Mar 11, 2011 By Carla Destefano 4 min read

Audience participation key to success for ‘Moliere Than Thou’

He may have written, directed, produced and now performs solo in his show, “Moliere Than Thou,” but Tim Mooney never works alone.

Audience participation in Mooney’s comedic introduction of works by the 17th-century playwright, Moliere, is key for success of the show, Mooney says. The renowned actor will bring the show to the stage at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, at noon March 17 in the Maggie Hardy Magerko Auditorium. The performance is free of charge.

“Moliere Than Thou” finds the playwright left without a cast after all of the performers come down with food poisoning. Refunding the ticket money for the sold-out show is not an option for Moliere, who then decides to deliver a comical one-man revue of his favorite speeches and an overview of his career.

Mooney, as Moliere, performs routines from “Tartuffe, Don Juan, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Precious Young Maidens, The Misanthrope” and “The School For Wives,” among others.

“Thoughout the show, Moliere brings volunteers from the audience up on the stage with him and puts them in the roles of what his fellow actors might have played,” Mooney said. “My favorite moments tend to be interaction with the audience. The electricity is heightened during those times for me.”

The show is one of many written by Mooney as part of his company, the Timothy Mooney Repertory Theatre. He said he began the show in 1999 and performed for the first time in the Chicago area.

“Within about a year, I realized that I had something. I still had the costumes. They all fit into a single trunk that fit in my car,” he said. “So I decided to drive around the country and started this long, elaborate tour.”

Typically, Mooney said he performs the show at colleges, high schools, festivals and other special events around the country. The stage is where he calls home, noting that he travels on average 200 days a year.

He’s lost count of the number of Moliere performances over the career of the show, now in it’s 12th year. But he said despite performing the same show over and over to hundreds of thousands of people, there are never two shows that are exactly alike, thanks to the audience.

“It’s a constant challenge to myself to keep things fresh,” he said. “But part of what makes it fresh is that interaction,” he said. “The audience is delivering lines too, so I have no idea how they are going to respond.

“Sometimes volunteers on stage may be very savvy or they could be absolute newbies. That is more fun than anything. If they are giggly or frightened, the audience reads that and it heightens the excitement for everyone,” he said.

In addition to the Moliere performance, theatergoers at the Fayette campus will also experience Mooney’s second show, “Lot o’Shakespeare,” where he performs one monologue from each of the English playwright’s works determined at random based on the spin of a bingo cage.

“This is a quick way of introducing the audience to the depth of Shakespeare’s work,” he said. “I always pick the monologues that appeal to me – dangerous, fun, exciting, sexy, playful.”

Mooney said the dual performance is structured in a way to be delivered to audience members of all ages. He said the show appeals to those newly introduced to Moliere and Shakespeare as well as those who are more familiar with their works.

“You don’t need to study French to understand Moliere,” he said. “And you don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar to appreciate these timeless stories that are just as modern now as they were then.”