My Introduction to the Concept of the "One-Woman Show"

Don't forget about my "Six Degrees of Shatner" Theory

Let’s start with October of 1961. William Shatner starred along with Julie Harris and Walter Matthau on Broadway in the Booth Theatre production of A Shot In The Dark, directed by Harold Clurman.

Fast forward to June of 2009. Julie Harris was at The Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, seemingly just hanging out near the famous “Round Table” in the luxurious lobby while I was singing at an Open Mic event. After my number, I respectfully introduced myself and asked if I could join her for a brief conversation. She was gracious and lovely and one of my favorite actress encounters of all time.

I had seen Ms. Harris on stage and on television performing as the poet Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst.” That show had opened on Broadway on April 28, 1976 and then appeared on a PBS Special and toured extensively throughout the United States the following year.

I was immediately enamored of its main character, the quirky and reclusive woman of the previous century who bucked the patriarchy and lived according to her own social construct. I asked my mother if she owned any books of poetry by Emily Dickinson, being an English major and graduate of St. Lawrence University and a former high school English teacher at Canandaigua Academy. Her favorite authors and poets were lining the shelves in our home… books by and including the works of e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, T. S. Elliot, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Archibald MacLeish to name the few I can remember. Oddly though, there was no Dickinson so I went to my school library and checked out an entire collection of her work. I was eleven years old and immediately decided that my favorite Emily Dickinson poem was this one, published in 1891:

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!

They’d banish us; you know!

How dreary to be somebody!

How public like a frog

To tell one’s name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

I was in the sixth grade by then and I was particularly interested in Ms. Harris’ tour de force acting in this one-woman production. I had never seen anything like it except for William Shatner’s one-man show that was touring colleges and universities around the country that same year.

WPIX television out of New York City had been broadcasting in many parts of the Northeast, including the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York, by the summer of 1972. While Star Trek: The Original Series began syndication almost immediately after it was canceled by NBC in 1969, it appeared in the Rochester, New York area on Channel 8 around November of 1970.

Between the Channel 8 broadcasts and the constant reruns that had begun airing on WPIX Channel 11 during the ensuing four years, I had become a Star Trek expert. We were just starting to be called Trekkies or Trekkers by then but I was something else altogether. I could deliver episode names with full synopsis descriptions as well as crucial dialogue and names of guest stars appearing in each episode. It was my “parlor trick” at school in 6th grade. It also got me sent to my room at home, sitting in front of the family room TV, saying every line just slightly before the actor’s delivery, driving my mother crazy.

I was obsessed with Star Trek and William Shatner as Captain Kirk. In 1967 the professional science fiction author, James Blish, began publishing adaptations of the scripts from the Star Trek television shows. Thirteen volumes were eventually published, covering every televised episode of the original live-action show. I had all thirteen of those books, based on the actual scripts, and had memorized much more than just dialogue. I had also spent a great deal of time in front of my parents’ bedroom TV set with a 60-minute, blank cassette tape loaded into my Webcor cassette tape player/recorder (this was well before the days of VHS and DVD) and pushed the “record” and “play” buttons at the beginning of each episode, then flipped the tape over halfway through to capture the second half of the show (most of the times with the commercials edited out) and organized them into a chronological collection of audio recordings of the entire series. Those tapes and books lined my shelves. When sent to my room for some diabolical, pre-teen infraction or for the above mentioned, annoying habit of saying the lines out loud before they aired, I would pull out my tapes and listen to my Star Trek shows while simultaneously reading the corresponding adaptation in the James Blish books. Yes, I recognize that this behavior was exhibiting some pretty hard-core fandom. I was definitely diving deep.

I was also starting to become acquainted with more of William Shatner’s stage, TV and film work outside of Star Trek and was becoming almost as much of a Shatner fan as a Star Trek fan. In October of 1976, my parents took me to Nazareth College in Rochester to see William Shatner’s one-man show.

It was life (and future career) altering. After the performance, we bought the double album, William Shatner “Live,” which I took home, then spent the next six months obsessively learning every line he spoke, including the question and answer section.

Here are Mr. Shatner’s liner notes from the inside cover of the album:

The idea of a one man show had intrigued me for a long time. It’s a well known fact that the film is a director’s medium and the stage belongs to the actor. Once the curtain goes up nobody yells “cut.” But the one man show is the ultimate of the actor’s medium and it was this thought that led me back again and again to what I could do, alone, on the stage. It would be merciless., I knew. If I were good it would be the actor’s dream - but if it failed I would be alone. Alone up there with thousands of eyes peering at me - opera glasses raised for a closer look, and the unasked but heavily felt question “what’s he going to do?”

All this was going through my head as I learned the lines - all this was in front of my eyes as I lay down at night - and when the day came that I was to open at Texas A&M University I was filled with fear.

A very primitive fear - the fear of the actor. The nightmare that all actors have from time to time is appearing naked in front of an audience - not knowing the lines, not knowing the play - I was living the dream.

Thirty-five hundred people awaited me expectantly; the buzz of their voices reached me backstage, the lights dimmed, the M.C. announced my name and I walked out. The spotlight hit me like a physical force and I was on - oh, muse, be with me now - I took a breath & started to speak...~William Shatner

I was hooked. I’ve been planning my own one-woman show ever since. As I have often said, I didn’t want to DO Captain Kirk, I wanted to BE Captain Kirk. I also wanted to be William Shatner.

I was invited to perform in a wonderful cabaret series in New York City in March of 2010. It was called “Under The Covers” and it was produced by the fabulous performer/director/teacher Lennie Watts.

The concept was that each performer had to choose a recording of a famous artist and present it live, from start to finish, in the order in which is had been recorded. We were encouraged to play with the arrangements, instrumentation, and interpretation of each song but had to stick to the recorded order. There were some exceptionally talented people in that series and I knew I had to do my best work to date.

I texted Lennie one evening that I was thinking about doing William Shatner’s “The Transformed Man” album and my partner, Shaynee Rainbolt, was thinking of doing Leonard Nimoy’s “Highly Illogical” album.

We were only half joking. Lennie was gentle in his response, gauging the hour of the night and my dorky sense of humor. I responded to his delicate reply and texted,

“I want to be the William Shatner of Cabaret.”

He responded, “You already are.”

We ended up going with Elvis ‘56. That was a cool show to put together and perform. One of my favorites so far. But I’ve still got that Shatner show brewing in me.

Next up: Danny Aiello, Billy Joel, and lessons in fame and humility.