In Durham, learning new things with Ira Glass

On the radio, Ira Glass steers an hour of storytelling that has won every major award in broadcasting.

But when he’s not hosting “This American Life,” heard locally at 7 p.m. Fridays and 1 p.m. Saturdays on WUNC-FM, Glass insists that stories aren’t really his strength.

“I’m not somebody who is ever a great storyteller in real life,” he said. Among his co-workers at the Chicago-based show, “if we’re in a situation where the same thing happens to the three or four of us, they will tell it better than me. And in my marriage, my wife is by far the better storyteller.

“In a way, that’s one of the reasons why I think I was able to invent a way of telling stories on the radio ... because I wasn’t natural at it. So I really had to think through what makes something effective, what makes something get through to you, what makes something pull you in.”

Glass will let the stories from “This American Life” take center stage in “Seven Things I’ve Learned,” a live show he’s bringing to the Durham Performing Arts Center on Saturday. He’ll showcase clips from stories he’s found personally inspiring, delightful or just plain interesting over the years, bringing them to life with commentary, audio, video and even a live dance demonstration. (“It’s not going to be me,” he assured. “I absolutely won’t dance.”)

The things he’s learned stem from making an Emmy-winning “This American Life” TV show (on Showtime in 2007-08), two movies (“Sleepwalk with Me” from 2012 and the currently running “Don’t Think Twice,” both with comedian Mike Birbiglia), and live shows including “Three Acts, Two Dancers One Radio Host” that featured dancers from New York’s Monica Bill Barnes & Company and “This American Life Live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” which featured theatrical interpretations of journalism, including a mini musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who went on to create “Hamilton.”

He’s also got several life lessons to impart, including, perhaps, the art of being flexible. The “Seven Things” he talks about on the road aren’t set in stone, he said.

“Each show I’m changing it quite a bit,” he said. In two performances before his DPAC appearance, he didn’t get to use all his material, “so hopefully I’ll get to some of those this time.”

Adding video to his presentations is a new frontier for Glass, who has toured regularly for two decades, at first to get some promotion for “This American Life,” and now to keep connected with its audience, which numbers more than 2 million via radio and another 2.4 million who download its episodes as podcasts. For one thing, video presents another layer of presentation and pacing he has to work with, and it has required him to learn about new software as well as limitations in technology. During an interview a couple weeks ago, he was unpacking two new computers that he hoped would boost his capabilities for the Durham show.

“I’ve entered an entire world of learning about video projection that I feel simultaneously excited by and angry at having to have learned,” he said. “There’s no way to do my job without actually learning these things.”

A story well told

But storytelling, at its essence, isn’t about the technology so much as the teller, he pointed out.

“There’s an old saying, ‘Great stories happen to those who can tell them,’ ” Glass said. “Some people just intuitively have such a nice feeling for what would be entertaining to listen to. And I feel like so much of what makes a story good is the sense of drama that people bring to telling the story when they tell it. And that can be hard to teach for sure.”

Finding the meat of the story, the drama in the mundane, has been key to the success of “This American Life,” but sometimes it’s more challenging than others. While the show sometimes showcases themes that would draw just about anyone in immediately – breakups, car sales, prisoners performing “Hamlet” – it also tackles more difficult topics, as with a recent set of shows focusing on refugee camps in Greece.

“We did everything we could to make those appealing and magnetic, because we know nobody wants to hear anything about refugees,” Glass said. “It’s one of those topics. It’s not that complicated, it’s really depressing, and it’s hard not to just feel sad. And also you just feel like every story is the same story.”

Overcoming this obstacle has imparted lessons he’ll address in “Seven Things I’ve Learned,” he said. “We just try to be as funny and surprising as we can be at the very top and then try to do things in creating characters and sort of creating a drama one after another after another in the different acts of the show that you just kind of get sucked in by the story and you don’t think too hard about what it is.”

But as well as “This American Life” often does that, and as loyal as its listeners often are, Glass said the statistics he saw on people streaming those refugee episodes showed that “fewer people stuck around to the end.”

He spoke about his hopes that those episodes would have fared better, then breathed a sad “yeah” his listeners would find familiar. And comforting. A pat on the back stretching through the airwaves and bestowed upon a stranger who suddenly doesn’t feel so distant.

And then he moved on. Because there are other stories to tell, and other lessons to be learned. Other ears to reach, whether in three acts, seven lessons or just a conversation.

This story was originally published September 8, 2016 at 8:00 AM with the headline "In Durham, learning new things with Ira Glass."