BRATTLEBORO — Writer/musician/performer Seth Lepore and actor/hip-hop artist Collin Clay Chace each have a history of performing one-man shows.
Now for the first time, they have decided to merge their shows as a double-act, “The Double Trouble Tour,” which will come to the Hooker-Dunham Theater in Brattleboro in early April.
Lepore and Chace have been friends since high school, where both discovered their talents for performing.
“Collin and I went to School One, an alternative high school in Providence, R.I., together,” Lepore says. “There weren't any grade levels, or actual grades, given to students. It was all evaluations. We were on a first-name basis with our teachers. We both feel like the school saved our lives.”
Lepore says that Chace “was the first person I knew to come out, and School One was a safe place to do that in the early nineties.”
“We're still in touch with a lot of our teachers,” Lepore says. “In fact, we're doing one of our shows as a benefit for School One when we play Providence.”
“It makes me feel so honored to be able to use art as a way to give back to a place that provided a foundation for me to express myself, where I found and nurtured my talents,” he says.
Lepore says that he prefers doing solo shows rather than ensemble work, and he describes himself as “not a joiner.”
“I did some ensemble work in college and also have been in a plethora of bands, but I tend to work best by myself or with one or two other people at most,” he says. “It's important to know what roles each person has in a production and be clear about that.”
Lepore and Chace had discussed the possibility of a double act before, and finally put their plan into motion early last year.
As it is produced by only the two of them and their business manager and friend Karen Spies, they juggle many responsibilities to keep the tour on track.
“Collin and I had been tossing the idea [for a double act] around for a while, when we both realized we were working on solo shows,” Lepore says. “In early 2011, we discussed what it would take [and]made a crazy mind-map of logistics.”
That's when Spies joined the team to provide “a consistent pragmatic and realistic viewpoint.”
Lepore says that he has been building an audience base throughout New England “so we're working off of that.”
“Since the entire tour is self-produced, we're constantly having to wear different hats - booking agent, publicist, fundraiser, branding consultant - never mind the rehearsing and artistic vision of the show(s) themselves,” he says. “It's been a lot of work, but totally worth it.”
The power of positive thinking
Lepore's show, SuperHappyMelancholyexpialidocious (say it three times fast!) is the second part of a trilogy of plays about “the underbelly of the self-help movement” which began with his award-winning 2010 play Losing My Religion: Confessions of a New Age Refugee.
“[SuperHappyMelancholyexpialidocious] turns the happiness industry on its head to unearth the farcical ideology of the positive-thinking movement,” Lepore says.
“ While I was touring Losing My Religion in 2010, I realized I had a lot more to say on the topic. This time, I was interested in tackling the happiness industry and the misunderstandings of depression.”
Lepore was inspired to write SuperHappy after reading two books that had “a significant impact on how this show came into being” - Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff and Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich - about the positive-thinking movement in America.
“I was compelled by Ehrenreich's precise investigations of how the positive thinking movement had infiltrated not only the self-help industry but the corporate sector as well as megachurches,” Lepore says.
“Rushkoff's pull-no-punches account of how corporations came to become a religion in themselves gave me a new understanding of the monetary system's monarchical history,” he adds.
Lepore said he has also been coming to terms with his own history of episodic depression, “so I incorporate that story as the through-line of the show, along with the ridiculous characters that came into being through the writing process.”
It took Lepore about two months to complete the first draft of the show.
“I put it down for six months, and then revised it about seven or eight times over the course of a month,” he says. “I recently workshopped it with some theater friends and realized some things that need to be shifted, dropped, and added.”
“What's really interesting is taking it from the page into the rehearsal process, and seeing how the character's voices start to change, how the pacing shifts, the gestures and body language that develop,” Lepore says.
Lepore describes SuperHappyMelancholyexpialidocious as being more physical - “even if that [only] means subtle movements and facial expressions” - and more outrageous than Losing My Religion “ in terms of what the characters' motivations are and how extreme their views can be [in regard to] what happiness means.”
“A lot of times, I start laughing uncontrollably at what they are saying,” Lepore says. “I need to get it out now [in rehearsal] so it doesn't happen on stage.”
A different sort of feedback
Lepore claims that a solo show is easier to set up and profit from than an ensemble piece is, though working alone can get lonely.
“Some pros are [that] you don't have to split the money with a big cast, so you can actually make a bit of a living. Also, I can just show up somewhere, do a tech for a couple of hours, and be ready to go. There's no big set, costume changes, [or other] things that can take a lot of time.”
The cons? “It can be a little lonely,” Lepore says.
“It's nice that I get to tour with a friend who also has a solo show and we can see how the audiences react to that,” he says. “I can go first one night and second the next and see how that affects things overall.”
Touring with another one-person performer “provides a different sort of feedback [that] you don't usually get from just dropping in, performing, and then it's suddenly over.”
Lepore and Chace do a lot of work together behind the scenes as well.
“Collin lives in London with his husband, so we Skype once or twice a week, go over the laundry list of to-do's and figure out deadlines and tasks to be divided up,” says Lepore.
“Since I know the venues we're dealing with and the press, I deal with a lot of that,” he says. “Collin is on top of the social media presence and outreach to organizations whose members would benefit from seeing his show.”
Lepore, a former resident of Brattleboro who now lives in Westhampton, Mass., has big plans for the Double Trouble tour this year, starting with a trip out west to San Francisco, Boulder, and Minneapolis first to do his shows in March.
“When I get back, Collin and I travel all through New England,” he says. “I've been touring the Fringe Festival circuit, self-producing my work but, last fall, I started to attend performing arts conferences.”
Lepore hopes that by showcasing at these conferences and inviting arts presenters to the shows, “they will hire me to perform in their venues and I can just show up and do my thing without having to do all the administrative work. I hope that enough people show up so that we make a decent profit.”
“All this work has taught me a lot about the ins and outs of the theater world as well as the power of being able to do-it-yourself, but [having] a booking agent or manager who understands my artistic vision would be ideal,” says Lepore, who is very optimistic about his experience as a solo artist.
“I'm getting there for sure,” he says.