SPEAKER_01 1:17

If you could go back and give yourself any advice about your first one-man show, how to prepare, what to do, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Don't do it. Well, actually, I would I would probably start with the um the step of accessing vulnerability earlier than later. When people create one-person shows, when I first created my first one-person show, I was trying to figure out what I could leave out so I wouldn't offend anybody. You've got to have it truly engaged. Unless this is going to be some litigious, you know, moment for you, you've got to put it in. And that thing you really don't want to put in is probably the exact thing that needs to be in there. So I would say the first thing is access vulnerability as soon as you can. You'll hear me say this over and over. It's like a mantra of mine because vulnerability is a superpower when it comes to creating one-person shows.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Um, we're gonna do a little mini master class on one-person shows. Since you have done nine of them, I think you are the expert here. So I am going to shoot away at some questions for you. So the first thing I want to ask you is when you start to write a show, how do you choose your subject matter?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Uh, I try to start autobiographically with the beginning of my own life. You know, what actually happened, what was the chronological movement of events? So that can always be a nice starting point for anyone to start at the beginning. And then, so it doesn't seem very like too plain and straightforward along the line of chronology. You can do flashbacks, keep doing flashbacks along the route. And you'll find you'll come on to areas of your life, maybe your college life or after college, that you say, wait a minute, that area is very rich. That could be another one-person show. Uh, that was a case when I started East 14th, about growing up in Oakland in the 70s.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Now, was that your first show, East 14th?

SPEAKER_00 3:35

That was my very first show. Yeah, East 14th was my very first show. But I took it all the way up until I essentially graduated and then jumped time to my father's passing. Uh, but the area that I jumped was the five years I lived in a retirement hotel serving breakfast to the elderly. And the the employees were a mixture of college students, wanting to be actors and musicians, and some near-do wells who were kind of selling drugs on the side and just a step away from um skid row. So all these people were living there, younger, interacting with these older folks. And after a certain point, I realized I was serving them breakfast and they were serving me stories that I would never ever forget. And so that became a separate show. So you can look at areas of your life, say, I worked at this place for this amount of time, or these wild things happened in college, or here's my perspective on my entertainment career, uh, as Robert Townsend is so uh brilliantly doing in his show. But you find an area of your life, concentrate on it, try not to cannibalize what could be in another show, and you got to think of it in those terms. You don't want to think of a one-person show as a one-off. You want to ideally think like this could be a trilogy, or it could be even more than that, which I've been blessed to experience.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Uh, you mentioned Robert. Robert's doing a show up in Berkeley that you are co-producing called Living the Shuffle, which is going fantastically, and he is discovering a lot of vulnerability within that show, and it is wonderful to watch the development and the exploration of an artist having to relive a story while telling it to the audience. So I'm loving that that whole process. My next question for you is how do you structure your one-person show to keep the audience engaged?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

I try to structure it overall like a movie. Act one, act two, act three. Overall, but I actually split it into two acts. Robert does his show straight through. He wanted to do that way. I have two shows that I did that way. But most of my shows have an act break in the center by design, uh, so that people have additional opportunities to market the show. When you have an intermission, a lot of times people will start talking to each other and start texting friends in the middle of the show. So rather than just the intermission or just the end of the show, they're texting friends mid-show and at the end of the show. Also, it's another opportunity for you to sell merch. If you have a merch table, if there's an intermission, people will buy then and at the end of the show. Uh so I lean there. And most uh larger off-Broadway and larger theaters want you to have an intermission so they can sell their merch, give an opportunity to look at more posters marketing upcoming shows besides yours, and they sell more cocktails and refreshments at the same time. So it has a twofold avenue so people can look at it and say, this could be a movie. That's what I kind of want them to feel. I try to do what's going to please me in the overall content. I don't try to create shows like maybe this market will like them or make them, maybe these people like it. It's still very personal, but I do design it so people can get a clear beginning, middle-in feeling throughout the course of the show. Yeah, it's it's a it's a fascinating process. But if I can dig a little bit more into the process once I actually start structuring, I get a bunch of white index cards. And on those index cards, I write down just about every single story, like went to Ricky's house, the time Willie had food in his pockets, the time I had to knock on the girl's front door when I was Jehovah's Witness and I had a crush on her. I just put that on the card with a black Sharpie on a white card. And I keep collecting them, collecting them, and I spread them out on the floor. At some point, when I get around 70 to 75 white cards, I start editing out and removing the cards. And you, it's not really something you can actually do on a computer. You probably can, because they have index and final draft, but the physical tactile move of having those white cards spread out on a big dining room table or floor, I can see the whole thing right there in front of me and go like, this story isn't as strong. Pull that one out, put it aside, pull that one out, put it aside. Okay, these two stories go together, and I can expand these into a larger chunk of the overall show. Let me move this out and this out. And wait a minute, I thought of another idea that goes with that and write another card. But you want to kind of work those cards down to about 30 cards, and then from those 30 cards, you go on to your voice recorder and you say them out loud. Just say the story as best as remember it out loud, best you can say it out loud. Then after that process, you start transcribing it off the audio. Start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. Once you get that whole script down, it'll be very rough, but you have most of your show there. Then at that point, you go through and you polish it. You put a big polish on it. Like turns out I don't need that anymore. Cut that out, cut that out, and you eventually have the whole script. At this point, you start to move into putting it on its feet, and that's when you turn the cards to red, yellow, and green. Green are the stories you know you could tell across a coffee table in a second. You put those cards, transfer it from white to a green card. The ones that are almost there, you put on a yellow card, and the ones you know you should keep, but you don't know at all, you put on a red card. And now you got like 25, 30 cards, but you know what level they're at. Now I learned this the hard way. You can save so much time by looking at the green cards and knowing what you know, what you kind of know, and what you don't know. Because when you start rehearsing, our natural process is to, okay, I'm rehearsing. If it gets interrupted, we start from the beginning. We start from the beginning. When in fact, you could have the first 10 cards down, and now you're wasting time going back in the rehearsal, going back over those 10 cards where the love and the tension needs to be on the yellow and especially the red card.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Hey, actor, where are you gonna be in 90 days from now? Is it gonna be with that same old headshot that is not getting you anywhere? That same old story that it's everybody else's fault while you're not booking? Or even worse, depression, because nothing is happening for your career. Well, let me help you because in 90 days from now, you can have a whole new set of pictures that are built on your brand. You can have a list of agents that actually would fit what it is that you sell and a plan to have a more prosperous career. Listen, I cannot book you, but I can make you bookable. So if you are ready, willing, and excited to change your circumstances, come and join us at ActingSmarterCircle.com, sign up and get started. We're a weekly community that helps actors get in gear and get the career that they deserve. I love this process you're giving me. I've taken several uh one person shows, I've done a a few one-person shows. I love how you're breaking it down. You have your stories. You got your stories written on your red cards, your your green cards and your yellow cards. And most of your stuff is autobiographical. You got these stories. What are the challenges? Because you we talked about this earlier, that unless it was letitious, you just did the story. Are there any challenges when you are bringing the story into being that you go, you know what? I don't want to out this person like this. I don't want to I I don't want to share this, or you know what, I want to share this. Because you you actually talk about in one of your shows the whipping that your stepdad gave you and made your mom participate. And sometimes we want to cover our parents. You know, we don't want to tell all the truth because we don't want them to look bad. So for you, how did you how did you go through that? Because that's that's a rough terrain to like expose to strangers.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Exactly. Well, uh particular to my mother, which was the biggest thing, because she was the only person that was still alive at that point of the characters in the show, besides my uh older sister, who doesn't have as much of a role as a character in the overall show specific to East 14th. She has a larger role in the prequel to East 14th called Can You Dig It, which is everything that happened before my father ran off to be a pimp. And then later on pushing me through UCLA. My my mother specifically, I did the show in LA. It was supposed to be for five weeks, it turned into five months. Then I was approached by a person to take East 14th off Broadway in New York. I ran it in New York the whole summer of 2008, and I had done at that point 90 performances and hadn't done it for anybody in my family at all yet. So then I got an opportunity to bring it to the Bay Area, to the Marsh San Francisco when there was once only a Marsh San Francisco. And I knew I had to call my mother. And the main thing connected to it, there was a lot of betrayal connected to my father taking me over his girlfriend's houses and then making lying really fun. He made lying like a fun game, and he would say, Baby, tell me this. Um we go on our way home right now, so today's your turn. You make up the lie. I'm like, Me make up the lie. He said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, baby, it's your turn. You make up the lie. Next time it'll be your other brother's turn, it'll be your sister's turn, but today's your turn. Or we can tell your mother. I'm saying, okay, uh, this sounds like fun. Okay, uh, we went to the park. He said, That's good, that's good. And why we ain't hungry? Why we ain't hungry, baby? I said, because uh your girlfriend made us something to eat. He said, definitely don't say that. Definitely don't say that. Don't say that at all. And then I said, Oh, we went to the deli and made some sandwiches, and that's why we're not hungry. He said, Okay, that's good, let's tell her that. So we tell my mother the lie. And I went to my mother as an adult now, doing the show and said, I gotta tell you something. And it talked about something. She's like, What? I said, I'm gonna be doing a show in the Bay Area. She said, What's it about? I said, about our family. She said, What part? I said, All of it. She said, Okay, okay. I said, So mommy gotta tell you something. Listen closely. I have to tell you something. She said, probably something about your father taking over his girlfriend's houses while I was at work. Here's some more stuff for your show, boy. And she gave me some more material. So I lucked out on that one. But what I often do is I'll change the names to protect the innocent or the extremely guilty. I'll switch it up. I had a friend who did a lot of drugs, and he's in the Kipling Hotel show. And there was a window of time that I didn't have anywhere to live. I was homeless down in LA. And because I had nowhere to go, I was doing drugs with him. I was going, like, I got nowhere else to be. I didn't even want to do any, but because I didn't have anywhere to go, I did him. And I changed his name to protect him because of his connection to the drug world at that time. I didn't want any retroactive impact on him. So I changed a name. Sometimes, though, I'll keep the name because I'm looking for the person. Like I haven't seen them in years, and I'll put their real name in the show in hopes they go, like, hey, that's me. What's what you doing? Like, oh my God, there you are.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

The intro of my show is I don't change anybody's name because they're all guilty. The story you're about to see is real, and everybody's name is real. I love your grace. You extend grace to people. I do not. You're writing, you know, you're you're putting stuff together, you're deciding based on your cards and your stories what the theme is gonna be, what the show is now about. So now you have your cards, you've figured out, okay, these are the stories I'm gonna work on, this is what it is. How do you then take it into a real storytelling portion? You know, because we have stories, but it's it's one thing to say, well, you know, this happened. But now you're telling it in a story that it has to be on stage, that has to be animated, that has to be entertaining. Do you sit with that or do you find that the just the story itself is enough?

SPEAKER_00 18:39

The story has to have many stories within it. That's the answer. It's not ever really one story. It's a compilation of stories with uh laser-sharp transitions. If you can transition smoothly between any number of stories and not going too far a tangent, because tangents usually mean you're heading into another territory that might be another show, or it's content for an entire book, uh, if you were working in that direction. But by design, you want to try and uh have a story that happened as early as you can almost remember, then the next window of time, and the next window of time, and the next window of time, and the next window of time. And that creates, if you stay in that chronological layout, you're ending up with a tale that is an overarching story, a series of stories being a cohesive one-hole story. But it's important to do that along the way. There's something I got to mention now, which a lot of uh solo artists don't really think about that much. And it's so important what your show is called. The title and the poster are so important. What I learned when I was at NBC in advertising and promotion is before anybody sees your, you might have an amazing 90-minute one-person show. You did it, you wrote it, you put it together, it's structured, you're ready to go. But if the title is wrong and the poster isn't right, nobody's going to come see it. You have an opportunity of basically 30 seconds to see a poster. You have to kind of time it with the fact of when you drive down the street and street and you stop, you stop at a light, and there's a bus stop poster. That is designed, as I know from network promotion and advertising, to get somebody to see the idea and get it in the length of time they're at that light. No more. A billboard is for that to drive by and you get it. So, you like I said, you can have an amazing full show ready, but if that poster and that picture and that tagline or that title aren't right, nobody's coming, no matter how amazing the show is, they'll never make it there. You gotta grab them. That's where that marketing advertising acumen must be in play. Because we want to create great art, but it's also show business. You've got to make a return, or the theater won't keep you, or you won't be asked to go to other theaters. You can say, I did well at this theater, this is how well I did. You can speak to them, and then you can get more and more and more theaters to be able to tour a solo show.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

So now you have your show, you pretty much decided what the story is. Now you're going into rehearsals, and now you're going to put it on its feet. What is the next step once you have the story ready, or at least have a good skeleton ready?

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Yeah, the good skeleton ready, and the script is, you're saying from the point of view that the script is complete. Now you want to make sure that each one of those major story beats you have on cards, and that's when you go to a rehearsal space. You could do it at home and lay them out on the bed, but ideally, you want to rent a cheap little rehearsal space, all kinds of rehearsal spots in LA and the Bay Area have these tiny rooms with a mirror. Rent the tiny room, it's like 20 bucks or 40 bucks. You might be able to negotiate with them to say, I'm gonna be here quite a bit, and they'll give you X amount of time for a low rate to come in there with a mirror, with your cards out on the table on the floor, and start doing the storytelling right in front of the mirror and on your feet, not sitting down, not just for memory, but seeing how your body's gonna move, how you're gonna be seated or standing, start working on the blocking. Because a lot of people think a lot of storytelling is very static, like you're gonna stand central. And only a few people can do that, and it's because the writing is takes you on an imaginative run. But the most entertaining shows have a uh a sizable amount of blocking and movement and character shift. But get into that space, and if it's at home, make sure you won't be interrupted and rehearse each card until it's at the green level, as I mentioned earlier, and get them all to where they're all green, and just keep doing uh sections over and over. Like maybe I'm gonna memorize these five cards, then the next five cards. Don't think of it as I gotta memorize this whole thing. You only have to remember five cards. And then once you get those hooked up, push them aside, next five, next five. And that locks it in your head, and then you keep doing it till you get it to a point where you have it mostly memorized and go to that studio and do it into the mirror without having to stop.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

I would also recommend they do a reading of it. Rent a little uh a little space, somebody's office maybe, but but have like a little space where you invite maybe 20 of your friends to come and hear it, and you just read it. You just read it without all the stuff so they can give you feedback by laughter or oh because I I do find that that does help because you know, as a comic, you know where the you know, you think it's a funny joke and then you put it up on its feet and it dies, or you're not quite sure and you get it on its feet and you go, oh my god, this is gold. And so for me, I always think just doing a reading of it to get feedback before you even start the rehearsals is is gold for the the performer because it it tells you if you're on the right track. Maybe there's a chunk that you think is good, but the audience isn't buying. Like I remember doing my show in the very beginning, very, very beginning. And I read it. I was in Mark Travis's class. He's in LA. He is king of the one-man shows as far as helping actors, and he helped Chaz Pomatary do a bronze tale. And that blew him up. I I was in his class for a year working on my show, working on my show, working on my show. Finally got the courage to go, okay, I'm gonna do a reading of it, invite people to come in, and I talk about my childhood because you know, we we are siblings from different mothers. Okay, that's right. Except my mother was a a prostitute. And so when I did it, there's a chunk in there that I talk about going to stay with the Amish for in the summer. Well, what I learned was it was its own story. It could not be in the story I was telling. And so sometimes you got you, because you talked about that earlier. Sometimes you have you have pieces that belong to another show. They might have been chronological, but they really don't work together.

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Along the lines of you saying reading aloud for a group, so my version of that, which I highly recommend, besides also doing the version you suggested, is I would find open mic poetry and music nights. Those are the places that are gonna allow you to go up and tell a story. If you got to go do them at the punchline or the comedy store or whatever, there it's like, oh no, please don't. Unless you're really accomplished and you're just testing out the hilarious parts, there's a way to do that. But for the most part, you want to go to a night where people are gonna lay in a theatrical space, uh, a listening space, poetry, ease back, not firepower, punchline, punchline, punchline. And you can do that at those nights. I did that at a place in LA. It was a just a little space, and only maybe 15 people could fit there at a time. And what I did is I went back every week and I did my opening and said, I grew up in Oakland in the 70s, my stepfather was a Jehovah's Witness, my real father was a pimp, and here's another story from that time. And that's how I was able to go up every week and do a different chunk, different chunk. But it was tested in front of a live audience, and then I did the whole thing on stage.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

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