Interview: Don Reed of GOING OUT at The Marsh Is Thrilled to Be Back Where He Belongs, Performing Live Onstage in Berkeley

The Marsh could not have chosen anyone more fitting for its return to live in-person performances than longtime fan-favorite Don Reed, whose partnership with The Marsh encompasses numerous hit shows over the past dozen or so years. Beginning on Saturday, August 21st and continuing on weekends through Sunday, September 19th, Reed will perform his brand-new one-man show, Going Out, at The Marsh Berkeley. This funny and moving work exploring his own experiences in getting through the pandemic couldn't be more timely. Audiences can expect Reed's trademark style of finding the humor in true tales from his own sometimes-painful experiences, and throwing in some serious dance moves along the way. To maintain a safe environment for everyone in the theater, proof of vaccination and the wearing of masks while in the building will be required. For tickets and additional information, visit TheMarsh.org.

Reed has enjoyed an unusually multi-faceted career onstage and onscreen as an actor-comedian-writer-producer-director, going back to his performance in the seminal 1987 satirical film about racial stereotypes, Hollywood Shuffle, and a recurring role on the popular TV series A Different World. His most longstanding gig was as opening act/warm-up comedian for over a thousand episodes of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. At the same time, Reed has maintained a thriving theater career, creating and performing enormously popular solo shows that have run at The Marsh, Off-Broadway and elsewhere. I caught up with Reed last week over the phone from LA, just before he headed up to the Bay Area to begin performances at The Marsh. We talked about his excitement in returning to live performance and how he conceptualized his new show, and chatted about some of the highlights of his long career. In conversation, Reed is affable and forthcoming, with a veteran's natural ability to relate fascinating details from his many years in the showbiz trenches. The following conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

How does it feel to be getting back in front of a live audience again after all this time?

It's exhilarating. I did a lot of Zoom performing, probably more than most, cause some people are story tellers or comedians or speakers, and I was lucky enough to be able to do some standup comedy, a nice amount of storytelling and some diversity and inclusion speaking as well. So I've been performing a lot in a different form, but I'm really looking forward to being back onstage live and seeing those eyes and those faces and hearing those immediate sounds. Cause sometimes they turn the sound off when you do a virtual performance, and you don't know if they're laughing or emoting or not, so it'll be great to be back in front of people.

Let's talk about Going Out. What is the show about?

The show's about me standing in line for my second [vaccine] shot, and pondering everything that went on before, during and up to now, around the pandemic, which I call the "Pan-Pan" cause I try to keep it light. Or I call it the "Cooties-19." Now a whole other variant might be in play, I gotta think of some nickname for that. But it came about as a result of me spending the lion's share of it alone. I'm normally somehow a serial dater, kind of leap-frogging to the next relationship, and during the pandemic I was dating no one. I spent almost the entire thing solo, and so I had a lot of time to think about all this. So that's what the show is about, reflecting on "Hey, we can't go out." The first third of the show covers from the moment I heard about it into my adventures venturing out while everybody was terrified and some of the hilarious and moving things that happened with that, then flashing back to my love for going out that I got from my parents, and then the last third is where we are now and the hope for surviving and going beyond this.

Have you been able to work out any of the material in front of a live audience?

Because the show is autobiographical - I mean all of it's real, there's no manufactured elements - I've been trying it out in conversations with friends on the phone or Zoom. I'll just slip in a whole chunk and they go "That's hilarious! You should do that in a show!" and I'm like "It's interesting you mention that..." [laughs] So that's actually how I tested a great deal of the material.

And from doing so many solo shows (this is my 8th one), I know elements that resonate, I know spaces where you can be deeply dramatic and a funny line will be the release. I know certain structures that work. I'm not repeating anything from previous shows, but there are certain structures you learn over time as a playwright and as a performer that you know can deliver.

So much has happened in the world since your last live show, between the pandemic and the sort of racial reckoning we've been going through. Has that changed your approach in creating this new piece?

It did in that I'm addressing it more directly. I had some beats in earlier shows that kind of flashed on the past, like I discussed the day I was eight years, four months and eleven days old, when my father wailed in the living room and I didn't know what he was crying about, and he said "They killed him, baby, they killed him." And he was talking about Martin Luther King. I've had moments like that in my shows, but I didn't have much reckoning or statements about the now. There is a place on the back end of this show that addresses how I felt, how we felt, about the George Floyd tragedy, and how that brought me and a friend really close together. But it also kind of awakened America in a way that I think if we had been mobile, it might have gone in the normal pattern of like "Okay..." and then we go past that. In a way I think the pandemic helped in that respect.

Yeah, I feel like it's hopefully given us the ability to talk to each other about difficult issues, where in the past we would have felt like "Ooh... I don't really want to go there."

Exactly. Because we were going through something that was life or death, it opened to the space to talk about difficult things. Whereas we [normally] try to keep things kind of on the surface and "Isn't life fantastic?" We're all in a life-or-death situation, so a conversation about race and equity or inclusion seemed much easier. It's still a challenging conversation, but much easier compared to life and death.

The Marsh has been sort of an artistic home for you for a long time now. How did that relationship come about?

My first one-man show, East 14th, started in LA, was supposed to be 5 weeks, and turned into 5 months. I was approached by a gentleman to invest in a run Off-Broadway [which] went really well. It ran the entire summer of 2008. Then I knew I wanted to bring it home to Oakland and San Francisco, but I was a little afraid to because it was about my immediate family. I knew I had to have a conversation with my mother first. I said, "Mommy, I'm doing a show in Oakland." And she said, "Just a regular standup?" and I'm like [hesitantly] "Nooo..... My work has really grown. It's autobiographical. It's about us, about our family." She said, "About what?" I said, "About everything." There was a part in that show about my stepfather forcing us to be in a religion that rhymes with Jehovah's Fitnesses and my real father, who I didn't know was a pimp. My father had taken me to some girlfriends' houses when I was just a kid, and there was a lot of betrayal attached to that. So I said, "Mommy, I have something to tell you. There's something in the show that is very touchy and kind of difficult to explain." And she said, "Probably something about your father taking you over to his girlfriends' houses while I was at work?" And I was like "Yes." And she said, "Here's some more stuff for your show." and she gave me more material, and I thought "This is gonna work out OK."

So anyway, when I brought that show to the Bay Area, it was like a homecoming. It was really, really well-received. I expected it to run for 5 months, but it got extended 22 times, and then The Marsh approached me to commit to opening another location in Berkeley. They said, "If you would commit to running this show ongoing here, then whatever you create next maybe you start it here." And then they walked me through the theater in Berkeley, cause [back then] it was a San Francisco location only, and said, "We can make this commitment if you can commit." At the time I was at The Tonight Show with Jay Leno five days a week, and I was flying up every weekend to do Saturdays and Sundays, and that turned into a now 11-year relationship and 8 different shows.

It's been a very, very freeing experience. I mean, almost every theater requires to you go through some kind of vetting process of your work, and my relationship with [Marsh Artistic/Executive Director] Stephanie Weisman has been one of extreme creative trust. I did do the hard work to prove myself, but Stephanie has been an unbelievable creative partner in that she lets me fly free. Very few places on the planet will let you fly that free. If she sees something glaring, then she'll be like a dramaturg, you know make a few comments, but it's never a lot. She'll laser in on something like "Maybe you might want to think about this to give it time to breathe." So by the time we open, we've gotten to something fairly solid.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Robert Townsend, who you also have a long history with, from acting in his film Hollywood Shuffle to more recently co-producing his one-man show Living the Shuffle at The Marsh. How did you originally connect with him?

I was doing standup at a club called the Comedy Act Theatre [in LA]. It was a place where Black comedians went to perform and work out material who could not get regular spots at the Comedy Store or The Improv. A guy named Michael Williams opened it up. It started out as just like "Hey, I'm going to get some comedians, it'll be Thursday nights, and you know you're not going to get those primo spots every week at the big clubs, but I can guarantee you time here." So we started working out there, and it was me and Robert Townsend, Damon and Keenan Wayans, Martin Lawrence, Tommy Davidson, Robin Harris, Sinbad, just a ton of people - Jamie Foxx! - doing the best we could at the time. And then it started getting a name that this is a spot to see some really hot guys. So then Magic Johnson, Arsenio Hall, different athletes, entertainment people, lawyers, doctors, start coming and it became this 600 hundred people a night, Thursday night, packed, well-dressed, well-heeled, hilarious Black audience roaring. It was inclusive and people came from different areas. If you wanted to see authentic, real Black comedy, you'd come there.

Robert saw me performing there, and he started working on Hollywood Shuffle and said, "Hey, I got this project I'm doing and there's one of the characters you do in your act I want to write a part for." I was kind of impersonating my brother who became my sister, who first identified as gay, but was trans over time. I was doing an impersonation of her and that was incorporated into the movie and it was very funny, very well received, because I brought compassion to it. I wasn't just making fun, this is my sister who I love. After that launched, I was actually the first standup he introduced on his HBO special, Partners in Crime. There were four of those and then I was in his movie The Meteor Man and it continued on in that fashion, but we did some collaborating behind the camera in addition to performing.

Interestingly enough, how I ended up producing his one-man show was he saw an excerpt of a thing I won the NPR "Snap Judgment" Performance of the Year Award for, which was the story of my brother who became my sister, with all the humor and the tragedy that was attached. That's what made him say, after also seeing me Off-Broadway, "Don, I want you to co-produce this show with me." Interestingly, that character [portrayed] on a humorous level in Hollywood Shuffle [and subsequently] extrapolated into a real-world comedy and drama presentation for NPR, was the reason why the leap got made to co-produce his show. And I just realized that right now in this interview, that it went full circle in that fashion.

I didn't realize that your connection with Robert goes back to a comedy club with all those now-famous comedians. Sometimes when I interview performers, I feel like "Do you all know each other?!" Because so many of you have these shared histories that go way far back, before most audiences were even aware of you.

Yeah, everyone basically knows each other or is quite literally two degrees of separation, six isn't even necessary, in terms of the community of how close comedians are, and then Black comedians as well. Because our opportunities were equally limited, so we all ended up at the same spots.

I'm curious about your gig as warm-up comedian for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which you did over a thousand times. It's common knowledge that talk shows use comedians to warm up the audience, but we TV viewers never get to see those comedians. So what was that gig actually like?

I loved that job! Because I came from half-hour comedy, doing audience warmup for shows like Sister, Sister and Blossom, Frasier, Empty Nest, Golden Girls, and you know Different World was my first show. But I came from that world, and a half-hour show takes normally 3 to 4 hours to shoot, right? And then I went into the one-man show world, which is basically an hour and a half, or an hour ten minutes, of just you by yourself. But that's how I got Hollywood's attention in a different way. You know there's a line in Hollywood of standups that's really long, but the line of one-person solo shows is very short. The way I got on The Tonight Show's radar was being Off-Broadway, cause I was doing something different. They asked me if I still did warmup, and I said "Absolutely." Cause it's actually quite a lucrative job. It can be kind of golden handcuffs cause you can get caught up in it and do too much. You've got a home and some nice stuff, but then you're kind of locked into that.

But anyway, I did a thousand episodes. Because it was such a well-oiled machine, we finished an episode in 55 minutes. And all I had to do was 3 to 10 minutes a day, that's it. 3 to 10 minutes a day, with a dressing room, with someone who would bring cocktails for your guests, and being backstage and meeting everyone from sports to science to authors, each President of the United States while I was there, until 2014. Then I'd fly up to the Bay and go from a show that's not about me and me just setting things up to doing shows that were just me. It was quite a window of creative fulfillment.

You strike me as such a natural performer. When you're onstage and it's going really well, like you're just totally killing it, can you describe what that feels like?

I guess it's gotta be what surfing must be like - and I don't surf. It's like you're riding a wave that doesn't end, until the show ends. As opposed to maybe riding a wave, it ends, you go back out, catch the next wave, catch the next wave. It's one l-o-o-o-o-o-ng wave. And you're riding it for, you know, an hour fifteen minutes. It's hard to explain.

Some people are tired after their shows, but I want to go dancing. Immediately! And I dance in my shows, every time. There's a ton of dancing in this show Going Out, as I flash back to some moments of going out in the body of the show. But I am electric and on my toes after a show, so it's a ride, it's a definite ride. For the audience, I think it's more of a roller coaster, because I hit on comedic and dramatic beats throughout all my shows. It's a lot of laughter, but there are almost equal parts of dramatic impact. Because in the case of this show we lost a lot of people as a result of Covid. So I dip into that space as well, but with definitely high hope up on the end.

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