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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote out 100 goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the old computer crashed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miles on the Vibe: 260,000

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

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

Temperature: 78 Degrees (in Dallas)

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

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

Next Performance: Western New Mexico University, March 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And ...

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

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


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

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

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

That night, the following showed up in my inbox:

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

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

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

Aloha!
Tim


Miles on the Car: 256,000

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

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

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

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

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

Reading: "The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The word “curmudgeon” comes to mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Love,
Tim

Miles on the Vibe: 252,500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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