In 1980 I wrote and performed a piece called Men Inside. It wasn’t “stand-up comedy” or a “showcase” or “performance art.” It was a play for one person. I had no intention of ever making another like it. I couldn’t imagine that this initial exercise would morph into a series of solos that I (and others) would perform in venues across the United States and the world. Wake Up and Smell the Coffee is the sixth in this series of full-length solos. When I created Wake Up, I put it together pretty much the same way I did when I made Men Inside twenty years before. What follows is a description of how I first came to make these solos and my method for making them.

Around 1978, having arrived in New York three years earlier, I met the actor David Warrilow, a charter member of the Mabou Mines theatre company. He had the most perfect speaking voice, so I asked him for some actorly advice on how to improve mine. He told me to get a tape recorder, tape my voice and listen to the results. He said I could be my own teacher.

I bought a cheap plastic cassette recorder and taped some off-the-cuff ramblings. I wasn’t working off any particular text or play, so I improvised as I spoke. For instance, I’d “do” a southern-style voice. I didn’t try for any specific dialect, I was just screwing around. I’d launch into a Sam Shepardesque monologue about fast cars and guns and liquor without thinking too much about what I was saying. The words flowed.

Later, when I listened to the tape I realized I had been improvising a little monologue. I hadn’t consciously planned to create a character but someone waiting inside me had spoken up.

I made more tapes. As these improvs mounted up, I decided to catalog the “people who live inside me.” I sorted them out and came up with twelve distinct male archetypes, ranging from a threatening street punk (“Nice Shoes”) to a redneck deer hunter (“Rodeo”) to a little boy playing (“Superman!”). All of these characters were the product of free-form vocal improv. I wasn’t looking “out there” for characters, I was looking “inside.”

This gallery of characters, this set of monologues, became Men Inside. I performed it first in 1980 at Franklin Furnace, a small loft space. Lots of people (fifty?) showed up and dug it. Later (after touring and playing clubs for two years), I performed it in a more polished version, at Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival.