XL Cover Story

Dishes and division

'American Fiesta' playwright Steven Tomlinson brings us along for his personal observations on love and what keeps us apart

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Thursday, July 20, 2006

Don't call Steven Tomlinson an actor.

An actor's stock-in-trade, after all, is morphing into a wholly different character.

Tomlinson morphs little when he is on stage, as he will be July 27 in the re-mount of his "American Fiesta."

As he has done in his other solo shows — "Millennium Bug," "Curb Appeal" and "Managed Care," among others — Tomlinson takes the stage as himself and spins a first-person tale that is factually in sync with his own as a 44-year-old, Oklahoma-born, Stanford-trained economist and professor who, as a corporate consultant, counts Dell Inc. among his Fortune 500 clients and as a lay minister teaches a "Money as Metaphor" class at Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest.

Calling Tomlinson an actor makes about as much sense as labeling "American Fiesta" — which nabbed last year's prestigious Osborn New Play Award from the American Theatre Critics Association — a play about gay marriage.

It is not.

While the story of Tomlinson's "renegotiations" (his word) with his family that preceded his Canadian marriage to his longtime partner, Eugene Sepulveda, forms the dramatic nucleus of "American Fiesta," the play is essentially about the deep divisiveness that plagues the contemporary American political landscape.

"There was so much venomous talk in the 2004 elections," he says. "Everyone got small and scared and hateful."

"American Fiesta" is also about dishes. Specifically, Fiestaware, the bright ceramics introduced at the height of the Depression as an affordable, piece-at-a-time way to colorfully augment and brighten the American home. A few years ago, Tomlinson obsessively began collecting Fiestaware, determined to acquire a complete set of mixing bowls in perfect condition. By 2004, his search through antique stores, e-Bay and estate sales for the perky, variegated crockery led him to thinking: In a day and age in which everyone lines up behind either red or blue, what if instead we opened our eyes to the intersecting rainbow of our beliefs?

"Can we really afford to be so dogmatic?" Tomlinson asks, his large blue eyes growing larger as his eyebrows arch, the forward thrust of his chin in motion.

He recounts a light-bulb moment at a dinner table with like-minded blue state souls: "Someone said 'One thing I can't stand is intolerant people.' And I was just shocked at how that sounded. Was I feeling that ungenerous myself?"

The good kid, the thoughtful teacher, the compassionate lay minister did what he does to make things better and help everyone, especially himself, understand: He made theater about it.

Always engaging

Even when he is not on stage, Tomlinson seems very much on script. Performance seems his default mode. Carefully enunciated words descend with meticulousness. Eye contact remains direct, unwavering. Hand gestures flow with balletic grace and a certain precalculated precision.

It's certainly how Tomlinson captivates an audience from the stage, which he has been doing regularly in Austin for more than a decade.

It is also how he talks one-on-one in the cool of his high-ceilinged, 1920s Central Austin home on a hot summer afternoon, his long limbs folded tautly as he sits at a vintage wood table. Impeccably clean yet comfortably filled with mostly craftsman-style period furniture, Tomlinson's home radiates the same studied casualness as he does. He could spring away at any moment. Or he could lean his head back, roll his eyes and crow with a deep Oklahoma twang, "Oh, honey!"

"I've always felt awkward with small talk," he says. "I got a lot of affirmation early on that I was good at delivering a message."

Born and raised in Shawnee, Okla. — where the Chamber of Commerce Web site brags that the city is "rich in textures reminiscent of Norman Rockwellian, freckle-faced times" — Tomlinson describes his family as "competitive storytellers."

"My own style is a very conscious attempt to imitate everything about my (paternal) grandmother, Olga, who held rooms spellbound with her stories," he says.

Affirmation of Tomlinson's storytelling abilities also came from his mother, Carol, a schoolteacher, and especially his father, Phil, a retired commercial real estate executive who is now Oklahoma's secretary of transportation.

"There was a competitive imperative to storytelling in my house," he says. "My father and I bonded over debate and forensics. Excelling at that was a way of getting and keeping his attention."

High school found the young Tomlinson holed up in the library studying current-events magazines in preparation for debate competitions — "trying to find the best way to say something" as he says — rather than gravitating toward the theater club. Before graduation, he was crowned a national champion of extemporaneous speaking.

Secular debate and competitive family tale-telling weren't the only factors fueling Tomlinson's speaking craft. His was a strict Church of Christ upbringing that included, by his own account, "hearing 150 sermons a year," his father playing a central role in the congregation's leadership.

The younger Tomlinson followed suit. When he was a graduate student at Stanford University, he took on the ministry of a Church of Christ congregation in Palo Alto, Calif. On Saturday nights, he would duck into the empty church and practice sermonizing — rehearsing his hand gestures, his verbal pacing and his movements around the church.

"The way I construct my monologues now is very much like I would create a sermon," Tomlinson says.

It's also very much how he fashioned lectures first as an economics professor during his 15 years at the University of Texas — where his performance talent netted him the Ex-Students' Association Texas Excellence Teaching Award — and now as a teacher at Acton, a private, intensive master's of business administration degree program.

Tomlinson landed in Austin and at UT in 1988, straight from Stanford. Within months, his inner storyteller led him to Chicago House, the downtown coffeehouse/performance venue that was Austin's epicenter for a then-nascent spoken word/monologue/solo theater scene. Turns at the open mike led to more-developed material, and then it wasn't long before he found his way to playwriting classes in UT's then-emerging writing program.

Among his instructors was David Mark Cohen, playwright, critic, scholar and popular mentor to young playwrights. By the mid-1990s, Tomlinson honed his writing and performing craft enough to present his autobiographically based monologues at FronteraFest, Austin's fringe theater event. He had also developed a committed relationship with Cohen.

"Free Trade" wove together Tomlinson's experience teaching economics in Mexico City with the inadequacy of financial theories and the light-bulb moment of seeing a flower vendor getting tossed out of a restaurant into the first of what is now one of Tomlinson's signature scripts: a one-person narrative that courses over a trajectory from light and delight (free trade, buying a house, collecting vintage dishes) to darkness (the brutality of capitalism, the limits of shopping, parents who disagree) to a realization of the never-ideal reality (his grief over Cohen's death in a 1998 car accident in "Curb Appeal").

"Every one of my plays has been about something I didn't want to think about," he says.

But they've certainly been things that many people have wanted to see. And his audience has grown beyond theater stages and the Austin city limits. Indeed, Tomlinson has shaped his stagework to fit the corporate world. Economist Richard Florida was so besotted with Tomlinson's "Perfect Pitch" performance piece at the Austin 360 Summit in 2001 that the script ended up verbatim in Florida's best-seller "The Rise of the Creative Class." Last month, as he has before, Tomlinson performed a short combined version of several of his pieces at the annual meeting of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

Man with a plan

Tomlinson insists that the purpose of his monologues is not the telling of his story in particular. "I use myself as a character more out of laziness so that I don't have to create another character," he says. "And also my process is very last-minute. The script is created largely during the memorization process. I simply don't have time to involve anyone else."

A lot of people in Tomlinson's orbit attest to his procrastination.

"He can go in a hundred directions," says director Christi Moore, who has worked with Tomlinson since the two met in playwriting class in the early 1990s and has directed all of his recent productions, including "American Fiesta." "But I never discourage him. Eventually, he'll come back to the story at hand. And then, he's talented enough that he can perform a cost-benefit analysis on his own script."

Perhaps it does come down to simple economics. "You really have to earn an audience's attention," Tomlinson says. "It's already risky having one person up there just talking. You have to deliver something that has resonance for others."

If deadline pressure — and audience engagement — is Tomlinson's greatest motivator, colored pencils and graph paper are his most basic tools. "Drawing for me is the way to put things into a relationship with each other," he says. "I can't think without drawing."

Indeed, Tomlinson seems never without a bound pad of graph paper which he fills with minute printing, carefully arranged outlines and colorful, simple charts. Stick figures abound; so do arrows and words such as "family," "community," "marriage" and "me" written in tidy block letters.

Glanced upside-down from across the table in Tomlinson's living room, it's impossible to tell if the notebooks pages outline a play, an economics lecture or a sermon.

In reality, it's all three.

"I've always sought ways to provoke people to think about the matters of our survival, the things that matter most in life," he says. "That's why I became an economist. Economics is a social science that has something to say about how we live, and I got into it with the promise that if you learn certain tools well, you'll have the power to make a difference.

"But I realize now that I was always looking for a more immediate connection to the imagination. Theater, imagination — that's the most promising way now to make a difference and break out of the patterns that hold us in trouble."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699