Comedian Drew Michael shares the love, through headphones, in his solo show 'Love Me'

Michael and director Prashanth Venkataramanujam discuss staging a uniquely designed production about connection, denial, and the truths we hide from ourselves.

Summary

• Comedian Drew Michael and director Prashanth Venkataramanujam discuss Michael's solo comedy show Love Me
• Michael discusses five of his past relationships and explores themes of denial, connection, and the search for affection
• Audiences wear headphones during the performance to experience the world as Michael, who is deaf, does

Emmy Award-nominated comedian Drew Michael is stepping beyond traditional stand-up and into theatre with Love Me, a theatrical solo show directed by Emmy nominee Prashanth Venkataramanujam. Playing a monthlong run at SoHo Playhouse as part of this fall’s New York Comedy Festival, the production uses innovative audio design to explore five of Michael's past relationships, with his story representing the universal search for affection and belonging.

Michael identifies as deaf, having had a shifting degree of hearing loss since early childhood, but he only acknowledged this fact during Love Me’s development. He was writing the show three years ago when a medical audio test broke through his lifelong denial, leading him to embrace his deaf identity. As such, Love Me is less a straightforward examination of hearing loss and more a multidimensional look at how people deny fundamental facts about themselves.

“A big piece of this story, both for me as a human being and in how we tell the story, is how something can be present with you through and through, but your mind will find different ways to tell you it’s not there or that it’s not true because you don’t want to deal with the implications of it,” Michael said.

“I want [audiences] to feel the weight of that revelation, the weight of the truth coming up underneath you, like the floor dropping,” Michael added. “I want them to feel all the ways in which they have gone through something like this.”

For nearly four decades, Michael bent his reality to avoid a truth he feared would cost him love and connection. (Only two of the five relationships referenced are romantic, a deliberate choice meant to break open the idea of love in all its forms.) Rather than simply stating the source of this disconnect, Love Me immerses audiences in Michael’s experience by having them wear headphones during the performance.

“When the headphones are on, they are a portal to my inner world,” the comedian said. Theatregoers navigate his relationships in a layered auditory environment, experiencing the friction of his day-to-day life before logically understanding it. They learn to rely on the audio feed delivered to their headsets to make sense of the show, living in this sensory tension long before Michael explicitly names the cause. “It’s a weird thing because it’s a spoiler, but it’s also central to what we’re doing,” he explained.

The production relies on the contrast between the individual headsets and the house speakers, which pipe subdued sound into the theatre to represent Michael's muffled external surroundings. Venkataramanujam, whose early appreciation for audio design was shaped by listening to thousands of episodes of podcasts like Radiolab, worked with five-time Tony-nominated sound designer Daniel Kluger to refine the auditory environment. “You never want people thinking in a live show; you always want them purely feeling,” Venkataramanujam said of the technical execution.

He and Michael first collaborated as undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the time, Michael was an engineering major, and Venkataramanujam was studying biology and neuroscience. They met at a theatre-program fundraiser where Venkataramanujam performed a stand-up set, a medium Michael had never seen a student do before. After Michael asked Venkataramanujam for advice on how to start, he wrote five minutes of material, and the two eventually performed in the same variety show before moving to Chicago to pursue comedy.

They continued their careers on opposite coasts from there but reconnected years later. By then, Michael had established himself as a comedian, earning an Emmy nomination for his writing on Saturday Night Live and headlining two WGA-nominated HBO specials. Venkataramanujam, meanwhile, had directed Hasan Minhaj’s comedy special, co-created their series Patriot Act, and earned an Emmy nomination for writing on Bill Nye Saves the World.

Michael shared his idea for an immersive show utilizing headphone technology with Venkataramanujam. Drawn to the unique storytelling challenge, he came on board to direct. Recognizing that they were building a theatre piece rather than a standard comedy routine, Venkataramanujam focused on the emotional core of the performance. “I wanted to make sure the sweetness and the empathy and the pathos of the piece came through,” Venkataramanujam said, noting that traditional stand-up can sometimes feel one-dimensional compared to the vulnerability of Love Me.

As Michael’s understanding of his own deaf identity evolved, and he began to feel the sharp divide between the hearing and deaf worlds, he also wanted Love Me to have support from a team that implicitly understood deaf culture. Deaf West Theatre, known for stagings of shows like Spring Awakening and American Idiot performed with deaf and hearing actors, joined as a producer. “They thought it was very important to include this story in the tapestry of what deafness means,” he said.

The show’s title was chosen from a list of about 20 options Michael presented to his director once they realized the story was fundamentally about the need for connection, with his hearing loss acting simply as the vehicle to explore it. Venkataramanujam immediately recognized Love Me as the perfect fit. For Michael, the phrase encapsulates the evolving journey of the performance, as he goes from seeking validation from the audience to offering a shared experience with them.

“When someone reads it, it can read like a plea,” Michael said. “But by the end, it changes. It goes from a plea to a command to almost a statement.”

Get Love Me tickets now.

Photo credit: Drew Michael. (Photo by Elizabeth Viggiano)