The Boston Celebrity Series presented its latest performance, “Ira Glass: Reinventing Radio,” this past Sunday, continuing is 75-year long tradition of inviting talented performers from a variety of fields to Boston. On March 9, a packed house at Symphony Hall gathered to see a man with a familiar voice: Glass is the host of the wildly successful radio program, “This American Life,” which has been nationally syndicated since 1996.
However, a unique start to the performance kept all waiting slightly longer than anticipated to see the 55-year-old Glass, who started his career in radio as a 19-year-old intern. With house lights dimmed, he played a clip from his radio show describing a woman’s experience as her house was lifted up in a tornado. This introduction — with its complete absence of accompanying imagery — interestingly mimicked the experience one has listening to the radio. After the clip was over, Glass had the lights raised and made the first of what would prove to be many minor jabs at himself. The self-deprecating host humorously greeted the audience by noting that he thought they “would have looked better too.”
With evident skill, Glass proceeded to intertwine a variety of clips from “This American Life” into his lecture, describing the art of storytelling and what he believes sets his show apart from others. Armed with a music stand, a handful of printed notes and an iPad, Glass introduced the audience to the concepts he believes constitute a good program — namely, telling a more complete story than the one that other major news producers are providing.
An example was “Somewhere in the Arabian Sea” (2002). The prologue of the “This American Life” episode — which is devoted to detailing life on an aircraft carrier that supports bombing missions in Afghanistan — focuses on a sailor whose sole duty was to load the vending machines onboard the carrier. Glass emphasized that other news outlets only give attention to the military agenda of the sailors. He and his team, conversely, wanted to highlight the often forgotten aspects of life on a carrier with a 5,000-person crew.
In a similar vein, Glass played part of a segmented entitled “Just Keep Breathing” from another “This American Life” installment, “What Doesn’t Kill You” (2012). In this clip, a woman recounts being attacked by a shark when she was a teenager vacationing in New Zealand. After being taken to the hospital, the doctor told the teenager’s parents that she would be fine. But it did not take long for the girl, as she began to experience strange and painful symptoms, to realize that something was amiss. Throughout the following night, she struggled to convince her parents to take her back to the doctor for treatment. On the surface this sounds like an engaging, if random, experience that most listeners would likely not be able to relate to. Yet, Glass showed his storytelling expertise in the segment by tying woman’s experience to something larger: many teenagers have experienced the pressing desire to feel understood and to convince adults that what they are saying is correct.
True to the title of his talk, Glass further reinvented the listening experience of his audience by incorporating a preview of his upcoming show, “Ira Glass: One Radio Host, Two Dancers.” As he discussed his approach to radio storytelling, Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass (of the dance company, Monica Bill Barnes and Company) joined him onstage to dance to his recordings from the radio show. Though quirky and innovative, this visual addition seemed to contradict his message earlier in the talk that emphasis should be on the power of the emotion in the words (and not on visual imagery).
A confident speaker, the most disappointing aspect of the event was Glass’s focus in the second half of his talk on expletive-laced storytelling. Though it aroused some laughs from the audience, overall, the beginning of the evening was more insightful. It was there that Glass guided his audience through the process of creating his art form. The second half, unfortunately, focused more on instances of crude humor in his work throughout the years. The base humor and seemingly random addition of dancers took away from what overall could have proven to be a much more enjoyable listening experience.
