The View From Here #122: Ocala & Gainesville, FL; Atlanta, GA; Lexington, KY; Lafayette, LA

Back in January, I took a day trip down to Dallas, while we were rehearsing Moliere, nights, in Oklahoma. I performed the hour-long version of the show at a high school, where, backstage, before the show started, I could here the technicians conversing over the dressing room monitor. After the show, I returned to the dressing room to change, and could hear them talking to each other, once again.

This time, though, their conversation was something to the effect of, “Can you believe that? He totally nailed that! He was like word-for-word in the script! That was incredible! Can you believe that …?!” It was fun to be the fly on that wall.


The shows closed in Oklahoma with one last performance, which was not without its adventures, including late and missed entrances at the very end of Precious Young Maidens, particularly by an actress who only has one line. (The actors were watching the clock to judge her entrance, and we’d taken an abbreviated intermission that day.) I felt bad that she waited around all afternoon to deliver a single line and had missed it.


I stuck around to do a token bit of clean-up during set strike and ran off to finish packing my car. Susan, the director, was hosting the cast party, and I went around getting pictures of the many people I’d been working with, most especially, Melissa, my dresser, who was endlessly inventive in finding ways to make my life easier in the course of the run. (I had initially resisted the notion of having a “star” dressing room, and the added privacy and privilege that might alienate me from the rest of the cast, but when I had my bout with salmonella poisoning, I quickly learned to gratefully accept the quiet solitude and personal support.)


The next morning, I was on my way to the Oklahoma City airport at about 5 a.m., catching a flight to Saint Louis, and then on to Detroit, where I got a rental car and spent a couple days with Isaac, celebrating his 13th birthday. – In honor of the occasion, I got him shaving cream, a razor and after-shave. – On the plane to Detroit, I found myself chatting with a woman in my row, who had a sister in Ocala, Florida, which was the location of my next performance. She later e-mailed me to note that her sister was, in fact, already planning to catch my show for bonus points in her French class.

Getting back to Oklahoma City was a nightmare, as the airport in Detroit was socked in with fog. Following missed connections, I arrived six hours later than expected, and drove north into Kansas, and then on to Fayette, Missouri the next day, where I’d promised to drop in on a rehearsal of Tartuffe.

It was a fairly good rehearsal (of the second act), though some lines were simply inaudible to me, and some of the words were getting directed upstage. I shared my reactions, and the actors had at it again, this time with much improvement, perhaps because of my responses, or perhaps just because the second pass-through made them more sure of the task at hand.


Following a long day of driving, I dropped in on Sabra in Chattanooga. She was going to help me set up for a conference coming up in Atlanta, and I’d had several new promotional items shipped to her house, including a life-sized placard of one of my new publicity photos (in the “Oh, oh!” moment from Precious Young Maidens, which seems to be turning into the new signature shot).

My biggest frustration with the show in Oklahoma was that we never captured any video of the performances. I deided it was time to knuckle down and buy my own video camera. Over the last five years, hundreds of performances now live only in my vague memory, and, as I composed a new book proposal for my Moliere and acting text work, I was finding a new resolve: I wanted to find a television producer interested in creating the “Moliere Than Thou” PBS special, and I wanted to have the raw footage available to convince that producer that this would be a terrific show.

And so, I shopped. Most of the video cameras were around $500, but with a major step up in cost, I could get a high definition camera that had its own 30 gig hard drive. After a couple days of agonizing over this, I made the investment and picked up the longed-for camera in Marietta, Georgia, where I visited with my old friend, Linda.


The next day, I zipped down to Ocala, with three performances at Central Florida Community College. One glance at the long distance between stage and seats told me that I actually wanted to perform in what was essentially the “pit” in front of the audience. The technicians were quite adept, and quickly had the lights refocused. The first performance was for a high school group, but unfortunately, the shows had been scheduled simultaneous to the state’s annual standardized testing, which meant that there were only some 25 students in the audience, at least until my host’s intro to theatre class showed up, two-thirds of the way into the performance.

We’d set up the camera at the back of the auditorium, but “zoomed out,” the camera sensitized itself to the dark areas surrounding the white light I was performing in, and the image “washed out.” For the evening show, the technician would zoom in more, and since his assignment was so light (he has just two sound cues in the show), he would follow me as I moved.

Years ago, there was a play reading group in Ocala, composed mostly of retired folks, who had taken on one of my scripts, assigning out roles and reading it aloud. This group was led by Maxine and Ed, the couple that had corresponded with me for the arrangements. Well, Maxine has passed on in the intervening years, but Ed was happy to be present, and I met him beforehand. He presented me with a poem that Maxine had written in response to my show, which I posted on the dressing room mirror:

PLAY READING, DEC. 2000
In May of 1995
Our group was born
And still we strive
To read the plays
One-act and three---
The comedy, the mystery,
The tragedy, the history.

We examined Bessie Smith,
And the Man Who Came to Dinner,
The Crucible by Miller
Was indeed another winner.

Chekhov’s Three Sisters
And Moliere’s and Mooney’s Sganarelle---
We’ll remember them well.

We explored the life of Lincoln
And the Brownings, poets both,
And to read of Daniel Webster
We were certainly not loath.

Ibsen, Miller, Christie, Synge,
Albee, Checkhov, Kesselring.
Aristophanes and Wilde
And by many more we were beguiled.

We’ve read 39 playwrights,
45 plays,
And we’ll keep on reading
For the rest of our days!!

-- Maxine Rosenberg

The show went fairly well that night, but the volunteer scenes sent it through the roof. Apparently this school has a Cosmetology Department which occasionally sends its students over to the theatre to give the students a little breadth to their education.

The Tartuffe volunteer was a cosmetology student, who seemed very nervous, blushing and shying away as Tartuffe approached. When it came time for her to speak a line, though, she reversed her field, and made overt moves on Tartuffe, grabbing him by the wrist. As Tartuffe, I paused, looked out at the audience, and let a big smile dawn on my face as they cracked up. Fortunately, I have this on video. (The girl also wore one of those candy bracelets which Tartuffe, in one of his more steamy, sensual moves, began to nibble on.)

The Scapin volunteer was also a woman, and also from the Cosmetology Department (you can identify them by their smocks). Even though this was a scene supposedly between two men, this student seemed to have learned the lesson from the earlier scene, and was playing it for its hitherto unforseen seductive qualities! There was an element of “nobody home” in her performance, though, as when I asked her where she was from, she responded “The Cosmetology Department.”

When Scapin wheels around behind her to pinch “Argante” on the backside, the stage direction in the script reads “Jump!”. This girl read aloud, “Jump!” And then squealed, “You touched by butt!” The audience went up for grabs.

The next night’s show was actually a better all-around performance, as my good friend, Sandra-the-Vegan had driven up from Orlando to see my show (She hadn’t seen it at the Orlando Fringe back in 2003). In spite of the fact that my voice was getting ragged, after three shows and a workshop in just two days, I found myself newly invigorated, seeing the show through Sandra’s eyes, as well as the eyes of the camera.

The next morning, I headed a half-hour up the road to Gainsville, where I was performing at a private high school. When I’d requested a camera operator to run my camera, the gracious French teacher offered up her husband, who had his own camera and would be able to edit and transfer the video to disc, and even add credits to the recording. That would be terrific, of course, though every time this comes up, I have to remind people that I cannot let them actually keep a recording of the full show: not only would it make bringing me back to their school, down the line, superfluous, but a single pirated copy of the show finding its way into circulation could effectively put an end to my tour.

I’d noticed the videographer setting up his stuff in the fourth row, which made me a bit uneasy, but I reassured myself that this would make for a sparkling clear picture. However, when I made my entrance at the top of the show, I could see that rows 2-5 were virtually empty, and 90% of the audience was seated behind the camera, essentially watching over the shoulder of the videographer. I hated to think of what kind of a message this was sending the kids, suggesting that the recording of the event was more important than their experience of it. I did what I could to act past the camera, alleviating whatever alienation they might be feeling.

Afterwards, the teachers were enthusiastic, with one even writing to the woman who’d booked me to say, “Congratulations on bringing THE best speaker/entertainer to Oak Hall's theater, at least in my memory.”

I stuck around to do my workshop two hours later, struggling with the attention span of one student who didn’t want to participate, though she did want to distract a student that did (does this only happen in private schools?), and then getting onto the road and heading north.


By this time, Sabra was in Atlanta, setting up my booth. There was a “mandatory orientation meeting” for this conference which I’d be unable to attend because of my commitment to the high school, so Sabra would be sitting in for me. I got in early that evening, just as the first exhibit hall session was beginning, and joined Sabra, who stuck around for a half hour or so before heading back to Chattanooga.

I’d allowed myself to be talked into this conference, in spite of a bad experience with a similar conference about four years ago, which was also largely composed of student representatives booking acts out of their student activity funds. This time around, though, I was guaranteed a showcase slot, and so I’d made the investment, while taking a pass on the Southeast Conference of Language Teachers meeting which was happening a mile away, at another Atlanta hotel.

It was a mistake. I’d worked and reworked the showcase to highlight my best stuff, and it went right over the students’ heads. Performing at a microphone, wedged in between stand-up comics and rock acts, Moliere was not on their radar screens. The subtle stuff or the ironic stuff was too subtle and ironic, and only the endless parade of “stop theif’s” in my final bit seemed to wake the students up to the tone of this humor. I cleared off, and that was that. I had three more days to hang out in the exhibit hall, handing out stickers and brochures and preview DVD’s, but there were no bookings to follow.

As such, I took all of my free time through this week, to push forward on the book proposals which I’d been laboring over for the past six weeks. I was coming towards the end of this 98-page document, and made significant progress.

The next day, I swung over to the Foreign Language teacher’s event, and was gratified to be reminded that there are still conferences where Moliere is wildly popular. Forty or fifty French teachers came to my event, as I performed forty minutes of my show, and handed out more brochures and DVD previews. Immediately, there were teachers from Georgia who were strategizing about how to get me to their schools. (One teacher called it "Phenomenal!")

Alas, when I finally got away from Atlanta, I found that the school that’d booked me for March 5 had failed to get the funding together, and the show had been cancelled. This was a bit of lingering fallout from the loss of my laptop computers last July. I’d lost the e-mail address of my contact at this school, and had only tracked her down again in the past week.

I made a stop at a friend’s house in the area (Jenny had seen the show at Auburn University a year ago), before heading back up to Marietta, where Linda, and her family were gracious enough to put me up for three days.

While staying at Linda’s, I finally finished off the book proposals and sent them off to five agents who’d requested a look at the full proposal when I’d made my big push last December.

I returned, yet again, to Atlanta, this time to the Southeast Theatre Conference (SETC). I’d been to this one twice in the past two years, both times presenting a “Fringe Festival” show, and a workshop. Most of the faculty attending this conference have received e-mails from me in the past, and I was glad to see that many of them still recognized my name. I’d lost a lot of my e-mail contacts when the computers were stolen, but I still had my “brand identity,” which will serve me well when I finally have time to rebuild my lists in June.

After SETC, I swung north, to Lexington, where I visited my cousin, George, and camped out in a hotel for three days, catching up on my correspondence, and following up with dozens of contacts that I’d made at three conferences (all in Atlanta) in the last two weeks.

The Lexington show went great, and my recent e-mailing had attracted representatives from three Lexington-area colleges (U-Kentucky, Centre College and Transylvania University) to see my show. Freshly invigorated, I pushed on south, stopping at Jenny’s in Alabama once more before pushing on to Lafayette, Louisiana, where I spent a pleasant day relaxing, taking pictures of some of the amazing trees down here (one over 450 years old, which, from a distance, looks not like a tree so much as a small forest!) and working on a new chapter for the acting textbook. The teacher, there, took me out to dinner each day I was in town.

On Monday I had a terrific workshop (captured on video), which spilled over for an extra hour into the following class. Following some confusion over the tech rehearsal, which started 45 minutes late, I performed for an audience of 75 or so. They were incredibly receptive, and I could feel their enjoyment building as the show went on. The “stop thief’ section of the play got amazing laughs throughout, and I actually had to cut off their laughing to continue the sequence. This finished with a standing ovation and a nice reception.


Tuesday, I drove to New Orleans, taking the picturesque “long way” through the south of Louisiana, and while I had images of washed out bridges and ripped-up landscape, it was actually in fairly good shape, at least from what I could see from the road.

My friend, and sometimes helper, April, joined me in New Orleans for two days of relaxation, before jumping back onto the road. I nearly made it back to Chicago in a single day, but finally pulled over in Champaign, where I finish off these comments before returning home, following some 70 days since my departure in January. (Departng again in two days ...)



PS: Thanks to all who sent well-wishes about mom. Now that I'm home, I can see she is very much recovered from the illness she was caught up in when I left. (She once again seems to like the flavor of her beer!)

Mileage: 219,800
Discoveries: Let people do nice things for you; enjoy and appreciate. * Work with the video guy to make sure you’re still creating the best experience for the audience.
Attendance: 16 + 50 + 150 + 150 + 75 + 100 = 541
Next Performance: 3/27, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA and 3/29, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY

The View From Here #121: Norman, OK

Reviewing recent e-mails, I was reminded of my performance at Central Methodist University, and the “Tartuffe” seduction scene. The show was going great, but it was one of those nights when no hands were going up in the first 15 seconds after asking for a volunteer.

From the back of the room came a gruff voice: “I’ll do it!”

On occasion in the past, we have “cross-cast” the volunteer scenes, mostly with women in the “Scapin” scene. Only once before have we had a man in the “Tartuffe” scene, but it had gotten big laughs, so I waved the fellow up to the stage.

I should have known by the amount of time it took him to get onto the stage that this was going to be a problem.

I should have known by the tone of his voice when he said “I’ll do it.”
The man was lit up like a Christmas tree. I could smell the alcohol from ten feet away.

It was impossible to even do a kind-of-a-parody of the seduction scene, because I had no idea what he might take seriously or not, in performance. If I made an inadvertent move towards him, he might suddenly turn into a very violent drunk, and any attempt to keep control of the show would be lost.

We worked through, as I made illustrative gestures, and resisted making commentary or humor from the fellow’s self-evident state, as this would have crossed a line, likely alienating the audience. As such, I recited my lines from a somewhat close … but not too close … proximity, while the man proceeded to wander about the stage. Occasionally, I would corral him back to face out toward the audience, and encourage him in a playful reading, but overall focused my attention on getting the scene over with as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, the fellow continued to wander in and out of the auditorium’s back door (presumedly to use the bathroom), and when the “Scapin” volunteer scene came up, this guy once again pulled himself out of his seat, and started heading down the aisle. “Oh, no, Richard, we’ve had you already; let’s give somebody else a chance,” I called, to head him off. Disappointed, Richard (not his real name) drifted back up the aisle, and back out the theatre door, while somebody else rescued me from the impending derailment.

Afterwards, some of the faculty asked me if he was “a plant.”

Had I been thinking, I would have said, “No, but he certainly was potted.”

I was working on three Shakespeare scenes, trying to rehearse and memorize these alongside rehearsing and memorizing two lead roles. Quickly I discovered that the time I’d intended to devote to writing a new book proposal, or to work the bookings for 07-08 was evaporating. But, at the same time, I was affirming several theories of Shakespearean performance that I’d outlined in my book. It was difficult to give full attention and support as acting partner to twelve different students, and for the most part, I was improvising my blocking and interpretation to respond to whatever they were bringing the scenes, but I was learning volumes about acting Shakespeare, as Prospero howls out “Thy groans did make wolves howl,” and Iago murmurs “By knocking out his brains,” or Angelo sneers, “you will stifle in your own report and smell of calumny.” At one point, amid a comment session on “The Tempest,” a student said, “When you said ‘A torment to lay upon the damned,’ I could feel the walls of the room vibrate.”

It was a perfect summation of a process in my Shakespeare workshop that begins with an exercise called “rattle the lights.”

I note that since my last exploration of Shakespeare, more than 20 years ago, my priorities have changed. I used to worry about how “realistic” I was being. Now it’s all about what I can do with the words. When the actors filled out my evaluation form, the most oft-cited discovery from these sessions was “Make bold choices.”

Opening night was coming up quickly. Every once in a while, I would get derailed off of my lines, particularly when I would perform a monologue that I do in my one-man show. Since these monologues have been cut and arranged to make logical sense for a one-man performance, there are sequences that have been left out, and sudden jumps that occasionally threaten to take me a few minutes ahead in the performance. My fellow actors generally know their lines better than I do. Of course, I had more to memorize than anyone, but often I have memorized a line in a particular way, incorporating a “re-write” which I’ve never incorporated into the script (which always feels like the way the line ought to be spoken, because I’ve re-memorized it in iambic pentameter).

I finally asked the very-supportive assistant stage manager to stop giving me line notes, because every time I slipped up in my speaking, the only thing I could visualize was her scribbling another note in her book, which was taking my concentration to all sorts of places that I didn’t want it to go.

Speaking of very-supportive, the students and the faculty have been amazing, providing me with everything I need, including my own dressing room, and my own dresser. I will clearly miss the luxury the next time I'm loading in my one-man show all by myself...

A week before opening, I got a cold, and beat it back quickly with fortified nutrition juices, “Airborne”, “Emergen-C” and “Re-liv.”


Three days before opening, I got food poisoning, and could only barely go through the motions on stage. Everybody felt badly for me, but there was no way I could take the night off, as there were some 70 people involved in rehearsal at that point. I marked through the shows, getting stronger as the night went on, and then feeling a relapse that night in the middle of the night. I blamed it all on some Soy Milk that I was taking to settle my stomach, but it wasn’t until last night that I discovered that the peanut butter I’d been eating had been recalled for salmonella contamination!

As opening night approached, I would rehearse my lines during the day, which would often remind me of individual problems or misinterpretations that had come up in rehearsal the night before, and I would e-mail these thoughts to Susan (the director), who would, in turn, share them with the rest of the cast. Ultimately, there was a level of trust to the conversation that enabled me to continue to push for my initial vision of the plays, all the way down to the detail of hitting this or that rhyme, or getting the presentational style consistent throughout the cast. As such, despite the very complex production that these have been given, it’s extremely cohesive, stylistically.


With opening night came lots of big laughs. I was confident about “The Doctor in Spite of Himself,” but I had no idea what the presence of an audience might do to the narrative thread that runs through my brain, and I wondered if the lines might disappear out of my head. As it turned out, the lines were dead on, and I found myself much more aware of what points needed to be stressed, and what pauses needed to be held in order for individual bits of information to register with the audience before moving on. “Doctor” got huge laughs, but it was the dance at the end of the show that brought the house down.

Jeremy, the choreographer, had created what seems to be a very quaint baroque dance as part of the curtain call, but towards the end, four performers from “Precious Young Maidens” (which has been set in the 1970s) enter, and the gentle baroque music shifts into a version of “The Hustle,” and the two casts’ choreographies intertwine as the astonished 17th century characters gape at the “mod rockers” crossing their paths.


“Precious Young Maidens” seemed to get even bigger laughs, and through the course of the run of the play, I noticed that the “favorite play” of the evening seemed to shift, as the second night’s audience responded more fully to “Doctor” while the third night (actually a matinee performance) enjoyed “Precious” more.

It was during this afternoon performance that I had my biggest line glitch of the run. I’ve been performing a monologue from “Doctor” for several years now, as a part of “Moliere Than Thou,” and when I do it as part of that show, I assume a crude Czechoslovakian accent. In this show, however, we’re all doing some form of British accent, and every once in a while I find myself in the middle of that monologue hearing echoes of Czechoslovakian coming out of my mouth. On this particular day, I knew that the dialect coach was in the audience, and in the middle of the monologue I suddenly found myself wondering if I hadn’t slipped into Czech. While I was wondering this, I misspoke one of the faux Latin words of the doctor’s “diagnosis,” and had no idea how to get myself back on track. After about ten seconds of dithering (which is an eternity on stage), one of the actors bailed me out with “The ventricles?” It was just enough to jump past the now-problematic Latin, and get me back into the swing.

When we got back into performances on Thursday night, the response was even better than before. I had drilled the lines twice that day, and felt completely in control of each line. This audience preferred “Precious,” and really responded to the “Stop, thief” section which has always been my favorite part of the one-man show.

Monologues that get fabulous response during the one-man show don’t always work when more actors are added to the mix. Suddenly the audience, which formerly only had me to focus on, has to “zoom out” or to “pan” from stage right to stage left, and some of the killer lines become a minor part of a flurry of details.

Friday was slightly off from Thursday’s high. Again, I note that I’d only rehearsed the lines once during the day, and I wasn’t feeling the level of texture and control that I’d realized the night before. Saturday, however, was up again, as squeezing in that second run-through before the performance seemed to spell the difference.

It’s now Sunday morning, and packing awaits. I’ve been “moved in” to this apartment for almost five weeks now, so I’m dreading pulling all this stuff together again. There’s a final matinee performance at 3:00, followed by set strike, cast party and fond goodbyes. Early tomorrow morning I’m flying up to Detroit for Isaac’s birthday, before flying back and working my way to performances in Florida Feb 26-28.

It’s been a very cold winter, as far as the Oklahomans are concerned, though reports of the deep freezes up north have kept me counting my blessings, and it looks like mild temperatures have returned just in time for me to load up the car.

From the “Oklahoman,” February 15, 2007:

Spoof, satire delight audience

NORMAN - A delightful spoof of a doctor who's really a woodcutter, and a heavy-handed satire of two "precious young maidens" fond of the disco lifestyle, were offered in a new University of Oklahoma production.
Called "An Evening of Moliere," the double bill was previewed Feb. 8 at the Rupel Jones Theatre, under the direction of Susan Shaughnessy, with choreography by Jeremy Lindberg, lights by Tyler Coffman and set design by Min Jung Cho.

In the first play, "The Doctor in Spite of Himself," Timothy Mooney and Rachel Kerbs were wonderfully robust and feisty as a woodcutter and his wife who seem to like to abuse each other verbally and physically, as well as the third party who tries to interfere.

Set up by his wife as a reluctant doctor who must be beaten before he will heal people, guest artist Mooney was hilarious in the title role, using fake Latin, body language and exaggerated gestures to con those willing to pay for his medical services.

Kate DuVall had some uproarious moments as a curvaceous nurse who appears to enjoy being examined by the dubious doctor, and Denis Pimm communicated her husband's outrage over the fake physician's attempts to do that and more.

Nearly stealing the show was Chris Baldwin as Geronte, the clueless, doddering master, engaged in a battle of wills with his daughter, Lucinde, portrayed by Marlowe Holden, who pretends to be mute until he allows her to marry the man she really loves.

Admirably filling the later role was Paul Stuart as Leander, who had some of his best comic moments disguised as an apothecary, trying to reveal himself to Lucinde.

Rhyming dialogue, the commedia dell'arte performance style and 17th century costumes designed by Stephanie Orr also made "The Doctor in Spite of Himself" nearly irresistible.

Contrasting nicely with this period piece, but often seeming overstated and simplistic compared to it, was the evening's second offering, "The Precious Young Maidens," adapted by Mooney and updated to Paris during the disco era of the 1970s.

Chase McCurdy brought powerful stage presence as Gorgibus, a man trying to "lay down the law' and arrange favorable marriages for his ditzy daughter and nice.

Sara Rae Foster and Isabel Archuleta managed to seem appropriately empty-headed, frivolously fun-loving and willful as the girls in question, who just want to have a lot more fun before they consider marrying the men chosen for them.

Carried on a litter, clad in a plumed hat and disco attire, Mooney got across the excessive panache of the flamboyant, pseudo-artistic Mascarille, a spurious "Marquis" while Baldwin was almost equally "over-the-top" as a wannabe viscount named Jodelet.

Much less sympathetic were Brad Davidson and Denis Pimm as the preferred suitors, who came across as almost brutal in their treatment of the two young women and the two men of fashion.

At its most charming during the transition between the two one-acts, when disco dancers invaded the space of dancers in period costumes from the time of Moliere, the OU production is well worth attending in its remaining performances.
-John Brandenburg
Photos courtesy Sandra Bent, University of Oklahoma)

From The Norman Transcript, Feb 16, 2007

“The wit of his quill brings quite a thrill
By Johnnie-Margaret McConnell

Two plays from the 17th century French playwright Jean Bapiste Poquelin Moliere lighten up the Rupel Jones stage this month.

Guest artist and translator Timothy Mooney stars in OU’s production, An Evening of Moliere in both plays, “The Doctor in Spite of Himslf” and “The Precious Young Maidens.” Mooney leads OU’s young actors, with Susan Shaughnessy’s direction, through the twists and turns etched by Moliere’s pen to spread the humor, often in dagger form. Moliere would have gotten along well with Garrison Keillor.

“The Doctor in Spite of Himself” opens the night with Rachel Kerbs, playing a vengeful wife Martine, and Mooney as the husband Sganarelle. Kerbs and Sganarelle have an excellent banter as Kerbs’ pigtailed, coiled curls bounce directly above her perfectly erect shoulders framing her plastered smile. Abigail to Maritine, Kerbs has turned into this season’s evil wench, but not without good cause.

The cast’s comic physical stunts, known as Commedia dell’Arte, are mirrored by Min Jung Cho’s cartoon-like sets. Completewith side columns, muses and a rising curtain, Cho’s set makes the stage look like a pop-up book with moveable 17th-century characters.

While Sganarelle finds marriage a curse, audience members of all ages (but I would recommend the evening to those whose voice has dropped) are in for a delightful hour of mishaps and misunderstandings at the whim of two women, a wife and a daughter, who understand the real power of control. One always reads Louis XIV’s restructuring of aristocratic society put the women in charge. Moliere helps us understand.

Jeremy Lindberg’s choreography closes out the curtain call to “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” and bridges well to the 1970s feel for the seond play.

Sara Rae Foster holds together the second play, “The Precious Young Maidens,” dressed in her psychedelic pink stretch pants, long-skirted top and teased blond hair. She is excellent as the “dumb” blond seeking adventure with her trusty sidekick Cathos, played by the pint-sized Isabel Archuleta. Foster has springs in her legs that you expect to propel her in her weight go-go boots to the ceiling.

I often found myself awaiting the next character entrance instead of the next line in the evening’s second half. “The Precious Young Maidens,” also running around an hour, is quite a shift in time and delivery from “The Doctor in Spite of Himself.” It does bring about more laughs, thanks to its sophomoric innuendos and wacky costumes.

OU’s Evening of Moliere proves great plays are timeless, even if they seem to be confections.

The crowd was dismal at best last weekend, but all who attended laughed a lot and left smiling as they hustled out. I hope this is not connected to Francophobia. The French do know how to have a good time.

I am glad to see that OU’s drama department is upholding its mission to provide quality education regardless of box office return. If art is guided only by the bottom line, Moliere may no longer be a rare experience to enjoy, but the standard.”

Discoveries: Killer monologues for a one-man show don’t always go over for a fully produced play. * Twenty-five years of acting since my days in the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (including 7 years of performing Moliere) have transformed my Shakespearean abilities.
Temperature: 52 F
Miles: 215,000
Music: Robbie Williams and CJ Chenier
Next performance: February 26-27: Ocala, FL

The View From Here #120: Fayette, MO; Houston & Dallas, TX; Norman, OK

Is it February already? Is the Super Bowl upon us? Where have I been? Where has the time gone?

It was Thanksgiving the last time I gave an update, and I spent about a week downloading all my favorite songs onto my I-pod. I’m not here to give commercials for the I-pod people, but I now have about 3500 of my favorite songs on it, a few music videos, a bunch of podcasts (you’ll want to check out Tom X. Chao’s “Peculiar Utterance of the Day”) , and I’ve installed a new radio in my car, which links in both XM Satellite Radio (for Air America) and my i-pod, and sitting on my current kitchen counter is a Bose sound system that the i-pod plugs directly into.

I finished an edit of The View From Here just before December 1, in time to commit the month of December to chasing down an agent for my books. (Usually I take on writing projects in December; this year I realized all of these writing projects have collected un-sold on my computer.) I sent out at least one inquiry a day for 31 days, and have a couple of “very interested” agents, and at least one pending project to assemble a new book proposal that bundles three of my works (the acting text, the collection of Moliere Monologues and the Moliere Anthology) into a single proposal. I’ll be getting onto that as soon as I dig myself out from underneath a few other things I’ve got backed up.

Of course, I also got new publicity photos done, and they’ve been added to a www.moliere-in-english.com website that will be sporting a splashy new look before long. Once those were done, I found I actually had a few weeks to grow my beard out, before trimming it in anticipation of another performance. If I get the chance, I’ll insert a photo of me with one of the pretty girls in a recent excursion to a karaoke joint. (Note new glasses ...)

Throughout this process, it was always the booking efforts that seemed to get pushed back, as that would put me back into the endless process of data-mining. I realized how rare it is that I get into the groove of circulating my materials, and actually following up with the interested parties, so I stuck with it through the month, and beyond, continuing to write proposals and another edit of The View From Here (now at 314 pages again). As such, there are still about 40 states that I need to send this year’s booking letter to (I lost my contact lists with the computer theft), and

I am again seeking people interested in helping me with data-mining (I pay 25 cents for every e-mail address), so if this appeals to your curiosity, drop me a note back (tim_mooney@earthlink.net) and let’s talk.

Along the way, I re-did the family calendar (also lost with the computers last July), sending it out to more cousins, aunts and uncles this time around. Isaac came out for a visit for several days around Christmas (he turns 13 on Feb 19!). And I got a start on taxes.

We had a bit of a scare over mom during break. She lost a bit of weight that she couldn’t really afford to lose, and was confined to bed for a few days. She was showing some slight improvement just before I left, and I’m told she is doing much better now.

And there, amid the flurry of catching up, installing radios, buying new tires, changing my oil, sorting papers and packing, it was time to drive again.

I drove to Fayette, Missouri, about a half-hour west of Columbia, where they’d just survived an intense ice storm. (It could be worse; I could be in Winnipeg.) Central Methodist University was producing my Tartuffe. They put me up in a guest house, and I did an afternoon workshop, and an evening show. Between events at the school,

I was hurriedly preparing for the Texas Educational Theatre conference, labeling and sleeving new copies of my preview DVD, and plotting out a new workshop I’d be giving on Commedia dell’Arte.

After the show I was onto the road immediately, stopping just outside Kansas City and getting back on the road early to drop straight south to Houston. I had one more performance at Cy-Fair Community College just outside Houston at noon the following day (which rocked), before continuing in to the conference downtown.

I caught up with some old Texas friends, sat in on a monologue-writing workshop, and an old friend of my brother, Mike, who’d shown up for my show at Cy-Fair, took me out for a terrific dinner and catch-up on about 30+ years of water under the bridge.

The next morning, I set up my stuff in the conference room, but couldn’t get my computer to “talk to” the projector. This is a mistake I seem to make every time I’ve had a long layoff between doing a presentation like this. Next time, please remind me about the “F4” button.

The workshop went allright, I guess. Without the slideshow, I was left reading more material off of a page than I wanted to, and the “lecture” set-up of the conference room left little opportunity for class participation, but when in doubt I threw in a couple of my Moliere monologues, which seemed to offer context to my intended point.

More to the point, I collected a bunch of e-mail addresses from the attendees (an idea given me from one of the potential book agents) as part of a drawing, which means that I have another 40 people on my list who might have an interest in my book when I’m ready to report its publication.

I stuck around at the hotel bar for a few hours passing out a couple more DVDs and brochures. My Laredo booking had cancelled on me due to the recent ice storm, which would give me a couple extra days in Norman, and so I headed north. The stress and lack of sleep of the last few days caught up with me after I was on the road for just a couple of hours, so I pulled over, and continued on my way Sunday morning, pulling into town in time for a Sunday night run-through at the University of Oklahoma to start work on The Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Precious Young Maidens.

This time they were putting me up in an apartment just off of campus, and with four full weeks in town, I unloaded about half of my stuff from the car and moved in.

The rehearsals were very good; not perfect, but showing great potential, and the actors are incredibly committed to getting it right. I spent one evening taking notes before getting down to work learning my blocking and sharing the stage with the students.

The interesting thing about sharing the stage, after spending five years performing a one-man show … I feel much more apt to “take” the stage, and playing things “out” to the audience rather than making constant eye-contact with my fellow performers. Of course, that’s the message I’ve been preaching in my acting workshops these several years, but it’s a little strange to set the stylistic tone of the performance and hope that it catches on to the rest of the casts.

The style has caught on with some more than others, and certain scenes are hysterical. On the whole, the plays definitely work, and the climax of Precious Young Maidens is probably going to bring the house down. As per usual, my characters get away with murder in both shows, and I manage to pull off all of the delicious antics the law might allow.

On my first Friday after arriving, I made a run down to Dallas for a noon performance at Bishop Lynch High School, and zipping back north again in time for that night’s rehearsal.

While in town, I have been working with the director’s (Susan’s) Shakespeare class, playing in scenes from The Tempest, Othello and Measure for Measure. It’s good for me to reestablish my Shakespearean credentials, if only to have more concrete examples for my book, but it’s interesting to see that my casting seems to be leaning toward playing the villain, playing Iago and Angelo. Even Prospero, in The Tempest has a very dark side to him.

And so, between the lead role in two plays, rehearsing three scenes, that I’m performing with twelve different actors, doing two days of workshops and performances for the local high school, and arranging workshops with the French and Theatre Departments, I would categorize myself as somewhat “overcommitted” at the moment.

I did manage to get to a karaoke bar one night last week, and am looking forward to the Super Bowl, but we’ve got six days until opening, I’m still blowing lines here and there, and there are projects stacked up awaiting my attention. I’m fighting off a cold today, which happens to be our last day off before we go into full production week.

Last night, the crew came to see the show for the first time, and I was very tuned in to their laughs. They were enjoying it very much, but I was entirely conscious of where I wasn’t getting laughs, and continuously re-evaluating the balance of the style, trying to make sure that my world-of-the-play aligns with the world that will eventually be coming from the others on stage with me.

One more week and it will all be brilliant.

Temperature: Hovering around 30
Mileage: 217,000
In the I-pod: Everything.
Discoveries: F4 * Five years of one-man shows have left me much more confident with “taking the stage.” * My “Shakespeare” side finds me leaning toward the villain … at least when cast across from college-age performers.
Next Performances: Norman, OK: 2/9-18

New publicity pics!

These are low-res versions of photos by Brian McConkey. (If you need publishing-quality versions, contact me directly; they'll be up at my Moliere website soon.)

Tim Mooney as Moliere:

"I'm afraid there's been a bit of a crisis among the cast of this evening's performance. It seems that they've all partaken of the same sort of ... shell-fish, as served in one of the local establishments that we players tend to frequent."

Monsieur Jourdain in "The Bourgeois Gentleman"

"My fair Marquise; your lovely eyes make me die of love!"


Monsieur Jourdain in "The Bourgeois Gentleman"

"And to think! I've never studied, and yet, I came up with that one right on the first go!"


Arnolphe in "The School for Wives"

"For once you misstep here, however slight,
It will become as black as any coal,
And all will know this darkness to your soul.
As it will mark you as a wretched jade,
And all will flee this path on which you've strayed.
For Satan's Cauldron boils without a pause!
May Heaven, in Its goodness, take your cause."


Tartuffe, in "Tartuffe;

Because one loves the glories of the Lord,
Does not suggest his ... works ought be ignored."

Mascarille, in "The Precious Young Maidens"

Oh, oh! I contemplated here, completely off my guard
With nothing else about or near, it quickly hit me ... hard;
Your eye, so sly, I did espy, with speed beyond belief,
You stole my heart and now I cry: "Stop thief! Stop thief! Stop thief!"



"I would like to thank each and every one of you for coming tonight ... and to thank you even more for staying. ... I would only ask that you come back again some night when we are, as they say, fully staffed."

The View From Here #119: Norman, OK; Joplin, MO; Highland Heights, KY; Millersville, PA; Worcester, MA; Signal Mountain, TN

I spent three days in Norman, Oklahoma, attending classes and observing actors.

My tour schedule wouldn’t allow me to be present during the actual auditions for Precious Young Maidens and Doctor in Spite of Himself, so I was watching the actors perform in classroom scenes. Susan, the director of the shows, even pulled together a reading of the two plays, with me performing the two roles that I’ll be playing this winter.

I went around getting pictures and names of all of the actors. It would help for me to have a visual image during casting conversations. Ultimately, I will arrive in Oklahoma sixteen days before opening night, so I want to hit my stride quickly in rehearsal.

The readings went well. About forty actors attended, and we set up music stands with scripts, while I recorded the reading. My intent was to get people excited about auditioning for the show, and to “raise the bar” a bit with my (almost memorized) reading, so that the level of commitment would be high. My third goal was to start enthusiastic rumors about the show so that by the time opening night arrived the house would be packed.

I had a weeklong break, so I drove to Chattanooga, to make camp at Sabra’s house while working on several projects. I started planning the 07-08 tour, while making a concerted effort to edit The View From Here back down to manageable size. (550 pages are currently down to 430.)

I doubled back west to Joplin, Missouri, with a workshop and a show at Missouri Southern State University. They have a special mandate around International studies, and this was a part of their “France Semester.” I was arriving a bit breathless and last minute.

[Side note: when my hotel room wasn’t ready, I stopped next door at a Bob Evans Restaurant. I’d always imagined that if nothing else, they’d have good sausage. I was way wrong. They were tiny, dry and chewy, like the ones that they sell for your microwave.]

As this was sponsored by “International Studies,” I walked in ready to do my Moliere Workshop, but discovered that the 25 students in attendance were all actors. I adjusted the workshop as I went, still covering Moliere’s biography, but involving the actors with exercises from the acting workshop. (The workshop had arranged before my computer had been stolen, and I never checked in to find that it was the acting workshop they wanted in the first place.) Regardless, the response was enthusiastic, and the work with the Tartuffe monologue seemed especially exciting.

The show was in a small auditorium, and the host seemed unfamiliar with the operation of the light board, so I simplified the plans, and went on.

I can’t remember having this much fun with the show before. The audience was laughing at everything. The response to Tartuffe was electric. (A couple days prior to the show, a preacher in Colorado had gotten caught amid a very public scandal over sex and drugs.) The audience roared and applauded a line that they must have assumed that I’d written for just this occasion: “It is interesting to consider that even though this play was produced more than seven years ago, in 1664! … our ongoing scandals of the present day have kept this work just as pertinent as it was the day that it was first produced!”

The girl who volunteered for the Tartuffe scene fluttered with excitement as I drew her in closer, and the audience ate it up. Likewise, every time I revisited “Stop, thief” they laughed harder and harder. The show ended with a spontaneous standing ovation, and I paused to thank them (out of character for once), noting “There’s nothing I’d rather be doing on my birthday than performing for you.” They returned the acknowledgement by singing me “Happy birthday” on the spot.

Some of the kids told me where the local karaoke bar was, and I packed up to head out. I said my goodbyes to my hosts, and just as I was getting in the car, one student, who had been lingering quietly on the periphery of the others, stopped to ask me if I “knew about Jesus …”

The next day was a slow start, as my birthday celebration seemed to have gotten the best of me. But I was on the road by 10:30, listening to news of the Bears finally losing a game as I drifted in and out of the range of various ESPN stations. About 12 hours later, I was driving through Louisville, finding a hotel.

I’d assumed it would be a quick hop to Highland Heights, Kentucky, but I’d forgotten exactly which interstate ran past Northern Kentucky University, and I got stopped for speeding. After 206,000 miles of touring, I had my first speeding ticket.

I’d been to Northern Kentucky University about twenty years before for a Society of American Fight Directors workshop, but I only recognized a tiny bit of the campus. Fortunately, the French teacher knew an expert technician who understood, with only a slight bit of direction, exactly what I wanted from the light settings.

This was more of a lecture hall than an auditorium, so there was no “offstage” access. I sat, assumedly unnoticed, behind a podium that’d been shoved to the side, with probably just my hair and my feet evident to the audience who cared to notice, and waited for the music to start the show.

The crowd was composed entirely of French teachers and students. The Theatre department had been informed of the event, but had responded with a blasé “Thanks for the information,” so nobody from the theatre was really expected.

Afterwards, several of the teachers stayed behind to thank me for my work, and the French teacher, who was hoping to make the show happen again at some point, helped me track down the theatre department, where I found that the assistant chair was extremely interested in my work. I left him with flyers and continued on my way.

I spent the rest of the day in Cincinnati, swinging by Xavier and Cincinnati Universities, and visiting with my friend Tamara, from the ’05 Cincinnati Fringe Festival.

The next day, I continued east to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was election day. I camped out in a hotel in Harrisburg and parked in front of a television for the night, watching one race after another being declared for the democrats. By the end of the night, they had secured the House, had picked up every open Senate seat but one, and were leading by narrow margins in the remaining two: Montana and Virginia. Even if the votes were close enough for a recount, a look at the 2004 election suggested that if we were ahead before voting irregularities were unraveled, then the wafer-thin leads would only grow.

My theory on this year’s election: It’s pretty well understood that once people actually know someone who is gay, they become more tolerant in the realm of gay issues. Well, this year it seems that some of the Republican’s best friends, people they’d spent millions of dollars on getting us to care about (as well as people from the church itself), were gay. And for the first time we have begun to find that sticking a “defense of marriage” amendment onto the ballot is not the slam-dunk that Karl Rove seemed to think it was.

Meanwhile every exit poll reveals that voters were overwhelmingly intent on bringing an end to the war. Continuing the war will keep the electorate in a mood for more change two years from now, and they simply didn’t have the opportunity to pass judgment on the remaining 66% of the Senate this year.

I had bought a new pair of glasses back in Chattanooga, but I was having trouble with them. At first I assumed they felt strange because they were a new prescription, but I was bumping my knuckles on countertops and losing my footing on staircases. It wasn’t until after a couple of celebratory birthday drinks that I found that I could not focus my vision on the TV set in the hotel room. I could watch it through either eye, but looking through both eyes simultaneously gave it a double image.

I found a mall in Harrisburg and brought my new glasses to a Lens Crafters. The clerk seemed confused, and brought the glasses back to the technician who, after quick examination, discovered that the Chattanooga Lens Crafters had filled the prescription for the left lens with glass for my right eye, and vice versa.

This struck me as the ophthalmologic equivalent of operating on the wrong limb.

In Millersville, I was just a few miles away from Lancaster, and dropped in on the French teacher at Franklin & Marshall College. I surprised Lisa, who had hosted my show back in 2003, and wants to get it back this spring. We checked out some of the performance spaces that the show might work for.

The next day, I did a workshop for the local high school students, and the host was delighted that 120 kids showed up. Afterwards, I made another trip to Lancaster to visit with Playwright Sandra Fenichell Asher, who had written four or five plays that Stage Two had produced back in the 90’s. She showed me over to the Fulton Opera House, and the Fulton’s Playwright-in-Residence, Barry, led us on a tour through the historic facility.

Back at the theatre, we ran a quick rehearsal and set up for the play. The theatre was a big barn-of-a-space, with a huge gap between the front of the stage and the first row. Fortunately, there were already lights focused on this “pit” area, so I alerted the technician that I may go into the audience more often than planned.

I had to push my volume and slow down so that the cavernous quality of the room wouldn’t swallow up my words. And with Sandy and Barry in the audience, I did very much want to do well. I wasn’t hearing a lot of laughs, and spent the play walking the line of “Am I doing too much?/not enough?” I could see smiles on the faces out there, particularly when I pushed off into the audience, sitting briefly on Sandy’s lap during the Scapin sequence, but the audience response still seemed relatively quiet.

After the show, people were as enthusiastic as ever, and it was only then that it struck me that any “muted” quality to their response was the likely result of performing in such a large auditorium. Just as I had to pitch my voice louder, so would they, if I was to hear them. Their laughs may have been as loud as any, but those laughs were circulating up in the rafters, and never quite bouncing back to me.

The next day, I was off to New York. The air had turned crystal clear, and so I managed to snap a couple of pictures.

New York and I have a difficult relationship, and this started off no different, as I got a parking ticket my first night in town.

I went to see Yvonne’s new play, The Truth, at the Metropolitan Theatre (It’s just officially opened this weekend, and I highly recommend it.)

Somehow, I always seem to show up in New York on the night that Yvonne’s having previews for a show that’s just about to open (4 times now!). Our ritual has been to stop out at a bar afterwards and talk through what is or is not working.


Saturday, Yvonne was back to work on her show, and I met up with Tom X. Chao from the fringe circuit. We walked around Soho, finding a bar and “people watching” for a few hours. It had started out a beautiful, warm fall afternoon, but was starting to get chilly, so I ran out to buy a sweatshirt from a nearby Army/Navy surplus store. Tom congratulated me on finding a plain black sweatshirt without any of the “I Heart NY” tourist crap on it.

On Sunday, a bunch of New York-based Fringers got together for a brunch, and I spent the afternoon with a bunch of people I usually only see north of the border, and during the summer. Later, I caught up with my buddy, Jose, and we found a bar to watch the Bears/Giants game.


It turned out that the bar also had karaoke, and so I was set for the evening. Unfortunately, with the game secure in the fourth quarter, Jose and I left, missing the 108-yard missed-field-goal runback.

Monday, Yvonne and I drove north to Massachusetts, where she teaches part-time at Clark University. I did a stripped-down, one-hour version of my workshop for her two classes, and afterwards, Yvonne remarked to the class, “Have you ever seen anyone who had more of a sense of 'Ta-Da?'”

Yvonne and I met up with the theatre chair, who wants to bring me in to do my show next year. He also seems to have a couple of connections for publication and further performance/production, so it was an effective side trip.

I dropped Yvonne back off in New York, and continued on to Baltimore. My sister Maureen’s dog had died recently, and she was still pretty sad about it. She and Tim and I went out to dinner, and the next day I was on the road once again, heading back to Chattanooga.

While driving, I was working my lines for Precious Young Maidens and Doctor in Spite of Himself every possible way, and by the time I got to Tennessee, I could recite my lines for either show in less than a half-an-hour.

I was running much later than anticipated for a workshop at UT-Chattanooga, and pulled into the theatre’s loading dock about two minutes after I was to have started. Fortunately, I had alerted them, and several people were out on the loading dock to help me bring in my stuff, and my workshop was underway by 2:05.

I was squeezing content from both of my workshops into a single hour, so I proceeded at a breathless pace, jumping through scenes from Flying Doctor, School for Wives and Tartuffe, and improvising explanations of the impact of scenes that I didn’t have enough time to perform in this setting. (Some of my explanations seem to go over every bit as well as a performance of the full scene does.) Finishing up with Precious Young Maidens,” I was reminded again of Yvonne’s “Ta-Da” comment, and found myself confidently giving that little extra flourish to some of the lines, which the students found hilarious.

I drove to Signal Mountain, northeast of Chattanooga, where Sabra is the administrator for the Alexian Village health care facility. She’d arranged a performance for her residents, and perhaps seventy of them filled the small recital hall (with an unknown number watching the performance from their individual apartments on the Village’s closed-circuit television system).

It was quite different from performing for teenagers. They were a more subdued group, less inclined to guffaw loudly at the crude gestures. When it came time to ask for a volunteer, no hands went up. Eventually, one gentleman pointed over toward Sabra, saying “How about her?” And so, Sabra graciously got up to join me, uncertain of whether she should pretend that she had no idea what she was doing, or if she should play it up. Likewise, I proceeded carefully, knowing that she had to come back and “administrate” for these people the next day.

For the Scapin scene, I chose the fellow who’d “volunteered” Sabra, and he blanched a bit: “I don’t think they can hear me …” he said in a weak voice.

“You can all hear him, can’t you?” I spoke up.

“Yes,” they cheered.

He was hilarious. He’d never acted before, and was obviously enjoying it, but just as obviously had no idea what he should be doing. The crowd loved him for it.

Afterwards, this “subdued” crowd was vocal in their appreciation. There was a small punch-and-cookies reception, and they commended my memorization, as well as my articulation. “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to understand what you were saying, but I heard every word!” was one typical response.

I took a day in Chattanooga to get caught up on stuff I’d been putting off: I submitted my applications for what I expect will be a much more limited Fringe tour this summer, focusing on Minnesota and Winnipeg. I sent off Coca-Cola souvenirs (from an antique shop I'd passed in Missouri) to Jill in Orlando (She’d billeted me two years back, and had coca cola stuff everywhere). And I figured out my bank balance. Now that I’m wrapping things up for the fall, I have no guaranteed income until January, so I need to be confident that I can make it through the gap. (A sudden cancellation of a performance in Knoxville had put things in doubt, but the successful performance and payment for other shows had me back on top again.)

I drove north to visit Isaac in Detroit. Susan, the director in Oklahoma has been casting Doctor in Spite and Precious and her stage manager has e-mailed photos of all 117 actors who auditioned. I’ve been matching those photos up with the characters that she’s casting them as, which reminds me of the people I met amid the flurry of activity in Norman. I have very high hopes for the show.

On Sunday, I broke down and finally bought an i-pod. At least two of my acquaintances from the road (Tom X. Chao and Dave Romm) are producing podcasts, and I felt like I was missing out. It seems that I have finally reached the age where I can turn to my progeny to understand new technology, and Isaac helped me shop, and showed me how to download stuff onto it. While I was at it, I bought an accessory that charges my i-pod from the car’s cigarette lighter while simultaneously “broadcasting” the signal onto an empty FM channel in my car. This means that rather than buying a multi-cd changer for my car, I can instead download my hundreds of CD’s onto my i-pod, and listen to weeks and weeks of music (and podcasts) as I travel.

So far, I have downloaded the A’s and B’s from my collection, and already have two days worth of material.

And finally, with the exception of three days in September in which I didn’t even unpack my car or my suitcase, I’m back home for the first time since mid-July, and the fall tour is history.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Miles on the Vibe: 209,500
Reading: Back issues of The View From Here
Temperature: Dropping to lower thirties, as I continue, reluctantly north.
Discoveries: A given audience may be laughing very hard, but their laughter may be fighting the acoustics of the room, just as much as I am. * Keeping “Ta-Da” in the back of my head, helps light up the scene. * The older you get, the less interest you have in “Audience Participation.”
Next Performance: January 17, 2007, Central Methodist University, Fayette, MO

The View From Here # 118: Lynchburg, VA; West Palm Beach & Melbourne, FL; Brunswick, GA; Hillsboro, Kingsville, TX

Well, suddenly we are in “prime time,” with shows coming fast and furious. One sequence of the past weeks has found me performing the show five times in four days! While I love doing the show, I can’t relax during periods like this. Any kind of illness could cost me big time, so it’s a constant roll of the dice.

Of course, I’ve never cancelled a show in my life, so that’s probably just my imagination working overtime.

From Idaho, I raced home in record time (two days from Boise to Chicago!), catching a Pathways celebration, and visiting with my "Tennessee girlfriend,” Sabra, who was in town for the Pathways Advanced course.

I made a quick side-trip up to Wisconsin, where I had been cast in a commercial. It was a three-hour drive to deliver a single line: Something like “Before it gets too cold, I’d better winterize my car.” And then, three hours back. (Passing by U-Wisconsin-Whitewater, I couldn’t resist dropping in on Charles Phillip Thomas, who translated Secret Obscenities, which I produced in the mid-nineties, and which I believe is the perfect two-man fringe play.)

From there it was on to Detroit, and a leisurely visit with Isaac. We caught a Detroit Tigers game (this was pre-post season, when they were really tanking), and I stuck around town to see Isaac play in a football game. Mostly we were just awed at how big he looked in his shoulder pads. He didn’t get into the game until the last five minutes or so.

Back on the highway, I drove from Detroit to Virginia (My odometer tripped over 200,000 miles somewhere in Ohio!), dropping in on my grad-school friend, Kathy, and continuing on to Lynchburg, where the Virginia Episcopal School was hosting me. There’s been a ton of rain these last couple of weeks, and I was noticing swollen rivers, particularly through the Virginia mountains, but subsequently through all of the south.

Lynchburg is the home of Jerry Fallwell’s academies, and I really hadn’t given it much thought until I was up on stage, performing the show. Not knowing quite how conservative this audience was, I found myself narrowing some of my more expressive gestures. (No matter where I perform, the words are always the same, but the gestures seem to get more or less expansive, depending on how comfortable I am in expressing the not-so-hidden secondary entendres of the speeches.)

The auditorium was packed. This boarding school holds Saturday classes on a regular basis, and the kids love the occasional break from studying. I was really “on”, too. In the “School for Wives,” Argante tends to get carried away and catch himself being overzealous. There were several moments when his mouth gets twisted in his self-righteous indignation, and I found my eyes actually looking down to my mouth in the process of “catching myself.” The teachers reported loving the show afterwards, and when I mentioned my concern about the play’s seamier side, they were fairly flip: “We’re Episcopalians,” they responded.

Still somewhat uncertain, I asked, “Is that good or bad?”

I headed south, getting a hotel in Columbia, South Carolina that night (where I was a big hit at a karaoke bar), and continuing to Orlando on Sunday.

I dropped in on my friend, Al, in Orlando, who was going to a theatre fundraiser that night. He brought me along, and I immediately wondered if anyone I knew might be present, considering that I’d done the Orlando Fringe three times in the past. Within five minutes I had bumped into Rene and Billy, two of my biggest Moliere fans, who gave me a delighted welcome. I found myself in a couple of conversations about bringing Moliere back to Orlando, and Rene jumped in repeatedly, raving about the show.

I headed for West Palm Beach, dropping in on my Aunt Evelyn (who lives in Port Saint Lucie) along the way. I hadn’t seen Aunt Evelyn in about thirty years, and was very glad to see that she’s in terrific health. I hadn’t seen her daughter (my cousin) Patty, in perhaps forty years, and she, too, was doing well. And I’d never met her granddaughter, Judy, who was now grown up with kids of her own. We had a great visit before I headed south again (losing my way, searching for the interstate for a half hour or so), settling into the hotel.

The next morning, I drove over to the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, which is a huge facility. I got a peek at their largest stage, which seemed to have about 8 levels of balconies! I was performing in a smaller auditorium (capacity of around 400), and there was a staff of four people there to see to all the technical needs. They had even catered the event, and the breakfast buffet laid out for this one-man show seemed to rival the continental breakfast of most hotels.

Word had it that the attendance for these two one-hour shows would be small, perhaps 100 or so for each. As I prepared to go on for the first show, I got news that one of the schools (about seventy students) were tied up in traffic, and would be late. “Don’t worry,” my hosts said, “we’ll just put them into the audience of the second show.” And just as I entered to begin the show, the missing crowd of seventy students started to filter in. Very slowly. And ongoingly. For about five minutes.

At several points during this process, I wanted to say, “Hey, welcome everybody: you guys get settled and I’ll come in again.” But I kept thinking they were almost done. And by the time they were done I was five minutes into the show … a show I only had an hour to do.

Did I mention that these late arrivers sat far back in the auditorium? I had one row of close-sitters, and five rows of distracted chatters at a distance.

After finishing my Tartuffe scene, I introduced Don Juan, and as I usually do, I selected a boy sitting in the first row as my confidante in the Don Juan scene. And the very moment that I started directing dialogue to him, he actually stood up and left.

Assuming that he had gotten up to go to the bathroom, I adjusted my focus to a student who was sitting right next to him, and continued.

And then this guy, and the guy who was sitting next to him stood up and left.

I did a take at them as they worked their way down the aisle. And then two more, and then two more also got up and left.

I did two subsequent takes, with looks on my face that one could only describe as “WTF?”

I pushed on through, eventually getting some good laughs out of Scapin and Precious Young Maidens, but the reception and the applause rang hollow, and I wished I hadn’t arranged for that second curtain call with the lighting technician.

Offstage, word had it that the kids who’d left were hard-core Christian home-schoolers, and they’d found Tartuffe to be offensive.

After a half-hour break, I came back and did it all again, this time with an audience that was settled in their seats, sitting close and extremely attentive. I was doing the same show I’d just finished thirty minutes before, but this time, I could feel everyone hanging on every word, getting the several levels of implication and waiting for the payoff. Once, I could even hear a woman in the audience gasping with astonishment over a double entendre for which she had apparently only heard the secondary meaning. I played off of that and continued. And while, I’m sure that their attentive response inspired me to heights I hadn’t reached in the first performance, it was their listening that created the space for excellence to occur.

A couple of the attendees had been overheard saying “I’m going to go on-line and see if he’s got a MySpace page!” (The answer is yes, but no sign of them signing up as my “friends” yet.) A bunch of the students hung around to talk with me, and we chatted for about fifteen minutes. They asked about life on the road and one of the students got my mailing address, so that she could send me a mixtape to listen to. Meanwhile, the crew had packed me up a doggie bag, and we loaded the car back up, and I headed off.

Later I received the following from the teacher who’d promoted me to the Kravis Center:

"It was such a pleasure to see you perform at the Kravis yesterday! I wasn’t able to come back afterwards because I had another appointment and because I am nursing a cough—and didn’t want to make you ill—especially while you are touring. I hear that some of the students I teach did get to speak with you and were thoroughly impressed!

"Your work was wonderful and dovetails nicely with the period acting class that I am currently teaching. We are just starting to look at Commedia and Restoration. I thought your liveliness, physicality and command of language were exceptional!"

The Melbourne, Florida show was at a Catholic high school, and I’d had my concerns when the teacher told me I’d be performing in the library to an audience of about sixty. I wondered if they could possibly get their money’s worth with so few in attendance. But the teacher had seen me perform the show in a conference room at one of the French Teacher conferences that I attend. She knew what they were getting, and assumed that the library would be very close to the conference room setting. (The teacher later explained to me that there had also been a benefactor among the parents who had sponsored the performance.)

Eventually, sixty or seventy students filed into the library and packed the place. With an audience packed in elbow-to-elbow, any individual laugh passes through the audience like a ripple on a pond. There were individual points of contact where chronic laughers were sending out wave after wave, and I did my best to direct my monologues to those spots. By the time I got to the end (and to conclude the metaphor), everything was making a big splash. They got up to give me a standing ovation at the end.

Later, the teacher sent me the following note:

"Thank you so much for coming! You were great! I got nothing but very positive comments all day. Everyone who attended thoroughly loved your performance. I was amazed at how still and attentive our ADD kids were/, too. I think they were spellbound. One of the boys from AP European history said he had never seen anything like it before. The benefactors loved it, too, and were most appreciative of this unique cultural experience for our students, which surely opened their minds to a whole new outlook on the history and literature- not to mention theater. Had I recalled the references to the church I would've tapped the religion dept., too. (But then we really would have had to move to the gym which is much less desirable for many reasons). I hope we can have you again and if it is either earlier or later in the school year we could probably go in on a theatre with other schools."

I pulled up stakes and headed on to Brunswick, stopping briefly outside of Orlando to catch lunch with my good friend Sandra-the-Vegan. (Sandra’s working on a campaign to stop mountaintop removal, and encourages everyone to visit: http://www.appvoices.org/, to help take action.) (From that point, you can also join in on their raffle for lots of cool prizes.)

I was in Brunswick, Georgia 24 hours in advance of my first performance (at Costal Georgia Community College), and was able to dig in to work, catching up with e-mails and editing my “travelogue” of The View From Here. (I’ve been putting off work on The View… ever since my laptop was stolen, largely because it’s such a huge project: 550 pages I need to edit down to 250 or less.) I took a modest bite out of the project.

CGCC has two campuses, separated by about 30 miles. They were hiring me to do the show at each campus on subsequent nights. The first was down towards the Florida border, and as soon as I saw the space, I realized that it would be difficult. It was a combination recital hall / lecture space, and the first three rows of the audience had long narrow tables in front of them, upon which we assume the students would set their laptop computers. Word had it that audiences never sat in these rows. Which meant that the closest audience members would be 25 feet away from me. I couldn’t help but feel this was deadly, and I kept trying to figure out how to overcome it.

I asked if anyone would object if, during the sequences in which I invade the audience, I might actually stand on those tables, and use them as a stage of sorts. No? Okay … (thinking, thinking, thinking …) I gave a heads-up to the host. “Tell the girl on the lights that I may go out into the audience on other occasions.” (This would cue her to bring up the houselights … which were actually brighter than the lights on the stage were.)

Four or five students sitting towards the back actually left after the opening monologue. (The Misanthrope) Of course there’s a reason that that monologue opens the show. It makes everything afterwards look good by contrast. But this was the first time anyone had walked out before the show was even ten minutes old.

I did two more monologues from the stage, and felt the audience start to warm to me, and when the Tartuffe monologue arrived, I climbed down from the stage and onto the table nearest to the audience. In other words I went from 25 feet away to 5 feet away, delivering the monologue directly to a woman in the second row. Suddenly, the audience sat stock straight in their chairs. I sometimes climbed down from the table, leaning in on the woman in the second row. It was no longer a play that the audience was looking at through a telescope, but one that had been placed in their laps.

I returned to the stage for the volunteer sequence of Tartuffe, and then made further forays onto the tables for Don Juan, and later The Imaginary Cuckold. I would even cross from one table to another, when I needed to have my character moving “upstage”. (The phrase “upstage” by the way, comes from the fact that the ancient Greeks had stages that were raked upwards, getting higher as they got farther away from the audience. In this case, for me, upstage was actually down, as the tables farther from the audience actually continued the downward progression of the audience rake, as the rows approached the stage.) From my point of view, it was like doing the show on a jungle gym.

My host was delighted, taking me out for dinner with a group of his students afterwards. I began to appreciate that this was not the usual Theatre department or French department booking, but a student government arrangement, in which all of the participants were part of an activities council. In fact, the host told me of a couple of booking conferences where he assured me I would do quite well, and I’m currently sorting out my schedule to see if I can make them work.

The next night I was at the main Brunswick campus, in a more traditional auditorium. There was no need for physical hyjinx, other than the wacky stuff I do as part of the usual show.

The next day I was on to Chattanooga. I dropped in on Sabra for a couple of days while working on “The View From Here; The Travelogue.” Even on a good day, the best I could do was to edit my way through perhaps 25 pages. This will be a long project.

I’m also working on lines for Precious Young Maidens and Doctor in Spite of Himself. I’ve arranged to do a reading with University of Oklahoma, so that the director and I can start looking at casting for shows that we’re performing in February. I’m hoping to arrive at the read-through with the lines already memorized, if only to set the bar of expectations high for the students who end up getting cast. (Having the memorization out of the way will also ease my workload for January/February, when I suppose I’ll be wanting to edit 500 pages of material.)

From Chattanooga it was a long day’s drive to Hillsboro, Texas and Hill College. I presented my workshop in the morning to a group of about fifty students. (The teachers loved it and asked if I had a DVD of the workshop. … I told them they could get the textbook when I finally find a publisher.) And then there was a show that night.

The host had alerted me that, while the show was free to the public, the first row had been reserved by a retirement community. Which I figured would make for some interesting contrasts as my onstage characters deliver some of the more salacious dialogue to women sitting in the front row.

Making my entrance, I could see there were a good 250 or so in the auditorium. Within seconds of my entrance, though, I could hear a cell phone go off, right in the first row. I ignored it as best I could, but this was a much greater struggle when the woman in the front row actually … answered it. I could only catch a few words, as I struggled to talk over this inconsiderate woman, but what I heard was, “I’m at the college now …”

I desperately put it out of my mind, as my anger could only take me off of the tracks of my memorized lines. And yet, she wasn’t done yet.

She proceeded to take out a camera, and snap pictures of me as I performed.

I ignored the first one.

With the second one, I did a “take” as if Moliere was wondering, “From whence did this strange lightening emerge?”

With the third one (and thereafter), all I could do was ignore it. She took photos all night long, every time I changed a costume. She even turned sideways, and took photos of the rest of the audience in the row with her, perhaps for the nursing home newsletter.

Her antics seemed to give someone else, in the back row, permission to follow suit. And more flashes lit up the stage.

I tried to look at the good side. Obviously I was important enough to them to want to preserve my image for their posterity. It was the only way I could restrain the resentment I had over the fact that she was placing herself and her camera between me and the rest of the audience’s ability to enjoy the show.

The scenes went well. I was cranking up my energy in an effort to distract the audience from the other distractions in the room. The volunteers were hilarious. The Tartuffe volunteer was a “cougher,” which has the unfortunate side-effect of inspiring coughs from the rest of the audience. The Scapin volunteer was a bit slow-on-the-uptake. And my takes to the audience punctuated the simplicity of his delivery.

Precious Young Maidens features a series of “Stop, thiefs” that I repeat, in five sets of three, with a pause before the third “thief” in each series. Someone in the first row, but well off to my left, repeatedly anticipated the final “thief”, speaking it before I actually said it. On the fourth pass through, when I sing the lines, that same person sang “thief” before I could sing it myself. Normally, I would ignore it and go on without breaking character. But as it had happened four times now …

I stopped dead, dropped my arms and stared in the direction from which the sound had come.

The audience roared with laughter.

I held this look for about ten seconds, before getting back into the position that I had previously paused in, and finished off right where I left off, singing the final “thief.” The audience roared again.

On the fifth and final series of “stop thiefs”, the audience singer chimed in yet again, and I was a little shocked that she had not learned her lesson. I simply raised a finger and arched an eyebrow to say, “Don’t make me come out there!” And finished the line myself.

Later on, someone explained the disposition of the singer in the audience, and I realized that there was a certain amount of impulsive helplessness, or perhaps dementia, in the woman who was singing, as she was twisting and laughing uncontrollably throughout the exchange. (People asked if she had been a “plant.”)

Following the show, the theatre had a small reception. Seemingly, the audience had actually been looking past all of "problems" facing this performance. Granted, most of them complimented that I had “an amazing memory,” but others were also conscious of the quality of the performance, too.

One attractive young woman was introduced to me as a student from Brazil, and she told me “I never laughed so hard in the theatre in my entire life.”

Okay, that made up for the woman with the camera.

I’d traveled to Kingsville four years ago, and a couple of the students were fans of my work, coming to see me every time I appeared, subsequently, at the Texas Educational Theatre Association conference. The previous Theatre professor had retired, but the French professor had met up with me at the AATF conference, and decided to bring me back. The day of the show, one of the Theatre students had asked if I would observe and respond to a rehearsal he was holding, and shared some notes with the cast. It’s been over a year since the last time I directed anything, so it felt good to coach actors again.

The Kingsville folks were worried about attendance, particularly as the school’s homecoming game was happening at the same time, as was a “salsa and margarita festival.” There were still about fifty in the audience, and it was another setting where the audience was set back at a significant distance. Again, I told the lighting guy to watch for me to move off of the stage, and I did the Tartuffe scene and the Imaginary Cuckold scene in front of the stage. The audience was scattered through the small theatre, and close to the front there were only men sitting, or else women with small children. I didn’t want the women to have to answer, “Why was that man looking at you funny?” so instead I shifted Tartuffe’s seduction focus up the aisle, to the French teacher who was sitting there with her husband. (As she had seen the show four years before, she, at least, knew what was coming.)

All the usual scenes went very well, and the show finished up with a standing ovation. There was a small reception in the lobby afterwards, and I visited with some of my theatre student friends late into the evening. The only disappointment of the evening was that the check wasn’t ready, and suddenly I was reminded that four years ago I had to chase down the Kingsville folks for about three months before getting paid.

On Sunday, I worked my way north (meeting friends for lunch in ouston and dinner in Dallas). I’m now in Norman, Oklahoma, getting ready for a reading of Precious Young Maidens and Doctor in Spite of Himself tomorrow.

By the way: God bless Keith Olberman. If you haven’t seen any of his recent Special Reports, it’s some of the best commentary I’ve seen in years.

Don’t forget to vote.

Miles on the Vibe: 203,500
Discoveries: Distractions at the top of the show stop the audience from appreciating the details that build upon the exposition, and they end up judging each bit on the intrinsic quality of the humor in that particular bit. Much more important to take the time and get the opening right, even if it means starting again. * The audience’s listening creates the space for excellence to occur.
In the CD Player: My lines for Doctor in Spite of Himself
Temperature: 80s but heading back down as I work slowly north
Next performance: Missouri Southern State University, November 4 (My Birthday!)