The Greatest Actress In This One-Horse Town
An appreciation of an actor nobody’s heard of.
Kristy Hartsgrove-Mooers is the greatest actress in Iowa City.
I hope that doesn’t get me in trouble with all my other Iowa City actress friends. You’re all wonderful, and I loved you in that thing that one time, and it’s not like I have you all ranked in some Hunger-Games-style death match of Last Artist Standing. I’m just saying: Kristy routinely blows the doors off the place, and we all know it. When I say she’s the greatest actress in Iowa City, I think you know what I mean.
Iowa City isn’t really a city, by city standards. Compared to your Chicagos, your Denvers, hell, even your Des Moineses, we’re a sleepy little berg, a college town where football fans outnumber actual residents. We’re — what? — sixty thousand people? Seventy thousand? Are we counting the suburbs? Doesn’t matter. We’re a town where a person with a car can get just about anywhere in 15 minutes.
Of course, to the real sleepy little burgs of Iowa — your Tiptons, your What Cheers, your Lone Trees — Iowa City is a glittering hotbed of depravity and culture. How mad would Des Moines be if I said Iowa City is the arts and culture capital of the state? Suck eggs, Des Moines, because it is. Iowa City churns out novelists and poets, sculptors and singers, actors and playwrights. We’re the home of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Here is where the bands play that the rest of the world will discover tomorrow. Here is where medicine and science and learning are heralded and respected.
We have three bookstores, y’all! That’s how cosmopolitan we are. And only one of ‘em is a Barnes & Noble!
We’re also the center of a tidy-but-mighty professional theatre scene. And Kristy Hartsgrove-Mooers is, to the one hundred and fifty people who are paying attention, a glittering, glowing star.
There’s probably somebody like Kristy in a lot of small communities across the country: that powerhouse actress in her late forties or early fifties whose roles don’t fit her talent. Kristy is forever getting cast as somebody’s mom, or somebody’s housekeeper, or somebody’s kooky comic relief.
But she is more than that. She’s a hurricane.
I recently had the pleasure of seeing Crooked Path’s yearly holiday cabaret, and it was as warm and pleasant as a mug of mulled cider. There were clever comic bits, and beautiful heartache-y songs, and the whole thing hummed along at a brisk, efficient clip.
And then Kristy hit the stage.
Billing herself as “the fifth most requested Judy Garland impersonator,” she leveled the place in four minutes flat. Wearing her Garland drag — her lipstick was its own character — she was all legs and tits and slurred words and booming voice. She played Judy Garland as a camped-up, corn-fed, hot-mess, chaos bomb. (Which she was.)
She reminds me, honestly, of Jack Black.
You know how Jack Black is always the greatest thing in everything he does? How his spoof of heavy metal, through sheer power of his ferocity, becomes a celebration of the thing he’s spoofing? Y’know how he transcends?
Kristy Hartsgrove-Mooers transcends.
I don’t know how many plays I’ve seen that I thought were good plays until Kristy hit the stage, and then I realized that everyone else, including me, were stuck on planet earth and she was in space, where the real action was happening. She has stolen more shows than I’ve written. I first saw her in the Iowa Summer Rep production of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, where she played the sister. It was a fantastic production, one of the best — a helluva script, a helluva cast. And Kristy stole it. Stole it! I thought, “Who is this broad who altered the center of gravity in every one of her scenes, simply through the power of her acting?” When I think of that show, I picture Kristy neurotically dusting, upstaging absolutely everyone.
Of course I had to be friends with her, after that. Don’t you want to be friends with virtuosos?
People underestimate Kristy Hartsgrove-Mooers all the time, in all the ways that are as aggravating as they are predictable. She looks like a middle aged art teacher who’s sniffed her share of glue. Her disposition is sunny and silly and coarse and left-field. Again and again, I watch people underestimate her. Can they not see her ferocity? Her devastating intelligence? Her keen talent? Her drive? Her cunning? Her empathy? Her nuance?
Do they not see the genius in their midst?
No, they don’t. They see the nice lady who brought a casserole. Their eyes sweep over her — her age, her gender, her accommodating smile rendering her invisible.
Not us, though. Not the ones who work with her and admire her. We in this tight-knit theatre community know exactly how good we have it when we get to see Kristy on stage. The only reason I haven’t written a tour-de-force for her to star in is that I keep writing them for myself to star in. If I were smart, I’d cast the better actor.
Before the pandemic, the last thing I saw Kristy in was the University’s production of The Wolves. She played the mother, of course. If you don’t know that play, it’s about a girl’s soccer team, and the mother doesn’t show up until the last ten minutes of the play, where she drops an anvil onto the proceedings. Kristy, of course, was perfectly cast: I can still recall her nervous fragility (a Hartsgrove-Mooers speciality), this emotionally destroyed character hiking up a happy face for these girls and convincing absolutely no one. It was shocking and raw and true and it altered the center of gravity.
Just another Saturday night.
If you’re wondering why, if she’s so great, she doesn’t just relocate to a larger market where she could be appreciated by even more people — well, you’ve clearly never been to Iowa City. We have farmers markets! We have an independent movie theatre! You don’t have to be a millionaire to buy a house here!
And we have Kristy Hartsgrove-Mooers, regional treasure.
Next month, Riverside Theatre opens its new space with a production of Mat Smart’s Eden Prairie 1971. I’m both envious of Mat and feel a little bad for him: Mat thinks he’s written a play about a young couple’s doomed romance that features a crazy mom in the second act. What he is about to discover, what we’re all about to discover, is that play is actually a heartbreaking, hilarious, devastating portrait of a wild toxic woman whose daughter has been talking to some guy for forty minutes. Kristy will reorder the molecules when she hits the stage in — rumor has it — only a towel.
I already have my tickets for opening night.
