Exclusive interview · Arts

For weeks, a man in a suit kept coming to The Moth’s storytelling nights. He put his name in the hat, waited for the drawing, and watched ten other people take the stage. Jenifer Hixson, who helped shape the organization’s StorySLAMs, began to notice him. He was impeccably dressed, an unlikely figure among the regulars at those early downtown shows. What, she wondered, did the suited man have to say?

Eventually, his name was called. Ed Gavigan told the audience how three teenagers had stabbed him in a random attack and left him for dead by the side of a road. It was not the story Hixson had expected from the quiet, well-dressed regular. He had been sitting among them for weeks, carrying this experience with him.

“Whoa, that’s what came out of that man,” Hixson recalled when we spoke this week. The Moth later developed other parts of Gavigan’s life into Mainstage stories. But what stayed with her was the first revelation: a stranger could be familiar in every outward respect and still be utterly unknown.

This month, The Moth is celebrating twenty-five years of its New York StorySLAM, the open-mic competition that gives ordinary people five minutes to tell a true story without notes. Its November 12 anniversary show, UNFILTERED: 25 Years of New York Stories, will take place at Music Hall of Williamsburg. Hixson is directing it. The program brings together veterans and newcomers, although, unlike an ordinary StorySLAM, nobody will hold up a score when a storyteller finishes.

The competition began as a way to solve an administrative problem. Founded by George Dawes Green in 1997, The Moth had attracted more would-be storytellers than its tiny staff could audition. Hixson recalled that Green and another early executive considered an open microphone: hear ten people in an evening, then see who had a story and the ability to tell it. A gifted writer could prove inert onstage. Someone with a magnetic personality might have no sense of narrative. The experiment would sort them out.

At Dixon Place, the experimental theater where the first StorySLAM took place, the distinction between storytelling and performance art had yet to settle. Some people arrived in costume, Hixson remembered. Some offered strange pieces that hardly resembled the direct personal narratives now associated with The Moth. The eventual winner told a true story about a difficult neighbor, but in a fanciful private language full of extra syllables. Hixson compared it to Dr. Seuss. She recently listened to that recording again and found it beautiful, although far removed from what the form later became.

What the organizers discovered was how little a good story needed. “I think the simplicity, just a single voice,” Hixson said when I asked why the format endured. “There’s no bells or whistles or special lighting.” A face, a voice, and the suspense of learning what happened next could be enough. She believes that people instinctively want to watch another person recount an experience. It is storytelling stripped to the equipment everyone already possesses.

The rules are simple. People volunteer their names, ten are selected at random, and each has five minutes to tell a true story on a given theme. Judges chosen from the audience award scores. The format has since spread well beyond the city: The Moth says it now has StorySLAM communities in twenty-nine cities around the world. Its larger operation includes radio, podcasts, workshops and staged performances, but the competition preserves a particular kind of risk. Whoever comes up might be wonderful. Whoever comes up might freeze.

That prospect is what keeps some otherwise willing storytellers out of the hat. I told Hixson that the thought of speaking in front of an audience terrified me. She had heard the objection before. People imagine losing their place, standing silent under the lights, unable to retrieve the next sentence. It does happen, she said, but the response can be unexpectedly tender. An audience will call out encouragement. Sometimes the storyteller gets an applause break simply for recovering.

“It’s a very kind room,” Hixson said. In a comedy club, she suggested, some patrons may be daring the performer to make them laugh. A StorySLAM audience usually wants the teller to succeed. Everyone understands what a large request it is to ask someone to expose a piece of private life in public.

Occasionally, however, a story lands harder than intended. At one show at Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Hixson recalled, an audience member in the front row fainted after hearing an account involving blood. The host cleared the room to make way for paramedics, fearing something terrible had happened. Then the person sat up, apparently having been overcome by the subject. Hixson tells the story with amusement now, but it is a reminder that listening can be more physical than the term suggests.

Other surprises are quieter. Hixson remembered an immigrant who was introduced to a Kit Kat and found the chocolate extraordinary. He wanted to save half for his roommate, in keeping with their custom of sharing things. As the hours passed and the roommate failed to return, he slowly ate the second half himself. It was an almost absurdly modest drama, made compelling by the storyteller’s guilt and delight. A small piece of candy became a test of generosity.

Then there was the librarian who described discovering a new sexual life after divorce with a more experienced partner. The pleasure of hearing her, Hixson said, lay partly in the mismatch between the person on the stage and the story the audience expected her to tell. The suited man and the librarian belonged to the same category of surprise. They overturned the easy judgments that people make about strangers.

Hixson is equally interested in stories that begin with experiences everyone recognizes. People tell birth stories, for example, even though childbirth is hardly rare. The particulars may be extraordinary: a cab, a bathtub, a hospital waiting room. A familiar event becomes absorbing when it is told by someone to whom it happened. Death, too, is universal and endlessly particular.

She described a story she had chosen for The Moth Radio Hour about a woman caring for her dying husband. Mostly delirious, the man opened his eyes and asked her to dye his hair green. Then he added his beard. She did as he asked. When he was lucid enough to see himself, he winked. Asked why he had wanted it done, he replied, “Didn’t do enough silly things.” The story was funny enough to be ridiculous and sad enough to make the joke almost unbearable.

Such accounts have little in common except that someone found a reason to tell them. Hixson thinks the five-minute limit helps people discover that reason. The first version may amount to little more than an amusing incident: something happened, and it was strange. The work begins when a storyteller asks what the incident meant and why it has remained in memory.

“Why do I want to tell this?” she said, describing the question that emerges during preparation. “What did this actually mean?” Cutting away the digressions can uncover an emotion that the storyteller hadn’t recognized. People sometimes tell Hixson that shaping an account has felt therapeutic. She is less interested in the language of self-help than in the curiosity that makes one person want to understand another.

When I asked what she wanted the anniversary evening to feel like, Hixson considered the idea of a twenty-fifth birthday. There should be satisfaction in what has been accomplished, she said, but also excitement about what lies ahead. She wants a celebration, with some favorite “fun bangers” from past StorySLAMs and fresh material. The point is not to pretend that every story from the archive was a masterpiece. It is to show why the format remains alive.

The announced lineup includes Carole Radziwill, Jeff Simmermon, Julian Goldhagen, Marilyn Torres, Di Zhao and Dave Kalema. Ophira Eisenberg will host, and Timothy Goodman is scheduled to create a live mural. The event dispenses with the judging, which Hixson regards as a welcome reprieve from the competitive machinery. For one night, the stories will not have to win.

She calls herself “professionally nosy.” While we talked, she became curious about why I insisted I would never tell a story onstage. Journalists, she said, can be particularly difficult to recruit. They ask questions for a living but resist answering them. She suspected that even the quietest person had something worth sharing. I maintained that I would rather write than perform.

Hixson accepted the distinction, though she did not entirely abandon the project of persuading me. The Moth, after all, was built on the possibility that the person least inclined to speak might be the one with the story everyone remembers. “The supply is endless,” she said. “We’re all creating stories every moment.”

UNFILTERED: 25 Years of New York Stories is at Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn, on November 12. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; stories begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and information.