A few weeks after he saw Derek DelGaudio’s show In & Of Itself for the first time, Stephen Colbert took him out for a drink to talk about tightrope walking.
In & Of Itself ran as an Off-Broadway show for more than a year, and before it ended in August 2018, director Frank Oz captured the production in a one-of-a-kind film that’s now on Hulu.
I assume that some of the people, maybe most of the people who are watching this right now, are watching it because they have seen the film and they’re interested in your or my thoughts about this.
No, obviously it’s a film about identity and how we are much more than what meets the eye.
Sure, yeah, exactly, and how we feel on the inside might match the exterior or how it might not, and how we are beholden to one another in how we shape each other’s identities.
When we first started talking about doing this film, after I had first seen the show and you and I went out for some drinks a couple weeks later and talked about tightrope walking essentially, like doing work that’s challenging and certainly emotionally dangerous for the person who is doing it because you’re taking a lot of risks in the kind of work you’re doing.
The way that you described the act of putting yourself out there, whether it be literally on a stage or just out there in the sense of putting yourself in the world to be seen by others, to be known by others, and to let them give you a name, you understood that so well and what I was trying to say with that and with the show.
But if they know, if you’re saying it to someone that believes they’re a fiction, then it relieves you of that pressure of saying it, because if its not real to them, it may as well not be real at all.
It’s hard to see through that you were in character in that context back in the old days, like at The Daily Show, before Colbert Report, you would interview people under a context where they thought it was one thing and it was actually something else.
The fiction of it and the fantasy of it and the idea that this was all make-believe is what allowed the experience to exist, in a sense, because the context they thought they were experiencing, it was different than the work.
So it allows you to play against that when the things that they believe are fiction turn out to be true, it transforms their experience in a way that they’re not grappling with, with fictions that they would like to be true.
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