Ugh, am I really about to do this?

Yes, I am announcing a (modest) return to the stage

I had genuinely thought I was finished. I wrote a whole essay about it. It’s been eight years since I’ve dabbled in anything even resembling it. And yet here we are. 

I’m mounting a goddamn show. 

To be fair, there have been signs. Coming out of pandemic isolation has made me hungrier for human interaction than I’ve been in years. I’ve acknowledged that I’ve never stopped imagining things in terms of dialogue and staging. And when I did a couple of live readings of Congress of the Monsters last fall, I can’t say that performing a story with mime gestures and funny voices in front of a live audience was entirely unpleasant. But did it really need to come to this? 

I guess it did, because that’s what happened. So first thing first, it’s called The Nerve. It’s a live performance that I’m hosting, which features my good friend and brilliant actor Bob Laine. It will play on Saturday, September 16, at CrawlSpace, a tiny Brooklyn performance venue run by another good friend, Michael Gardner. Here’s a flyer that repeats that information with the addition of some visuals that might tell you a bit more than the words: 

(Or not!)

I’m not really going to say much more about the show, because in my mind the experience depends upon not really knowing anything going in. And that’s apt, because one of the main reasons I feel comfortable getting back in the game is the removal of expectation. 

The work that Hope and I and our dozens of collaborators created over the years under the auspices of our erstwhile theater company, Piper McKenzie, was entirely dependent upon expectation - mine, if no one else’s. I had dreams as big as my means were limited. The conception of every show we mounted was a swing at the stars, and I missed pretty much every time. It’s only recently begun to dawn on me: That’s art, baby! You’ll never make it! 

In the years after we stopped making theater, I tried to follow that statement with the inevitable “So why bother trying?” Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to stop entirely. I have what they call “the bug,” which is of course a sickness. I’ve turned my attention to drawing, to other types of writing, to this that and the other - a lot of it has been fun and interesting, but again, it’s all been swings and misses. The difference is that these other projects have felt a lot more lonely - it turns out I miss making things with other people. 

When this realization started creeping in, it set off a panic - why would I think of doing that to myself again??? I’m still burnt out from 10 years ago! But the heart wants, etc. So I decided to get ahead of myself: What can I do that will scratch the itch without actually tearing my skin off? 

The answer has been another subversion of expectation: Think small. The work of Piper McKenzie was all about going as big as possible within the confines imposed by creating work in an expensive city without wanting to spend any time begging people or organizations for money. We staged epic battles between monkeys and monsters, created a fictional arctic civilization, and dramatized the fall of Babylon with 31 actors in a space that could barely fit an audience. Each of these, and so many others, strained our mental, emotional, physical, and financial resources, and I had no interest in putting myself on the line like that again. 

So this one is just me and Bob and not much else. Hope is directing it for us. It’s very small-scale, incredibly loose, and we’re not marketing it beyond family and friends. It’s an experiment is what it is, and as such I’m not interested in trying to seek out a wider audience or critical approval, like I was with the earlier stuff. (Which isn’t to say I’d say no to such things…) The point is to have fun making something interesting with friends. So far so good!

For those of you in NYC, if you’re interested in coming to see The Nerve, just drop me a line (or write to strikingthenerve[at]gmail[dot]com) and I’ll save you a seat. There will only be about 30 of them, and then that’s it. Unless people really like it and we decide to do it again - expectations die hard, I guess.