Tonight through Friday night, Ira Glass, the host of “This American Life,” brings “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host,” his dance-and-story collaboration with Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, to Town Hall. (One show, two genres, three performances.) Glass and the dancers have a similar sensibility—brainy, playful, taking pleasure in the warmth and awkwardness of human interaction, at times visibly charmed by their own creation. In “Three Acts,” Glass and the dancers perform in tandem and in harmony, with Glass narrating a story or addressing the audience, in a style familiar to his listeners, and Barnes and Bass providing movement that reflects, abstractly, on what he’s talking about.
Last week, I visited Glass at “This American Life.” The office, which had windowed walls that brought “Mad Men” to mind, was full of books, CDs, and other comforting old media. Glass was between meetings about upcoming hard-news stories for “This American Life,” having to do with education and economics. He has gray hair and he wore an elegant gray shirt, and was drinking water from a “Simpsons” Season 22 pint glass. “I’m only drinking out of this because I’m in Season 22,” he said.
Glass has experimented with visual forms before: television, live shows, movies. Until he encountered Monica Bill Barnes & Company, dance was the exception. It wasn’t a big part of his youth. (“I’m basically, like, a very unathletic person,” he said.) There was no dancing at his wedding. And aside from an occasional Mark Morris piece, he hasn’t attended many dance performances. But when he first saw Monica Bill Barnes, something clicked. There was confetti, goofiness, turtlenecks, pop music. “I really loved it,” he said. “While I was sitting in my chair, I started imagining working with them. It was so surprising to me what they did. It felt so much like the work I tried to do on the radio, and what was surprising about that is that you can’t get further from radio than dance. You have one medium which is all movement, all visuals, no words. And another medium which is no movement, no visuals, all words. And yet it felt like exactly what I am trying to do.”
As listeners know, Glass, though serious when he needs to be, generally talks to his guests, and to us, the way you’d talk to a friend. He laughs, he says “like” the way young people do, he says “Right?,” as if we’re his co-conspirators. The voices and speaking styles of his best-known contributors (including Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, Mike Birbiglia, David Sedaris, and the late David Rakoff) are entertaining and theatrical. Though NPR had been making radio feel personable for many years before he came along, Glass has made it feel familiar—or, dare I say, relatable—to a younger generation. Now that podcasts are ubiquitous, that sensibility doesn’t feel as rare as it once did. But Glass helped pioneer it. And his sense of humor is key.
Monica Bill Barnes & Company were relatable to him. “They see themselves as entertainers in a way that dance does not—they are truly out for fun—and in a way that a lot of journalism does not,” he said. “I’d never been to a dance show where it was funny. It wasn’t about an esoteric idea of how to move people through space or how to use time and music in space. There was nothing theoretical about it.” Once he got to know the company, he understood better the “deep level of chops” required to create the feeling of, “ ‘Oh, we’re just up here making this funny little thing for you.’ ” That, too, felt familiar. “I work with some of the best radio reporters and editors in the country, but it’s all in the service of creating a sense like, ‘Oh, I’m just sitting down and chatting with you about this thing.’ Their casual friendliness on the surface was undergirded with like a tremendous infrastructure and scaffolding of technique that you could feel when you sat in the audience. I respected it and felt like: These people are my kin in some way. I also thought in a basic, guttural way: If I like this, everybody who likes our show is going to like this. And they’re going to have the same feeling that I’m having.” He laughed. “The surprising feeling of like, Wait a second, I think maybe I’m sophisticated enough to like dance!”
Much of what he saw that night has been folded into “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host.” “They had as part of their repertoire this dance that we put into the show where they dance to a Dean Martin song about Vegas,” he said. “And they’re dressed in suits, like men, and there’s a lot of, like, punching, and falling on the ground, and the lyrics to the song are this jokey kind of, ‘My wife’s so crazy! She loves gettin’ pregnant! And I’m goin’ to Vegas, and I’m not gonna bring her!’ At times it feels like they’re playing the man in the marriage, and at times it feels like they’re playing the woman in the marriage, and the whole thing feels like a celebration of being that kind of guy, but then at times it feels like it’s totally a critique of that kind of guy, but it’s also about the joy_ _of being in Las Vegas, and being out to do whatever the fuck you want, and so it takes you all over the map, and it’s not a story that you would tell on the radio. It’s more like a visual poem on a bunch of things, with the elements of a story.”
A story, Glass said, has traditional things like plot and characters—“but there’s also just the world of the stories. Some stories are better stories because the collection of props and moments and feelings is just a pleasing one to live in. You know? You just want to kind of hang around. Like, there are certain books you want to hang around in.” Monica Bill Barnes & Company, he said, “choose, in a way, like a really good writer does, like a Michael Chabon does, where the way he’s peopling those stories and the way he’s peopling that world are so particular and so designed for your pleasure.”
This reminded me of a passage from Chabon’s “Wonder Boys,” in which the hero, Grady Tripp, has a twenty-six-hundred-page novel whose world he can’t stop creating—there are too many “buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming.” He wants to keep hanging around in it, so he keeps on going. It occurred to me that Glass is creating a similar pleasurable world, ever expanding, in which more and more like-minded souls are welcomed in, even indulged, and encouraged to hang around.
And he intends to keep at it—doing what he does best and also trying new things. “I’m thinking of moving on to improv comedy,” he said. “I’ve never said these words out loud. It’s been a secret thought for like a month and a half.”
