I think we think that seeing each other as a passive act, But like when you look at someone, it's doing something to them. Just just the act of observation is doing something to someone. When you look at them, you're making judgments or assessments, and that's enough to shape part of who that person is. We are helping create one another's identities at any given moment, and I think
that we're not very conscious of that responsibility. I think that that we we have this paradoxical relationship with labels where we need labels to navigate and make sense of the chast in this world. But then these labels become the thing that we know each other for, and we can't see past them. The labels actually, while they reveal one thing, they conceal everything else at the same time. Who are you? How do you see yourself? How do
others see you? Just want to impact the other? These are some heavy, tough questions, questions we usually don't want to think about. But our guest today is asking you to think about it. His one man show turned Hulu documentary in and of itself is taking the Internet, and I will tell you my life by storm. If you have not seen it, hit pause right now, go watch it come back, and then you can finish listening. It's hard to describe Derek DelGaudio. His whole show is about
labels and how they're an illusion. But for a little context, He's an artist, a writer, a performer, a creator. He's the one behind In and of Itself, one of the most successful shows in off Broadway history. Is also the co founder of Performers Art Collective Abandoned. While the show, many people would say is indescribable, I would describe it
as pure magic. This podcast, the whole idea behind it is about thinking outside of our comfort zone, and Derek del Gaudio has had me thinking for the last year. I'm Stephanie Rule, MSNBC Anchor, NBC News Senior correspondent, and this is Modern Rules, a podcast from NBC Think and I Heart Radio. A year ago someone showed me this documentary. It blew my mind when I saw it. Well, a year has passed. In it of Itself is on Hulu.
People are seeing it and they are more excited than ever, and I finally have the opportunity to talk to the man behind it all. Derek. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. I know this is hard because many people listening haven't seen it. So for people who haven't, how would you describe what this production is? I have described it as a as a
theatrical existential crisis. Um, And that's the closest I think I can get without tainting it with some sort of description that might ruin it for people in some way, or or or set expectations in a way that it can't meet. Because if I call it a theater show, uh, one man show play, none of these things really set people up for it. It's just difficult to describe by design. So it so it works theatrically and as a as
a work of art, but it's horrible for marketing. I was gonna say, an existential crisis is tough on a bumper sticker. Then how was the show born? What is it about? What is it about? It's about you? You just don't know it until it's too late. What do you mean until it's too late? Well, I mean people think it's a show about me because it's autobiographical in a sense, and so they think that they're watching a story that I'm telling about myself. And I'm struggling to
find my identity. But it's really just a vehicle to you know, have you think about your identity and how you see others in yourself? Where did it come from? I just felt like this was something I needed to do. I've stayed in the background for a long time. I haven't really stepped into any real spootline. I've done other shows, and i've I've worked on things, and but I've never I've never done anything to put myself out there like this, where my name was on a poster, you know, by
itself like that. And so it felt like something I had been working towards. And I knew that if I was going to do it, I needed to do it in a way that I felt comfortable with. I felt trapped by others perceptions. So I decided to do a show about that and started writing and putting thoughts together, and a year later, that's what I came up with. When you were creating it, the director Frank Oz asked you at one point, are you gonna be okay if
nobody gets this? Yes, he did, and what's the answer. Yeah, I'm fine, I'm doing all right. I had to think about it when he asked me that I didn't really have an answer for him. This is a show that requires others, and it requires an audience to do, and I didn't have an audience until the very first night, so it was very hard to kind of rehearse this thing. We've went for a coffee and he asked me, very seriously, are you gonna be okay if no one gets this, like if no one likes this? And I was kind
of surprised by the question. I didn't have an honest answer for him. And I thought about it, and I thought about the work as it was, and I realized, like we had already kind of achieved even privately, We've already kind of achieved what I set out to do. It challenged everyone involved, including Frank, and he's an amazing artist, so the fact that it was challenging him too, it was like, yeah, we've we've already kind of made a thing here, and so I was. I was proud of
it even before we showed it to anyone. So yeah, I was okay, And I told him so many people listening I haven't seen it. But when you think about or or as you experience performing it, people do call you a magician, an illusionist, a mentalist and you say that's not true. That's fine. They can call me that. That's I have no problem with that. If people see the show and they want to call me a magician, if that's what they think I am, there's nothing I can do about that, and so that's fine. I have
no problem with that. I do have a background, you know, as as a magician, and I have implemented a lot of things that I've learned, you know, with that craft into this work. It's totally fair for someone to see it and think that that's what it is. I don't necessarily think that that's an appropriate term to use for this work. In particular, there's very specific imagery that pops into people's minds when they hear the word magician or
think of magic. And even if they hold magic and magicians in high regard, which would that would be rare, but let's say they did, it's still an inappropriate term to go into this with that in mind. My job is not to deceive you. That's and it's certainly not what this show is aiming that. It's not about you coming in and me fooling you and you not knowing how things work and having a little bit of wonder. That's not what this is about. Is the show a
true story? Yeah? Every word of every word I say, every single word I say, not not some of it, all of it, every single word is true. Um. So the show begins with the words, we're here because I heard a story, and in a nutshell, that story was I was in Spain visiting a friend of mine and uh, while we're in a bar, he introduced me to a
man who told me a story. As this stranger told me a story about a sailor who, after returning home, he didn't have much going for him, so he started playing Russian roulette for money, literally literally playing Russian roulette for money. And it turns out he was very good at it, and people didn't know whether it was luck or skill. Somehow he maybe he was cheating the system,
but he kept playing and he kept winning. And the man who told me this story related it to me and he said that that I was like that roulette player, the ruletista, and I didn't understand what he meant. And the show is an exploration of me trying to understand why he might have said that. Why why this stranger, someone I didn't know, might have compared me to someone who puts a gun to his seat every single day. And so for you, it was so important for you
to find out what was it about your character? What did you put out in the universe that would make someone think that of you? Yeah, I mean I met a guy who said you remind me of a guy who tries to kill himself every day. That made me wonder what he saw in me that made him say that that. That's that's worth exploring. You know why he said that, Why he may have said that, And what is my life intersect with that story? And how many different avenues and where does it intersect and why does
it intersect? And maybe this is what he meant. Maybe this is what he meant. That man saw the show, he saw the film. I corresponded afterwards and asked him if he would watch the film, and he did, and it was it was amazing because he absolved me of of it. He basically he said, you no longer need to carry the bur of being the realtista, which is the best thing I think anyone could say to me afterwards. But did he tell you why he ever said that
to begin with? Because I asked, there are all sorts of labels and experiences that we have in our lives, and some of them may just be accidental, right, some of them A girl one day in the fourth grade could be told by someone hey, fatty, and that could impact the rest of their life. And if you go back in time and find that person who said that to them, that person may be like, I don't even know why I said it. I don't want to know why he said it now, especially I don't want to know.
I just I'm I'm glad he did because the journey it send me on was, you know, extraordinary. The relatist say is really a metaphor. It's that thing that you you you believe people think about you, that you think about yourself. Uh, that's he are good or bad. And that's because no matter what you say about like I'm I'm who I am and I don't care what other people think. That's just not how it works. It matters.
It matters what other people think, and it doesn't matter like that you need to change your life or do anything differently, but it does matter. I remember I talked to a philosopher. I talked to a few philosophers while making the show, and so this philosopher. He had another thought experiment. If you could divide a person's brain in two pieces and take half of their character and put it into one body and another and the other half and put it into a different body, which one is Bob?
And so he drew this on a napkin and he said, so, which one is is the real Bob? And I pointed to one of them and I said that one, And he goes, well, how do you know that? And I said, because that's the one I'm calling Bob. And he's like, that's that's not how this works. I go, sure it is, and he's like, not, how how? And I said, okay, Well, let let's take you, for example, your professor of philosophy
at the school, and that's what people know you as. Yeah, Um, what if I could convince everyone in this room that you're not weird a restaurant? So what if I cooman is everyone in this room that you're not you're not actually college professor? Um? And then your name isn't even what your name is? And then what if I could do it with everyone in the city, and then everyone in the state, and then everyone in the country, and
then everyone in the world. But if I could get everyone in the world to believe that you're not who you claim you are, you know who who are you? Then? And he didn't take me up on it, But the notion being that, like, it does matter if everyone in the world won't acknowledge your existence as you claim to be, and they deny you of who you are? What does that mean in the context of the world you know
and others and and identity? Does an existence of acumens understanding that connection between others and ourselves that matters, and also realizing that we are others to other people. So busy fighting to be seen by others, we forget that we are others were judging were But also, like, what if we stop fighting to be seen and we just focused on seeing others? If you just focused on really seeing and acknowledging others, what happens. It's a leap of faith. Yeah,
it's a leap of faith. It's and its vulnerability. I don't expect people to be able to accept, you know, the multitudes of everyone. I know, that's a lot to ask. But what you can do is accept the mystery you know and embrace the mystery of others, not putting anything on them or any preconceived notions. What what might fill that blank space? If you can just let mystery be mystery and allowed to live and breathe, who knows what
we can discover. We'll be back after the break. You performing this show every night require there's an enormous amount of vulnerability in the audience. You see Deray McKesson, who's one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, You see Bill Gates. The show was supposed to run for ten weeks. It ran for what seventy? Watching it as a film, it appears that it's not The room isn't that dark? You can see the faces of the audience. Is that true? Everyone?
Every single person? Yeah? How hard was that? Right? So you're sitting there and not even in a good seat. By the way, Bill Gates is sitting sort of off to the back on top with his arms folded. Hey, do you know when those people are there and be does it impact you? I mean, I love that he had a bad seat. Yes, that one of my favorite parts is that he has a bad seat. Yeah, And that's part of it is like no one, no one can have special treatment because they're as special as anyone else.
In ever, I try to equalize it in that in that sense, but yes, it's it's obviously it changes the air in the room a little bit when everyone looks over and Bill Gates is standing there. It changes things. At the beginning of the performance, people are encouraged to to choose how they see themselves. Uh, and at the end of the performance, I tie that in and I have private affirmations publicly with these people of how they might see themselves. What title did he get? Leader? He
was a leader? But the best ones are the ones where people would surprise us. We had a I won't say the name, but we had a very very extremely notable person and they chose something very vulnerable. It shows add it, you know, and they were really struggling with that at the time. It was like shocking to everyone because they can tell it was genuine. But how liberating for that person. Yeah, it must be to be to be seen, to live in that moment of being known
and admitting the thing that they probably conceal. Was it hard on you all? I mean every night people are crying, having these emotional catharsis, experiencing the show. So what was that like for you to go home? Every night after that. It felt like I took the S A T S And attended a funeral every single day, is what it felt like as an artist who devoted this much of his time his craft focused on identity. Why is that?
Where did that come from in your life? Um? I think I've been around otherness, you know a lot that grew up with a gay mom, of gay single mother most of my life, and depending on what someone knew about her changed people's perception of her, And so she would go from being a normal mother to a freak within a single word, which was you know, growing up in Colorado in the time when it wasn't really you know, uh, there wasn't a lot of acceptance around me in terms
of neighbors, the city I was in, and things. And so I learned the power of a single word and how it can change your world depending not on person, but on the people's perception of that person. How as soon as people knew she was gay, it would absolutely change the air around her, um, and how they treated her and me based on that. Right, think about your your Twitter bio, Right, what does mine say? Probably you know mom, wife TV anchor, New Jersey native, Right, it's
how we categorize ourselves and inadvertently even classify ourselves. Right, So, I think this person went to an Ivy League college winner, this person only went to high school? Are they a loser? As someone who's so acutely aware of the impact of labels and identity, how is it for you to exist right now at a time when people's political identities, their race, they're they're the region. Therefrom in the United States has become such a deep identification that categorizes people, maybe more
than we've ever seen in our lives. I started the show and I wrote started in two and so the election happened and everything changed and the show became something else because people started taking it seriously. Like Charlotte'sville was a big moment when after Charlotte's Ville, how people started identifying themselves. It was much more sincere and also the kind of you could feel it in the room. The
room became like a microcosm for the world. When you say the room, you mean the theater, the one room show, Yeah, correct, the theater that I was performing in. You could feel the atmosphere and of that conversation it was. It was really surreal. Yeah, I don't know. It was like I was isolated writing and creating it and then put it into the world, and it was it was just a conversation that everyone is having or ready to have. Then, being someone who is so focused on this had the
last four years been hard on you. Right even right now, when you look at how conspiracy theories have taken hold of millions of people, it's hard for you to witness this every day. I wrote a book that's coming out next month. It's called A Moral Man. But this topic is what the book is about. It's about this subjectivity of truth that we're having to deal with in our
day to day lives. That was that was there before, but now we've never had people so blatantly exposing the mechanics of deception, like in front of our eyes, like we use. As a journalist and someone who follows politics, you've seen it, but I don't think the general public was aware of how blatant it is. And and now
it's part of the dialogue. As a journalist, it's brutal to study every day the mechanics of deception, like at work, and then to go out in your personal life and watch the reverberations of that work make its way to your mom and dad's kitchen table. It's really really hard, it is, it's really painful. Also, they don't even know they're being deceived. I mean, it's really it's it's more
of a discussion of truth than it is deception. Like the people who march the capital on the sixth, Like, as horrible as that is, like I would say, most of them believe it. Most of them, it's not. They're living fiction as if it's true. They're the marks of this you know, scam if you will. But that's what makes it terrible. It's so obvious and clunking, but it's happening. At the same time. It makes you, being a witness to this, feel like you're taking crazy pills. Yeah, it does.
But being able to see through and have the conversation and talk about what you know, what's happening is really important. And having the conversation with empathy so that people who have been deceived cannot feel like fools, because that's what happens is you feel like you've been occurred. So you can't leave. You can't leave, and you can't you can't
admit it, you know, you can't admit. But I think that if if even the smartest people admit to their own self deception, I mean, then you can start to have that conversation, whether it's self deception or being explicitly deceived by others. We know what that feels like, and it needs to be treated with empathy when we we encounter others who have been so blatantly deceived and are
not living deception. They're living truths, and and it's really hard to strip them of those truths and to to give them new truths to to live by without them feeling foolish. And so we need to figure out how to how to do that. When you think generally about your audiences and the feedback you get for most people, is it a light experience or a dark experience? I think there are some lights you can only experience in
the dark. I think that's what this show is. I think that's you know, sometimes some some rays of light you know, are so dim, you know, you need to go to the darkest cave to see him. And I think that's what this is. I think that there is a lot of darkness in it. But and and that's what that's what any deception that is in the show and the illusions, the illusion aspects. They are part of that darkness, but they are used to create a space
that allows the light two to come in and illuminate things. Hopefully, that's if you're choosing to listen. What made you continue the show instead of ten weeks? It was seventy weeks and it's seventy weeks. It was at the height of its popularity, and you came in one day and said, I'm done. How did all that work? It just felt like you you got it and doing it more would be, you know, diminishing returns like I don't, I don't I think that. It's just like I don't need to repeat
myself anymore. They've heard it. I repeated myself over and over again for you know, for for years, and and then as soon as I saw not in okay, they heard it. I'm done. Now we're good. I've said it. We can go home. And Frank felt that way. He was there all the time. Frank Oz, the director, who is you know, incredible. Two weeks before we closed, we were still making adjustments to the show. Two weeks, two weeks before closing night, and our our crew was just
like what you guys are absolutely insane. It wasn't about getting it right. It's like you're trying to say something and how much clarity can it be said with and
communicated with, even if it's non verbally. And I feel like there's there's like we all have notes inside of us and you try to plug those notes and hope that they reverberate in someone else, and and others can feel it, and it just it felt like there was you could hear the symphony in the room and and everything everyone was vibrating at the same frequency, you know,
and a lot of the craft is hidden. But that's one thing Frank and I really related to is that people will never really know the lengths that we go to to achieve we do, because I mean, you can't imagine how hard it was to bring Yoda to life. You know. Frank was, you know, the creator. He brought Yoda the life, eternal life, eternal life. And doing that not just the physicality and the movements of your you know, it's not just a guy with a hand of a
puppet and the voice. It's like everything it took to do something like that, or to create the Muppets, you know, to to bring Miss Peggy to life to create life on this earth. You know, like Miss Piggy is a thing, it's a living Hey kidding me? Chose my number one childhood icon I love. I know, I mean'st but like it's like, yeah, you put your hand up a puppet and you just use a funny voice. No, you can't comprehend what it takes to do that. There's a reason
why Miss Piggy is eternal. Excuse me. She was the first woman of influence to have it all. There's no one like Miss Piggy. Anytime someone thinks of the name Frank Case, everyone conjures something different. You know. Some people think of Miss Piggy. Some people think of what about Bob a Little Shop of Horrors or the guy from the Blues Brothers move be like that. Everyone thinks it's something different. But I asked him. I asked him in an email if he would be willing to direct, how
did you explain it to him? It's a show about identity, and I wanted to break it apart in front of people. I wanted to use the show as an identity and my identity and explode it right there on stage and blow it apart in every different way. And and have people recognize, you know, the complexities of it and break it, break you know, break it spatially, temporarily, break what they think they know you know. And he appreciated all of
those aspects of it. Then I guess my last question is, then does the show have no message or no goal? I'm careful to answer that because of I understand how the work is resonating with people, and I see the reactions that people are having, and I don't want to give people the idea that I'm someone who has answers I don't have. We are all the unreliable narrators of
each other stories. And it's just that responsibility of knowing that, like when I get off of this call, people are gonna call me and ask how it went, How is Stephanie? What was she? Like? The point being that responsibility is what I'm aware of, is that, like, I'm shaping who you are in this world the moment I walk away and talk to someone else about you. If I meet someone down the road and they asked, me, oh, you've met Stephanie, how is she? I'm doing something to you
even before I opened my mouth. I'm deciding and defining who you are as an individual and what you are in this world. I just want to bring an awareness to that responsibility for for myself, and I believe that if others had that awareness, the world would be a better place for it. Derek Show is so hard to describe. Were so many reasons. It's truly an original artistic endeavor,
and it turns everything upside down. And while it resonates on a very deep level with so many people, at the same time, so many people don't actually have the words or the comfort level to delve into a lot of these really complicated issues. I can tell you I was livid when I was praising this film to my producer Rachel and she said, oh, I saw it. I saw it live in New York about a year ago. And I said, why on earth didn't you tell me? And she thought about it for a second and she said, Honestly,
I think maybe it's too hard to describe. Derek's entire journey is about identity, how we see ourselves and how we see others. For him, it was a chance running in Spain that led him to a journey of self discovery.
What is it for the rest of us? On this podcast, we like to leave you sometime to think and something Eric left me thinking about, Well, he left me thinking about a lot, but specifically, how much of our identity is based off what we think we should be, who we want to be, instead of just who we are? And how much of our identity is based on these labels we give ourselves and the labels we imagine other
people put on us. I know we all have very busy lives with a lot of distractions, and it's our instinct to identify, to label, to categorize when we meet somebody within five seconds. But does that really serve us or does it limit us? And can we instead give people the opportunity to show us who they are over time. I'm Stephanie Rule and you're listening to Modern Rules, a podcast from NBC Think, MSNBC and I Heart Radio. This podcast is hosted by me Stephanie Rule. Mike Beet and
Katrina Norvell are executive producers. Meredith Bennett Smith is Senior editor for NBC Think and our editorial lead. The podcast is engineered and edited by Josher. Additional production support provided by Charles Herman, Rachel Rosenbaum, and Lauren Wynn, and special thanks to Katherine kim Are Global head and digital news right here at NBC News and MSNBC. For more thought provoking analysis, visit NBC news dot com slash thing