Michael Mauldin — Stephen Legawiec

Michael Mauldin loomed large in my imagination. As a performer, he seemed to have emerged fully-formed, forged as an adult professional actor in some grand theatrical furnace.

I don’t know how else to describe him. As I said, he loomed large.

I first met Michael Mauldin at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) when I got my first professional acting job there. I was cast in their Summer Repertory Theatre in 1978.

I played George in Our Town and Michael played the Stage Manager.

Michael also played Arnolphe (“the lead,” as we used to say in high school) in The Amorous Flee, a musical based on Moliere’s School for Wives.

He also played Victor in Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

And as if that weren’t enough, he performed as Mark Twain in his own solo Mark Twain show, which he had toured with for years.

He was the first professional actor that I ever worked with, and he was extraordinary in all four of these roles.

By the way, we were the same age at the time, which was 21.

I didn’t find this out until years later. He looked 30 or older. I don’t know anything about Michael’s biography. That summer we worked together he was careful not to reveal his age.

I don’t want to let you think that it was just his age that was the issue. If you went to a university theatre program you know that there were those college actors who always played the mothers, the fathers, and the older roles.

The thing about Michael was that he had a talent and technique at 21 that few 40-years-olds could approach. I didn’t know him as a kid, but I imagine that he was some kind of child theatre prodigy - especially if he had been touring Twain in professional venues as a teenager. When I met him he had been “In the business” for years.

Michael Mauldin as the Stage Manager in *Our Town* (1978). Anne Hickok as Emily.

I used to watch him rehearse the Stage Manager speeches in Our Town and could not believe that he could extract so much meaning out of those lines. He brought so much subtext to those speeches, they conveyed two or three times the information that you read on the page. I’ve seen many productions of Our Town in the ensuing forty years and I’ve never seen an actor wring more out of the Stage Manager’s text. In fact every time I see Our Town, I can’t believe that those actors can’t extract all the meaning that Michael showed me was in there.

Michael Mauldin (left) as Arnolphe in *The Amorous Flea*. Michael Friedman, center. (I’m on the right.)

Michael excelled in erudite, wordy, comic characters, which made him a natural for Moliere and Noel Coward. In The Amorous Flea, he played a middle-aged role of Arnolph, who wanted to marry the teenage Agnes. School for Wives is a great play, but Flea is not a great musical and the director ended up cutting some eminently cuttable songs, which was no skin off the show. But in place of one of these songs, Michael would create these hilarious adlibs. These both smoothed out the hole created by the song’s omission, and surreptitiously said to the rest of the company, “Aren’t you glad this song is out?”

Did I mention that he was 21?

A page from Mauldin’s promotional brochure which was printed when he was 20.

Mauldin did a Mark Twain solo show and he also did an Edgar Allen Poe solo show and by the time he was 21 had toured with both of them for years. Hal Holbrook was the first to do a Mark Twain show, which played on Broadway. It was based on Twain’s own tour, which Twain organized in the 1890s because he needed the money. Twain’s own show consisted of the humorist reading his works, but much of it was just funny. Twain has been called the first stand-up comic. Holbrook’s show premiered in the late 1950s and he did it for six decades.

At the time, I don’t think many other people, if any, (other than Holbrook) were doing a Mark Twain show. Mauldin was one of them. Michael researched the show himself, and although he did Twain’s greatest hits, he did not copy Holbrook’s show, which he never saw. Like everything else Michael Mauldin did, his performance was extraordinary. He was an impeccable comedian and was born to do this role. Someone I know saw both Mauldin’s show and Holbrook’s show and said that he couldn’t choose between them.

Michael was very funny off stage. The theatre at Mizzou was a rep season, and so at the end of each performance we always changed the set to the next show. Michael didn’t participate. I said to him, “How come you aren’t part of strike?” He smiled, traced his eyebrow with his finger and said in his mock-effete way, “Want to compare contracts?”

Mauldin as Salieri (in black) in Amadeus at White River Theatre Festival in 1992.

When I started my theater in White River Junction, Vermont in 1988, Michael Mauldin was the first person who I called to take part. We were a brand-new theatre and, being an actor and not yet a producer/director, I wanted someone who would give us professional credibility. Michael agreed to do his Twain show every Sunday for two months, while also acting in Sleuth.

Other than the Twain show which played every Sunday, we were not running in rotating rep. Each of the regular plays played for 2 weeks apiece and of course, the sets had to stay up. So Michael did his Twain show on the set for Children of a Lesser God, on the set of Sleuth, Talley’s Folly, The Fantasticks, and As you Like it. It didn’t matter. Give the man a podium and a white suit and he had you.

Michael Mauldin passed away in December of 2021 at the age of 64. He did several shows at my theatre in Vermont, but I had not seen him since the mid 1990s. He had earned his Ph.D. in Theatre Arts from Ohio State University. And he was a former Chairman of the Theatre Arts Department at Cleveland State University, where he was a highly respected professor for thirteen years. His obit said he acted in Les Miz on Broadway. I did not know that.

The year I first worked with Michael at Mizzou was not his first year there. A fellow actor once joked that they brought Michael in, as if to say to the younger performers, “This is an actor. Can you be one of these?”

In my experience, you were lucky if you could be “one of these.”