Steve Burns Premiers Solo Show (For Grown-Ups) at LaMaMa

There are things Steve Burns is prepared to tell audiences at La MaMa that he isn’t prepared to tell his family. 

The former Blues Clues star is set to mount his solo show Steve Burns Alive at The Club at La MaMa this week. In it, he discusses parasocial relationships, how the internet proclaimed him dead (and alive again), and the challenges he’s faced. He wants audiences to know that this show isn’t for kids — it’s for adults grappling with “heavy stuff” and his own way to tell his story. 

We sat down with Burns via Zoom from his home in the Catskills in late June to talk about his writing process, his viral video from Blues Clues’ 25th anniversary that had the internet weeping, and why he feels passionately about sharing his story. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Just to kick things off, how are things going? 

This is a pretty busy time for me. I've got a bunch of things going on right now — the show is one of them. We did this last year in Beacon, New York. Our plan is not to really change too much from the last time. It'll be getting it in my head again and remembering how to do all the weird tech wizardry.

For sure. Is there anything that you're particularly excited for or nervous for?

I'm always nervous to do this show because it's a pretty deep excavation in a lot of ways. A lot of the material is stuff that I've never told my friends or family. To be standing on stage, sharing darker corners, there's an authenticity to that that I think is part of, hopefully, what works about the show. But it is fraught and it is uncomfortable, and it does make me nervous. But luckily, I've been blessed by my therapist to do it. 

How did the show come about? What kind of got you ready to write something like this, and why did you decide to in the first place?

Well, Matt Freeman, with whom I worked on this is my oldest friend. I've known this guy since I was 14 years old, and fortunately, he's also a brilliant playwright. He's had a front row seat for a lot of what the show is about. He’s always encouraged me, over the years, to write stuff down, I’d tell him “oh, no man, I'm not a writer.” He encouraged me, because I've done storytelling in the past, you know, just to sort of jot some stuff down. I did, and I showed it to him, and he said, “there's a one man show here, let's just throw it together.” And we did. It came together really quickly, and we just kind of put it up for shits and giggles to see if anybody would respond. And people seem to respond to the material and to the subject matter, so we’re gonna give it another shot in the city. 

You said it went by pretty quick. Tell me a little bit about the writing process. How did you guys go about sitting down and putting this together?

I did what I called word vomit. I just kind of puked a bunch of stuff onto the stage, onto the page, and did very little editing and sent it to Matt without any real direction about where I'd write and what areas I'd cover. There were larger sociological points that I wanted to make that sort of reflect my lived experience, but I wanted to take my lived experience and put it in a broader context, and that's where Matt was brilliant, because I would just rant and rant and rant over this table here in the Catskills, and he would make sense of what I was saying.

It's good to have a friend like that. I want to talk to you a little bit about Blue's Clues. I’m curious how you would characterize that time of your life?

I would characterize that time of my life as unnecessarily difficult. I mean, I was young. I was a kid. We were all kids. The creators of that show were like 24, I was 21, we were just babies. It was an experimental show. I agreed to do it because I didn't think it was gonna work — I thought, “Oh, this is kind of cool in a super weird way. There's no way any show this bizarre is gonna do anything.” I just thought it would be an interesting project. And then it just took off immediately. I think we were all a little bit back on our heels the entire run of that show. I did that whole show with untreated, undiagnosed, severe clinical depression, and I had no idea what's going on with me. I just knew that everything was very hard to be the happiest man in North America every day. That felt very depleting to dig because it had to be real, like I don't think that show would have worked if the relationship with the camera didn't have a heartbeat. My favorite part of the show was talking to the camera, so I was always digging for this stuff that was part of the character's sense of wonder and joy and curiosity and energy, and all these things that I didn't have every day I was trying very hard to create them without any kind of replenishing strategy. 

There was a cost to that over time, as there would be for anyone, and I think that's something that most people can relate to. My depression didn't always or even often, manifest as sadness. It manifested as frustration, and I guess what we would call imposter syndrome now. I  remember feeling eminently unqualified for the role that I had found myself inhabiting, and I thought that it should almost certainly have been a child development specialist or someone like that who was given all this responsibility. I just felt like I was the wrong dude for the job. I mean, I auditioned for that role with long hair and a dirty t-shirt and a pack of cigarettes in my pocket. Tracy Page Johnson, who drew the whole show, she's one of the creators, she's the voice of blue — she always says “you had no business being on kids TV, which is why it worked.” I think she's right about that. 

I hear you. Obviously, a couple of years ago, you had a viral video that everybody responded so significantly to. I'm curious what that felt like.

Crazy. I thought you all thought I was dead, first of all, I really did. I made that video in a vacuum. I mean, Blue's Clues turned 25 that year, and I remember I was directing a little music video for Nickelodeon that day, and they said, “you guys should all do shout outs to the kids.” And I said, “I don't want to talk to the kids. The kids don't know who I am. I'm an old bald man. They don't know me like I want to talk to my friend from way back. I want to talk to my homie, my ride or die.” And that's what I did. 

I didn't write it down. It was just an improv. It just came out. The first time I did it, I got kind of weepy, which took me by surprise. The second time I did it, the whole crew cried, and I thought maybe it would resonate a little. But none of us expected it to hit the way that it did. I think there's a lot of potential reasons for that resonance, and largely I think it's because a calm, respectful conversation is still an utterly missing thing on your phone. I think for that reason, it kind of is arresting — it kind of comes through because you don't see it. The internet is a place where everyone goes because it's fun to be a total dick there, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Definitely. Back to the show, you mentioned the sociological points that you're trying to make. Can you speak a little bit to what those are, and why you wanted to make them?

I can't conceive of doing a one man show that's just about my lived experience. Unless you're David Bowie, I don't see a reason to do that. But I do think that my story is sort of esoteric and novel and a little extreme around the contours, but the contours of my story do echo a moment we live in. I was rumored dead by an emergent internet, and no matter what I did, the truth always lost to a more satisfying narrative. We all know what that is now, we're all just kind of floating in this sea of misinformation, and we're all trying to navigate that. As we do, there's a tension between reality and what we prefer, and because of that, we stress our concept of reality. 

The show is very much about presence. It's very much about the way we use this technology. I was an early parasocial force, and the show very much questions the reality of this. How real is this connection? It gets kind of out there as our reality is tested in that way, we're setting the conditions for mental unwellness more and more. We know this. There's evidence for this. And my mental unwellness got to a point where it really felt too heavy to carry. And that's when I did in my real life, what Steve did on the show every day is I sat in front of someone and I looked him in the eye and I and I said, “Will you help me?” 

That ask, that moment of confrontation, was the most important act of my adult life. Despite all of the conversation around mental health right now, I think asking for help gets a little lost. If I can get that destigmatized, or at least humanized, that'd be great. 

There's an entire sphere of men right now that really bothers me, a very tragic version of strength that's being passed around. It's about dominance, and we forget that real strength is very different from that. I don't feel particularly weak. I've done hard stuff, and asking for help is a courageous act of confrontation and takes actual strength. It's the opposite of weakness. 

How are you taking care of yourself as you're dissecting all of this heavy stuff from your past?

At the start, I was like, “man, I'm gonna spend the next year and a half with my head so far up my own ass. It's the last thing I want to do. I'm not interested in the source material. I'm so sick of Steve Burns.” But my friend, who's very wise, said “find ways to be of service.” That's how I look at it. I wouldn't be doing all of this vulnerable over sharing, and it is dysfunctional over sharing if I didn't think that I could be of service while doing it. And if I can get one person in the crowd to think, “I should ask for help” or “I should look at this a little differently,” then that was worth it. 

Steve Burns Alive runs at The Club at La MaMa on East 4th Street in New York City from July 23 to 25. For tickets and more information, visit here.