Growing up in public

Bill Harley wonders, 'Who am I?'

by Bill Rodriguez

Bill Harley sure is good at getting different kinds of people to listen, take in his droll and insightful observations, and laugh. Entertainment Weekly touted him as "the Mark Twain of contemporary kids' music." If you raised a kid in the last decade you're likely familiar with a song or two from his nearly 20 recordings, which accept mischief and fears -- fooling your mother, monsters in the bathroom -- with bemused understanding.

If not, you've probably caught his observations on National Public Radio, perhaps his telling of a feminist assault on a men's room or when he learned to take a guilt-free nap. Harley survived a coup last year that weeded out less popular commentators from All Things Considered, so he continues to broadcast his wry reminiscences every three or four weeks. He's done more than 100 since 1991.

That radio audience of millions has made Harley one of the most well-known storytellers in the country. It was at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, also in 1991, where he began serious work on material for adult audiences Theatricalizing his storytelling eventually led to his performing Lunchroom Tales at Trinity Repertory Company. The show was produced by Bob Jaffe, who directed Get Lost:Rules for Travelers, the current piece at the Sandra Gamm-Feinstein Theatre.

That's quite a step, a solo performer taking direction. After all, with no ensemble to work with, Harley's been the authority on what he's after on stage and how best to get it.

"It's funny for someone who generally works solo to say this, but I'm realizing that in order to take further steps there are certain things that you need to give up," Harley says. "If you want the vision to be bigger, then you have to give it to somebody else, and it's inevitably going to look different than you originally envisioned it. But I think that's part of growing."

He is speaking on the sun porch of his Seekonk home, where he lives with his wife and two boys, ages 11 and 15, the source of so many of his NPR stories. His amorphous face, which can convulse an auditorium with a curl of the lip, is as animated when he's not performing.

"At this point I can't tell you what Bob decided and what I decided. But one of the things I pose in [Get Lost] is that when you're traveling you find yourself becoming people that aren't you. So you end up asking this question, `Well, who am I really?' " he says. "You stop asking `Who are they?' and start asking `Who am I?' "

That's a question that most 44-year-olds have wrestled with. For Harley the question poses less urgency on a personal level -- after all, he gets paid to have large groups of people go into knee-slapping fits of appreciation when he's around.

He's learned a lot over the years about performing, about communicating past the array of smiles before him.

"I have learned that you've got a lot of time. You've got a lot of time to work with people. People have invested in you, and they're going to give you a chance to succeed," he says. "The great joy of performing is that time seems to open up. That kind of experience where you're very present."

Harley points out that all artists can be troubled by legitimacy issues. Am I a good enough musician, playwright, whatever? A proven method for relieving doubt about what you can do is to actually do it. Harley has successfully gone that route, cutting back on performing this summer in order to do more writing. He was working on a kids' novel, among other things.

"I've got a couple of writing projects, books and plays that I would like to write. But I would need to block off larger chunks of time, and that time's very hard to find," he says.

And if he got a MacArthur genius grant tomorrow, he is asked, what would he do with the freedom it would buy? He mulls that over, mentions a couple of kids' novels he'd like to finish, but then his interest settles on a dramatic play that's been gestating for two or three years. Harley has been researching what Sarajevo went through under the Serbian seige, particularly about the daily newspaper that kept on publishing. He would want to travel there and learn first-hand more about how a multi-ethnic community kept going under dark, genocidal pressures. The play he envisions would examine that "shining example of multiculturalism," as he describes the city.

"It's a way to talk about ethnicity that doesn't have to do about America's problems. There are many similarities between the stresses in society that led to genocide and our culture," he says. "That's a big stretch, a different direction. But I'm just real interested in that question of ethnicity."

And if he isn't able to carve out enough time in his life and career for such a dream project? Well, he'll be a grown-up about it.

"I'm incredibly lucky. I know that. I tell myself that every day," Harley admits. "Whining may be forever, but it's really kind of stupid." And he laughs that laugh that so many have joined in with over the years. .

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Lost and found

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