In It Goes Without Saying, Bill Bowers begins with some classical mime. It’s just to show that’s what he is as a performer; however, he also presents himself as a person, a gay man. He’s from Montana, and he tells how that has made all the difference in both of his identities.
Big, quiet Montana overseen by a changing moon and possessing a legacy of the Trail of Tears (mimed by Bowers’s mom in stories about Indians, with whom she played as a kid) formed him. There were also those oft-spoken dictates like “Silence is golden.” “Hold your tongue.” So when he played with a friend’s Barbie dolls, he got no spoken reprimands but instead a parade of Tonka trucks.
At 13, he joined a pantomime drama club that, for him, was a Gay Head Start. At 17, big and quiet, he was in college, then for graduate work in New Jersey. Out of school, he got a variety of mime jobs, here mimed very comically. In NYC, he met his great love Michael, eventually doomed by a conspiracy of silence and, as Bowers presents heartbreakingly and in anguished detail, death.
A return to Montana after Michael’s demise relieved Bowers of talk of AIDS. It was prominent in New York news when he went back to five years of mime jobs along with a few Broadway roles. Fortunately, he met and married another Michael.
Finally getting to study with his childhood inspiration, Marcel Marceau, Bowers found himself an outsider in the touring group that both studied and performed under Marceau’s leadership. They put on airs and spoke only as “faux Friench.” Bowers at 40 decided he “didn’t want to be like them.” Since, he’s been principally on his own and--as his recent appearances in Sarasota, especially under auspices of The Ringling attest--successful.
His mimed conclusion definitely brings his version of a Montana Moon to shine over Sarasota’s historic, archive-preserving Crocker Memorial Church.
