Tuesday, March 27, 2012

"Spotlight on Philip blue owl Hooser" by Peter Bakley

This article is from the February 2012 issue of KC Stage

In the 2004 Late Night Theater production of The Women, Philip blue owl Hooser walked onto a stage set like a hat shop and answered a ringing phone. For the next ninety minutes he acted out the story of the 1939 movie The Women, relaying the screenplay in glorious detail and acting out all the parts, each and every one of them female. The script of the stage play, with its central character haranguing imaginary customers to see this favorite film all the while keeping up a running commentary, was also written by Philip, and his tour de force performance of it is a happy memory to all of those who got a chance to see its original run. It also gives a good primer on the talents of Hooser, who, as well as an actor and writer, is also a producer, director, and educator in the Kansas City area, with a career going back to the early 1980s. A KC theater goer may have seen him at The Rep, The Unicorn, the Coterie, Late Night Theater, or the Gorilla Theatre working as an actor, writer, or director. Or they might know him as the guy who gives the preshow lectures at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival sharing duties with his friend and mentor, Dr. Felicia Hardison Londre.

For thirty years, Philip Hooser has been working and performing in Kansas City, while seeing his work performed around the country. I recently sat down and talked to Phil about his career and current and future plans.

Oklahoma Birth, Jefferson City Boyhood
Philip Hooser was born in Oklahoma, his parents living there while his father got a master’s degree in environmental education. He grew up in the state capitol of Jefferson City, where his father worked for the state Department of Education and his mother taught junior high school. 

Philip blue owl Hooser was given his name from tribal elders when he was a young man. Of Choctaw heritage, he has used his background to form several of his plays. It does make interviewing him a little difficult. “There’s a basic thing in Native America culture about modesty. If I’m talking about myself, it feels ... wrong.”

Phil Hooser went to Jefferson City High School, where he found a theater teacher who was happy to challenge her students by producing plays such as The Lark by Jean Annoulh and She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith. It was during high school that Phil began writing, “mostly poetry at that time and I was published regularly”, his early work appearing in literary journals and Modern Haiku. His poetry teacher encouraged him, but told him that he would need to choose between verse and playwriting.

“I don’t think I chose. I think theater chose me,” says Hooser. “I discovered that I could do so much more and make people laugh. People don’t laugh at poetry much.” He did win his senior talent contest doing his Elvis impersonation in a version of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” And as soon as he graduated, he escaped from Jefferson City and came to Kansas City as a theater major at the UMKC.

A Long Undergraduate Experience
Phil was drawn to UMKC on the strength of the Missouri Rep theater and its reputation. “From there, I fell into the delightful clutches of Felicia Hardison Londre, from the playwriting and the theater history, both of which I love. Then I stuck around for a long, long time,” Philip laughs. “I was on the ten year program. At one point, I applied for tenure. I felt that I should at least have my own parking space.

“I fell in love with learning. I feel the idea of a liberal education is a good one,” he cheerfully states. He spent his time taking as many courses as he could. He took all theater courses he could find: performing, directing, and playwriting. But eventually, the money or school simply ran out and Phil left UMKC without a degree after ten years.

The time was well used. He played a variety of small roles at Missouri Rep and in undergraduate productions at UMKC. He had a one on one class in directing with Fracis Cullinan. He worked outside of school, playing the lead in Gemini at the Unicorn and Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor at New Directions Theater Company. And he took the opportunity to write, produce, and direct his own short plays.

“The early plays were ... well ... crap,” he says. An early play called “Table Tips for Teens” used a single actor and a blowup sex doll as his maid and showed how manners play against social differences. But better things were on the horizon, because while at UMKC, he wrote one of his favorite plays, Dottie, a one woman show about Dorothy Parker, the mid-twentieth century wit, writer, and Algonquin Club mainstay.

“I would quote Dorothy Parker and so many people would say, ‘Who…?’ I felt I should do something about this.” He goes on to mention that this play has received productions around the country. It was first done at UMKC, then New Directions, and went on to be performed in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chicago.

Another essential play written while a student was “Jeffrey Thinks He’s a Big Black Woman.” Another one person play, it shows a young man so unwilling to face his identity as a homosexual that he creates an alter ego for himself, the big black woman of the title who can say and do the things he thinks he can’t. It was produced at Gorilla Theatre.

“One actor shows made me a lot more interested in the relationship of one actor with an audience,” he reflects. “And having to create a complete world that comes out of that character in a way that an actor can work with an audience and say, ‘you’re part of this, too.’”

From School To Life
After leaving UMKC, he supported himself by working at various local ticket offices, a type of job he still holds today. He has worked at Starlight, American Heartland Theater, The Coterie, the new Kauffman Center, and is currently working at the Midland. Ticket sales are a way to earn money between other theater gigs and give a unique perspective on the people buying the tickets. “Some people love the shows and some people simply want the best seats.”

While working at the Coterie, he was commissioned to write Coyote Tales, a collection of Native American tales, which Philip also acted in.

“That had one of my favorite audiences ever. We had a senior citizen’s group, a middle school group which had to be rescheduled, and of course the thought, (disdain) ‘Talking animals, we’re too cool for that’ and, of course a young kids’ group, which is the demographic The Coterie is aiming for,” he remembers. “Well the young kids liked all the slapstick and the puns and silliness of it, the middle school kids really got into the swing of it and played along, and the senior citizen’s group got all the jokes.”

Coyote Tales went on to be performed at the Smithsonian Theater in Washington, D.C. The director, Roberta Gasbarre thrilled Philip by understanding immediately that it was to be presented as a vaudeville show. It was a great success and was performed again two or three times in subsequent seasons.

In 1990, Phil performed his first drag role as Boom-Boom, a Puerto Rican transvestite, in Doric Wilson’s Street Theatre, a play about the night of the Stonewall riots. This was unbeknownst to him the start of a tradition. He does differentiate between drag roles, where he plays a man dressed as a woman and female roles, where he actually plays a woman.

An example of the former was in the landmark Kansas City production of Plan Nine from Outer Space: the Musical. Produced by Gorilla Theatre and performed in a bar on Southwest Boulevard, they were surprised when the owner of the rights to the movie, a Kansas City man named Wade Williams, showed up one night. He was expecting to shut them down, but liked the show so much that he allowed them to continue and became a supporter.

In the cast of that show was a young performer named Ron Megee, who would soon present a new opportunity to Philip.

Late Nights in Kansas City
Plan Nine experienced a good long run, moving from Actor’s Ensemble Theater on Southwest Boulevard to Wade Williams Fine Arts movie theater in Mission. “We would start the show after the last movie had ended, so we were going onstage about 11 o’clock with this big musical in this movie theater.”

“Late Night Theater started because Ron Megee had ideas he wanted to do that didn’t fit in with what anybody else was doing. We started taking on big pop culture moments, especially ones which had a little kitsch edge, like Valley of the Dolls.” Hooser remembers that show as being the first real Late Night production, even though they hadn’t taken the name Late Night Theater at that point. “It was an all male production, and there is a special energy that goes into creating that.”

That play, an adaptation of the camp classic movie of the same name, utilized 135 costumes and two small dressing rooms. It was happy pandemonium.

Megee was the driving force behind Late Night Theater, producing, directing and writing the shows. When the company produced their version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Ron gave Philip a co-writing credit.

“He would give me a writing credit even though I didn’t really write a lot of it. I’d just whisper jokes to people,” Phil says. His contributions grew as he wrote or co-wrote the all-woman Bonanza show, the Oscar Wilde/sitcom mash-up The Importance of Being Three’s Company (which he also directed) and generally kibitzed through all the shows.

“Pop culture is the real culture,” he opines.

One of the final productions he worked on for the company was The Woman, which came about because he was a huge fan of the film based on the Clare Booth Luce play, The Women. He would push it on everyone and recite huge sections of dialogue from it at parties, to the point that Megee suggested that he do it as part of their season. Philip wrote the script and played the sole character, a shop owner who, over the phone acts out the entire movie for a friend.

The Itinerant Theater Professional
Over the years, Hooser has filled many roles in Kansas City Theater, both as an actor and in many other guises.

He is well known for his regular gig giving “scholarly lectures” on the productions at Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. “I knew that ten years of college would pay off.” He calls these lectures “edutainment” for his desire to give the audience valid information on the bard’s plays, but to entertain them. He has used cartoon action figures to lecture on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, to point out the cartoonishness of the characters. He’s been doing these popular speeches for more than 15 years now.

In the early 2000s, the Unicorn Theater commissioned Philip to write a one woman show for the talented local actress Missy Koontz. The one woman show Loving Lucy was co-directed by Jeff Church and Phil Fiorini and gave Koontz an opportunity to portray comedy legend Lucille Ball. The script has gone on to other productions in Indianapolis and Seattle. “It was wonderful just to be able to study Lucille Ball. She went into everything like a child would. She had the ability to believe every absurd situation she was put in.”

He also had the opportunity to write a one woman show for Kansas City acting great, Kathleen Warfel. The play Icebox came about after discussions with the actress about her life and came up with a play based on their conversations which took the emotions she was feeling to come up with an original script about a woman confronting herself in front of an icebox in the middle of the night.

Make Them Eat Their Words
Phil had been working at the downtown bookstore Out There when the owners decided they wanted to have something to promote their new coffee and sandwich shop. Philip had the idea to combine the ideas of reading and eating and so he came up with the title Eat Their Words. He earlier heard of a show where people read selections from celebrity autobiographies. It seemed a great fit for the store and its clientele.

In an early show he hit on a great moment when he had local writer Charles Ferruzza read a selection from makeup giant Mary Kay’s autobiography. Feruzza was not familiar with the material before he read it and his shocked reaction while reading made for some great theater.

“Then I became more and more focused on finding the most insane or stupid or self involved sections in these books. I love celebrities, but whatever makes them believe they should be writing these books, or having these books written under their name ... I don’t know.”

Eat Their Words continues to be a regular show in Kansas City, performing every month or so at different locations. Most commonly performed at either The Fishtank Performance Space or at Prospero’s Books, it has also been seen at the Indie Bar in downtown Kansas City and at readings with various burlesque and variety shows in the area.

On any given Eat Their Words, you can see all varieties of celebrity insanity. Zsa Zsa Gabor describing the ordeal of her 36 hour incarceration for slapping a police officer, Tommy Lee’s tips on romance, Tori Amos’s incoherent ramblings on religion and music, Vanna White on the difficulties of turning letters, or Mr. T. giving a loving tribute to his mother have all been read to great success. One popular piece takes sections from multiple autobiographies to tell the story of how Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor and how she left him for Richard Burton, with five actors playing Fisher, Reynolds, Taylor, Burton, and a wryly commenting Carrie Fisher.

This has also become a regular fun activity for many of the top actors and actresses in the Kansas City area. Regular readers include Hooser himself, myself, Tom Kessler, Bess Wallerstein, Gail Bronfman-Bunch, Patrick Rippeto, Andy Chambers, and Mark Manning. Other performers who have dropped by once or twice include Katie Gilchrist, David Wayne Reed, Lisa Cordes, Jeremy Lillig, Patricia Rusconi, Kellie Main, Stephanie Roberts, Virginia Hubbard, and Beth Byrd along with dozens of others.

“What I really hate is the celebrities we can’t use. Take, for example, Traci Lords. She’s intelligent, reasoned, has a compelling story to tell. Completely wrong for our purposes.”

Current Projects
The next planned Eat Their Words is going to be a politically themed show, with Phil currently reading through selections by The Palin family (Sarah, Bristol, Levi), the Clintons, and many others.

Current writing projects include a play on 14th century British mystic Marjorie Kempe, another script called The Big Noir, and a 30s pastiche burlesque musical called Hobo Erectus.

Philip has been in demand as a director, last year having directed both Premortem and Jet Propulsion for Kansas City Peep Shows (now Cunning Stunts Productions), with more to come, including a planned production of a new script Couple’s Night for Fringe Festival next summer.

Pete Bakely is a local actor and playwright who has known Hooser for more years than either would care to admit. Bakely is a regular reader at Eat Their Words and is the founder of Kansas City Peep Shows. He produced and appeared in Premortem written by Joseph Concha and directed by Hooser, and wrote Jet Propulsion, also directed by Hooser. He also wrote Couple’s Night.

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