Steve Timm's voice is steady, yet his words carry the momentum of their emotionally charged subject matter, as he begins his monologue with, "I'm moving backward."
Sitting at the piano a few feet away, junior Jennifer Peacock begins to play. She has only the words of Timm's piece, placed like sheet music on the piano's stand, to guide her.
Her melodies, at times calm and reflective and at others tense and frenetic, are almost entirely improvised, based only off of a few musical fragments concocted beforehand.
It was the second time ever that Timm and Peacock's collaboration came together when they performed a reading of Into My Father's Wild on Tuesday night at the Putnam County Public Library.
Comprised of a monologue written by Timm, a professor of communication and theatre, along with a piano accompaniment created by Peacock, the piece describes Timm's relationship with his late father and its intersection with their shared love of nature.
"I think that, in writing the piece, what I was able to do was to make sense of, you know, at least four or five segments of my life," Timm said. "Framing them this way is all kind of connected to his passing. That in some ways might honor him. Also I came to terms with the fact that he was gone. And I just kind of recognized those gifts that he gave to me."
Timm's inspiration came when he found an envelope addressed to him while going through his late father's possessions. Inside the envelope were several maps, including one of the Boundary Waters, a series of remote lakes on the border between Canada and the United States that his father had frequented. After visiting the areas marked out on the map, Timm decided to write about his experiences there.
The resulting text, which chronicles several experiences Timm had with his father and in the wilderness, provides an intimate look at the relationship between the two men. The account is so personal, in fact, that Timm said performing it in front of an audience was one of his greatest challenges.
"When you work with material that is so deeply personal, there comes a point where, just to get through the thing, I have to distance myself from it," he said. "And I have to approach it as, you know, I'm playing a character."
It was not until he worked with Peacock on DePauw's production of The Rocky Horror Show, however, that Timm pursued setting the words to music. Over the course of several meetings, Timm and Peacock discussed the technicalities of setting the work to music. The preparations also included one full rehearsal in the days leading up to the event.
The majority of Peacock's work came during the actual performance, when she improvised her accompaniment to fit the tone of the piece.
"I think the point of this is that I can't plan it out too much, and so I really tried not to practice," Peacock said. "I want it to be organic."
For Peacock, dealing with the spontaneous nature of the piece and how it related to Timm's work constituted both one of her most difficult challenges and greatest satisfactions.
"I guess, in general, I feel like we were on the same page. I feel like we connected well," she said. "I felt a sort of unity of the piece, of his writing and my music, and I don't know if other people felt that. But I guess I felt satisfied at the end, like we had done our job or something."
Both Timm and Peacock considered the performance a success. Timm also said that he would welcome working with Peacock for an upcoming DePauw production of his work, which is set to premiere Nov. 14.
Greencastle resident David Greenburg, who attended the performance, found the themes of the piece particularly moving.
"The other thing about the piece was you begin to think about your own relationship with your father, and some of the things we did and didn't do together," Greenburg said. "And that's the part that I'll probably think about for a while."