Matrimonial Mayhem
Truth Telling: How James Braly came to expore the dark depths of marriage inhilarious one man show Life in a Marital Institution
If you’ve got a story worth telling, you should share it. James Braly has many to tell. This tall gray-haired man is not short on wit or stories. He’s on stage at the Long Center For the Performing Arts this week, telling a tale of boy meets girl, boy flirts with different girl, boy hesitates but marries first girl, girl and boy have babies, girl freezes baby's placenta. Well that’s the gist of it anyway.
Throw in a high strung family, a shaman, some leprechauns, an eccentric couples counselor, inappropriate breast feeding, and a little hospice humor and you’ve got all the elements of an intense emotional journey that’s sure to leave audiences laughing. Life in a Marital Institution is a well-crafted 65-minute autobiographical monologue that makes audience members repeatedly laugh with delight, squirm in discomfort and gasp with disgust. In four words, it is worth seeing. The subtitle of the piece is “20 years of monogamy in one terrifying hour.” It’s James Braly’s intention in the monologue to explore dark places in his relationship, others don’t dare go in their own.
I met James Braly on the eve of his first Austin show. We chatted for about 45 minutes, and it’s clear this man likes to tell stories. To me, one of his most interesting stories is the narrative that explains how he came to tell them for a living. After he became the father of two sons, the former corporate and motivational speechwriter says he started to question what he did for a living, pretending he was having conversations with his then infant children, later in life.
“I started having imaginary dialogues with the older one. He was six or eight months old at the time.”
He says he imagined his son, a few years down the road, asking him to defend his life choices, including what he did for a living. Braly realized he couldn’t give a good answer as to why he did what he did and that was part of what motivated him to make a change.
“I did not have the guts…who I am to counsel somebody to go and follow their dreams and it’s just talk because I’m not doing it. So I sold my apartment and moved into the storage unit of the building on Central Park West.”
Braly freed himself of the expensive overhead of having a New York City apartment and moved his family upstate. A few months later, he realized something was missing and decided he needed to be in the city to create. He was still leasing his old storage unit in the basement of the Central Park West apartment building and decided to move in. So, for several years, he slept and worked in the 250 square foot area, four to five days a week, commuting back and forth on Amtrak on weekends to see his family. In the apartment building dungeon, he had access to just a sink, a toilet and a window.
“I went down on a Monday morning on the Amtrak and sort of waited until the gangs of Polish and Mexican construction workers would come in on their 10 o’clock coffee break,” Braly explains. “I’d go behind them and I’d have my storage unit key and then I’d go behind the sheets of plywood and I’d sit there all day and then I’d come out as though I was living in the neighborhood and say 'Hi' to the doorman and he’d say, 'Hey, where are you now?' 'I’m upstate.' And it appeared as though I’m just hanging out at my storage unit. I stayed there for a couple years five days a week trying to change my life.”
Braly spent countless hours in the meager setting, perfecting the critically acclaimed one man show he is now on tour performing, Life in a Marital Institution. He explains the project’s inception.
“I was living in New York and I was associated with a group called The Moth which is a storytelling community- the best and the only storytelling community in New York. I started performing stories about my marriage, which were inspired by the drive to understand, “Why is this happening to me? I don’t understand what’s happening to me.”
Braly says the show is not about ‘hammering’ his wife, because that wouldn’t be funny. He calls it a dark piece in which he explores why he chose his relationship. He says it’s less about her and more about their chemistry. He says the initial spark was, “to write things that would help me understand why I was suffering; why I was choosing to suffer but in a way that was funny. “
After hundreds of drafts, in 2006, Braly emerged from his storage unit on Central Park West, and performed what is now Life in a Marital Institution to a packed house full of friends and acquaintances. It must have gone over well because out of that performance he found someone to back his show, who then sent him the simple advice (or perhaps it was a request) “Don’t f*@% up.”
Since then, he’s put on more than 120 performances and gained the backing of Meredith Vieira Productions and the adoration of audiences around the country.
His wife Susan has never seen the show. He says in the early days, he didn’t want her to because he was still perfecting it. When he was ready, he invited her but she turned him down, saying she had no interest.
I asked Braly about his marriage and his response: “It’s complicated. There’s no check box on Facebook for my relationship. “
Braly’s complicated relationship has him traveling across the country doing what he has always wanted to do, tell his story, or what he calls his “truth." His truth is also being developed for television and film and into a memoir.
The former speechwriter has come a long way since squatting in a New York City apartment storage unit. He’s living his dream while showing his kids that with a lot of hard work and dedication, they can fulfill their own.
As we end our 45-minute conversation, Braly sums up his feelings on the day he decided what he wanted to do with his life and what it took to get where he is today.
“It was a transcendent moment cause that is who you are. It’s that love, non-judgemental love that will drive you through the hours…you know the hours and weeks and the months and the years. Cause it’s taken years and years to be having this conversation with you right now… years in a frigging room talking to an uninsulated steam pipe... going through a ten-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty-five word script five hundred times. The only thing that keeps you failing and struggling like that is that you have to love to do it. You can’t summon that drive any other way.”
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Life in a Marital Institution is playing in the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center through October 16th.