The show must go on

On a hot September afternoon in Cabbagetown, Gene-Gabriel Moore leans heavily on his cane, yet moves at a surprisingly rapid pace. His gait is half-stride, half-limp as he travels tirelessly down the middle of Gaskill Street. A tall, bespectacled man with a slight stoop, he feels impeded by the broken sidewalks, and moves to the side of the road only when he sees a car coming.

“My sense of myself was shaped by the mill village society of Cabbagetown,” says Moore, 66. He points out the house where he was raised, the homes of church ladies and mill superintendents and the mill itself, which has since been converted into apartments. These days, Moore’s thoughts have been drifting back to his childhood as he sifts through raw material for Linthead Boy, an autobiographical play he’s writing that he hopes 7 Stages Theatre will produce some day.

Moore qualifies as someone who could easily rest on his laurels. He’s been a New York actor, a foreign news correspondent in Europe and Asia and for nearly a decade, host of PBS’ literary talk show “Byline.” He covered the Civil Right Movement in the 1960s for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s legendary editor Ralph McGill and was managing editor of Creative Loafing in 1986. And in the last 10 years, he’s survived a tumor on his brain stem, a ruptured aorta, multiple strokes and 11 surgeries.

But instead of slowing down, Moore has speeded up. In 1998 he founded Not Merely Players, an Atlanta theater company primarily by and for theater artists with disabilities, for which he serves as artistic director. He’s also developing his own plays, researching a history of Atlanta theater, serving on the Fulton County Commission on Disability Affairs and preparing for his first stage roles in two decades.

Perhaps the two most significant strands in Gene-Gabriel Moore’s life are his love affair with the English language, especially in the traditions of live theater, and a strong sense of social justice. He’s always been opposed to the “caste systems” of Atlanta, the unspoken barriers that separate rich from poor, blacks from whites, abled from disabled. Throughout his life, Moore has tried to use the former to challenge the latter.

When Gene-Gabriel Moore speaks, he twists his lips to one corner of his mouth, and his consonants get rounded off in the familiar way of people who have suffered strokes. He maintains that, ironically, he’s far more loquacious now than before his health problems impeded his words. Meeting a server at the Carroll Street Cafe in Cabbagetown, he introduces himself by name, shakes hands, and is soon swapping hometown stories.

Sitting in the cafe window, he can peer directly across the street and see the window of the room where his mother, a teenage mill worker, lived when she had him in 1936. “I was what was euphemistically called a ‘bush baby.’ My parents were never married. I was born at Grady hospital and never really knew my mother, who ran off when I was very young. I had grandparents in the neighborhood, but they were pious and didn’t want anything to do with me.”

As a baby, Moore was passed around by neighborhood families and eventually was taken in by John Banks, a carpenter by day and moonshiner by night. He taught Moore to read and looms large in his memory. “This old man, about as old as I am now, who had nine girls and six boys of his own, discovered me when I was 4 and raised me until he died in 1946 when I was 10. Everyone called him ‘Papa,’ so what else would I call him?”

Banks’ house still stands on Tye Street: “It’s still blue, but it’s a different kind of blue,” notes Moore as he stands before it a little later that day. From the street, he gestures up the driveway to the back yard, where the Banks kept chickens and, briefly, a cow, and where Moore staged his first play. “I wrote it when I was 7 — it was probably about cowboys. Papa had found a picture of an Elizabethan stage in a book and built me a smaller version of it in the yard. Whenever I wrote and put on a play, he made all of his children, grandchildren and neighbors, all come and pay a nickel a piece to see them. That made me a tidy sum.”

Moore’s attraction to theater made him stand apart from the community’s primary concerns of family, religion and race. “These were the days of Jim Crow. At the time we were taught to hate in church and in school, and with me it didn’t take. I was a strange Southern boy and had a political view back then, even though I didn’t think of it that way. I had a black friend my age from Reynoldstown.”

This friendship led to the only major conflict “Papa” ever had with young “Shorty.” “Papa was very much a man of his time and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” says Moore. Wanting to set the boy straight, Banks took him to a KKK rally atop Stone Mountain. The event is something of a blur to Moore today — he recalls the brightness of the fires, the colors of the many flags (mostly the Stars and Stripes) and the long trek up and down Stone Mountain. “The next day he asked me what I thought, and I told him. I can’t remember what I said, but that was the only time he hit me.”

Class and racial tensions figure prominently in Moore’s play-in-progress, Linthead Boy, which takes its title from a derogatory term for cotton mill workers. Although writing the play has mostly involved remembrance, Moore has been busy with historical research, confirming facts and dates of such events as when FDR’s funeral train went through Atlanta.

Moore had a knack for finding mentors and advocates throughout his life. When he was 14, a passing acquaintance with Margaret Mitchell provided his entree into the Atlanta Theater Guild, the city’s sole theater troupe at the time. The following year, a pair of Cabbagetown church ladies raised the money to send Moore to the Georgia Military College in Milledgeville. “I was surrounded by grubby little boys, the sons of well-to-do South Georgia bigots. They liked me about as much as I liked them.”

He found solace in the written word, and came across Lillian Smith’s memoir Killers of the Dream one weekend in a Macon bookstore. “All the questions and doubts I ever had about Jim Crow and the South were in that book,” he recalls. Moore wrote her a fan letter, which led to a correspondence and friendship that lasted until her death in 1966. It was Smith who insisted that Moore move to New York to pursue his ambitions as an actor. “The day I was 17 I took the bus to New York City. I was too stupid to be afraid.”

In New York, he studied with renowned acting teachers Herbert Berghof and Stella Adler, and his major roles eventually included two stints as Hamlet for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Before turning 20, he was married with a baby daughter. He followed an acting job to Hawaii, where he saw the end of his marriage (after fathering two more children) and the beginning of his career as a journalist. He was working as a reporter in Bangkok in 1962 when he got an offer from McGill, to become a general assignment reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he covered politics and Civil Rights.

He moved to Paris in 1968, but returned to Atlanta a year-and-a-half later. No matter how far he strays, he always winds back up here. “I just get homesick. I don’t get silly about Atlanta. I know what it is and what it isn’t. I came up in poverty in a city where that mattered, and I have not forgotten that. But I do love the town. It’s my home. My home.”

In 1973, Moore’s career took another divergent path. He began a nine-year stint hosting “Byline,” an Atlanta-based talk show on PBS devoted to books and writers. At its peak, it reached 144 TV stations via satellite. His most memorable interviews included chatting with Eudora Welty, verbally sparring with Jeffrey Archer and masterfully stage managing the notoriously combative Norman Mailer, who behaved himself at a taping before an audience of Agnes Scott coeds.

Moore tired of “Byline” by the early ’80s and took on other editing jobs, but wanted to be more active in theater. “Most of my life I’ve had dual careers: theater and words. I do scribbling to make money, but at the heart of me I’m a theater person.” In 1992, he was implementing plans to combine his lifelong attachment with Cabbagetown to his theatrical vocation. “Atlanta theater is much more accomplished and professional now. It used to have a Mickey-and-Judy, ‘Let’s put on a show!’ approach to theater. I was planning to start my own Mickey-and-Judy in Cabbagetown, before my world turned around.”

Moore intended to open an 80-seat theater, to be called the Carroll Street Playhouse, in the building currently occupied by the restaurant Agave. But in April 1992, as he was lining up funding and play scripts, he began having inner-ear problems, and what was first diagnosed as an ear infection turned out to be a non-cancerous tumor on his brain stem.

“What a mess!” he says. He came through 18 hours of surgery unable to walk, talk or swallow, and spent years recovering from it and subsequent surgeries on his throat, eye and face. “For two years I could only make noises, which was not very lyrical. I was in bed for four years. I could walk around my building, but that was about it.”

On the slow road to recovery in his Midtown apartment, Moore had a “eureka!” moment while half-watching All About Eve on television. “Bette Davis was chewing the scenery on some Hollywood soundstage idea of what a theater looks like, and ‘Bang!’ my head went up. I immediately walked the eight or nine blocks to 14th Street Playhouse, went up and told Kim Patrick Bitz head of the Atlanta Coalition of the Performing Arts that I wanted to rent an office there with my Social Security money and start a theater.

“My recovery went much more quickly after that,” he says.

Gene-Gabriel Moore likes to make broad, expansive gestures with his sizable hands. Mention Not Merely Players, and he clutches his hands to his chest, then cradles them to make a rocking motion. “That’s my baby,” he says. When he talks about defending the company, he puts up his fists like Popeye.

Soon after resolving to start his own theater, he hit upon the idea of devoting it to people with disabilities. “I discovered that there are a lot of genuinely talented men, women and children out there who have disabilities. But they can’t get cast, for no other reason than because she has one arm, or he’s in a wheelchair. That’s discrimination. They need, I need, society needs for them to have their own theater.”

Moore founded Not Merely Players in 1998, taking the name from Shakespeare’s line, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Since that time, the group has seemed poised for a breakthrough that’s still yet to come. Moore loves the phrase “raise high the roof beams,” but Not Merely Players’ goals have been slow to fruition, in part due to Moore’s health troubles. Three years ago, when preparing Not Merely Players’ first production, A Cabbagetown Christmas, he required heart surgery to repair a tear on his aorta. Moore and his company were out of commission for a year and had to give up their office space at 14th Street Playhouse.

The company got a much-needed boost in early 2001 when 7 Stages invited Not Merely Players to become a resident company there, providing Moore with office space. But Moore still faces the difficulties of all theater companies at the turn of the 21st century, and then some. “Not Merely Players is in just as impossible a situation as the rest of us,” wryly remarks 7 Stages’ Artistic Director Del Hamilton, a member of Not Merely Players’ board of directors. “They have to identify stable sources of funding, create an infrastructure for a staff and get support for artistic programs. And persons with disabilities have their own problems to bring to the arena with how to create art, creating more logistical concerns.”

Moore’s grander ambitions, such as opening a state-of-the-art playhouse for audiences with disabilities, seem a long way off. But Hamilton points out that Moore has quietly built support as a community advocate for disabled people, and particularly disabled performing artists. “He’s gotten us in contact with groups for the visually impaired and autistic. He’s held benefit performances that have attracted people, done workshops for abled and disabled, brought disabled groups to work with 7 Stages and other theaters,” says Hamilton.

In November, Not Merely Players will present Unbound II, a variety show fund-raiser featuring song, dance, staged readings and other pieces from disabled performers. Unbound Director Karen L. Thomas, an actor with bilateral tarsal tunnel syndrome in her ankle, became involved with Not Merely Players after attending a workshop at 7 Stages in June, and she says it was an eye-opening experience. “I hadn’t realized how many incredibly talented actors are marginalized because of their disability. I myself haven’t been cast in shows because I can’t stand for a significant period of time, and directors don’t always want to deal with that. I’m a director — and yet I’ve been guilty of that kind of thinking myself.”

Thomas served on the casting committee of Georgia Perimeter College’s upcoming production of Much Ado About Nothing, which tapped Moore for the role of Antonio, an angry father with relatively few lines. On opening night, Oct. 10, Moore takes his first stage role in 20 years.

“Yes, he has a speech impediment, but more importantly, he’s a phenomenal New York actor, and it’ll be great for the young people in the cast to work with him,” says Thomas. “Five years ago, I would have been afraid to cast him — I would have worried that the audience may not catch individual words, and discounted his power and talent and charisma.” Moore’s rehearsals for Much Ado have gone so well that he’s been cast in a nonspeaking role in the Chattahoochee Theatre Company’s Babes in Toyland in December.

Although it’s been two decades since Moore has been on a stage, he has no butterflies in his stomach. “I’ve never had a problem with stage fright. I’ve always been a ham. I’m grateful that they’re taking a chance on me — I have a hunger to work. It amuses me to think that there are still bits and pieces of actor in me.” Moore offers living proof of the revitalizing powers of art: Since being cast, he’s been exercising his voice and physical mobility, and they’ve noticeably improved.

After many fits and starts, things seem to be falling into place for Not Merely Players, which has announced its first full season for 2003-04: playwright-in-residence Brent Darnell’s new work Straightaway Dangerous, Susan Yankowitz’s Night Sky and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which Moore hopes to co-produce with 7 Stages.

Moore’s still a little disappointed that Not Merely Players has not grown more quickly. “All of these things would move with more dispatch if it were not just me keeping it going. The world doesn’t go at my pace, and I lack the agility I once had.”

Not that he’s putting the brakes on his efforts. “I shall not quit, retire, go fishing. What would I retire to? I think when we have all 10,012 ducks in a row, when Not Merely Players has a couple of seasons under its belt, when we get our own theater building that goes beyond the guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act, then I hope I’ll have the wit and wisdom to step back, let someone else take over.”

It’s difficult to imagine Moore going gently into that good night. His passions will remain Cabbagetown as it was and Not Merely Players as it could be, and the former Linthead boy will continue devoting his time and efforts to each. All other things — his history, his disabilities, his abilities — are grist for the mill.??