Interviewing the Dead, a Fictional Autobiography
John Starrs, Johnny Mars, and Theater of the Catbird
The Rhinoceros Theater Festival, now in its 13th year, isn’t the place for solo artists who expect to be coddled. All the performers, from the 30-year veteran to the greenest neophyte, get the same things: an empty stage and a time slot. If they need someone to direct, produce, design, stage-manage, or type up a program–even black out the lights–they have to do it themselves or bring in a friend. Many go without. The festival is not for theorists but for those who can roll up their sleeves and bang together a piece from scratch.
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Onstage Meyers’s beguiling mix of east-coast cool and midwest gawkiness perfectly embodies his literary style, which artfully combines aloof sophistication and wide-eyed wonder. His newest story, Interviewing the Dead, a Fictional Autobiography, achieves this delicate balance with more finesse, humor, and psychological depth than anything he’s written in recent years. In Meyers’s trademark fashion, dreamlike elements creep in almost unnoticed, transforming a quaint, quirky episode of marital malaise into a hallucinogenic romp through Judgment Day.
For all its fantastic elements, Interviewing the Dead is deeply poignant, astutely capturing the psychology of inertia, expressed not only in the stranded turkeys of the dead but in the pitiful marriage of Meyers’s alter ego. “Beety and I live inside our personal capsule,” he says. “Together we generate enough force to rip at each other, but not enough to tear us apart.” This easily recognizable paralysis gives the tale sufficient weight to keep it from evaporating into pure fancy.
Starrs’s tale of teenage chicanery–copping fake IDs from a friend, then heading up to Wisconsin for a marathon of drinking–is unadorned. He never bothers with literary flourishes or symbolism. The events of one self-indulgent day are enough for him, although he heads off on a dozen tangents. Whose car did he drive that day? Perhaps it was his father’s or his brother’s. No, his brother never had a car. His father used to own a Model T. One time he flipped it over in a ditch, grabbed the chassis in both hands, righted the car, and went on his way.
