Bill Bowers: Mime's the Word
In our hyper-verbal 21st-century society, what is the role of a mime? Bill Bowers, who trained in the art form with Marcel Marceau, has given that question plenty of thought. In solo performances and educational programs throughout America, Canada and Europe, the Montana native has shared his talent and raked in a slew of great reviews. Along the way, Bowers has also had some, um, interesting encounters, and he's gathered those strange-but-true tales into a new one-man show, It Goes Without Saying, currently at the Rattlestick Theatre. In addition to teaching and performing as a mime, Bowers has acted onstage in musicals such as The Lion King and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Using his naturally witty storytelling style, Bowers shared the origins of his new spoken-word show with Broadway.com.
A number of years ago I was in Los Angeles visiting a friend, and she invited me to come with her to a psychic reading. What can I say? It was very L.A. A group of folks surrounded this odd little British man who claimed to be a trance-channeler. As I sat in the candlelit room, trying hard not to roll my eyes, the channeler began asking if there was someone named "Willy" in the group. I asked if "Bill" was close enough, since no one has called me Willy since I was a kid. The psychic told me that my father was in the room and needed to give me a message. Odd, I thought, since Dad died in 1984.
My dad was apparently standing behind me, dressed in overalls, pulling a mule, and he had two vitally important things to tell me:
1. Move to Las Vegas and study the Art of Stand-Up Comedy. It was my calling.
2. Check the rear tires of my rental car.
The next day, I discovered that the rear left tire on my Ford Escort was bald and the steel belt was completely exposed.
I did not move to Vegas, however, and did not become a stand-up comic.
I am an actor and a mime. Yes, a mime. I guess you could call me a stand-up mime because I do tell stories and act them out from time to time. I certainly never intended to write a play like the one I'm doing now, It Goes Without Saying. I just have some stories that I've been telling all my life—backstage, in dressing rooms, on bus trips, at dinner parties, at family reunions....
In 1997, when I was in The Scarlet Pimpernel on Broadway, I would report to the hair room every night at 7:30 so Joel could put on my wig. As we got to be friends, I would tell him stories. Well, eight shows a week for more than a year adds up to a lot of stories. One night, after I had told him about the time Miss Montana vomited on me, Joel slammed his brush on the counter and said, in his thick Southern drawl, "Bill Bowers, shut up with your weird ass life!" For a while, I actually considered using this as the title of my play.
After leaving the hair room, I would twirl into my friend Gilles Chiasson's dressing room for a nightly visit, so he heard quite a few of my tales as well. One night he told me, "You are going to write a play about your life, and I know the person who is going to help you do it." He handed me a scrap of paper with the name "Martha Banta" written on it, and a phone number. I never called her.
The idea for the play continued to take shape in my dressing room at The Lion King. People started showing up nightly to hear my mime horror stories and I got great encouragement to write down my adventures. For my birthday that year, my partner, Michael, gave me a list of stories—my Greatest Hits, it were—and said, "Now go write a play."
Not long after that, I was invited to Harvard University to participate in the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue, founded by the great monologist Anna Deavere Smith. I was the only mime there—in fact, the only white male—in a group of scholars and intellectuals. One morning, Anna said to me, "Why are you a mime?" She has a way of looking right into a person, like a searchlight into your brain. Her question led me to write two plays, both of them without words, both of which were ultimately produced in New York 'Night Sweetheart, 'Night Buttercup at Here and Under a Montana Moon at Urban Stages.
But I still was trying to answer that question: Why am I a mime?
In 2002 I was invited to do Under a Montana Moon at the Adirondack Theater Festival, and the artistic director there was a woman named... Martha Banta. I told her I was working on an idea for a spoken play and she suggested that I come up and do a reading of it at her theater. I had no script; I simply sat on a stool in front of an audience and told some of my stories. The response was really terrific, so she and David Turner, the producing director at ATF, offered to help me develop the show for their 2003 season. It took five years for Martha and me to get together, but Gilles was absolutely right.
Since then, Martha and I have been working on how to take my weird-ass True Stories and turn them into an evening of theater. That has brought us to the Rattlestick Theater in New York, opening It Goes Without Saying.
And it brings me back to my dad. He offered some advice to me years ago, when I was a little boy.
"Son," he said, "if you have the choice, always tell the truth. It's easier to remember."
So here goes.