The Nocturnists Charlie has narrated audio tours for museums around the country. MFA_Boston_FrayFelix_Intro charlievaronart charlievaronrockwell charlievaronphoenixfamilytour Clients (partial list): Antenna International * Art Institute of Chicago * Blue & Gold Fleet Bay Cruise * de Young Museum * Earprint Productions * Getty Museum * Guggenheim Museum * High Museum of Art * Jewish Museum of New York * Los Angeles County Museum of Art * Metropolitan Museum of Art * Morgan Library & Museum * Museum of Fine Arts, Boston * Philadelphia Museum of Art * San Francisco Museum of Modern Art * Walters Art Museum Available to record on short notice. Can work with your production team or mine. Contact: charlie@charlievaron.com 415 648 6782

A solo show by Charlie Varon developed with & directed by David Ford Rush Limbaugh learns Spanish in Greenwich Village, falls in love with a feminist, plays Othello in New York's Central Park… Charlie's one-man show won rave reviews and was an audience favorite in 1994-95 and again when he revived it in 2004-05. Listen to Charlie's one-man, 20-character satiric feast! ( This recording was made live at The Marsh in 1995.) Rush Limbaugh in Night School Act 1 00:00 / 45:04 Rush Limbaugh in Night School Act 2 00:00 / 36:08 Rush Limbaugh in Night School opened at The Marsh in San Francisco in 1994, quickly became a hit, enjoyed a 7-month, sold-out run and won numerous awards, including the Will Glickman Award for best new play of the year in the Bay Area. Charlie went on to perform the show in Washington, DC, and Off Broadway in New York. Critics called it "dazzlingly funny" (SF Chronicle), "a delight" (Washington Post), and "a comic tour de force" (The New Yorker). Was Rush Limbaugh a demagogue? Read Charlie's account of hearing a speech by Limbaugh in 2005 .

< Back #9 Bernie's Strange-Bedfellows Dream January 7, 2024 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Bernie's Strange-Bedfellows Dream 00:00 / 02:29 Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe Attention, writers and performers: I have openings for mentoring/coaching starting in February. Previous Next

In the fall of 2002, Charlie Varon discussed the new performance form he and David Ford have devised. QUESTION : How did you come up with this new way of creating theater? CHARLIE : In the summer of 2001, I found myself artistically adrift. I asked Stephanie Weisman to book me for two weekends at The Marsh. The plan was, David Ford and I would create a show from scratch in ten days, and I'd perform whatever we came up with. I hoped it might give me the idea for my next play. The process was the most intense and thrilling of my life. It was full of surprises. But perhaps the biggest one was that I didn't end up wanting to write a play. I wanted to keep working in this new form. QUESTION : How long does it take to make SOUP? CHARLIE : Last time, ten days. This time we're giving ourselves a month. But a short process, with a deadline, is good. It forces me to work intuitively. When I did plays, I'd take a couple of years on each, writing, honing, indulging my perfectionism. Now, in middle age, I'm becoming an imperfectionist! QUESTION : What excites you about the form? CHARLIE : It's utterly unpredictable! I begin with an idea, or a line, or a voice for a character. Then I start improvising, David asks questions, we go back and forth. We end up someplace I could never have imagined. We keep doing this, until we have six or eight monologues. Then I go onstage, with absolutely no idea what an audience will make of it! QUESTION : What did the audience make of it? CHARLIE : People loved the form, the risk of it, all the topical stuff, the comedy, and the mix of pieces, from satire to storytelling. The fact that we came at them from so many different angles. So we extended the show, and recorded it, and now it's out on CD .

An experiment gone amok feat. Studs Terkel & Dr. Oliver Sacks Charlie Varon 's Comic Bonbons #12: An Experiment Goes Amok, feat. Studs Terkel & Oliver Sacks Studs Terkel & Oliver Sacks - An experiment goes amok 00:00 / 04:53 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Collaboration: David Ford Special thanks to J.P. Tilleman Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe Attention, writers and performers: I have openings for mentoring/coaching .

Before a show, after a show: maintaining sanity as a performer Spiritual Exercises for Solo Performers Stage fright. Adrenaline. Vulnerability. Before a show. After a show. A few practices I've found useful. To view or download the printable booklet, click here . STORYTELLING SPIRITUAL EXERCISES FOR SOLO PERFORMERS Political Theater Now I remember seeing Mother Courage at Berkeley Rep a year or two ago. The acting and production were excellent! But the transaction seemed off. I would have preferred a documentary film about one of our current Mothers Courage, living in Iraq or Congo. The transaction at Berkeley Rep seemed comfortable. An affirmation that by watching this play and getting it, we audience members know something about the world and are on the right side of things. Some days I wonder how much theater (and other art forms) consists of flattering its audience. Offering comfort food of one sort or another. I look at the world. Who can fathom the global economy? The future of disease? Climate change? Korea? Megacities? The massive behavior modification experiment called the Internet? I inspect my world view. Totally inadequate to the times. So for me the question is always: How do I let myself write from inside the question, and resist any impulse to offer an easy resolution, facile answers, or stale truths? When I'm doing my work right, my characters take me to places I wouldn't otherwise go, and say and do things that scare and trouble me. And now I must indict myself. Last fall, my agent got me a weekend's worth of gigs doing Rush Limbaugh in Night School in Kirkland, WA and Tacoma. I printed out the 3-year-old script -- which was itself a 10th anniversary revision. Which meant that many of the words were already 13 years old. Reading the script, I laughed. Some good jokes! It was like reading someone else's play. One of the nice surprises of time passing. You get to be the audience of your own work. I memorized, I did character work, I purchased pears. Politically the play felt dated. I cut out some lines about voting machines in Florida. But satire really wants to be fresh -- to have not just the absence of the stale but the startling new. And RLNS did not meet that test. I rationalized doing the show on the grounds that it's a well-wrought story, it's funny, and people need to laugh. And I need to buy groceries. But that is a rationalization. One night recently in my solo performance class, a guy about my age did a piece about his first job as a newspaper reporter, in the early 1980s, in a small town in Connecticut whose main industry -- silverware making -- had just collapsed. The Hunt brothers had bought up silver futures, causing the price to skyrocket, and the industry fled overseas. The performance piece was full of the texture of decay -- potholes, eviction notices posted on plywood doors of houses, bars full at 2pm. A girl rides a motorcycle without a helmet, suffers brain damage, Reagan's Medicare cuts prevent her from getting the rehab she needs. The reporter writes a series of stories about this and wins an award; some action is taken; and there is a death. So why was I riveted? Why didn't this all feel dated? Maybe it was the presence of the man who had lived it. The events occurred 25 years ago, but he's here, still struggling to understand, wrestling with the past in the present, asking me to join him on the journey. Maybe it was the fact that it forced me, uncomfortably, to see afresh. "Holy shit, I lived through this! I lived through Reagan and decimation of social programs and deindustrialization!" Or maybe it was just that he told it well. (Winter 2008) POLITICAL THEATER NOW

Memoir Writing for Everyone Say What You Mean Before You Die: Memoir Writing for Everyone Webinar - Sun May 14, 2023 10am to 12noon Pacific on Zoom Key idea: Writing your memoir is a relational act! I've coached writers and performers for 30 years. I thought I knew something about autobiographical work. Then I started writing my own memoir. Exciting. Scary. Vulnerable. Overwhelming. What got me writing each morning? Knowing that Molly was going to read what I wrote. (See photo above.) So... Forget the millions or thousands of people who might buy your book. Pick 1 to 4 people you trust and engage them in your writing adventure . This workshop includes Time to write & prompts to get you started "What one story must I tell before I die?" Craft, craft, craft: How memoir writing is different from writing what happened An emergency plan for when you feel like quitting Price: $64* After b uying your ticket, you'll receive an email with the Zoom link. Note: No refunds for this workshop. *Why $64? Recently, two people I know, in separate conversations, called me an elder. Whaaat? Well, I’ve been writing, performing, directing, etc for 40+ years. And I turned 64 last year. So... Elder it is! Buy ticket

On comedy, a changing city, and an octogenarian who wants to surf Charlie Varon talks about his new show, Feisty Old Jew QUESTION : What got you writing Feisty Old Jew? CHARLIE : Sometimes a character shows up in my imagination and just takes over. That’s what happened with Bernie Schein. He’s an aggressive, mischievous 83-year-old guy from Brooklyn, very smart but never finished high school. Fearless. Amazing guts. Also manipulative and obnoxious! He’s lived in San Francisco for 60 years and has a thing or two to say about what the city is becoming. QUESTION : Is Bernie a mouthpiece for your views of what’s happening in San Francisco? CHARLIE : His view is more extreme. He hates the young people he sees drinking $6 cups of coffee, hates their yoga studios and their chichi restaurants with the pink aioli and truffle butter. And he also hates them just for being young. One of the reasons I write is that my characters can do and say things I – as a shy and polite person – can’t. Bernie is such a character. QUESTION : How long have you lived in San Francisco? CHARLIE : I moved here from New York in 1978. I was 19 years old. It was still an affordable city, and it was a fantastic time and place to be a young bohemian and soak up all the art and culture and politics happening in this experimental city. Back then my rent was $70 a month. Now people can spend seventy bucks a month on lattes. QUESTION : Why are you wearing a wetsuit in the photo? Do you surf? CHARLIE : The monologue takes place on one of those hot October days in San Francisco. Bernie is out on the street, gets tired of waiting for a cab, and finally sticks out his thumb. He gets picked up by three 20-somethings in a Tesla with two surfboards strapped to the roof and a cappuccino maker in the dashboard. By the time they get to Marin, Bernie has convinced the kids to let him go surfing for the first time in his life and has bet them $400,000 that he’ll ride a wave. QUESTION : You didn’t answer my question. Do you surf? CHARLIE : I have never surfed and do not plan to. The photo shoot was the first and last time I will wear a wetsuit. QUESTION : What performers have influenced you most? CHARLIE : Growing up in New York, I listened to the radio, and that's probably had the biggest influence on me. The pure human voice. Jean Shepherd, perhaps the best American storyteller ever heard on radio. Bob and Ray, and their quietly insane comedy sketches. Malachy McCourt, Long John Nebel, Paul Harvey, a zillion radio preachers. The BBC. Oh, and my father. He wasn't on radio. He was a dentist, but he did—still does—all kinds of voices and accents. And he and my mom, a librarian, gave me a love of language, spoken, written, the delight in the infinite ways human beings can shape thought into language, and all of that infused with a very New York Jewish sensibility! QUESTION : You are now well established as an artist in solo theater and as a satirist. What are some pivotal experiences that brought you to this place? CHARLIE : The key moment happened in 1991. Stephanie Weisman saw me perform a rough version of a solo show that I didn't even know I would finish. She took out her calendar and offered me a 6-week run at The Marsh. First I trembled; she had called my bluff. Then I said yes, and that has made all the difference. That launched me. A couple years later, almost as a lark, I did a show called Rush Limbaugh in Night School, which was a big hit at The Marsh and then went on to New York and Washington DC. The other essential fact is my collaboration with David Ford. Director isn't a strong enough word. David has been the midwife of all my shows for 23 years. He is the most brilliant theater artist I've ever worked with and he has taught me most of what I know about theater. QUESTION : Who should come see this show? CHARLIE : People who love comedy. Who care about what’s happening to San Francisco. Who aren’t afraid of characters who are smart, complex, funny… and old! And who want to find out what happens when Bernie gets in the water and tries to surf!

< Back #17 Turn back the hands of time December 28, 2024 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Special thanks to J.P. Tilleman Turn Back the Hands of Time 00:00 / 04:43 Keep the bonbons coming! Email me when the next one is ready! Email Subscribe Coming up Sun 1/12/25... Free webinar w/me & Kenny Yun Previous Next

Mind bcomes tranquil Charlie Varon's Comic Bonbons #18: Mind Becomes Tranquil Mind becomes tranquil 00:00 / 05:09 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Collaboration: J.P. Tilleman Saturday evening, March 8 in Oakland: Charlie Varon's Comic Bonbons LIVE! Info & tickets

An emergency card for when you feel like giving up

"You want it all" Charlie Varon's Comic Bonbons #22: "You want it all" You want it all 00:00 / 01:07 Written & performed by Charlie Varon Collaboration: David Ford Special Thanks: J.P. Tilleman Next live show at The Magic Patio - date TBA More announcements #1 Don't postpone writing your memoir! New session starts Thu Sept 4 Email me for details #2 Can't stand what's happening in this country? Life is better when you're doing something to change it Here's one place to start