`Radio Tears: Stories From `This American Life’ ” begins with the audience in the dark. The smooth, amplified and irrepressibly quizzical voice of National Public Radio’s Ira Glass explains that this is the great advantage of radio reporting — a listener cannot judge people by how they appear, only by the power of their words. Glass jokes with the audience that, if he had his way, the entire piece of theater that they are about to see would take place with no lights. But, he says, Beau O’Reilly objected.
Of course he did. Fringe theater veteran O’Reilly is a highly physical performer with a shuffling gait but blazing eyes. You have to see him to fully appreciate him.
With that yin and yang opening, Glass and O’Reilly perform a bizarre double act in the Steppenwolf Studio. Borrowing the format of WBEZ Chicago’s “This American Life,” Glass’ contemplative radio news magazine, this pair of storytellers each contribute three stories on subjects varying from the frozen smile of Julia Roberts to the media’s distortion of issues of race to the relationships of these men with their families.
The O’Reilly tales of Midwestern life are theatrical monologues, based on true experience but recounted with stylized verve and occupying most of the stage. Glass, on the other hand, sits behind a mixer board and a bank of wires, re-creating his radio persona. He fiddles with tapes, inserts segments of interviews, extemporizes on a live microphone, and his body hardly moves.
But despite this strange combination (or perhaps because of it), this contemplative piece of theater carries the audience along wherever it goes. The boyish Glass (whose radio work last week won a Peabody Award) has an incomparable ability to hook his listeners with a human interest story, probably because he seems fascinated by life’s paradoxes and in love with its victims. The gruffer O’Reilly just throws his truths out in the light and wrestles with them in public — his emotional monologue about his late father, celebrated actor James O’Reilly, is raw and riveting.
“Radio Tears” could further develop its exploration of how different media reflect life in different ways, but it’s already an engaging evening because these men are as wise as they are vulnerable. Heavy with Chicagoland references, these are 90 warm and reflective minutes, full of ideas about the wonder and sadness of life.
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“Radio Tears: Stories From `This American Life’ “
When: April 13, 20; June 8, 15, 22
Where: Steppenwolf Studio Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Phone: 312-335-1650
