“Tell me a story.” That’s been a human desire since prehistoric times as tales have been spoken from person to person and passed from place to place, even before they were written down. The Epic of Gilgamesh, about an actual Sumerian king from 5,000 years ago, might be the oldest known story. We credit the Greek poet Homer with writing the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 8th century B.C., but those tales of gods, heroes and men were surely told and retold for centuries before that. More than a millennium ago in Persia, the tales of One Thousand and One Nights were credited to the fictional storyteller Scheherazade, a woman who preserved her life night after night with storytelling skills, forestalling a murderous husband by cutting short her stories and forcing him to come back another day to learn the outcome. In England around the same time, a storyteller recorded the saga of the hero Beowulf as an alliterative poem clearly derived from spoken words.
Down the generations stories have been shared — fairytales collected by the Brothers Grimm, for instance, or folk tales from slaves in the American South assembled by Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus stories. Mark Twain spun yarns, as popular in his public performances as they were in print, and humorist Will Rogers took to the radio to cultivate an immense following for his homespun narratives in the 1920s and 1930s. A Prairie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor and his public radio stories about the denizens of Lake Wobegon continue this tradition, and radio producer Ira Glass’ This American Life offers weekly broadcasts and podcasts of unique voices and personal stories that captivate.
The Moth
That brings us to The Moth, a storytelling institution that began on a porch in Georgia in the 1980s, when George Dawes Green gathered friends to swap stories as moths fluttered in and out of a hole in a screen door. In the 1990s he recreated these get-togethers in his New York City living room, but the gatherings soon outgrew his home and moved to nearby bars. In 1997, Dawes founded a storytelling organization that produced events in cities across America. Today these “true stories told live” are adored by listeners of The Moth Radio Hour on hundreds of public radio stations (heard locally at 8 p.m. on Sundays on WVXU-FM 91.7) and podcasts. The Moth’s simple premise: “Everyone’s got a story. What’s yours?”Dawes applies the term “raconteur” to storytellers that listeners love, citing the classic example of Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 recording, “Alice’s Restaurant,” a true musical monologue that evolved with each performance. A raconteur such as Guthrie is “a person who tells anecdotes in a skillful and amusing way.” The personal warmth and essential truth brought by The Moth speakers, everyday people whose first-person stories are rooted in their own lives, are what attracts people to such programs and events — not unlike moths drawn to a flame.
True Cincinnati Stories
The Moth inspired Dave Levy and Jeff Groh to launch True Theatre in 2010. The pair knew each other from theater gigs. Levy, a computer programmer for Kroger, is an occasional actor and theater sound designer; Groh, who leads the New School Montessori in North Avondale, is also an actor and stage director. They knocked around ideas for a performance-oriented project to bring people together and found common ground in storytelling as practiced by The Moth. “Our idea lay dormant for number of years,” Levy says, “but Jeff called me up one day in 2010 to say he’d been speaking with Eric Vosmeier at Know Theatre, who offered their bar space. I said, ‘Let’s give this a shot.’ We talked to Eric about getting a date on the calendar, and he suggested we do four dates and make a season of it. We had no idea if anyone would come to our first show, let alone four. One (show) meant a half-assed approach; four (shows) meant we developed a logo, made posters and planned out a year ahead. We came up with themes.” They latched onto holidays for their first season — trueFEAR happened close to Halloween, trueBEGINNINGS came right after New Year’s in 2011, trueFOOLISHNESS was linked to April Fools’ Day and trueINDEPENDENCE was the topic right after the Fourth of July. Each evening features live musical interludes between the stories. “Our first show sold out after the box office opened on the evening of the show,” Levy says, “the second show before we opened the box office, the third show weeks in advance. We’ve been running strong since.” They’re in the midst of their sixth season.
“We hopped on a nerve that had been touched on a national level with the popularity of programs like The Moth,” Groh says. “It was a vacuum in people’s lives in Cincinnati. They could listen to podcasts, but there was no opportunity to experience stories live.” True Theatre and several other local programs are filling that vacuum today. Groh and Levy’s endeavor continues to flourish.
Their events are presented at Know Theatre’s Underground Bar, supported by Know’s Jackson Street Market, which provides fledgling arts organizations with space to perform, as well as marketing, box office services and technical staff. “Their support is great,” Levy says. “We don’t have a stage manager or anyone to do sound and lights; they provide that, manage tickets and run the bar — so we don’t have to worry about those elements. People have said we should go to a larger space. Our response: ‘But we’d have to leave the Know.’”
True Theatre’s quarterly themed programs continue to sell out; admission is $18. On Jan. 11, trueFOOD featured five storytellers: Patricia Van Skaik, a devoted foodie, discussed her son’s unadventurous attitudes about eating; Mark Gosson and Stacey Roberts shared a story about diving into deep-frying; Dan Phares offered up his foray into vegetable gardening and canning, a surprising connection with earlier generations of his family; Nyah Higgins described her evolution from homelessness to JameriSol, her Jamaican-inspired food and beverage business; and Dr. Jack Rubinstein talked about vegetarianism, as a child of carnivorous parents and as the parent of a meat-eating child. True Theatre’s season continues on April 25 with trueGAY and concludes on July 18 with trueANIMAL. A seventh season is in the works. (More info at truetheatre.com.)
The Art of Storytelling
A storyteller stands alone in front of a crowd of strangers. She or he shares a personal reminiscence, the telling of which becomes an adventure that’s both frightening and exhilarating. The Moth’s Green says this is not for the faint-hearted. In an interview with The Rumpus, he pointed out, “It’s not like performing in the sense of when an actor goes up to perform and uses a script. The raconteur is going up there without a script, without an interviewer, without anything but himself and 10 minutes. It’s a terrifying thing to do.”
Levy and Groh coach storytellers to speak naturally without memorization or detailed notes. “At first we were tempted to over-craft stories and stylize them to perfect 10-minute episodes,” Groh says. “What we learned was that the more we tried to do that, the more the story crumbled and the storyteller became more self-conscious. It lost the kind of feel you get when you’re sitting across the dinner table from someone or you’re at a bar, very freely sharing a funny or poignant moment from your life. The energy, rawness and flexibility — these are things people love — a kind of unrehearsed story. We try to capture that as much as possible.”
They solicit stories around each True Theatre theme (they’ve had as many as 15 applicants), pick five speakers and hold one-on-one rehearsals. “We provide feedback, but we reiterate that the story belongs to them,” he says. “We make suggestions. But we tell them that the story needs to feel right to them and they need to own it. It needs to have room to breathe.”
“We host a dinner at one of our homes the weekend prior to the show where we invite everybody,” Levy says. “They can bring a guest and our musicians come, too. Throughout the evening, we’ll eat, have wine, maybe desserts and the storytellers take turns telling their stories. It doubles as a rehearsal and an opportunity to get to know each other. When they go onstage on Monday night, they’ve had an audience.”
“We thought this was going to be a one-time thing for our first show,” Groh says, “but in the middle of that first evening, we realized this was something we wanted to keep as a tradition. In a microcosmic way, it brought what Dave and I were really looking for when we started the program, opening up a door into other people’s lives in an intimate setting — around a dinner table or sitting outside. We would have some music, some wine and share stories. It was a chance to have conversations about how the story reminded you of your own life. Or to ask questions.”
That encouragement of the community has struck a resonant thread across Greater Cincinnati as other storytelling programs have taken off around town.
More Local Stories
Additional local true-story events have varied formats and concepts. Some bring forward well-known Cincinnatians to talk about what they’re up to, while others feature everyday people. Some are anchored in an institution or shaped around themes important to the life of the city, lining up speakers to articulate something personal that people will be excited to hear.
On a chilly Sunday evening in January, The Cincinnati Enquirer picked up on the storytelling phenomenon and used its media power to turn out an overflow crowd in a 400-person ballroom at The Phoenix downtown with their program Cincinnati StoryTellers. Storytellers, emceed by columnist John Faherty, talked about what they love about Cincinnati — chef David Falk, Cincinnati City Council member Yvette Simpson, mixologist Molly Wellmann, entrepreneur James Marable, designer and marketer Jason Snell, attorney Aftab Pureval and even CityBeat columnist Kathy Y. Wilson.
Cincinnati StoryTellers has evolved into more or less quarterly free-admission sessions at The Phoenix, beginning at 6 p.m. with a cash bar and food for sale, and stories commencing at 7. Last April’s event was LGBTQ-themed — gay marriage Supreme Court litigant Jim Obergefell was one of the speakers — and an evening in July used the All-Star Game as its jumping-off point. October offered a set of “Downtown Dreamers.” The Enquirer’s next program, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” happens Feb. 3, hosted by food and restaurant writer Polly Campbell. It features Todd Kelly, executive chef at Orchids at Palm Court; Elias Leisring of Eli’s BBQ; Corey Ward of Tom+Chee; Michelle Brown or Jag’s Steak and Seafood; Sharon Butler of The BonBonerie; and Matt Cuff of Just Q’n Barbecue. (Find #CincyStorytellers on Facebook.)
About a year ago, Shawn Braley launched Cincy Stories at MOTR Pub in Over-the-Rhine with an evening featuring Cincinnati City Council member Chris Seelbach and mixologist Molly Wellmann. Subsequent bimonthly programs happened in May, September (UC president Santa Ono was a speaker) and November. Cincy Stories’ mission is “building community through narrative.” The website says, “Stories allow for walls to come down and empathy and understanding to be built in their place.” Cincy Stories produced a program on Tuesday, Feb. 2, featuring speakers including The Enquirer’s engagement editor Katie Vogel and Derrick Braziel, co-founder of the entrepreneurship hub MORTAR. (Videos of some of Cincy Stories’ speakers are featured on the website, cincystories.net.)
Last Sunday, Jan. 31, was an installment of Findlay to the People at Over-the-Rhine’s Findlay Market about “Good Intentions.” Speakers included chef Jean-Robert de Cavel, opening a bakery shop at Findlay this year, and De Stewart, proprietor of Colonel De Gourmet Herbs & Spices, a popular Findlay stop. OTR activist and market supporter Jai Washington has organized these monthly Sunday afternoon programs around themes inspired by the market and life in Over-the-Rhine, including “Generations,” “Organic” and “Abundance.” (More info at findlaymarket.org/events/findlay-storytelling-series.)
In Northside, the go-to spot for storytelling is the craft brewery Urban Artifact, which has hosted Bespoken Live every two months or so for the past year. The brewery’s Facebook page says, “We discovered an ancient truth: Something magical happens when a group of people get together and share their stories. When we laugh, cry and dream together, we realize we’re not so alone in this life. We believe listening to each others’ stories has the unique power to start an outbreak of contagious hope.” Bespoken Live’s next free program, stories about luck, is set for March 4 at 8 p.m. (More info at artifactbeer.com.)
Filling The Need
With all this storytelling going on, it’s apparent that novelist Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) was accurate when he observed, “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need the most in the world.” True Theatre’s Groh says there doesn’t seem to be much crossover of audiences, yet. “We’re getting close to hitting some kind of tipping point,” he says. “We need to have a calendar of storytelling shows and make ourselves visible to one another.”Groh and Levy continue to seek good storytellers for their series; they sometimes have to go hunting. Looking at who’s been speaking, it’s apparent that some people who are good at this are making the rounds. But there’s room for many more. So what’s your story? Are you ready to tell it? Audiences are waiting. ©
This article appears in Feb 3-10, 2016.
