INTERVIEW: Michael Cruz Kayne on ‘sadness that feels like you are in touch with something human’
Photo: Sorry for Your Loss was written by and stars Michael Cruz Kayne. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by BBB with permission.
The new off-Broadway solo show Sorry for Your Loss, written by and starring Michael Cruz Kayne, is a 70-minute theatrical experience that begs for adjectives, some of them seemingly contradictory. The show is funny, at times gut-bustingly so. The show is heartbreaking, at times devastatingly so. The show is profound, powerful, revelatory, difficult and human. There’s nothing quite like Sorry for Your Loss.
Kayne’s piece, directed by Josh Sharp and extended to June 10 at the Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village, is part of the Audible Theater series, meaning New Yorkers have a chance to experience the play in person, and Audible listeners will have a chance to catch the audio recording in perpetuity after the final curtain. What both theatergoers and listeners will find is an exploration of love and grief, a story of Kayne and his wife building a life and family together … only to then experience the tragic loss of their child, Fisher.
In the show, Kayne brings the audience through his life before getting married and the birth of his three children, and what the journey of grief has been like over the past few years. Along the way, Kayne explains how he used social media to tap into a community of strangers, their only connection a shared story of loss told in 140 characters or less on Twitter.
This experience prompted Kayne, a writer for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, to begin offering his thoughts on stage. “It did sort of start with tweeting about it,” Kayne said in a recent phone interview. “As I say in the show, I’ve been writing something every year, and sometimes more frequently than that, about Fisher, and on the 10-year anniversary, I tweeted about it. As I say in the show, there was an unexpectedly large and positive response, and from there, it made me aware of the possibility that people might be interested to talk more about it. So I started doing the show wherever they would let me do it.”
For these early versions, Kayne never put pen to paper and wrote a script. Instead, he simply stepped on stage and said sentences aloud that he was thinking at the time. He would have eight to 10 passages he wanted to share, and his team would record the audio. Later, they would listen back to the recitations to see what worked.
“With this particular subject, anytime that I would try to write something out in the privacy of my home, it always felt less true than it did if I would just say what was on the top of my head when I was in front of people,” he said. “So the show itself, even up until this production, never had a script per se. Like there was never a piece of paper that had the show written on it. Instead it was just many, many, many, many audio recordings of the show, so that when Audible finally was like, well, the stage manager is going to need a physical script, we ended up transcribing the most recent version of the show. So when I say the show was written, it was, just not written down until very recently.”
There are times during Sorry for Your Loss that Kayne goes off-script, especially at the beginning of the show when he shares some hilarious thoughts on the world at that moment. There’s a stand-up comedy frame to the entire evening, so much so that Kayne said it’s only “kind of a play.”
“If there are things that I think of on that day that I might not have thought of the day before, I’ll just say them because it feels like that’s truer to the particular experience I’m trying to impart to the audience,” said Kayne, whose work has earned him a Peabody Award, WGA Award and three Emmy nominations. “There is an obvious and very good form of storytelling that goes first this, and then this, and then this, and then this happened, but … when I’m skipping around from beat to beat, because it’s me, it’s not like I’ve written this character for someone else, it makes a primal sense that I think the audience can buy into because hopefully it feels real to them because it’s real to me.”
Each iteration of Sorry for Your Loss has been developed closely with Kayne’s wife, whose pictures and stories are prominently featured in the show. He likes to think of the solo piece as an offering to everybody, but it’s also a theatrical work intended for himself and for his family.
“It’s also for my kids, all of them,” he said. “They’ve definitely been consulted. My kids have seen the show a couple times now. Before they saw it for the first time, I was like, ‘These are the stories I’m going to tell. This is how I feel about them. How do you guys feel about this? Is this OK?’ I’ve been lucky enough to have them be totally supportive of it.”
He added: “At the base level of it, I only did the show at the beginning for me. I didn’t really care. It felt like something that I needed to do. I had not been talking about this for so long, and I had so many thoughts about it. I can’t put every single thing in the show, so there are thoughts that remain unexpressed. To my great surprise, people were not put off by it. In fact, at every show that I’ve done, people message me or come up to me afterward and express some level of relief or gratitude or joy or even deep sadness, but a sadness that feels like you are in touch with something human. And so having an idea that the show could be of use to other people is what encouraged me to pursue this particular venue for doing it.”
The community that Kayne and his wife have become members of has had a lasting impact on their lives. Via Twitter, via a podcast, via theater, via everyday life — Kayne has openly discussed grief and heard from others. This is one of the ultimate takeaways that Kayne is holding on to during his run at the Minetta Lane Theatre.
“It’s sort of an unbelievable gift,” he said. “I think anyone who has something that is secret or something only they know or some kind of feeling of shame or profound loss, when you become aware of a community, it unlocks a million doors that you didn’t even know were there. Being in touch with people who have had similar experiences has meant the world to me, and I hope that the show and other people who come to the show help expand that community.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Sorry for Your Loss, written by and starring Michael Cruz Kayne, continues its extended run through June 10 at the Minetta Lane Theatre as part of the Audible Theater series. Click here for more information and tickets.
