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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Manhattan's hit nightclub storytelling series comes to TV, minus the cocktails but with its intimate front-porch spirit intact.
Nov 16, 2002 | "I am speaking on a land line from the worst phone in the world," says George Dawes Green, whose cellphone was cutting out earlier. Green is talking to me from his mother's house in Georgia, and the phone is playing his own voice back into his ear. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in an empty room in Los Angeles, where my voice is bouncing off the walls and sounding thrillingly oracular. It's not the ideal setup for talking about the Moth, the New York literary phenomenon in which storytellers weave 12-minute tales for an intimate audience with whom they've been having cocktails moments earlier, but it's something.
Not to damn with faint praise, but the same could be said for the new Moth TV show. After having sold out live shows in New York in under three hours for the past five years, "The Moth" will premiere as a one-hour original series on the cable network Trio on Monday, Nov. 18, at 9 p.m. Eastern (6 p.m. PST), and air every weeknight through Nov. 27.
Trio has handled the televised version of the series with a light touch and stayed away from imposing its own vision on an already successful formula. The series is staged at a small club where the audience is lighted as well as the stage, and the storytellers sit at tables until it's their turn to go on. Then it's just them and their five-minute yarns (shortened from the 12 minutes of the live show). There is no reading, no memorization and no rehearsal before the show. As artistic director Lea Thau, who spoke to me earlier from her office in New York, put it, "We want the storytellers to be focused on the audience, not on the piece of paper they left in their desk drawer."
Stories at the Moth are neither readings nor performances, but carefully constructed tales told as though they were being shared at an informal social gathering. "We don't allow people to read," Thau says, "but we're not really looking for memorization, either. It has to be a story with a clear story structure: not five loosely connected anecdotes, not 10 jokes. It's not stand-up and it's not a reading. Stories are told in the style of a story you would tell at a dinner party -- very relaxed, doesn't seem rehearsed. But at the same time, there will be 300 people at this dinner party and not three."
Each show is organized around a single theme, proposed by a curator. The first two episodes on Trio are called "Relationship Wars" and "Rock 'n' Roll Saved My Life." The Moth method is to find five to seven storytellers from different walks of life to tell a story based on each theme. A few are high-profile people who have published a book or made a movie on that topic, but the others are nonwriters and nonactors who provide a different perspective. For instance, the "Relationship Wars" show features great stories from Doug Liman, the director of "Swingers" and "The Bourne Identity," and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnick, but one of the best is told by a thrice-married divorce lawyer who represented her mother against her father in their divorce. Trio has stayed as true to the Moth spirit as possible, but they can't host the cocktail hour, and you won't be able to go out eating and drinking after the show, as the Moth community -- audience and all -- always does. For that you'll have to wait until the Moth comes to your town, which it may, thanks in part to the TV show. Plans are afoot for something called the Moth migration next spring, probably targeting London, Berlin and Los Angeles in the first wave.
Unlike habitués of open-mike nights, Moth storytellers work extensively with Thau for weeks before hitting the stage, meeting with her anywhere from two to seven times to shape their stories into something with a clear narrative arc and a beginning, middle and end. She works to transform written pieces into oral ones, and helps nonwriters to structure their stories. Ultimately, she says she looks for things that "take their starting point in something anecdotal, but transcend the anecdotal by telling us something about who [the storyteller] is, or about love, life, the world in general. Something that transcends that individual experience or incident."
Part of what makes the Moth such a riveting series is that one never knows when a storyteller will kill or bomb. Some of the Moth's most successful stories have been told by people who have never been onstage before, and some of the least successful have been told by celebrities. To some extent, Thau says, she and Green have a general idea of who will do well and who will not do so well.
"But that's part of the magic that the audience feels, because every time a person gets up there, the audience holds their breath and asks, 'How is this person going to do?' It's a bold thing to do, to get up there. You're very naked, in a way. You're not hiding behind a persona or a façade. But the audience is incredibly supportive. We are very lucky to have the best audience in New York. There is always the sense that they want the storyteller to do well. They sort of carry them."
