Breakneck Comedy of Errors
Tim Mooney takes on the impossible one-man show: four sets of twins and an outrageous series of mistaken identities! Winner of “Best Overall Show” at the So Many Shakespeares festival. Unanimous 5-star audience reviews at the Minnesota Fringe! “Takes convoluted Shakespearean comedy and turns it into a bullet train.”
Reviews
- “[T]his skilled performer single-handedly fills the stage with a complete cast of characters in this delightful romp through Shakespeare’s classic comedy…. Tim’s style is energetic [and] never stoops to pointless zaniness for the sake of a laugh… He uses his face and body to bring at least 16 characters (including two sets of twins) to life in rapid-fire succession. Accents, gestures, posture and attitudes define each one with distinct, often hilarious personalities. … He has the ability to narrow the story down to key elements and characters without sacrificing the integrity of the play itself. Tim Mooney is a personable performer with an infectious enthusiasm for his craft that comes across loud and clear, and his Breakneck Comedy of Errors is a kick in the pants I highly recommend.” –Mallory Moad, KingsRiverLife.com
- “Tim created a gloriously organized story out of utter chaos.”–Ricky & Dana Young-Howze, The Young-Howze Theater Journal
- “60 minutes of great fun, more bang for your buck than a barrel of fringe shows.” –Jordan Young, Author, “Solo Performance”
About the Show
Timothy Mooney, award-winning veteran of hundreds of performances on the road, performs a seemingly impossible one-man show: Breakneck Comedy of Errors.
This one-man “Comedy of Errors” finds Tim Mooney taking on THIRTEEN different characters, including ALL FOUR PAIRS of twins! (He threw in two extra sets of twins just to up the challege.) Tim explains, “It’s a play about mistaken identity with all the identities being played by the same person. My challenge was to make sense of all of this in a way that the audience would immediately grasp the evolving situation, but still feel the delight of puzzling through the criss-cross of confusion.”
Breakneck Comedy of Errors had its broadcast premiere at New York’s “So Many Shakespeares” festival in late July, where it won the “Best Overall Show” award. Broadcast to the Minnesota Fringe Fest, it won universal five-star audience reviews, acclaimed for “taking a “convoluted Shakespeare comedy and turning it into a bullet train” and “creating a gloriously organized story out of utter chaos.” At Fresno’s Rogue Festival, KingsRiverLife called it a “delightful romp… a kick in the pants I highly recommend.”
Tim is no stranger to KC audiences, bringing NINE plays since 2009, including Lot o’ Shakespeare, The Greatest Speech of All Time, Shakespeare’s Histories, Breakneck Hamlet and Breakneck Julius Caesar.
Breakneck Comedy of Errors is Tim’s twelfth one-man play, and first one-man farce, captured in a flurry of character/costume changes, entrances, exits, twists and turns. He notes, “I had no idea just how I might pull this one off, but the more ‘impossible’ it seemed, the more I just had to find a way to make it work!”
“I originally staged it for a three-camera shoot, performed, essentially, with my hands and face. I’ve retained a lot of that feel, but with a greater range of motion, all the while furiously switching characters. A wide variety of hats and wigs helps the audience instantly recognize which of the various twins is speaking, even as the confusion mounts.”
As usual, Tim can’t resist throwing in “snarky narration” to further clarify and underline the absurdity of it all and, as usual, he can’t resist throwing in puns here and there, as when he acknowledges that it was the Father’s fateful trip to Epidamium which seems to have… “damned ‘em.”
