INTERVIEW: Steve Burns has a story to tell … his own
Photo: Steve Burns will bring his solo show, Steve Burns Alive, to New York City, July 23-25. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Emily Owens PR with permission.
Steve Burns captured the hearts of TV viewers back when he was the original host of the successful Nick Jr. program Blue’s Clues, which paired Burns with Blue the dog as they unearthed three clues and hoped to solve a mystery within a few minutes. The show, which premiered in 1996, was wholesome and beloved, and Burns had fun creating the many episodes of its initial run.
But behind the scenes there was another story impacting the host’s life. Burns would like to open the door a little farther for his fans and let them in on a little secret: He wasn’t always the happiest person when performing on Blue’s Clues. He told Hollywood Soapbox that those years in his life saw him dealing with untreated mental illness, and it didn’t help that some bizarre conspiracy theories surrounded him in those early-internet years. One of the theories was that Burns actually died. Spoiler Alert: He’s alive and well.
Burns has internalized these ups and downs, and tried to make sense of it all, and now he’s sharing those lessons with theatrical audiences. Steve Burns Alive, which first premiered in Beacon, New York, will soon play a limited engagement at La MaMa in Downtown Manhattan, July 23-25. The shows are billed as pop-up performances, and Burns hopes they lead to a much longer run.
“This is a thing that my oldest friend and I kind of put together in a couple of days,” Burns said in a recent phone interview. “I happen to be friends with a guy named Matt Freeman, who is a brilliant playwright. He had big success last year with a play called The Ask. He’s won a bunch of awards. He’s just been my friend since junior high school, and he’s had kind of a front-row seat to all of my near-collapses and reconstructions. And he just said, ‘You know, why don’t we put something together about this?’ Because I’ve done storytelling in the past. I told a bunch of stories for The Moth, and I used to host for them. It’s just something I’ve kind of flirted with.”
Freeman, who directs the piece, began to help Burns with the writing of the one-hour monologue. The process was organic and led to those early performances in Beacon. The shows were well-received. Burns remembers looking out in the audience and seeing “middle-aged men shoulder-heave crying,” so he thought they were a success.
“I think we’re throwing a stone in the pond and seeing how the pond reacts,” Burns said. “I’d love for this to have a larger life. … It’s much more about my personal life than it is about my professional life. It’s much more about my unique lived experience as someone communicating on a blue screen with no other actors or props or marks and looking into a void every day and asking it for help, which was literally my job. What most people don’t know is that I was doing that the whole time with untreated, severe clinical depression, and as you can imagine, it was my job to convey unbridled joy and curiosity. And in order to not fake that, I sort of had to deplete a well within.”
Burns added: “And I was a kid, so I didn’t have any real replenishment strategies for all of that. So there was a cost to that. It’s also about being an urban legend. It’s mostly about being an urban legend. It’s about being rumored dead, which definitely happened to me, and what it’s like when a zillion strangers tell you that you died enough times that there’s a part of you that starts to wonder if it’s true.”
The former TV host said the show is less about consoling and more about confronting pain head on, and he hopes there are some lessons to be learned for the audience’s sake. Burns said that when he finally asked for help for his mental illness, he had accomplished the bravest and realest action of his life.
“If people identify with that, then I’m happy that they came to the show, for sure,” he said. “It’s really weird, man. I’m such a private person that the fact that I’m doing this, I feel like an astronaut on a spacewalk or something. It really is untethering for me to be out there in this way, but I think we all need connection. We all need to share, and I spent a lot of my life just sort of isolating and not sharing. And perhaps this is a dysfunctional overreaction to all of that, I don’t know. My therapist has blessed the endeavor. That’s all I know. In the show, I talk a lot to a camera, and I make no bones about doing that because it’s more comfortable for me. The only thing I had 10,000 hours of is creating a viable connection through the highly mediated experiences of cameras and screens, so it feels more authentic to me that way, if that makes sense.”
Those internet rumors about his demise definitely hurt Burns at the time, and he couldn’t quite understand how they began and how they proliferated. He said these untrue statements spread like wildfire in the early days of when so many people were accessing unfounded stories via the internet.
“It was happening while I was on the show while it was still dial up,” he said. “The internet had decided that I had passed in some egregious way, and it was difficult to reconcile that. … Oh, this must be true because a gazillion people on this message board said it was true. Each one of these tiny posts is a reinforcing opinion that my brain cannot help but adhere to, and we’re still learning how to navigate all that, I think. We’re still learning how to discern truth as it relates to a billion opinions at once. I still think our brains aren’t really set up to interpret that kind of information. … You really do start to wonder if everyone knows something that you don’t.”
Burns said he somewhat understands why he was targeted. Blue’s Clues was the definition of wholesome entertainment, and there’s something strange and defeatist in society that wants to bring down that purity.
“I get it,” Burns reasoned. “I understand there is a base human impulse to corrupt that which seems implausibly pure. … It looked like a bright, happy, shiny balloon, but when you popped it, it was full of misdeeds. Everyone loves that story. It’s the cheapest joke in the book, but everyone goes to that time and time again. And I get it. I understand that. … But what stuck with me is: Why did it endure? I was out there on The Rosie O’Donnell Show dancing. I was doing every print interview I could, everything I could back in the day to show that I had a pulse. We were still making new episodes of the show, and the rumor persisted. So it really kind of gets into your brain.”
Burns doesn’t see Steve Burns Alive as therapeutic, but he does find performing the show comforting because he’s able to make that connection with an audience that he never really saw when he was on Blue’s Clues. And his fans, as he’s come to learn, are numerous and cut across multiple generations.
“It’s really wonderful for me to continue the conversation with people of a certain age … more as a peer about the shit that’s really hard,” he said. “It feels very special to me and feels like a pretty unique circumstance that I have the gift of experiencing.”
Burns added this about his fandom: “You’ve got to keep in mind, Blue’s Clues to me was a very personal experience because it was very small. It was just me and a camera in a blue void. It felt like a very personal show. It felt like me talking to a friend, at least that’s the way I looked at it. Intellectually I understood we were a big show. We were bigger than Sesame Street for a couple of years. We were in like 37 countries or something, but I didn’t really internalize that or get my arms around that in any meaningful way until just a couple of years ago. It’s heartwarming to say the least, terrifying, wonderful. I don’t feel worthy of any of it, but it’s great.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Steve Burns Alive, written by and starring Burns, will play July 23-25 at La MaMa in Downtown Manhattan. Matthew Freeman directs. Click here for more information and tickets.
