The New Yorker:

A one-man show, a box of old stories, and the strange intimacy of talking to a room full of strangers.

By Adam Gopnik

Writers who contemplate going onstage tend to fall into two camps: those who know better and those who should but don’t. Of the second kind, The New Yorker has, over its hundred years, produced quite a few. Robert Benchley, one of the magazine’s founding voices (if on permanent loan from the Algonquin circle), was perhaps more famous in his day as a performer than as a writer. His sketch “The Treasurer’s Report” became a classic. He was eventually hired to narrate the musical-comedy film “Road to Utopia”—no small compliment, or challenge, given that it meant adding laughs to a prime Bob Hope–Bing Crosby comedy. Alexander Woollcott, another early contributor who left his title, if not his campy imprint, on Shouts & Murmurs, went on to play himself in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” The character, Sheridan Whiteside, was based on Woollcott and intended to mock him—until he took the part himself, turning satire into homage by his living presence as a pre-mocked subject, like jeans sold pre-distressed. More recently, Calvin Trillin performed two funny and affecting solo shows drawn from his own work—“Words, No Music” and “About Alice.” Lawrence Wright has done a couple, too, including the more sombre “The Human Scale.” And, of course, there’s been a steady trickle of gifted performers who’ve leapt into our pages, and then leapt back out again, as slightly reformed characters, or at least more literary-minded comedians.

To come to the point—and it’s not a point that will survive an interminable buildup—I joined the company of these writers long ago, and am now returning to it. As it happens, I spent a good chunk of my childhood onstage, where I was, for a time, the Shirley Temple of the Philadelphia avant-garde theatre—a boast few could make, or would want to. At nine, I was cast as Galileo’s apprentice in a mid-sixties production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” one of the first shows directed by a newly minted impresario, André Gregory—already as sleek as a borzoi, with the same mesmerizing patter that would later delight the world in “My Dinner with André.”

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