Chicago actor Timothy Mooney is bringing “Breakneck Hamlet” for a single performance to Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College’s Jefferson Davis Campus Fine Arts Auditorium on Thursday, August 30.  The performance will begin at 7 p.m.

This exciting and hilarious “Hamlet” has drawn raves and awards at festivals across the U.S. and Canada, as well as in performances in England, Ireland, and sold out performances in Denmark.

Tim Mooney has “recklessly sliced” the play from Shakespeare’s original, cutting a four-hour production to a single hour with a single actor! This “breakneck” performance reveals Hamlet as “a thrilling chameleon, with an immense intellectual capacity and a hilarious, wicked sense of humor.” Rather than the usual “melancholy Dane,” Mooney’s Hamlet “fights like hell,” with barely a second-long pause throughout!

Mooney is a veteran of some 60 fringe festivals, including “Breakneck Julius Caesar” performed at last year’s inaugural Tampa International Fringe Festival. For 15 years he has toured colleges and high schools across the U.S. with his award-winning one-man shows. “Breakneck Hamlet,” Mooney’s eighth one-man play, follows amazing feats of memory and performance that include “Moliere than Thou,” an adaption of Moliere’s play; “Lot o’ Shakespeare,” an abbreviation of monologues in each of Shakespeare’s plays; and “The Greatest Speech of All Time,” composed of actual historical speeches ranging from Socrates through Martin Luther King.

The adaptor of 17 of the plays of Molière, Mooney authored the popular acting textbook, “Acting at the Speed of Life; Conquering Theatrical Style.” His skill at turning rhetorical complexity into theatrical power gets a harrowing and thrilling test, boiling the greatest play of all time down to a one-man, one-hour romp.

Mooney  explains, “I was inspired to bring substance and passion to the soliloquies and great speeches (while bridging the gaps of the ongoing action with a playful, snarky commentary that I can’t quite resist). The intent is to add by subtraction. By removing a dozen actors and three hours of melancholy, we surface the power that the original Elizabethan audience must have felt. It gives the modern audience access to one of our greatest cultural touchstones. We are suddenly more aware of a delicate and dangerous political battle, between two equally powerful, and equally aware players fighting to the death over who gets to be king.”

Tickets for “Breakneck Hamlet” are $5 and can be purchased online at https://commerce.cashnet.com/MGCCCJDP, via telephone at 228.897.3931 or at the door. The performance is open to the public and will be offered free to local students who attend Biloxi High School, Gulfport High School, Long Beach High School and Ocean Springs High School.  For more information, contact Ryan Pierini at  228.897.3740 or ryan.pierini@mgccc.edu

More on Tim Mooney can be found at http://timmooneyrep.com/ , and a two-minute video race through the play can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QATcDH3H6vM .