So when the opportunity came up for me to tour as a solo act with a group of other performers, including the original Rock Steady Crew and Fab Five Freddy (the first rap/break-dance/deejay gang to hit the Midwest), I grabbed it. I decided Men Inside was the best piece to do. While on tour, one venue billed me as a “comedian.” Because the audience expected to laugh, they did.

I liked this. I liked the idea of acting-out a dozen obnoxious characters, pissing off the audience but drawing them in as well. I liked the energy level of solo, it felt limitless. I kept working on the characters, refining them, giving them more dimension, finding the comedic beats, the aggressive beats.

I decided to focus my attention on my solo work, treating the pieces as one-person plays. I wasn’t always sure where I was going with the new material, but to paraphrase Wallace Shawn: “I find out what I want to write about by writing it.”

I want to get theoretical here for a page or two and discuss acting and character and, ultimately, writing for the stage, at least as it applies to what I do.

Theatre is character, everything else is window-dressing. It’s not the terrific story that makes Shakespeare great, it’s the characters. It’s not the atmosphere that makes the Greek tragedies awesome, it’s the characters. And the same is true with Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams. (The exceptions might be Beckett and Pinter. Maybe.)

What makes a character tick is fascinating because we are all characters in the way we see ourselves and the way we see others. “Character” is our way of conceptualizing who we are. Character is what we create every time we interact with another. In his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman says we learn how to act to be the people we are. “Acting” in day-to-day life is more than behaving, it is imitating, it is constructing. When I am interacting with other people, I am consciously or unconsciously imitating the behavior of other people I’ve known. And to take it one step further, because I live in a world of mass media, I experience all sorts of people who are not only in my life but who I “know” from movies or TV.