choose whether you want to be creating more stress or more success. * My name has become as effective as my costume in getting attention for my work. * Just being present at some of the workshops enables potential bookers or publishers to get comfortable with me as a collaborator. * People talk about me behind my back, and I’ve reached the tipping point, where third party conversations confirm the nature of my work with people who need to know whether they ought to book me or not. * Played with the proper amount of exuberance, an audience will appreciate the theatrical gesture for the sake of the gesture itself.
Next performance: Norman, OK (U of Oklahoma) March 19-20.
The View From Here #107: Chicago, IL; Williamsburg, VA & Orlando, FL
Well, the bookings have been few, but the business has been good, in its own way.
Home from New Orleans, I dove back into “Karaoke Knights.” While I had been trying to draw some video engineers into the project, one of them was tied up with a theatre project, and others worked in a Mac format, and were having difficulty opening the files that I had put together.
I had found myself taking over bits of the project as elements of the technology had come within my grasp. I’d already gotten a bit of mastery around the audio end of things, timing out the interlude music with some exactitude, which would then give way to the karaoke numbers and the original music (the downbeat for the new song, for instance, coming in on the downbeat from the previous number). While, previously, I had turned the music over to the audio engineer, with elaborate notes, at this point I had timed out a new karaoke video to synchronize exactly with the music as I had edited it, and probably no amount of explanation could get the engineer to recreate this.
Which meant pushing the project along as far as I could, mixing the music into an “mp3”, turning that into a “wav”, using the “wav” to make a “cdg”, turning the “cdg” into an “avi” file.
The key moment of this process lay in the discovery of how to edit the vocals mostly out of an existing piece of music, which meant that I could “karaokeize” the music that I had so carefully timed out, without having to re-integrate karaoke cdgs into the process. This meant going back to the start, more or less, dropping the new “karaokeized” music into the soundtrack, but it also meant that all future transitions would be under my control.
And while I’d hoped to pass the “avi” on to the engineer to “render” the video onto the dvd, in the end, I bought my own rendering program, and eventually I invested, with my friend April, on a dvd burner, and we burned the dvd ourselves.
And while it may have been a pain to take the project all this way all by myself (each stage of the project seemed to demand that I go back to the beginning on some of the songs, and start over), at least by now, when I want to rework elements of the show, it is all within my grasp, and the turnaround time, whenever I reconceptualized the work, (which I seem to do just about every time I get the new version of the show in hand) would be greatly diminished.
In the meantime, I was resuming work on “Currency,” my “personal growth” book. While I’d reconnected with my friend in Texas (who’d suggested a literary agent to me two years before), and gotten her to promise to send me his contact info, I hadn’t yet received it, and decided to press forward in refining the text, so that I would have something ready to share when the opportunity presented itself.
I did at least an hour a day on “Currency,” even to the point of creating an index (which I’d never done before). I then refocused my attention on “Acting at the Speed of Life.” It had been over a year since I’d done any work on this one (I’d gotten a couple of gentle rejections from publishers), and while previously, I couldn’t envision any improvements, a year of delivering and evolving the message through my acting workshops helped me see new insights and exercises and smoother transitions, which made it a slower process than my work on “Currency,” although the changes were getting me excited about the book again.
The deadline for getting back onto the road was bearing down relentlessly. I knew that I would have a new version of “Karaoke Knights” ready to test out, so I arranged with my friend, Freddy Weaver, to use the “Tantra Nova” space in the city to host a performance, and I dove back into rehearsals. I hadn’t memorized the new narration that carried me from one musical number to the next, and I hadn’t gotten a sense of how the counterpoint narration (on the video) would play. I was relatively confident in the songs themselves (I’d re-edited several of them to cut off key seconds in which I had nothing to actually do onstage) but they still needed fresh rehearsal as I hadn’t actually performed them since September.
There were perhaps 10 or 12 people in the (very friendly) audience for this performance, and the bits that may have worried me played very well. There were some audio balance issues, with interludes that played louder than the songs themselves, confusing moments around when I was the narrator and when I was being a character, but overall the show went as well as I might expect. (Two weeks later, I am continuing to memorize the narrative bridges, and testing the show out on anybody I can find on the road, in anticipation of a big audience at the Southeast Theatre Conference on March 3.)
With the completion of this performance, I sprinted through the last items of my to-do list en route to packing the car and getting back onto the road.
The first stop was Detroit, with an early celebration of Isaac’s 12th birthday. We managed to catch two movies (“Pink Panther” and “Zathura” … I preferred the latter), eat out a couple of times and hang out watching a bit of the Olympics.
Weather reports spoke of a winter storm that had marched along the east coast, and so I replotted the trip that was intended to carry me through Washington D.C., to stop instead in Harrisonburg, Virginia, visiting with my grad school friend, Kathy Conery, and her now-fiancée, Jeff. Kathy was working on a production of “How to Succeed in Business” which was in its final rehearsal, and I watched about 45 minutes of Act I, before sneaking out to watch “24” in the Student Union, and returning for the last half hour of “How to Succeed.”
The next morning, I was on my way to Williamsburg (or “Colonial Willamsburg” as they call it), where the weather had turned warm and sunny. I met my host, Elizabeth Wiley, who had apparently gone to great lengths to publicize both my performance and my workshop, as I saw flyers for both throughout the theatre building.
The theatre building, by the way, was commemorated by two plaques that designated it as the site of a presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, as well as the democratic primary debate from the 1988 election. Williamsburg is, of course, the site of the College of William and Mary, one of the first colleges established in “the colonies,” and the main street of Williamsburg is actually open only to foot traffic, running from the university to the former state capital. It’s rather like a very large version of Salem, Illinois, with blacksmith shops, and costumed historical characters festooning the streets.
The theatre for my show was along this street, and they were a busy facility, with historical reenactments and storytellers performing in the space 3-4 times a day. They’d put an enormous poster about my performance in their showcase, and had me listed on two or three more brochures. They clearly had the publicity side of the event down … the only question was how much of a “draw” Moliere might be in this town.
Sign spotted at the side entrance to the hotel: “FOR YOUR SECURITY, PLEASE USE YOUR ROOM KEY TO ENTER THE BUILDING.” (I suppose that’s a lot more secure than putting your fist through the window.)
Notation on a University website: “Theatre major, Heidi, has been a regular working actress since graduating from St. Mary’s.” (And what her digestion has to do with her schooling, I don’t imagine I can guess.)
In the news: “Rioting over cartoon;” Every time I hear this, I have to remind myself that this time the news ISN’T referring to the city in Africa.
The next day, following a quick technical rehearsal, I went to deliver my acting workshop, and found that, with attendees from neighboring schools, there were about 65 students in attendance. (This may have been a record.) I continue to improvise my way through the order of this workshop, putting the “Misanthrope” exercise (now known as “The Jerry Springer Show”) earlier in the process, which seems to go better with the “being seen” theme of my lecture.
The “Tartuffe” exercise (occasionally known as “Elimidate”) went very well, and when it came time for me to do a demonstration of this monologue, I picked out a flirty female volunteer, and pulled her onstage as victim. The monologue worked to terrific response and afterwards the girl was flustered: “I … I didn’t know what to expect … I didn’t know if you were going to touch me … or … I mean, I know I WANTED it, but …”
Of course, the only possible reply to that is always, “Stop by to see me after the workshop.”
Several days later, I was trading e-mails with the student’s teacher, from Virginia Commonwealth University. They were, in fact, hoping to book me for a full week at some point, and the teacher concluded with “Samantha Bishop [not her real name] is still blushing as your Elmire!” I wrote back, “Samantha Bishop SHOULD be blushing, that little hussy!”
That night, the start of my show was delayed several minutes, as I was informed there was still a line up at the box office. By the time I got out on stage, I saw that there were a good 200 or so people in the audience, which meant that the theatre might actually MAKE money off of my performance, which might portend well for getting invited back some day.
There was at least one great “laugher” out in the audience, and the show was really rocking throughout. I found myself working through the final (“Precious Young Maidens”) monologue, making eye contact with two of the women in the audience, as I always do. Somewhere in the process of connecting with them, a thought flitted through my head, wondering how well they were responding, or not, and then suddenly wondering whether I knew what my next line was. That is, of course, a question that I never want to be asking, as the answer can only be “no.”
And so, I blanked. In a very noticeable way. A few phrases from the latter portions of the monologue were popping into my head, but I had no idea how to get myself back on track. Fortunately, the technicians in the booth had the script handy, and were following along more or less. So, I called for “line.” It was perhaps the first time in about five years that I’ve actually had to call for line in the course of the show. A fragment of a line came floating down to me, but I was still lost. I asked for more.
This time, enough of the line came back to kick-start me into the speech. Fortunately, the screw-up had come early enough in the speech that I knew I had enough time to win the audience back over, with the series of “stop thiefs” that continues to build in absurdity as the scene progresses. One audience member was later kind enough to point out, my screw up actually reminded the audience of the level of difficulty involved in performing the show, making the previous monologues, in retrospect, all the more impressive.
After the show, a few friends from the afternoon’s workshop joined me for a couple of beers, and one of my new friends rumored that there was a leading role open with the local Shakespeare festival. I went back to the hotel to look up the festival on-line, and found that the show didn’t conflict with any of this year’s Fringe festivals.
It did, however, conflict with the annual French teachers’ conference I attended, and so I spent the next day’s drive to Orlando weighing my readiness to begin acting in full productions again, against my need to get more bookings in the coming year. (I have also been thinking about ditching the tour schedule entirely in the 07-08 season, and committing exclusively to directing and acting in full productions, but the jury is still out on that one.)
In Orlando, I caught up with Sandra-the-Vegan, who, ironically, was flying to Chicago the following day. Early the next afternoon, I proceeded to the hotel where the conference was being held, to be reminded that I’d paid $25 for a ticket to the awards luncheon that had started at noon.
I also discovered that this conference was due to end the following afternoon. Amid my flurry of activities leading me down to Orlando, I’d assumed that the conference would end on the Sunday. My performance of “Moliere Than Thou” was scheduled for 2:45 on Saturday, the final workshop session of the conference.
It struck me rather heavily, in that moment, to know that I was performing on the “get-away day,” after the exhibit hall was already closed and torn down, and after most of the attendees would have already moved on, catching flights.
I made a few passes through the exhibit hall and, with my promotional work cut out for me, I headed to town, staying with my friend Patty, who was, herself, house-sitting in a very plush home. I knuckled down to work on a new flyer, in the style of the flyers I’d done for Fringe Festivals past, which would announce the time and location of the preview performance I was giving the next afternoon. Early the next morning, I got copies printed up and I returned to the conference hall. In a shameless act of self-promotion, I put my wig and Moliere coat on and “flyered” conference-goers emerging from other workshops.
The flyering was executed to ever thinning groups of potential attendees, and by 2:45, it seemed like everyone had disappeared. About a dozen still showed up. It seemed that half of the attendees were there out of idle curiosity, a couple more because they were Moliere fans, and perhaps three or four because they were actually considering booking the show. Mostly, I could see them all grinning, although, once I hit the “Tartuffe” section, the conversation that I imagined in the backs of their heads was “Can we get away with this in our school?”
A couple of the attendees left in the middle of the show (evidently to catch a flight), but the rest stayed throughout, with several staying behind to thank me or to grab a video. One teacher in western Georgia (who was not at the conference) has since reported that the teacher who DID attend my performance is now talking about booking me. And several days later, I received the following e-mail from eastern Georgia …
“Wow! Let me add my praises to your list of accolades. I was in the audience at SCOLT Saturday last. I apologize for leaving early but I had to catch a plane. I wish that the performance had not been so sparsely attended. I am the prof de français at the … School of Fine Arts in Augusta GA. … I hope that I will be able to book you to perform here before long. I know it would help energize my French program also. Merci for a fantastic performance last Saturday; it was the highlight of the SCOLT conference in Orlando.”
Given that I’d thought the conference was running on into Sunday, I’d planned for another day in Orlando, and so I took the day on Sunday to finally resume the e-mail campaign that I’d left off more than a month ago. (I’d started this campaign back in August!) I finished the e-mails I was sending to Kansas schools, and moved on to Missouri and Mississippi. There are still a handful of states left, but I can’t seem to get to them as long as I keep picking up and driving almost every day.
And on Monday, I picked up and drove. I pushed northward to Raleigh, NC, where Forsyth and I caught the latest episode of “24”, and then on to Washington DC, (where I caught up with my friend Wendy Taylor), and Baltimore, where I took two days at my sister Maureen’s house, before pushing on to New York City, visiting Yvonne and catching a show by playwright Sherman Yellen (the one who’d quoted me on the Huffington Post website a couple months back).
By this time it was Friday, and I was aiming for Granby, Connecticut, where my friend Debby Reelitz was due to get married on Saturday. But first, I’d arranged a lunch appointment with a literary agent in Stamford, Connecticut. This was the fellow I’d heard about two years ago at the Texas Theatre festival. He and I had finally made e-mail contact and arranged a meet-up for Friday. I dug out the works that I thought were my most saleable (“Currency” and “Acting at the Speed of Life”), along with a few other goodies to give him a flavor of what I do (my already-published “Tartuffe” and “Imaginary Invalid” texts, and my “Karaoke Knights” CD). I kept waiting for him to seem overburdened (“Oh, not another manuscript!”), but he never seemed to give that signal, so I gave him my Moliere promotional video, as well as one of my children’s stories (“Isaac and the Dinosaurs”). We had a really charming conversation, even noting a couple of mutual acquaintances, and I left in a fabulous mood, singing my way through “Karaoke Knights” as I drove.
I drove to Debby’s house, discovering that one of my all-time favorite people, Cathy Maday, was already there, helping Debby get set up. I was in such a good mood, that I actually helped, bringing in firewood for the stove.
I think, though the course of the weekend, I must have explained the concept of “Currency” to about four or five people (their enthusiastic reactions stoked my confidence), and Cathy Maday even downloaded a copy onto her laptop and started reading it then and there.
That night was a small pizza party, and three or four of us seemed to get into a crossword puzzle groove, going through some five or six puzzles, with each of us bringing a separate-but-equal background of knowledge to the game, which meant we actually were able to finish each puzzle before moving on into the next one in the book.
The wedding was the next day, with about 40 chairs set up in the living room. The bride was gorgeous and the groom was surprisingly unflappable. (Of course, both had been through this process before.) My role in the ceremony was to actually hold the declaration of the vows for the couple to sign (I was “a table” … it was a supporting role), and later, to cause as much mischief as I could … enticing Cathy Maday to perform an impromptu dance during the party as the musician who’d played piano post-ceremony hauled out a drum for the occasion.
(Side note: I’d heard them talking abstractly about “Oh, we’ll have to get together to perform one of these days.” Knowing that Cathy was from North Carolina and the musician was from Connecticut, and that “one of these days” was code for “probably never,” I spoke up, “This is bullsh*t; just bang a rhythm on the table while Cathy dances.” Eventually, he went out to his car to get his drum, and I dragged Cathy out of the kitchen long enough to dance. After a moment, Debby joined in and the two of them gave the party crowd a performance that they’re not likely to forget for a while.)
And so, the party continued, and I tired earlier than usual. I crashed before midnight, getting up on Sunday to work on these notes. Family returned to Debby & Chris’ house for brunch, and I downloaded photos from four different cameras onto my computer, sending the couple off on their honeymoon with a disc full of wedding pictures already in hand.
I lingered, amid some fond farewells, and proceeded only about an hour south, where I met up once again with my ex-roommate, (another) Deb, and her partner Sara. I shared my “Karaoke Knights” CD with them, but decided to pull the costumes out of the car and do a full living-room performance for them, before they had a chance to hear the CD itself. Deb is actually cross-referenced in one of the songs, and I wanted to see her surprise when I performed it for her. I was a little nervous through that sequence, but Sara hooted her approval and the impromptu show went very well, giving me renewed hope about the performance I’ll be giving in Orlando at the end of this week.
Yes, I have driven from Orlando to Connecticut, only to turn around and head south to Orlando once again. And while the gas may be expensive, I’ve found friendly accommodations at every step along the way, and made a couple of connections that I look to portend terrific things for the future.
Temperature: Teens to 80s, to teens again.
In the CD Player: Red Hot & Blue, the Cole Porter Tribute
Reading: All my own stuff …
Attendance: 65 + 200 + 12 = 277
Miles on the Vibe: 171,000
Discoveries: I now know how to “karaokeize” music. * Move the ball forward in anticipation of other people stepping up. Don’t wait for them to step up to set things in motion. * Rather than freak out about a very limited schedule of bookings, I’ve renewed work on my writing, which may mean a short-term deficit, but longer-term success. In fact, the time off from performing may, in fact, be a great opportunity to make headway I wouldn’t otherwise be challenged to make. * I find myself contemplating taking a year off from the tour, to do longer residencies with full stagings of my plays … my next thought is whether I would ever get back to the tour, after having taken a year off. * I seem to worry overmuch about overburdening others.
Next Performance: Orlando, FL (3/3/06)
Home from New Orleans, I dove back into “Karaoke Knights.” While I had been trying to draw some video engineers into the project, one of them was tied up with a theatre project, and others worked in a Mac format, and were having difficulty opening the files that I had put together.
I had found myself taking over bits of the project as elements of the technology had come within my grasp. I’d already gotten a bit of mastery around the audio end of things, timing out the interlude music with some exactitude, which would then give way to the karaoke numbers and the original music (the downbeat for the new song, for instance, coming in on the downbeat from the previous number). While, previously, I had turned the music over to the audio engineer, with elaborate notes, at this point I had timed out a new karaoke video to synchronize exactly with the music as I had edited it, and probably no amount of explanation could get the engineer to recreate this.
Which meant pushing the project along as far as I could, mixing the music into an “mp3”, turning that into a “wav”, using the “wav” to make a “cdg”, turning the “cdg” into an “avi” file.
The key moment of this process lay in the discovery of how to edit the vocals mostly out of an existing piece of music, which meant that I could “karaokeize” the music that I had so carefully timed out, without having to re-integrate karaoke cdgs into the process. This meant going back to the start, more or less, dropping the new “karaokeized” music into the soundtrack, but it also meant that all future transitions would be under my control.
And while I’d hoped to pass the “avi” on to the engineer to “render” the video onto the dvd, in the end, I bought my own rendering program, and eventually I invested, with my friend April, on a dvd burner, and we burned the dvd ourselves.
And while it may have been a pain to take the project all this way all by myself (each stage of the project seemed to demand that I go back to the beginning on some of the songs, and start over), at least by now, when I want to rework elements of the show, it is all within my grasp, and the turnaround time, whenever I reconceptualized the work, (which I seem to do just about every time I get the new version of the show in hand) would be greatly diminished.
In the meantime, I was resuming work on “Currency,” my “personal growth” book. While I’d reconnected with my friend in Texas (who’d suggested a literary agent to me two years before), and gotten her to promise to send me his contact info, I hadn’t yet received it, and decided to press forward in refining the text, so that I would have something ready to share when the opportunity presented itself.
I did at least an hour a day on “Currency,” even to the point of creating an index (which I’d never done before). I then refocused my attention on “Acting at the Speed of Life.” It had been over a year since I’d done any work on this one (I’d gotten a couple of gentle rejections from publishers), and while previously, I couldn’t envision any improvements, a year of delivering and evolving the message through my acting workshops helped me see new insights and exercises and smoother transitions, which made it a slower process than my work on “Currency,” although the changes were getting me excited about the book again.
The deadline for getting back onto the road was bearing down relentlessly. I knew that I would have a new version of “Karaoke Knights” ready to test out, so I arranged with my friend, Freddy Weaver, to use the “Tantra Nova” space in the city to host a performance, and I dove back into rehearsals. I hadn’t memorized the new narration that carried me from one musical number to the next, and I hadn’t gotten a sense of how the counterpoint narration (on the video) would play. I was relatively confident in the songs themselves (I’d re-edited several of them to cut off key seconds in which I had nothing to actually do onstage) but they still needed fresh rehearsal as I hadn’t actually performed them since September.
There were perhaps 10 or 12 people in the (very friendly) audience for this performance, and the bits that may have worried me played very well. There were some audio balance issues, with interludes that played louder than the songs themselves, confusing moments around when I was the narrator and when I was being a character, but overall the show went as well as I might expect. (Two weeks later, I am continuing to memorize the narrative bridges, and testing the show out on anybody I can find on the road, in anticipation of a big audience at the Southeast Theatre Conference on March 3.)
With the completion of this performance, I sprinted through the last items of my to-do list en route to packing the car and getting back onto the road.
The first stop was Detroit, with an early celebration of Isaac’s 12th birthday. We managed to catch two movies (“Pink Panther” and “Zathura” … I preferred the latter), eat out a couple of times and hang out watching a bit of the Olympics.
Weather reports spoke of a winter storm that had marched along the east coast, and so I replotted the trip that was intended to carry me through Washington D.C., to stop instead in Harrisonburg, Virginia, visiting with my grad school friend, Kathy Conery, and her now-fiancée, Jeff. Kathy was working on a production of “How to Succeed in Business” which was in its final rehearsal, and I watched about 45 minutes of Act I, before sneaking out to watch “24” in the Student Union, and returning for the last half hour of “How to Succeed.”
The next morning, I was on my way to Williamsburg (or “Colonial Willamsburg” as they call it), where the weather had turned warm and sunny. I met my host, Elizabeth Wiley, who had apparently gone to great lengths to publicize both my performance and my workshop, as I saw flyers for both throughout the theatre building.
The theatre building, by the way, was commemorated by two plaques that designated it as the site of a presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, as well as the democratic primary debate from the 1988 election. Williamsburg is, of course, the site of the College of William and Mary, one of the first colleges established in “the colonies,” and the main street of Williamsburg is actually open only to foot traffic, running from the university to the former state capital. It’s rather like a very large version of Salem, Illinois, with blacksmith shops, and costumed historical characters festooning the streets.
The theatre for my show was along this street, and they were a busy facility, with historical reenactments and storytellers performing in the space 3-4 times a day. They’d put an enormous poster about my performance in their showcase, and had me listed on two or three more brochures. They clearly had the publicity side of the event down … the only question was how much of a “draw” Moliere might be in this town.
Sign spotted at the side entrance to the hotel: “FOR YOUR SECURITY, PLEASE USE YOUR ROOM KEY TO ENTER THE BUILDING.” (I suppose that’s a lot more secure than putting your fist through the window.)
Notation on a University website: “Theatre major, Heidi, has been a regular working actress since graduating from St. Mary’s.” (And what her digestion has to do with her schooling, I don’t imagine I can guess.)
In the news: “Rioting over cartoon;” Every time I hear this, I have to remind myself that this time the news ISN’T referring to the city in Africa.
The next day, following a quick technical rehearsal, I went to deliver my acting workshop, and found that, with attendees from neighboring schools, there were about 65 students in attendance. (This may have been a record.) I continue to improvise my way through the order of this workshop, putting the “Misanthrope” exercise (now known as “The Jerry Springer Show”) earlier in the process, which seems to go better with the “being seen” theme of my lecture.
The “Tartuffe” exercise (occasionally known as “Elimidate”) went very well, and when it came time for me to do a demonstration of this monologue, I picked out a flirty female volunteer, and pulled her onstage as victim. The monologue worked to terrific response and afterwards the girl was flustered: “I … I didn’t know what to expect … I didn’t know if you were going to touch me … or … I mean, I know I WANTED it, but …”
Of course, the only possible reply to that is always, “Stop by to see me after the workshop.”
Several days later, I was trading e-mails with the student’s teacher, from Virginia Commonwealth University. They were, in fact, hoping to book me for a full week at some point, and the teacher concluded with “Samantha Bishop [not her real name] is still blushing as your Elmire!” I wrote back, “Samantha Bishop SHOULD be blushing, that little hussy!”
That night, the start of my show was delayed several minutes, as I was informed there was still a line up at the box office. By the time I got out on stage, I saw that there were a good 200 or so people in the audience, which meant that the theatre might actually MAKE money off of my performance, which might portend well for getting invited back some day.
There was at least one great “laugher” out in the audience, and the show was really rocking throughout. I found myself working through the final (“Precious Young Maidens”) monologue, making eye contact with two of the women in the audience, as I always do. Somewhere in the process of connecting with them, a thought flitted through my head, wondering how well they were responding, or not, and then suddenly wondering whether I knew what my next line was. That is, of course, a question that I never want to be asking, as the answer can only be “no.”
And so, I blanked. In a very noticeable way. A few phrases from the latter portions of the monologue were popping into my head, but I had no idea how to get myself back on track. Fortunately, the technicians in the booth had the script handy, and were following along more or less. So, I called for “line.” It was perhaps the first time in about five years that I’ve actually had to call for line in the course of the show. A fragment of a line came floating down to me, but I was still lost. I asked for more.
This time, enough of the line came back to kick-start me into the speech. Fortunately, the screw-up had come early enough in the speech that I knew I had enough time to win the audience back over, with the series of “stop thiefs” that continues to build in absurdity as the scene progresses. One audience member was later kind enough to point out, my screw up actually reminded the audience of the level of difficulty involved in performing the show, making the previous monologues, in retrospect, all the more impressive.
After the show, a few friends from the afternoon’s workshop joined me for a couple of beers, and one of my new friends rumored that there was a leading role open with the local Shakespeare festival. I went back to the hotel to look up the festival on-line, and found that the show didn’t conflict with any of this year’s Fringe festivals.
It did, however, conflict with the annual French teachers’ conference I attended, and so I spent the next day’s drive to Orlando weighing my readiness to begin acting in full productions again, against my need to get more bookings in the coming year. (I have also been thinking about ditching the tour schedule entirely in the 07-08 season, and committing exclusively to directing and acting in full productions, but the jury is still out on that one.)
In Orlando, I caught up with Sandra-the-Vegan, who, ironically, was flying to Chicago the following day. Early the next afternoon, I proceeded to the hotel where the conference was being held, to be reminded that I’d paid $25 for a ticket to the awards luncheon that had started at noon.
I also discovered that this conference was due to end the following afternoon. Amid my flurry of activities leading me down to Orlando, I’d assumed that the conference would end on the Sunday. My performance of “Moliere Than Thou” was scheduled for 2:45 on Saturday, the final workshop session of the conference.
It struck me rather heavily, in that moment, to know that I was performing on the “get-away day,” after the exhibit hall was already closed and torn down, and after most of the attendees would have already moved on, catching flights.
I made a few passes through the exhibit hall and, with my promotional work cut out for me, I headed to town, staying with my friend Patty, who was, herself, house-sitting in a very plush home. I knuckled down to work on a new flyer, in the style of the flyers I’d done for Fringe Festivals past, which would announce the time and location of the preview performance I was giving the next afternoon. Early the next morning, I got copies printed up and I returned to the conference hall. In a shameless act of self-promotion, I put my wig and Moliere coat on and “flyered” conference-goers emerging from other workshops.
The flyering was executed to ever thinning groups of potential attendees, and by 2:45, it seemed like everyone had disappeared. About a dozen still showed up. It seemed that half of the attendees were there out of idle curiosity, a couple more because they were Moliere fans, and perhaps three or four because they were actually considering booking the show. Mostly, I could see them all grinning, although, once I hit the “Tartuffe” section, the conversation that I imagined in the backs of their heads was “Can we get away with this in our school?”
A couple of the attendees left in the middle of the show (evidently to catch a flight), but the rest stayed throughout, with several staying behind to thank me or to grab a video. One teacher in western Georgia (who was not at the conference) has since reported that the teacher who DID attend my performance is now talking about booking me. And several days later, I received the following e-mail from eastern Georgia …
“Wow! Let me add my praises to your list of accolades. I was in the audience at SCOLT Saturday last. I apologize for leaving early but I had to catch a plane. I wish that the performance had not been so sparsely attended. I am the prof de français at the … School of Fine Arts in Augusta GA. … I hope that I will be able to book you to perform here before long. I know it would help energize my French program also. Merci for a fantastic performance last Saturday; it was the highlight of the SCOLT conference in Orlando.”
Given that I’d thought the conference was running on into Sunday, I’d planned for another day in Orlando, and so I took the day on Sunday to finally resume the e-mail campaign that I’d left off more than a month ago. (I’d started this campaign back in August!) I finished the e-mails I was sending to Kansas schools, and moved on to Missouri and Mississippi. There are still a handful of states left, but I can’t seem to get to them as long as I keep picking up and driving almost every day.
And on Monday, I picked up and drove. I pushed northward to Raleigh, NC, where Forsyth and I caught the latest episode of “24”, and then on to Washington DC, (where I caught up with my friend Wendy Taylor), and Baltimore, where I took two days at my sister Maureen’s house, before pushing on to New York City, visiting Yvonne and catching a show by playwright Sherman Yellen (the one who’d quoted me on the Huffington Post website a couple months back).
By this time it was Friday, and I was aiming for Granby, Connecticut, where my friend Debby Reelitz was due to get married on Saturday. But first, I’d arranged a lunch appointment with a literary agent in Stamford, Connecticut. This was the fellow I’d heard about two years ago at the Texas Theatre festival. He and I had finally made e-mail contact and arranged a meet-up for Friday. I dug out the works that I thought were my most saleable (“Currency” and “Acting at the Speed of Life”), along with a few other goodies to give him a flavor of what I do (my already-published “Tartuffe” and “Imaginary Invalid” texts, and my “Karaoke Knights” CD). I kept waiting for him to seem overburdened (“Oh, not another manuscript!”), but he never seemed to give that signal, so I gave him my Moliere promotional video, as well as one of my children’s stories (“Isaac and the Dinosaurs”). We had a really charming conversation, even noting a couple of mutual acquaintances, and I left in a fabulous mood, singing my way through “Karaoke Knights” as I drove.
I drove to Debby’s house, discovering that one of my all-time favorite people, Cathy Maday, was already there, helping Debby get set up. I was in such a good mood, that I actually helped, bringing in firewood for the stove.
I think, though the course of the weekend, I must have explained the concept of “Currency” to about four or five people (their enthusiastic reactions stoked my confidence), and Cathy Maday even downloaded a copy onto her laptop and started reading it then and there.
That night was a small pizza party, and three or four of us seemed to get into a crossword puzzle groove, going through some five or six puzzles, with each of us bringing a separate-but-equal background of knowledge to the game, which meant we actually were able to finish each puzzle before moving on into the next one in the book.
The wedding was the next day, with about 40 chairs set up in the living room. The bride was gorgeous and the groom was surprisingly unflappable. (Of course, both had been through this process before.) My role in the ceremony was to actually hold the declaration of the vows for the couple to sign (I was “a table” … it was a supporting role), and later, to cause as much mischief as I could … enticing Cathy Maday to perform an impromptu dance during the party as the musician who’d played piano post-ceremony hauled out a drum for the occasion.
(Side note: I’d heard them talking abstractly about “Oh, we’ll have to get together to perform one of these days.” Knowing that Cathy was from North Carolina and the musician was from Connecticut, and that “one of these days” was code for “probably never,” I spoke up, “This is bullsh*t; just bang a rhythm on the table while Cathy dances.” Eventually, he went out to his car to get his drum, and I dragged Cathy out of the kitchen long enough to dance. After a moment, Debby joined in and the two of them gave the party crowd a performance that they’re not likely to forget for a while.)
And so, the party continued, and I tired earlier than usual. I crashed before midnight, getting up on Sunday to work on these notes. Family returned to Debby & Chris’ house for brunch, and I downloaded photos from four different cameras onto my computer, sending the couple off on their honeymoon with a disc full of wedding pictures already in hand.
I lingered, amid some fond farewells, and proceeded only about an hour south, where I met up once again with my ex-roommate, (another) Deb, and her partner Sara. I shared my “Karaoke Knights” CD with them, but decided to pull the costumes out of the car and do a full living-room performance for them, before they had a chance to hear the CD itself. Deb is actually cross-referenced in one of the songs, and I wanted to see her surprise when I performed it for her. I was a little nervous through that sequence, but Sara hooted her approval and the impromptu show went very well, giving me renewed hope about the performance I’ll be giving in Orlando at the end of this week.
Yes, I have driven from Orlando to Connecticut, only to turn around and head south to Orlando once again. And while the gas may be expensive, I’ve found friendly accommodations at every step along the way, and made a couple of connections that I look to portend terrific things for the future.
Temperature: Teens to 80s, to teens again.
In the CD Player: Red Hot & Blue, the Cole Porter Tribute
Reading: All my own stuff …
Attendance: 65 + 200 + 12 = 277
Miles on the Vibe: 171,000
Discoveries: I now know how to “karaokeize” music. * Move the ball forward in anticipation of other people stepping up. Don’t wait for them to step up to set things in motion. * Rather than freak out about a very limited schedule of bookings, I’ve renewed work on my writing, which may mean a short-term deficit, but longer-term success. In fact, the time off from performing may, in fact, be a great opportunity to make headway I wouldn’t otherwise be challenged to make. * I find myself contemplating taking a year off from the tour, to do longer residencies with full stagings of my plays … my next thought is whether I would ever get back to the tour, after having taken a year off. * I seem to worry overmuch about overburdening others.
Next Performance: Orlando, FL (3/3/06)
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