When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the moon in 1969, America’s most famous spaceman was living in a mobile home in the Hamptons.
William Shatner, the star of the television and film series “Star Trek,” found himself performing in a community theater production fresh off his run across the universe as James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise.
But that night, as a giant leap for mankind was taken, something happened to Shatner that has happened time and again in his 83 years – he was recognized for his outer space heroics.
“And I go on to describe it, the irony of it all,” Shatner said in an exclusive interview with Blank Slate Media in advance of his one-man show, “Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It” Saturday at the Tilles Center for Performing Arts at LIU Post.
The rest of the story goes like this: The boy asks Shatner if he is, in fact, Capt. James T. Kirk, and whether the camper is, in fact, Capt. James T. Kirk’s spaceship, and the boy nearly explodes with excitement when Shatner invites him to check out Capt. James T. Kirk’s mini stovetop.
The story is one of many Shatner peppers the audience with throughout his 90-minute show – tales full of love and loss and music and fatherhood and the zen art of motorcycle maintenance captured atop a chopper he once stole and then rode into the sunset.
“The evening is not comprised of just me but of a great deal of laughter and thoughtfulness and tears – the death of a horse,” he said. “The evening is a mixture, but in the final analysis, it’s terrific entertainment.”
Shatner wrote the show himself more than three years ago, gathering the stories he wanted to tell and then going back later to connect them with his showmanship.
What formed, he said, was not the story of Shatner through the eyes of Captain Kirk or Sgt. T.J. Hooker or even the Negotiator, the character he plays in ads opposite Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting for the online travel agent Priceline.
It was Shatner himself, in his purest and most vulnerable form.
“It evolved,” he said of the writing. “I’m actually writing a speech right now, which I’m calling, ‘Musings on a Starry, Starry Night,’ and I don’t know the path yet. I put down the subject matters and the anecdotal materials from research and I just fill the pot and I stir it and see what comes to the top, and then I rewrite to what that line is that I find there.”
Then Shatner took the show on the road across America, tinkering each night with the order of his tales and the way in which he would deliver them.
He was pleased with reviews – the New York Post’s musing that the show “is more entertaining than it has any right to be” adorns the home page of Shatner’s website – and more dates were added in cities big and small.
On Friday, he will be in Morristown, N.J., at the Mayo Performing Arts Center. On Saturday, Long Island.
Shatner said he’s making a weekend out of it.
“I wrote this for me,” he said. “If you start thinking, ‘maybe I should do a line this way or that way, maybe not with that sentiment,’ if you do it for other people, it’s going to be unfavorable.”
“It’s the conundrum of any creative person, whether it’s painting or dancing or writing,” he added. “If you do it thinking other people will like it, you’ll be making a mistake, but if you do it for yourself, there’s no mistaking that.”
