by Celestine Bohlen
… Like the stories, the Moth’s format is both fluid and highly structured: half a dozen people are asked to tell stories onstage before an audience on a given theme … At a recent show at Nell’s Bar in Greenwich Village the storytellers included a therapist, a former drug addict, an author who has written about Prozac, a reporter who told of investigating a suicide and Andrew Solomon, author of an encyclopedic book on depression.
The theme, appropriately, was “Melancholy,” but the atmosphere was more hilarious than gloomy. … Mr. Solomon, who appeared with the Moth for the first time that night, said he found the experience exhilarating. “It is exciting because it is scary,” he said. “You feel very naked up there because it is just you, telling your story, with nothing else to mediate between you and the other people.”
Mr. Solomon said the story he told, about a Cambodian woman who had survived the traumas of the Pol Pot regime, was fully revealed to him in the telling. “There was a mystical feeling of the rhythms of the story,” he said. “I could sense its ebb and flow. You have to have an internal clock.”
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