Most people feel misunderstood. When I ask a room of people in a class or a post-show Q&A if you feel understood in a significant way, almost everyone raises their hands. The person I was ten years ago feels foreign to the person I am today. And yet there’s very little to show that. Even many of our close friendships get forever stuck in some year in the past. Perhaps it’s best to let some friendships remain frozen at their peak of connection, as trying to unfreeze and update them will only reveal how distant that connection has become.
We crave personal connection and validation. Thus social media continues to boom even as we do so half-knowing it’s bad for us. And yet true connection can be fleeting and hard to find. In our noisy, overstimulated culture, close, active listening and giving someone our full attention is an act of love. One of the biggest gifts we can give. It asks us to submit our ego in service of someone else’s.
Having done journalistic theater for 20 years now, I’ve started teaching some of the things I’ve learned. Folks are often worried that telling stories that aren’t their own is too problematic. I certainly understand this apprehension. And when done without permission, respect, curiosity, attention to detail, nuance, reverence, transparency, empathy, and thoughtfulness, it can be all sorts of bad and wrong.
The more I do the work though, time and time again the feedback from folks who see their story portrayed onstage is a sense of validation, of being seen. When Jarrett from the South Bronx first came to see Border People, a show in which I embody and tell his story, he admitted “I was a bit afraid that Dan might botch my story, or parts of it.” His experience seeing the show surprised him. He said he was “blown away” and told me “he wouldn’t have me change a thing” because it “conveyed the truth and the essence of who I am to the viewership.” He ended up coming back six times over the five week run in New York, bringing different friends and family every time. Or Mike Evans, the deported vet living in Ciudad Juarez, whose story I also portrayed in Border People, who asked to record me doing him for him, and then sent it to all his family. You can watch video of these folks talking about this experience here.
It is a profound experience to see one’s story onstage. It is a profound experience to perform that person’s truth onstage while they are watching.
And — and this surprised me at first — it inspires those folks whose story is portrayed to tell their story as well. The experience of having their story be received by an audience, and it resonating strongly, signals that their story has value and meaning and is entertaining, and they want to share it more. It’s not, in fact, a zero sum game. It is often a catalyst for more stories.
This was true when Williams/Okosi came and saw Tings Dey Happen in Nigeria. He promptly began work on his own autobiography, written in hand on 100 sheets of paper. Or when Sam, whose story I tell a part of in my new show Talk To Your People saw the show, he hugged me afterwards and said, “I feel so seen.” He later told me it inspired him to work more diligently on his own writing.
There’s a lot going on in this dance between art and journalism, between entertainment and truth, between homage and channeling. There is the duality of seeing our shared humanity in a truthful recreation of someone who often doesn’t look like me, while also celebrating the fact that we are all unique and different. It acknowledges the gaps in our personal experiences while mining the core truths that bind us as humans. It does the Brechtian theatrical magic of obviously not being real, but when done right, coexisting with the fact that it feels real, that we are simultaneously seeing a summoning of someone who is obviously not that person, and yet we still can’t help but be transported into this other world and space and worldview and reality and relationship.
And it is an invitation to participate and experience this relationship and this connection. For it is now being recreated for you, the audience. And all it asks is some of the same close observation and full attention that I gave in order to take in someone’s essence. You can take it in now too. The story is shared, and passed on, as stories have been, and are meant to be, for thousands of years. The truths are amplified and multiplied. And when we witness the recreation of someone specific and eccentric and multi-dimensional being understood, and have the opportunity to extend that act of understanding to them in a theater, hopefully we connect to our common shared humanity. And maybe hold out hope that going forward the world might be able to understand and see each of us more fully too.
