Andy Offutt Irwin often supports his stories with songs, guitar playing, and ‘vaudevillian’ whistling.
Andy Offutt Irwin is the kind of storyteller that’s just as explosive in one-on-one conversation as he is on stage, slinging character voices and impressions at the listener a mile a minute, all the while dropping nuggets of literature and history along the way.
Irwin’s collection of characters will find their way to the Burke Arts Council on Saturday, June 13, at 7 p.m. for “Free the Imprisoned Lightning,” a fictional story of German-Jewish immigrant Leopold Mendelssohn arriving in the lower east side of Manhattan before journeying to the deep south in the early 1900s.
“We’ll meet Marguerite. We’ll meet Rose, great uncle Leopold’s great granddaughter, (and) Benjamin, great uncle Leopold’s great grandson. I don’t think Mary Francis is gonna be there. I have to go to the people in my head and ask them if they’re gonna come,” he said, laughing.
Mendelssohn is the great uncle of Irwin’s Aunt Marguerite — that’s Dr. Marguerite Van Camp, to be precise — who is one of Irwin’s more well-known recurring characters.
“People will come up to me and say, ‘Well, where is Aunt Marguerite now?’” Irwin said. “I have to remind them that she’s coming out of my face.”
While the stories and characters are fictional, Irwin cultivated many of the mannerisms and voices directly from people he encountered in life. Marguerite, he said, is modeled after his grandmother, who he would imitate as a kid.
Andy Irwin embodies his characters on stage, moving his hands and body to fully immerse the audience.
The fact that she’s a recent graduate from medical school was peppered in to layer on the humor.
“It’s not impossible, but it is improbable,” Irwin said, explaining that friends send him links to articles about 72-year-olds graduating with medical degrees all the time because of it. “I use the overstatement to jump into the stuff. Any good fiction also tells the truth, even if it’s not telling the facts.”
Within the truths of “Free the Imprisoned Lightning,” Irwin mixes the facts of the Statue of Liberty’s original name, Liberty Enlightening the World and the historical figures that constructed it and why.
He spices in Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus;” and her time with the Transcendentalists, before weaving it all into one character-driven tale.
“Just knowing those things and putting them together in a story that makes people go, ‘Huh,’” Irwin said. “Just making these connections and bringing it to a place where it’s accessible to everybody, so we know a little background to our own history. This story, in particular, is my most patriotic piece.”
While Irwin often leans into the laughs, using “humor for serious business,” he said, the laughter serves a purpose. If they’re laughing, they’re learning.
“Treat children with the respect of adults, and treat grown-ups with the exuberance kids crave,” Irwin said, explaining that he’s cultivated a lifetime of experience in family entertainment — and not the “insipid” kind.
Andy Irwin produces characters from people he meets across the South, explaining that he ‘writes what’s familiar.’
He likes to keep audiences on an even playing field: none of the kids sitting on the floor and adults in chairs behind them.
“So, I can make fun of the grown-ups in front of the kids, and vice versa,” he said.
Although audiences at his public shows are typically over 50, Irwin doesn’t believe the art of storytelling will dissipate with time.
“I have hope for it,” he said, explaining that he thinks the culture is shifting with a move back to simplicity in lieu of the complications of the modern age.
“I think people will warm into it,” Irwin said. “I’m not a nostalgist. In fact, nostalgia kind of gives me the blues. But I am sentimental. A nostalgist is concerned about their own comfort. The sentimental person is concerned about the comfort of others.”
“Don’t look that up, I made it up,” he quipped.
