High-energy Shakespeare, and a lot of it, is on tap April 7, 2011, as the Kansas Wesleyan University Humanities Division presents Tim Mooney in Lot o’ Shakespeare.
The presentation is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. April 7 in Sams Chapel and is open to the public at no charge. The cost of the event is being covered by KWU’s Humanities Fund and William Clyde Brown Fund for the Humanities. The event is part of KWU’s 125th Anniversary Celebration.
“The Humanities Division has wanted to host an event that would engage not only the KWU community, but also the Salina community as well. We have invited classes from USD 305, USD306 and K-State Salina to join us. With the University celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, we felt this would be a great time to bring Tim Mooney to campus,” said Dianne Wayman, Department of English chair. “Tim takes a high-energy, fun approach to Shakespeare that everyone will enjoy.”
During Lot o’ Shakespeare, Mooney will perform monologues from Shakespeare’s plays or will recite sonnets, either by request or in random order.
The following information is from the Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre website (timmooneyrep.com).
About the Show
While I was on tour with my one-man show, “Moliere Than Thou,” and performing in one of our southeastern states, one of my hosts informed me that a local Shakespeare Festival was looking to cast their Macbeth, and that I really ought to send them my resume. Having grown up as the stereotypical dweeby theatre major, it was somewhat of a shock to grasp that someone/anyone might look at me and say: “There’s our Macbeth!”
And I started fantasizing about all of the Shakespeare roles that were now coming into my range in my middle years. I thought that I might be able to transform my performance tour into an audition tour. What if, no matter what Shakespeare play they were doing, I had a monologue from that show available to perform? So I might be able to ask, “So what shows are you doing this summer?” And when they said, “Pericles, Coriolanus and Henry VI, part 3? I could say, “Great! Lemme do those for you!”.
I started envisioning an acting workshop and a one-man show and wondered what might be the best order in which I might package these speeches: in the order that the events in the plays actually occurred, according to their date of composition, by the position of the monologue within its play of origin? In the end, I decided to leave it to chance, select the order by lottery and let the audience play along with their own IAGO (Bingo) cards.
Timothy Mooney Biography
Mooney has given tens of thousands of students their first introduction to Moliere through his one-man play, Moliere Than Thou. Mooney is the former founder and editor of The Script Review and was the Artistic Director of Chicago’s Stage Two Theatre, where he produced nearly fifty plays in five years. While most of Stage Two’s plays were original works, when they turned to the classics, Mooney found himself writing new versions of the plays of Moliere, with a playful sense of rhyme. He has now written seventeen iambic pentameter variations of the plays of Moliere (most published by Playscripts, Inc.), produced around the world. High School productions of Mooney’s The Misanthrope, The Miser, The Imaginary Invalid, and Tartuffe have gone on to state finals in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina and Alabama, while his Doctor in Spite of Himself, took third place in the Scottish Community Drama Association National Festival, and was a finalist at Italy’s Sanremo Global Education Festival. Mooney continues to present Moliere across North America, while teaching classical acting and performing his other one-man shows, including the sci-fi thriller Criteria and Lot o’ Shakespeare.