10 Years of Storytelling

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The New York Sun

If you love either theater or memoir, and you haven’t heard of the Moth — well, for your own sake, get with it! In the past 10 years, this not-for-profit has earned a reputation for producing hilarious, moving, and surprisingly intimate evenings of old-fashioned storytelling. The monthly main-stage shows are curated around a theme, such as “Who’s Your Daddy? Stories of Fatherhood” or “Call of the Wild: Tales of the Untamed.” There are also twice-monthly StorySLAMs, at which anyone can put their name in a hat to tell a five-minute story. The stories are all autobiographical.

The Moth holds an annual fundraising party, aptly named the Moth Ball. (The organization owes its name to its founder, George Dawes Green, who used to tell stories with friends on his screened-in porch on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, where moths would fly through a hole in the screen and circle around the porch light.) The 10th anniversary ball, on November 12 at Capitale, will be co-hosted by Andy Borowitz and Gabriel Byrne. The program will include the first-ever presentation of the Moth Storyteller Award, to Garrison Keillor, as well as a storytelling competition between two of The New Yorker’s most facile writers, Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik.

Tickets are $275 ($295 after October 29) for a sit-down dinner and the subsequent show and party, or $150 ($170 after October 29) for admission to the show and party only. To purchase tickets, go to themoth.org, or call 212-742-0551. Proceeds benefit all of the Moth’s programs, which include teaching storytelling to adults in rehabilitation programs and teenagers in underserved communities.


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