Mark Twain Remembers

Submitted by Evelyn C. McDonald
Arts & Culture Reporter
September 24, 2015 10:00 a.m.

Mark Twain comes to life on the Studio 209 stage at ACT. Moving around the stage, Don Maley as Twain reminisced about his life and told stories. One piece was about an old man trying to tell a story about a man bending over downhill from a ram. He keeps getting distracted and goes through side stories about family lineages and even a glass eye. He must have gone on five minutes or more and the audience was in stitches. And we never did find out if the ram butted the man.

Twain gave a two-sided interpretation of being interviewed. He played both the hapless interviewer and himself. I say hapless because Twain twisted him in knots. The piece made me fervently hope that I never had to interview anyone like him. As the old advice goes, never get into a verbal tussle with a person who writes for a living.

At one point, Twain talked about humor in the context of teaching and preaching. He said he was teaching and preaching but was always open to letting humor in if it so desired. Twain’s humor comes in part from his perception of the incongruities of life. It is never mean humor. Nor is it always sunny humor. The best humor seems to accommodate both laughter and pain. There was an element of the latter in Twain’s reminiscence about his wife’s illness and death.

Don Maley was pitch perfect as Twain. It’s easy to be over the top in attempting to be funny when you have material from someone like Twain. Maley resisted the temptation, instead letting the humor arise gently out of the stories. It’s all the more impressive in a one-man show. The actor is alone up there with no other actors to buoy him up or step in if he forgets a line. Maley never dropped out of character for the entire play.

The play runs through October 3. Ron Kurtz and Don Maley have put together quite an evening of theatre for you. This is an original script so was having a “world premiere” in Fernandina. The author, Robert Valentine, also attended the performance. The Studio 209 theatre is perfect for this type of performance.

If you are going to attend Ron’s forthcoming course on plays, he suggests that you see the play if possible. He plans to discuss its staging and invite Don Maley over to discuss it. The course, “The Play’s The Thing,” starts October 1, at 4 pm at St. Peter’s. Registration information is available at www.fscj.edu/cll.

Evelyn McDonald moved to Fernandina Beach from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. in 2006. She is a chair of Arts & Culture Nassau, a city commission charged with support of the arts in Nassau County. She serves on FSCJ’s Curriculum Committee for the Center for Lifelong Learning. She is also the chair of the Dean’s Council for the Carpenter Library at the UNF. Ms. McDonald has MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BA in Spanish from the University of Michigan.