Confessions of an Awkward Mind
By Sara Grace McCandless
Published: February 26th, 2007 | 2:03pm
"New Kids on the Block were really important in shaping someone's life. You can't dispute it."So sayeth Dave Nadelberg, creator and editor of Mortified: Real Words. Real People. Real Pathetic.
On both stage and in print, Mortified is told through a variety of source material, but Nadelberg feels the ones that tend to work best stem from letters and diaries or, as he puts it, "pieces that take themselves very seriously, where the protagonist is essentially really passionate about something. [It] could be anything from war to important social injustices, but it could also be getting rejected for prom. When we're at that age, all of our emotions were on the same playing field," he adds.
Which brings us back to New Kids on the Block: one of Nadelberg's favorite pieces exclusive to the book is "Blockhead" by Vanessa Murdock. The selection stems from the author's diaries about her ongoing obsession with the band or namely, with member Joey McIntyre who she loves "SO MUCH IT'S SCREWING UP [HER] LIFE!" What makes the contents so different from other manifestos of love for boy bands is how it's juxtaposed against her very sincere concerns about conflicts in Iraq, circa 1991. "She's legitimately debating what she'll do with Joey [when she meets him] and turning down real life opportunities as a result, but the other half is her feelings about the Gulf War, which are just as intense," Nadelberg says. "I like those pieces where there's [a] dichotomy."
Be it hideous poetry, alarming letters from camp, or not-quite-Grammy-worthy song lyrics, Nadelberg is quick to identify the common thread. "There's this recurring voice throughout all these submissions, and it's the voice of the kid who just doesn't feel like they are being heard," he notes. "What I love about getting to do Mortified is look, it's two, three decades later, but someone is finally listening albeit strangers, which would horrify most 13-year-old versions of us."
Nadelberg spent his own adolescent years in the saccharine suburbs outside of Detroit, Michigan, but notes, "Just because you're in an environment that's kind of bland doesn't change the fact that you'll have a swirling sense of emotions in your body."After moving to Los Angeles and building a successful career as a television writer, he still found himself longing for a project of his own; one that would allow him to keep his original premise intact without the interference of studio heads that were prone to making changes at any time, for any reason they saw fit, whether it made sense or not.
Subsequently, Mortified was born. In fact, the idea first came from one of Nadelberg's own mementos: a love letter he penned during his teen years but never sent. "There [were] really no direct ancestors to this, cousins, but no direct ancestors,"he says, referring to other projects such as Found and PostSecret. "I love the idea of what all these projects celebrate; the extraordinary lives of ordinary people," he adds. "It's from your life but not a memoir, more like artifacts."
Now, as the Indiana Jones of our adolescent moments, Nadelberg's plans for Mortified continue to grow. Future projects include a documentary, teaming with Eddie Schmidt, whose credits include This Film is Not Yet Rated. The Mortified stage shows also continue to regularly sell out, and are currently being performed in five cities across the United States including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago, with plans to expand to other locations in the near future.
The project has also earned the attention of several celebrity admirers, some of which recently participated in a Los Angeles staged reading of 500 Miles to Indy, a Days of Thunder-inspired script penned by contributor Jason Smith when he was just 15 years old. The cast included Elijah Wood, Busy Phillips, Kevin McDonald, James Denton, and Curtis Armstrong, and as one might imagine, the content was both wonderfully amusing and terribly awful.
"I think people are laughing in this show in a very supportive way," Nadelberg shares. "We're laughing at it but cheering for it. It's different than stand up where you're laughing with, but at a distance. People who tend to like Mortified feel like they're included. It has this built-in communal aspect that I certainly didn't have a [hand] in making; it's just part of it."
Most of the time, pieces are performed by their original creators who are amateurs when it comes to the stage. "We look more for journalists than theater or acting type of people," Nadelberg says. "Our casting process is really more hand-holdy. You can't be Simon Cowell. You can't fold your arms and be like, 'You've got five minutes to impress us.' We have to be their friend and bring it out of them."
He continues, pointing out, "This is content that was never intended to impress anyone. Usually what's impressive about it is stuff that's sort of buried, and you've got to be a detective."
Perhaps it's this approach that has created and sustained such fervor behind the concept, one that took on a life of its own based almost completely on word-of-mouth buzz. How does the content play differently on the page versus in person? "I think the book version is more emotionally dense, because you can go back and read between the lines of who these people were, while the stage show is more humorous and visceral," says Nadelberg.
Regardless of the format, comedy wasn't necessarily the objective, but has become a welcomed by-product. "We generally don't want anyone to seem like they're trying to be funny. 90 percent of the humor of this project, if not 95 percent, needs to come from the words themselves; this material that has no self awareness. And while there are exceptions to that, it's rare and we really work hard to find stuff that can be satisfying to the audience on a number of levels," he explains. "It's not just intended to be this show and tell, but more that these pieces will reveal something about the author's life."
Issue #13
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