What was the inspiration for A Fire as Bright as Heaven?
A Fire as Bright as Heaven is a composite of five solo shows written over a seven year period. Each of the five chapters of A Fire as Bright as Heaven is a distilled version (approximately 20 minutes) of a one-hour solo show. I began writing these multi-character, political, comedic one-man plays in response to whatever major political/social terror seemed to be gripping America in a given year: sequentially, I wrote a solo show called Eleventh & Love, in 2001 (about living in London during 9/11), Puzzles, in 2003 (about the invasion of Iraq and its impact on a small town in coastal New England), The Power Play, in 2005 (impromptu interviews with people on the street — literally — about terrorism), Gunshy, in 2007 (based on my clandestine visit to the NRA National Convention in St. Louis), and Door-To-Door in 2008 (about my experiences working as a canvasser for the Obama campaign, sort of). With the exception of Door-To-Door, which was written deliberately as a "final chapter" to A Fire as Bright as Heaven, I created each show without being cognizant that the material would somehow all end up together in one "mega-show” — instead, I created the first four shows out of a need to sort out the staggering sense of powerlessness I felt when confronted with the daily horror show of American political reality — war, terrorism, George Bush, wiretapping, Abu Ghraib, fundamentalist Christians and the end of the world... I sometimes liken my experience of creating A Fire as Bright as Heaven to the experience of that girl with the camcorder in The Blair Witch Project — the camera gave her a once-remove, a sort of escape-hatch (albeit temporary) where she could observe and record through an objective eye, preventing her from being slammed and overwhelmed by terror 24/7. Obviously, this comparison between my process and Blair Witch is no longer useful when we consider that everyone in Blair Witch gets chopped up. American artists are luckier (thus far), in that we get to take an objective stance, create work and, hopefully, come to see the events/issues that we are contemplating in a new and revealing light. I believe Americans have been roughly ushered into a shockingly new millennium, and my deepest effort has been to create a solo show that attempts to make some sense out of the last eight years of totally mind-blowing and frightening weirdness.
Your emphasis, as both an actor and a writer, is on solo work. Why so?
It's really the only thing I've ever enacted that made real sense to me. When I was in sixth grade, our teacher had us write in a daily journal, and once a week we'd have a chance to read something in front of the class. My whole academic focus (there was so little of it) turned to these weekly performances — I started fleshing out one-man scenes, memorizing parts of the writing, that sort of thing. Inciting my fellow students to laughter became a soul-mission, and I've turned it into a career. In addition, solo work provides an opportunity to create a very particular zone of communication: the solo performer speaking directly to the audience, processing an issue/emotion of some urgency — for me, I was unable to locate a satisfying place in society to voice my concern and to hear other's opinions about the very frightening events taking place in our country, so, in my solo work, I've attempted to posit a spectrum of opinion and emotion, as many facets as possible, in hopes of creating a venue in which to process and understand, to sort out, and make sense of.
You make your living producing and touring your solo work around the country. What does it take to do that, day in and day out?
I have been creating and touring my solo work since 2001, and in that time I've identified the four things that are essential to the lifestyle that I've created:
1. Coffee. 2. Regularly scheduled panic sessions. 3. Writing and rehearsing every day. 4. My fiancée.
The process of learning how to be a full-time solo performer has transformed from a trial and error process into an entire life, and "How to do it?" is a question I address and attempt to answer on a sometimes daily basis. Primarily it involves establishing a circuit of gigs that I can return to on a yearly basis — that guarantees a steady supply of work — but it also means I have to create a show a year, more or less, so I can keep returning to those venues. I think that creating a full-length show a year is totally realistic and a great challenge, and, of course, as you create a body of material you can begin to custom-build some of your performances, much like a rock band shaping up a set list. I like to work on several shows at once, accumulating a tangle of notes in a sprawl of notebooks that I can pick through and transcribe at a later time... the point is to forever keep working, keep the ideas moving, keep writing, keep walking in circles, talking to yourself (by that I mean rehearsing). The rest of it, calling people, emailing endlessly, accosting people for gigs, applying to festivals, getting a solid website, updating blogs/touring schedules, MySpace, getting a DVD, getting good photos... sometimes this stuff is very hard — it demands a flexing of a very different set of psychic muscles than the ones used to write and rehearse. I tend to savor my alone time (hence the desire for solo work), so the outward, phone-call-get-a-gig-hustle-cover-letter-head-shot-thing is sometimes immensely challenging, but, until Obama creates a multi-billion dollar artist public-works project that funds touring solo artists and books 52-week tours with gigs from Daytona Beach to Tacoma, Washington and every city in between, I believe the career path I've chosen is very much a one-man show, and I'll keep working to make it work.
I understand you're planning to move from St. Louis to Chicago. Why the change of scenery?
Chicago has copious amounts of solo performance. I'm eager to immerse myself in a city with lots of busy-ness and competition. Since I graduated college in 2002, my focus has been living in smaller cities so as to exist inexpensively and focus exclusively on creating shows and touring. Now that I've created a touring circuit and a body of work, I'm excited to duke it out in Chicago. My fiancée and I plan to end up in New York City in a few more years — but Chicago first. In the meantime, I'll bring my shows to NYC as often as possible.
You're working on several future projects, including a sequel to A Fire as Bright as Heaven. Could you tell us more about them?
Yes — it creeps me out whenever I slip up and say A Fire as Bright as Heaven is "finished" — while those particular five chapters and how they are arranged is a completed work, I see A Fire as Bright as Heaven as a life-project, creating a show a year about American existence and all the opinion and emotion therein. My next project, the sequel to AFABAH, is called (tentatively) Conventions, which will focus on consumer niche groups in the United States — the NRA convention configures heavily in that show. I will actually expand Gunshy and take a deeper look at the NRA and their particular vision. I'll also do some research of certain mega-churches, and even more seemingly benign groups, like gamers, men and women who's primary focus is pop-culture/sci-fi/role-playing sort of stuff. I'm really eager to understand the spectrum of personalities that attend these big select-interest gatherings, and what these specific groups of people indirectly tell us about America and its future existence.
I'm also creating a show called The Script, a solo show that addresses the issues of dating violence and sexual assault. This play will tour to high schools and colleges, sort of an educational piece, but with a focus on men/teens and the way that the inherited patriarchy thwarts the natural progression of one's personality. My hope is that I will create a genuinely subversive work that will help students identify who they might genuinely want to be, as opposed to subsuming the tired gender roles and heavy stereotyping that ends up emotionally mutilating a lot of young men and women.
And I'm creating a stand-up comedy show about evolution. And a new solo show about astrology and the new American post-God consciousness. And more. Solo performance is it. I'll do it forever.
Interview with Tim Collins was conducted by Michael Criscuolo January 2009.