In the beginning, it was dark. Pitch black. Well, there was a soft spotlight on the sign language interpreter, but save for that, nothing. Then there was music—faint—and then a voice started: “I tried to convince the crew here at Benaroya Hall to let me do the entire show in darkness,” the voice said from the shadows, “but they didn’t go for that.”
And it’s a good thing they didn’t. While it’s true that there’s an intimacy to hearing without seeing, to investing so much in faceless, shapeless sound, human beings were given the gift of sight for one single, indelible reason: to see Ira Glass.
His setup last night at Benaroya Hall was simple—a table covered with a black cloth, a microphone, a tape player, pages of notes, a bottle of water—but his humor, his witty quips, the enthusiasm he clearly conveyed for his job were so encompassing that not an inch of the stage felt empty. And, in fact, hardly an inch of the theater was.
Glass spent much of the two hours describing the narrative structure of a successful radio show, a structure of “action, action, action, and then a little bit of thought” which he explains is so fundamental that “it isn’t in the Bible. It IS the Bible.” He played music and clips of interviews. He made balloon animals. He wrangled $38 from a woman who admitted during the Q&A session that she had never donated money to the show. He told a story he’d promised not to share on the radio and forgot to change the names. He talked like he hosts, and he hosts like he talked.
Though Glass is an intimate friend of everyone who listens to him week after week, by the time the night was through he was no longer a disjointed voice coming through the radio speakers. He was a tangible presence, a person in a theater full of people, a face that seemed instantly as familiar and comforting as his voice. He was all his stories, all his interviews. He was This American Life.
Comments