This Monday, Essential Theatre presents a one-night-only performance of Only An Actor by Tim McDonough. Read on to find out more about this Atlanta theater stalwart.
Tim McDonough has acted 100+ roles, winning awards up and down the East Coast since the 1980s. For 28 years he taught acting at Emory University; he served as Chair of Theater and Dance and as Artistic Director of Theater Emory. He has directed Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, contemporary playwrights, and his own plays and adaptations of fiction and has written a book, Acting Narrative Speeches: The Actor as Storyteller.
ET: If you could share one thing about your show to explain why someone else should come see it, what would you say?
TM: This monologue is about an actor in search of himself. His career embodies my convictions about acting as a craft, a way of life, and an existential perspective. The storytelling is autobiographical and fictional, comical and philosophical and reflects on the question, “Why would a person decide to live other lives?” What we find is one complicated answer.
ET:Where did you get the idea for this play? What made you want to write it?
TM: After 60 years of acting, I thought I should write something about what all I think I’ve been up to, and why. I’d written and performed two monologues about morality, and I turned next to another perspective on my life. This is the second of two solo shows about acting.
ET: What made you want to start writing plays?
TM: My first inspirations to write for theater were fiction and non-fiction characters that I wanted to act. To perform Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver or the minister in The Scarlet Letter or the man who killed Billy the Kid or one half of vaudevillian Siamese twins or a brilliant anthropologist who studied troubled American families, I would have to learn how to shape stories not written for the stage. Adaptations enlarged my perspectives on what might happen when conventional theater techniques were not enough.
ET: Are you working on any new projects at the moment? What’s next for you?
TM: One answer to what’s next is in my play.
ET: Are there any thoughts you’d like to share about having this play presented as part of the Essential Theatre Play Festival?
TM: Essential Theatre has in fact been essential to playwrights in Georgia and I’m proud to be part of this year’s festival. In 2018, Essential hosted “a bunch of different ways i’d like to die,” and those performances proved to be critically important in the development of that monologue.
Tim’s play, Only an Actor, is one night only, this Monday, August 18, at 7:30pm. Get your tickets at EssentialTheatre.Tix.com!
