2041
(2 votes, average 5.00 out of 5)
Written by Louis Weisberg, Staff writer
Dec 16, 2010
John McGivern’s stories resonate with audiences of all stripes – Photo: Courtesy
John McGivern was completing a run of the play “Shear Madness” in Chicago when a member of the company took him aside and commanded, “You’re going on stage this summer and tell the stories you’ve been telling us backstage.”
That was the eureka moment in McGivern’s career. For years he’d regaled friends and colleagues with his stories about growing up in a colorful Irish-Catholic family on Milwaukee’s East Side. But as a professional entertainer, he’d always played a character in other people’s works. The idea of building an entire performance around his own life was “daunting,” he says.
Still, McGivern was intrigued by the concept. His first one-man show, “Midwest Side Story,” debuted at Chicago’s Bailiwick Theatre in 1993 and went on to play during the New York Gay Games in 1994. After that, McGivern took the act on the road under various names, packing auditoriums throughout the country and scoring appearances on HBO and Comedy Central.
Last month, McGivern received the highest honor of his career – a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award for “outstanding achievement for individual excellence on camera” for “The Early Stories of John McGivern,” produced by WMVS. Now Milwaukee Public Television is considering the creation of a monthly series around McGivern, who is also a frequent guest on WKLH-FM’s morning show with Dave and Carole.
While McGivern continues to perform other material, including “American Fiesta” and “The Wonder Bread Years,” his life remains his signature act. Milwaukee audiences can catch his latest installment at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Stiemke Studio, where McGivern’s updated “Home for the Holidays” plays through Jan. 2.
McGivern’s material is constantly evolving to reflect what’s going on in his life. “Home,” for instance, opens with his mother’s recent cataract surgery. She learned that she had the malady from an exam at Shopko.
“I asked her, ‘Shouldn’t you go to Wal-Mart for a second opinion?’” McGivern quips.
But the show contains familiar material that’s beloved by Milwaukee audiences as well – McGivern’s childhood stint as “the Liberace of altar boys,” his mother’s Bradford Exchange Santa collection, his father’s crooked Christmas trees. The performance is like the perfect holiday card, packed with nostalgia, humor and inspiring sentiment.
What keeps McGivern’s act evergreen is his uncanny skill as an entertainer and the universality of his material. Although he’s a middle-aged, gay, Irish-Catholic man from a working-class Milwaukee family, audiences discover that his stories are, beneath the surface, hilariously familiar – so deeply specific that they penetrate the realm of common experience.
“When I began storytelling, I had no idea that the stories weren’t specifically mine,” McGivern says. But he learned otherwise, he continues, when a 72-year-old Jewish woman from Brooklyn approached him after a performance and said, “You spoke my life in your stories. Thank you for coming to my home.”
McGivern has been criticized by some in the gay community for the tameness of his material, but he says those critics are missing the point. He doesn’t “step into the room with my gay foot forward,” he says, because he’s using humor as a bridge to connect the various dots of humanity.
The strength of that bridge is evident in his box office numbers. Even McGivern’s appearances in small Wisconsin communities such as Whitewater, Cedarburg and Hartford routinely sell out auditoriums seating up to 1,2000 people. The majority of those audience members are straight and “somewhere between 40 and death,” McGivern says slyly.
When he returned to Milwaukee to live after more than two decades away, McGivern didn’t know what to expect, he says. He’s been overwhelmed by the way Wisconsin has embraced him as a native son.
An even greater surprise was finding his first true love in his hometown, after living in such gay hot spots as Atlanta, Los Angeles and Chicago without romantic success. He and Steve Brandt, a builder, met eight years ago and have been together ever since. They have a business renovating and renting out furnished apartments to business travelers.
In his Emmy acceptance speech, McGivern thanked his family for providing him with material. As his mother’s fond of saying, “Without me, you wouldn’t have a career,” he says.
But he also thanked his partner for teaching him “how to be patient and quiet,” he says. With Brandt, McGivern says he’s finally found a balance in life that had eluded him until now.
That’s not a laugh line, but McGivern is beaming as he delivers it.
