The stage is bare except for an old metal music stand and a microphone. Off to the side, David Sedaris straightens his cotton T-shirt and then politely weaves his way through the crowd to the stage, carrying a small piece of paper, his introduction for the performance artist Cheryl Trykv. He adjusts the microphone, then recites a series of adoring adjectives–such a torrent of outrageous, parodic hyperbole that you can’t wait to see the woman described. How can she match this?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sedaris and Trykv, though they’re friends, do not really work together. Both can best be described as literary readers; Trykv recites from memory, and Sedaris brings a notebook onstage. Their acts are low-key and low-tech: both recite compelling prose compellingly, and they can be entertaining, cruel, even shocking. “I like to make people laugh at things that are a lot of times terrible,” said Sedaris, who admits to being obsessed with acts of physical and emotional cruelty against gays. “I want to say: ‘You’re as capable as anyone else of committing a horrible act.’ I want them to get lost in the story–surrender to it,” he said.
Trykv isn’t sure how to respond to this. “I’m a writer,” she explained. “My job is to share my experience and present a picture illustrative of experience. People can do with it what they want.” Her raw material is anecdotes from her own life; she paints pictures in prose and poetry.
“When you’re reading out loud, you have to have some gimmick for people,” Sedaris remarked. “As Flannery O’Connor said, ‘If you’re not surprised by the story, no one else will be.’ I never know where the stories are going when I write them. I tend not to write about real experience because I know how it ends.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mike Tappin.
