Audience members mix it up with celebs in Inside Private Lives

by Christopher Cappiello

In an age of seemingly endless celebrity confessionals and with television audiences accustomed to having the power to vote on reality shows, combining the two elements into an entertaining evening of theater seems like a brilliant idea. That’s just what Kristin Stone did in 2005 when she and some colleagues created Inside Private Lives, an interactive theater event in which audiences meet several of the 20th century’s most controversial figures and take part in a pivotal moment in that character’s life.

Stone’s show premiered in North Hollywood three years ago and has since earned raves in New York and Edinburgh, introducing audiences to a stable of notorious figures, from pioneering transgender woman Christine Jorgensen (Stone) to the Oscar winning author of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, Julia Philips, and from England’s Edward VIII, who gave up his throne for an American divorcée, to Billy Carter, Jimmy’s beer-swilling, epithet-hurling brother.

The show returns to Los Angeles this month for a string of Sunday evening shows at South Pasadena’s Fremont Centre Theatre.

In 15-minute segments, each character directly addresses the audience, revealing the circumstances of their life at that moment and what they need from the audience.

“You [the audience] actually get to play people who may have been a part of their lives at that time,” Stone explains. “It’s lots of fun. You’re allowed and absolutely encouraged and empowered to challenge the characters and questions them—to go along with them or not.”

On any given night, six of the 13 characters appear on a rotating basis. In the case of Edward VIII, the audience is a group of international journalists meeting with the new king on the day of his father’s death. Edward wants the press to keep his affair with Wallis Simpson private. In Philips’ scenario, she has just been fired from Close Encounters of the Third Kind for her erratic, drug-addled behavior. Audience members are the studio execs who just gave her the ax, listening to her response.

“She pleads her case, and you all get to decide what your thoughts and feelings are on it,” Stone says.

In addition to directly engaging and challenging the characters, Stone says audience members will often argue with each other.

“They’ll go back and forth, and our character will then essentially play referee. And that’s great fun, too,” she says.

While audiences might go home knowing more than they did before about the first transgender celebrity or the first Tupperware saleswoman, Stone stresses that the main point is entertainment.

“I’m not there to teach a history lesson. I’m really there to serve the audience. To entertain them,” she says. Nevertheless, the show’s interactions inevitably spark curiosity in the audience.

“We’ve been told time and again by audience members that they’ll go home and they’ll Google these characters. They’ll talk about them at breakfast. They’ll come back to our show—we have folks who have come two, three, four times because not only do they want to see the other characters, but they want to talk again to the ones that they met, because they say, ‘Now I’ve got something that I really want to say!’” she says with a laugh. “Great! Bring it on.”

Inside Private Lives runs Sundays at 7 p.m. through Oct. 19 at the Fremont Centre Theatre, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena. For tickets and more information, visit insideprivatelives.com.