It Goes Without Saying - Mime Bill Bowers at Out North

Out North is a small theater. It holds, maybe, 100 people and we were sitting in the front row. So, I put away my camera before the show started. This is the stage. A flip chart with the names of the stories he's telling. And the stool. The rest of the space a blank slate for Bowers to paint with mime.

The title - It Goes Without Saying - is a little misleading - the mime actually talks. He tells stories of his life and why he mimes for a living starting with growing up in Missoula through gigs at trade shows, through studying with Marcel Marceau, through caring for his dying partner.

I got drawn into the stories and the mimed illustrations. A key theme was silence. His family, his community, as he tells it, didn't talk about the important aspects of life around them. This theme seemed to climax when he told us about meeting a mime in Romania, who he said was the most famous man in Romania, dubbed "The Voice of Romania." (I'm not sure I've got the title right and the "Voice of Romania" hits I got on google didn't give me any mimes, but the image of a mime being the voice of a country where repression ruled for so long is a delicious conceit.)

This was an interesting evening, delving into places I've never been. Yet I went home with a feeling of incompleteness. A one person, autobiographical show, only works if I feel I'm hearing directly from the performer's heart. After a night's sleep, I have the feeling that Bower's voice wasn't completely authentic. Maybe because he's really a mime, not a talker. Maybe he's done the show too often. My sense is that perhaps he hasn't yet found his own true voice and he's still trying too hard to get our approval instead of just his own.