“It's a lot of cringe, but in all the best ways,� says Mike Graupmann, the lead story producer for Mortified Austin. The long-running storytelling show features regular folks reading their written works in front of an audience. That seems simple enough, except for the key distinction that all the works being read were written when the authors were children.
“Childhood diaries, journals, school assignments, poems, songs, anything that they created when they were kids,� Graupmann explains. “We like to think of it as ephemera from their youth, so that they can get up on stage and they can sort of make peace with who they were at the time, as well as, you know, having the opportunity to share the highlights, the funniest and most embarrassing bits.�
Sharing those ‘most embarrassing bits� pretty much guarantees that the author and the audience will experience Mortified Austin’s namesake emotion, but Graupmann says that’s a means to an end. “Ultimately it's a catharsis that you feel,� he says, “because, you know, when you're young and dumb, and you're writing all of those emotions onto the page, coming to terms with them as an adult and realizing who you were as a youngster and knowing that you made it out all right is really important to us. And people leave the show generally feeling uplifted and better about themselves somehow.�
“Mortified is one of the emotions that that we feel,� says executive producer Rusty Pierce, “but you know, there's a lot of laughter, a lot of joy. It's the full gamut.�
Graupmann says the show draws from all ages, but does tend to focus on the awkward teenage years, where mortification is at its peak. “We love adorable elementary school assignments and things like that,� he says, “because, you know, you just aren't aware of the world yet. So that's part of the fun� but the real meat comes from when we start, you know, developing hair in weird places, and start getting sweaty all the time, and suddenly have to, like, cover up embarrassing things that are happening to our bodies, then talking about those. We love to do that on stage.�
Mortified tends to do four shows a year in Austin, and for their upcoming June show, they’re celebrating Pride Month. “We thought this would be really fun to overlap it with Pride Month and do a specific Morti-PRIDE theme,� Pierce says. “A lot of our entries are queer in nature anyway. A lot of our entries are sexual in nature anyway. And it was really fun to put together a show where all of the performers are LGBTQIA2S++ identified.�
“And we're also going to be partnering with TENT, the Trans Education Network of Texas,� Graupmann adds. “We're excited to be able to partner with them so that some of the proceeds from the show will be going to support their efforts as well. It's just a really great opportunity for the community to come together to support not only the performers, but this awesome nonprofit that's doing great things here in the state too.�
In some storytelling shows, the actual content of the stories being shared is as much a surprise to the producers as it is to the audience, but that’s not the case with Mortified. “We do one thing that makes our events a little unique,� Pierce says. “They're pretty much fully scripted � that helps support our ASL interpreters, so they know every word that's gonna come out. We are taking people's actual words from the stuff they created in their youth, but then we've sort of pieced together a story, so we actually at this point know exactly what's gonna be said on stage.�
“It is definitely entertaining,� Graupmann says, “but we want to encourage people to think back on who they were when they were younger, and to give them some grace. The theme of our show � that we say at the end of every one of our shows � is that we were young, we were dumb, we were scared, but we all survived. And I think it's really important for us to give ourselves that sense of grace, and to look back upon the past where we may be really hard on ourselves and give ourselves just a little bit more, you know, comfort and take care of that younger version of ourselves.�
