In N.Y. Nightspots, Writers Mix Page and Stage

Their props are lecterns, overhead projectors and gin and tonics. Sartorially they tend toward sweater vests, although occasionally--when it feels right--they don loincloths. What they do isn’t traditional spoken word, and it’s not quite improv. They’re not the brash types who mix it up at poetry slams, work their shtick at open-mike comedy nights or dabble in performance art.

They’re people who work in the Conde Nast Building or spend their days in Brooklyn apartments revising their next novels: young writers, editors and agents, all leading typical lives of manuscript queries, story meetings and book launches. And yet they have an itch to get out there and perform.

In growing numbers, these bookish men and women are improvising a new fringe art form in New York’s nightclubs, off-Broadway theaters and performance spaces, one that toys with the cliches of literary gatherings, shakes down writerly stereotypes and redefines what’s funny both onstage and in print.

“Readings can be pretty dry affairs,” says writer John Hodgman. “It can feel like someone is reading a book report in seventh grade.” A former agent at Writer’s House and a contributor to Men’s Journal, the New York Times Magazine and the Paris Review, Hodgman grew impatient with standard-issue literary events and sought outlets that could, as he puts it, generate “strange moments of sheer beauty that cannot occur on the page.”

One of his first performance forays was at an event celebrating the second issue of Dave Eggers’ upstart McSweeney’s magazine in April 1999. The well-attended, irony-drenched gala--held at Jing Fong, a cavernous Chinatown dim sum restaurant--featured Hodgman and various cohorts reading his humor piece “Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?” attired, like refugees from a 1950s Princeton revue, in caveman garb. Hodgman was further inspired when one of his McSweeney’s associates, short-story writer Arthur Bradford, took to smashing guitars at his readings. This, Hodgman argues, “was exactly what literature needed.”

Drawing participants from the McSweeney’s pool of contributors, Hodgman has gone on to curate an increasingly conspicuous reading and performance series called the Little Grey Book Lectures. Inspired by the early 20th century Little Blue Book pamphlets published by E. Julius-Haldeman of Girard, Kan. (with such wide-ranging titles as “How to Make All Kinds of Candy” and “The Soviet Constitution”), Hodgman’s lectures take place at the Brooklyn bar Galapagos and have addressed such themes as “How to Begin an Important Project,” “How to Spell Several Common Words” and, in the wake of Sept. 11, “How We Can Possibly Go On.”

As emcee, Hodgman sets the pseudo-reflective tone with his wry, hangdog demeanor (he has the vaguely besieged aura of an Ivy League professor uncertain of his tenure), while his guests--editors and writers, cartoonists and actors--find amusing ways to jump beyond the limits of the lectern.

At the “Hints on Public Singing” evening, Elizabeth Gilbert presented her GQ profile of Hank Williams III, concluding with an “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” sing-along. And when TimeOut New York sports editor Brett Martin delivered a history of the “bouncing ball,” a demonstration was given, with the aid of projectors and the lilting strains of “The Rainbow Connection.”

Commenting on the ubiquity of the lecture format among the current crop of readers, performers and storytellers, Mike Albo offers a curious observation: “I feel like graduate school is the new punk.” Albo, the author of “Hornito: My Lie Life,” a novel about growing up gay in suburbia, explains: “There’s this group of people who are sensitive about having gone to too much school, and so there’s a reaction to it--a sense of playfulness toward lectures and bouncing away from it.”

As an undergrad at the University of Virginia in the early ‘90s, Albo turned to performance as a way of blowing off steam. But it was a later bout with academia--in the form of the prestigious Columbia University MFA program in creative writing--that got Albo performing in earnest around 1995. “I was workshopped out of my brain,” Albo says. “So when I started doing this, it was in reaction to the workshoppy writing world.”

Albo’s acclaimed performance, “Please Everything Burst,” which he took to London last summer, takes the form of rapid-fire monologues that channel the hysterical patter running through our lives: the breathless sloganeering of advertising, the confessional babblings of our best friends and the mile-a-minute surge of answering-machine messages.

Several of Albo’s monologues, which are often created in collaboration with former Talk editor Virginia Heffernan, found their way into “Hornito,” proving that it’s possible for a writer to successfully mesh his stage work with work on the page. (Albo does admit, however, that depicting an audience’s ecstasy at a Wang Chung concert is easier done in person.)

The phenomenon is catching on in Los Angeles as well--though not in quite the same numbers--particularly at Highways and the HBO Workspace, where Albo has made appearances. Sandra Tsing-Loh is perhaps the best known of the L.A. writers-turned-performers. Acclaimed for her humorous insights and wit, the Valley resident is the author of such works as “A Year in Van Nuys” and “Depth Takes a Holiday.”

“She’s evolved from an amusing woman that sat on a stool and told stories into a real performer,” says David Schweizer, a local theater director who has worked with Loh. “She loves it.”

Bill Wasik, an assistant editor at Harper’s magazine, would agree that, at literary events, being funny saves the day. “Readings and lectures can, as you know, be stultifyingly boring,” he says. After co-founding the underground humor review the Weekly Week in Boston, Wasik moved to New York in 1999 when his piece “What Would Journey Do?”--which found helpful living advice in the lyrics of Journey songs--ran in Harper’s.

Since then, Wasik has been turning up at various New York events, including Hodgman’s Little Grey Book Lectures, and at Block That Kick, a Lower East Side cabaret series that he helped curate last summer with the alternative comic Eugene Mirman, an old pal from the Weekly Week. The pairing of the mild-mannered Wasik with the gonzo Mirman gave the two an opportunity to skewer a New York audience’s expectations about high and low humor. A typical performance found Wasik presenting his hilarious piece “The Bawdy Shakespeare,” in which he waxed professorial on various X-rated passages from the Bard, nearly all of them invented.

“Print comedy,” Wasik contends, “is somewhat of a moribund enterprise. Put a great piece of satire from the New Yorker up against a great episode of ‘Mr. Show’--it’s just hard to compete with the sheer comic power of the latter.” Wasik says he’s trying to infuse literary gatherings with the same mad energy. As for Mirman, he appreciates the influx of bookish types onto his turf. “A lot of their stuff,” he says, “is funnier than the stand-up shows.”

The staged storytelling evenings of writer Jonathan Ames also have a certain telegenic appeal. The author of several books, including the novels “The Extra Man” and “The Exhibitionist,” and a former columnist for the New York Press, Ames is, in some ways, the reigning king of New York’s performing writers. He has appeared at the downtown music venue Fez more times than anyone except the Mingus Big Band, the club’s house act, and created a successful one-man show at P.S. 122. (He’s appeared in Los Angeles at Uncabaret, a performance comedy series at the HBO Workspace.)

Ames is an occasional boxer, and his ring exploits as “The Herring Wonder” have been chronicled in the New York Times. Equal parts John Updike and Andy Kaufman, Ames is known for asking his audience nosy questions about their bedroom habits, dancing in a raincoat to Serge Gainsbourg songs, appearing onstage with the inventor of a prosthetic device called the Mangina, distributing mimeographs of his balding pattern and, as he describes it, “shooting chakra life-spirit beams into people out of my forehead.”

Performing now for 11 years, Ames was inspired by monologist Spalding Gray and by a desire to “give people some joy, some catharsis” in the context of a literary event. Ames found straightforward readings overly structured, preferring to emulate “an old-fashioned raconteur in front of the fireplace.” Though his outlandish stage presentations aren’t exactly hearth-like, they are startlingly intimate, soul-bearing affairs in which the buttoned-down writer gets to go off the deep end. “I’m pretty quiet and isolated,” Ames explains. “But then onstage I get to experience this transformation of my personality. It’s the hambone.”

Nell Casey is familiar with this phenomenon. “Writers, I thought, were this shy breed that write because they don’t do well in structures or formats or with people. And then, suddenly, they’re up there with top hats and canes.” Casey, an editor at Self magazine and the daughter of novelist John Casey, is referring to the transformation of writers--and firemen, lawyers and assorted everyday people--that takes place at the Moth, New York’s roving “urban storytelling” evening. Casey serves as the Moth’s general counsel and has appeared on its stages, which have attracted the high-profile likes of George Plimpton, Frank McCourt and Roy Blount Jr.

Created in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, the Moth holds its themed evenings in venues ranging from velvet-roped nightclubs to the Museum of Natural History. Each storyteller has 12 minutes to do his or her thing, at which point a violinist signals the end. In connection with her 2001 anthology “Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression,” Casey was host of a Moth event devoted to melancholy that found Andrew Solomon, the author of “The Noonday Demon,” telling a sobering story about depression yet unable to resist the urge to crack jokes and be a ham. The stage bug is contagious, Casey suggests. “It’s definitely shown me that if I had two lives, I’d try to act in the other one.”

Casey says that preparing for the Moth is quite unlike writing one of her essays and that, in fact, the experience can be utterly terrifying. Some writers have flat-out refused to participate. The movement toward jazzed-up readings, literary cabarets and in-your-face monologues does leave some people cold.

“It’s all about being a stand-up comedian and getting tittering laughter,” says David Knowles, author of the novel “The Third Eye.” “I read a story that was vaguely satiric at one of these things, and no one laughed once. I completely bombed. I hated it.”

But for other writers and editors, getting out from under a manuscript and putting on a show is both challenging and liberating, a way to bring the fresh air of improvisation to the staid literary life.

“I’m just playing this whole thing by ear,” Ames says, discussing his newfound infatuation with Richard Pryor and his lead role in “The Girl Under the Waves,” a movie recently picked up by the Independent Film Channel.

“I don’t have any clear-cut ambitions with any of this. I’m just winging it.”