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True-Life Tales

Spontaneity key to Stoop series' success

July 29, 2008
By Martha Thomas
Photography by Dan Kempner

 
True-Life Tales Seven people get seven minutes each to tell a true-life story onstage.
 

Seated onstage, Steve Luxenberg asked to have the Centerstage house lights raised. “How many of you think you don’t have any family secrets?” the Washington Post writer and editor asked the audience. Plenty of hands went up. “A few years ago, I would have been one of you,” he said. He then launched into a story about learning that his mother, who all his life told him she was an only child, actually had a sister who was institutionalized in her 20s.

Luxenberg, on leave from the Post to research and write about his mother’s secret, was one of seven storytellers at the February installment of The Stoop Storytelling Series; the theme was “Family Secrets.” By the end of the evening, the audience had heard seven stories — sad, scary and uproariously funny — plus three ad-hoc tales from audience volunteers. The tales varied wildly: Writer Lisa Libowitz told of discovering she had siblings from her father’s previous marriages; drag king Justin Credible revealed that he was a “second-generation gender dysphoric”; and illustrator and “creative baker” Barbara Dale regaled the crowd with a story about skipping charm school to shop at the mall.

“Everybody has a story,” reads a blurb on The Stoop’s website (www.stoopstorytelling.com). “What’s yours?”

The Stoop Storytelling Series, founded in February 2006 by Laura Wexler and Jessica Henkin, has a simple premise: Seven people get seven minutes each to tell a tale. “Stories of love, death, revenge, forgiveness,” the website proclaims. “Failures small and large. Double-crossing and two-timing. Shame and success. … Blood, sweat and tears — and lots of laughs. … No notes, no scripts, no actors — just true stories, artfully told.” (The storytellers do rehearse.)

Last year the Monday-night series moved from its original home at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson to the 540-seat Pearlstone Theater at Centerstage. All of the performances — shows are held roughly every six weeks — have sold out.

Each Stoop event has a theme: from “Scary Stories” for Halloween and “Holidays from Hell” in December to “Songs That Changed Your Life.” On June 9, the 15th installment will be “Campfire Tales: Stories of panty raids, bug juice and wet hot American summers.”

The most successful tales are those that feel spontaneous, says Wexler, who by day is a senior editor at Style magazine. “We encourage people to not write out the story and memorize it,” she says. It’s the impromptu nature of the performances that gets the audience hooked. “When you’re in the audience, you’re rooting for the person on stage,” she says.

“There’s a feeling of community that is almost revolutionary.”

Wexler hit on the idea a few years ago after attending a storytelling evening in San Francisco. “I was struck by how different it was from anything I’d been to,” she says. “I’ve been to a lot of live theater and a lot of literary readings and some standup comedy. It had elements of these but was unlike any of these.” She returned to Baltimore, called her friend Jessica Henkin and The Stoop was born.

Co-producer Henkin, who works with autistic children in Baltimore County schools, is married to Aaron Henkin, producer of the WYPR program The Signal, which broadcast The Stoop’s first show and continues to air occasional segments. Wexler and Henkin plumbed their Rolodexes for friends and friends of friends and wove a web of storytellers.

The format is a perfect fit for Baltimore, cozy and familial but also avant garde. Early shows featured a lot of writers, editors and radio personalities, as well as a smattering of well-known locals such as Gary Vikan, director of The Walters Art Museum; David Simon, creator of the HBO series The Wire; and Keri Burneston, aka the burlesque performance artist Trixie Little. But plenty of dog walkers, bodybuilders and wannabe poets have told their tales too.

Some shows are easier to program than others. “People were coming out of the woodwork” for the family secrets show, Wexler says. It has been harder to line up storytellers for other evenings, such as the “Education” show. Wexler and Henkin succeeded in finding a long-time Baltimore City schoolteacher. To find participants for April’s “Coming to America: Immigrant Stories,” the two cast a wide net to find a mix of people that adequately represents Baltimore’s diverse population.

As an audience member you live vicariously. It can be awkward. Storytellers discuss fears, failures, illness and mortifications. People you previously knew only as voices on the radio or bylines in the newspaper suddenly are sharing deeply personal stories about drug addiction, abortion and absentee parents. It’s a bit unnerving — you feel like a voyeur — but fascinating.

To hear any previous story, just go to the website. There you can hear artist Mark Eisendrath talk about surviving an inoperable brain tumor as well as a plane crash, or yoga guru and radio host Diane Finlayson discuss her years of drug use.

In other shows, participants take a mundane situation — attending a family event without a date, dealing with a constipated dog — and deliver a series of hilarious, riffed monologues.

Wexler says one of the most memorable stories was told by a boxer, Mike “the Persecutor” Paschall. She tracked him down for a show titled “Corpus: Stories About the Body.”

“I could tell right away that he had never considered himself to be a person with a story to tell,” Wexler says. Nevertheless, she persuaded him to give it a try. “He told a perfect narrative story about wanting to be a professional boxer and finally getting his chance and how terrified he was.”

Wexler emphasizes the important role of the Stoop’s audience. “Without the audience and their desire to listen and empathize, the Stoop doesn’t work,” she says. “Sometimes with conventional theater you have the feeling that the play would be the same whether the audience was there or not. Not so with the Stoop. The audience is absolutely and intimately involved.”

 
 
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