Drew Michael would like to get inside your head. He has a plan for doing it: hand you a pair of headphones and tell you about his love life.
The comedian’s new show, Love Me, is an 80-minute account of five relationships, performed at SoHo Playhouse with the audience listening through headphones. This is an unusual arrangement for stand-up, a trade in which the performer depends on hearing the room laugh. But Michael, who is deaf, has never had quite the same relationship to sound as most of his colleagues. He says the headphones are not an accessory. Without them, there is no show.
Michael, a former Saturday Night Live writer whose comedy specials have aired on HBO, is making his theatrical debut with Love Me. In a written interview with New York Hours, he talked about the four years it took to make the piece, the experiences that upended it while he was writing, and the director he credits with rescuing its structure. The result is less a succession of jokes about exes than an attempt to let strangers listen to the way he thinks.
“I’ll be honest — this started as a theatrical production before it even knew what it was about,” Michael said. “I started writing this four years ago, knowing I wanted to utilize theatrical elements to tell a story.” It was only afterward, he said, that he understood he was writing about love.
He could have made a stand-up special. He has made them before. But he wanted more than a microphone could provide. “I love stand-up, but it’s like a tool in a tool box,” he said. “You can’t build a house with just a hammer.”
The house, in this case, comes furnished with headphones. Every spectator gets a pair. A theater full of people becomes, in one sense, a room full of private listeners. This gives Michael a peculiar advantage: he can address the crowd while seeming to whisper to each person separately. In comedy, where even silence can be contagious, it is a rather drastic way of rearranging the audience.
“The headphones give the audience direct access to my mind, my inner world,” he said. “The way we use them is totally unique.” He was coy about precisely what they do. There are tricks of sound and perspective that he would rather leave for the performance. “The story literally cannot be told without them.”
The equipment also introduces a personal complication. Michael has lived with hearing loss since childhood. During the making of Love Me, he told New York Theatre Guide, a hearing test forced him to consider an identity he had long resisted. The discovery did not arrive neatly before the writing began. It came while he was working, forcing him to reconsider the story he thought he was telling.
There is an obvious difficulty in writing a play about your life while continuing to live it. When Michael began, he could not have known which episodes would come to seem important four years later. Some of the crucial ones had yet to happen.
“Some of the most pivotal events in the show happened while I was writing it,” he said. “And they changed everything — the story that was told and the lens through which we told it.”
That change matters more than another twist in a romantic history. A breakup is a reliable source of material for a comedian, as is the retrospective humiliation of having behaved badly. But Michael’s material has grown stranger as he has reconsidered it. Five relationships offer five occasions to look again at what he thought he heard, what he assumed someone meant, and whether he was listening at all.
Love Me was first presented at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023. The New York engagement, part of the New York Comedy Festival, has sound design by Daniel Kluger; Deaf West Theatre is among its producers. There is much Michael will not disclose about the staging. “Without spoiling anything, it allows us to push the show in a completely new direction,” he said of the headphones. Evidently, he would prefer that the audience discover the direction for itself.
He is considerably less guarded about Prashanth Venkataramanujam, his director and longtime collaborator. Asked what Venkataramanujam brought to the production, Michael invoked a character not generally found in theatrical acknowledgments: Prometheus.
“The way Prometheus stole fire from the gods to bring to humanity, Prashanth did that with writing structure,” he said.
This is lavish praise for a man who helped organize a script. Michael went further, saying Venkataramanujam “has put more personal energy into this than anyone on earth, rivaling even me.” Whatever arguments they may have had in rehearsal, the director appears to have won his author’s gratitude.
A show about its creator’s relationships runs the risk of asking paying customers to sit through somebody else’s emotional accounting. Michael knows that the audience needs something to do besides sympathize. He says the headphones were designed with spectators in mind from the outset, not added as a novelty after he had finished telling his story.
“This is my theatrical debut, but it’s also the first time I’ve written something that has the audience top of mind at all times,” he said. “We designed this experience for them.”
There is a pleasing contradiction here. Michael promises access to his innermost thoughts but does so by giving the listeners their own little sealed-off worlds. They will hear the same show, but each will hear it alone. Whether this produces the closeness he wants is something only the performance can establish. For now, he is content to promise an experience rather than explain the trick.
He wants New Yorkers to leave feeling that they have seen something special, something that “reached deep into their hearts and stayed there.” For a man trying to get inside other people’s heads, it is an ambitious destination. Still, he has not forgotten the less poetic requirements of putting on a show.
“And on behalf of my producers, I want them to tell their friends.”
Love Me runs October 24 through November 22 at SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street. Tickets: lovemeshow.com.
