FAYETTEVILLE — SELF PORTRAIT
Date and place of birth:
Sept. 16, 1963, in Fayetteville
Family:
Wife Julie Gabel
Occupation:
Teacher, actor and writer
The last great things I read were
Ruled by Race by Grif Stockley and The Actor Within by Rose Eichenbaum.
One place I want to visit is
the countryside and some back roads in Ireland.
The most challenging role I’ve ever taken is
a play called Mountain by Scott Douglas about the life of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas - a huge historical figure, with several beautiful monologues.
When I’m struggling to write I
go outside, remember to breathe, find a rhythm.
Before going on stage I
find a quiet corner and focus on what my character was doing before the play started.
To be a successful director you
must believe that you can bring something to the play that no one else can.
What surprised me the most about Digging Up Arkansas
the way it was so fully embraced by teachers, leaders and kids in the community.
A word to sum me up:
Inspired
“Don’t worry, boys, these burgers are huge!” Again and again, Mike Thomas repeated this line, and the director kept telling him it didn’t sound right. Thomas was playing the role of a youth football coach in a commercial for California locations of AM/PM - one who was supposed to persuade his kids that the convenience store’s new hamburgers were much larger than they appeared.
Thomas thought this was ridiculous. Anyone could plainly see that the burgers were far from huge.
So he struggled to get it right, take after take.
Finally, long after the burgers had begun turning greenish, he said the line convincingly enough to satisfy the director, and it was a wrap.
“They weren’t huge! It was so hard [to say itconvincingly],” Thomas recalls. “It was such a terrible experience to say that one line.”
The AM/PM commercial paid well. So did the Christmas ad Thomas did for Southwestern Bell, which brought him residual checks for a few years.
Los Angeles is filled with aspiring young actors, dreaming of that big break and struggling to make ends meet. Comparatively speaking, Thomas and his wife, actress Julie Gabel, were doing well for themselves in the late 1980s. Thomas did commercials and stand-up comedy, and both of them found stage work.
“He had an agent or two - we all had an agent or two - but he was more prolific [in his work],” says longtime friend Gary Sweeney of Tulsa, whowas also living in Los Angeles and working as an actor at the time. “He’s got something that comes across on film and on stage, some sense of security that’s uncanny.”
Yet while the couple were doing relatively well in California, they missed Fayetteville. They missed their families, and they missed real acting - getting involved with all aspects of a production, not “winning the lottery” and spending an entire day trying to convince child actors that the burgers were way bigger than they looked.
So near the end of 1990, they left Los Angeles and returned to Fayetteville. Within two years, Thomas had found his daytime stage, beginning a career as a teacher. And even before then, he was on his way to becoming a fixture in the Northwest Arkansas artistic community, making a majorimpact in the worlds of theater, live comedy, the written word ... and yes, even filming plenty of commercials over the years.
“He is one of the best actors I know in the country,” says playwright Bob Ford of Fayetteville. “He has an actor’s and a writer’s ability to empathize with all people. I can only imagine what it would be like to be one of his students; he must be amazing in that classroom.”
These days, Thomas may be best known for the traveling play he wrote, Digging Up Arkansas. It’s a spirited look at the history of Arkansas through its 1936 centennial, acted out by three members of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) who explore and organize artifacts before the impending arrival of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It has been performed in front of thousands of Arkansas students in schools around the state.
The play combines the things Thomas is passionate about - teaching, writing, live theater - while being mighty entertaining to boot.
“Mike has a real gift of having a childlike view of the world - he’s not childish, but he’s still interested and curious in the world,” says Gabel, his wife of nearly 28 years. “You can see his influence in the humor in [Digging Up Arkansas]. It’s not just a kids play. It’s focused on children, but one adults can relate to well because of his humor and point of view.”
A MAN OF FAYETTEVILLE
When Thomas was in junior high, his family moved from Fayetteville to Springdale.
He was miserable in his new school, and his grades plummeted. Seeing this, his mother talked to Fayetteville’s superintendent, Harry Vandergriff, and pleaded with him to let her son return to Fayetteville public schools. Vandergriff said yes.
“I think he saved my life,” Thomas says. “Thank God Harry Vandergriff let me come back to Fayetteville.”
Thomas has lived most his life in Fayetteville. It’s a place he loves, in no small part because so many people have helped him over the course of his life.
Times were tough when Thomas grew up. His father, a diabetic who lost both legs to the ravages of the disease, died when Thomas was just 5 years old, and his mother remarried several times during his childhood.
Quickly, Thomas discovered that he loved making people laugh. He wouldn’t try to make his classmates laugh - that was too easy, and a recipe for getting into trouble - but instead focused his humor on cracking up his teachers.
“He was incredibly talented,” says older brother Butch Thomas of Fayetteville. “He was the family cutup and he liked the stage attention.
“I remember him being 14, 15 years old, getting an 8mm film camera and making several videos. When everybody else was trying to capturetheir family at Christmas, birthday parties, he was making hilariously funny movies with friends. He put some thought into them.”
From a young age, Thomas displayed a creative streak. He wrote poetry and short stories in high school, encouraged to do so by a Fayetteville High School teacher, Milton Burke.
Thomas wasn’t really sure what he was going to do after graduating from high school in 1981. The answer came from a woman for whom his mom had baby-sat.
Connie Williams worked in the University of Arkansas’ financial-aid department, and she found ways for Thomas to continue his education in Fayetteville. He earned a bachelor’s degree in the dramatic arts in 1985, a year after he married Gabel, a Fayetteville native who was earningher master’s at the UA.
“I love Fayetteville - the people and the destiny, the sense that this happened for a reason,” Thomas says. “It’s always been very eclectic, all these different people, and that’s what I grew up learning. There was no segregation here, everybody was equal, it felt to me. ... As far as what you wanted to do and who you were, you were always accepted.”
Williams’ actions had set Thomas on a better path, just as Vandergriff’s had done before and others would do in the future. UA professor Kent Brown was a huge influence, encouraging Thomas as a performer and writer, in college and after he returned to Fayetteville in 1990, when he cast Thomas in a production of Valentines and Killer Chili.
Since returning, Thomas has been involved with dozens of theatrical productions, as an actor, writer and director. He has appeared in commercials and movies, done stand-up and improvisational comedy and been heavily involved in the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project.
“He loves the area so much, and has such a respect for Fayetteville,” says Michael Riha, a professor in the UA’s Department of Drama. “He’s sort of an ambassador for the place. More than anything else, though, through his teaching he’s shaped so many people.”
POSITIVE INFLUENCE
Not everyone in Fayetteville was eager to help Thomas, though.
He still remembers the teachers who hit him on the head with a ruler. Or the ones who would make kids who hadn’t done their homeworkstand up and mock them in front of the class.
Thomas strives to be nothing like those teachers.
“Learning should be a fun experience, therefore you will do it again and again,” Thomas says. “It’s almost like a spoonful of sugar; if you can mix in some humor, some acting, some improvisation, the curriculum’s coming in the back door instead of being shoved down their throat.”
Thomas got his first teaching job in 1992, the same year he earned his second bachelor’s degree from the university, this time in education. (He earned his master’s degree in secondary education from the UA in 2011.)
He taught special education for fifth- and sixth-graders for a year at Happy Hollow Elementary School, then spent the next eight years teaching third grade at the school. That was followed by three years teaching fifthgraders at Washington Elementary, and the last eight were spent teaching drama and speech to ninth-graders at Ramay Junior High. This fall, he moves to Fayetteville High School, where he will be teaching speech and drama.
Language arts teacher Julia Woodward of Fayetteville worked alongside Thomas for close to a decade. She says that persuading ninth-graders to perform in front of their classmates - whether it’s acting or simply reading monologues - is no easy thing during those self-conscious years, but that Thomas excels at it.
“He really engages the kids,” Woodward says. “He lets them have opinions and share their insights, and he’s also very nurturing, and I think he’s been a father figure to a lot of kids who needed one.”
Humor is a huge part of Thomas’ classroom, just as it is in his everyday life. He’s constantly taking his kids’ pulse, asking them how they feel about him, to make sure he’s not going too far, but it’s hard for him to go too long without cracking a joke.
That sort of quick-fire wit is invaluable in schools, Woodward says. At the end of every school year, he’ll write humorous skits to honor retiring teachers, and usually collaborate with the band director to get a song in there as well.
His humor is often unscripted, she adds, coming in five-minute bursts between periods, keeping things light for teachers on stressful days.
“Mike is hysterical - I mean really funny,” Woodward says. “That sense of humor breaks down a lot of barriers, when you can laugh at your mistakes.”
PENCIL TO PAPER
The challenge was this: Make Arkansas history come to life.
Come up with something that elementary-school students will remember, but make it entertaining - really entertaining - but don’t talk down to the kids. And above all else, cap it at 50 minutes.
These were the obstacles Thomas faced when puttingtogether Digging Up Arkansas.
“You need a profound knowledge of how drama works to make it sound like it’s just coming out believably, and make sure the audience doesn’t feel like they’re being told a bunch of information,” Bob Ford says. “The level of difficulty was very high. ... Also, you needed to be able to crawl into the skin of a 9-year-old and not [just] talk to them, but also delight them. Very few playwrights can do that.”
Digging Up Arkansas began around three years ago, when Walton Arts Center approached Kassie Misiewicz of Bentonville’s Trike Theatre about the possibility of creating a children’s theater production about Arkansas history. Misiewicz thought of Thomas, whom she had befriended through their work together in Fayetteville’s TheatreSquared.
Thomas said yes, and it became a collaborative effort. Actors were hired, and he worked with them an hour or two a day, often improvising with them before going home and writing.
He bounced around numerous concepts - a time capsule found on a playground, a puppet that was channeling an American Indian - before deciding on the WPA project set during the state’s centennial. Music was then added to the production.
By that point the play had ballooned to two hours, more than double the allotted 50 minutes. Thomas kept cutting back, and when he couldn’t cut anymore, Misiewicz became his editor.
There were a few times when Thomas felt like throwing in the towel, but he never walked away from the project. He credits Walton Arts Center with showing the play to the right people, who provided the funding for it to be shown all over the state.
“It was like Field of Dreams, ‘Build it and they will come,’” he says. “When they saw it, they started [donating money].
“Teachers e-mail me and say, ‘You’ve really given me a springboard, a way to teach Arkansas history in the classroom.’ That’s great. It’s really been the right time at the right place again. I’m good at that.”
As the show tours throughout the state this school year, Thomas will be working on its sequel, geared toward older students and covering recent Arkansas history.
He’ll be continuing his theater and comedic work, and he’ll be writing, always writing. Thomas’ house is filled with notebooks, and he’s almost always carrying at least one - along with a sharp pencil - so that no observation goes unrecorded.
On those rare days when he doesn’t write, Thomas will wake up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep unless he has, at a bare minimum, reflected back on his day.
“He loves to write,” Gabel says. “He writes all the time. It’s part of his work, and part of his leisure, to think and rest and write.”
Northwest Profile, Pages 31 on 07/29/2012