The Moth Lands On East End, Finally

On her second night in Manhattan, Catherine Burns was already out on the town—far from the comfort of her childhood home in Alabama—and headed into the heart of the city to meet up with an enthusiastic girlfriend.

“You have to come see this thing,” she had insisted, without giving much away. “It’s called ‘The Moth.’”

With zero expectations, Ms. Burns watched as, one after the other, storytellers took to the stage. They wove snippets of their lives into winding tales—sometimes humorous, other times not—until, hours later, she left the venue completely moved and nearly speechless.

“I was just, like, ‘What is this?’” Ms. Burns reminisced on Monday morning during a telephone interview. “At some point after 9/11, The Moth’s first artistic director quit. I was 30 years old and I thought, ‘Gosh, if you’re going to take a chance, you need to do it now.’ I just leapt. It was the best decision I ever made.”

Twelve years ago, she was one of two employees. Today, The Moth—a traveling nonprofit dedicated to finding incredible people with compelling stories to tell on stage in 10 to 12 minutes, without notes, scripts, props or accompaniment, which is making its East End debut on Friday night at Stony Brook Southampton—has grown tenfold, exponentially expanding with a podcast, international tour dates and even a book.

And the stories are pouring in more rapidly than ever.

“Back in the day, we were begging people,” Ms. Burns said. “Now, we have a pitch line where anyone can call and leave a two-minute voicemail. We get 300 to 400 people a month.”

The first Moth event was held 17 years ago in founder George Dawes Green’s living room in Manhattan—an effort to recreate many an evening in his native Georgia, where he would find himself on his friend Wanda’s porch sharing mesmerizing stories with their comrades into the humid summer nights.

They weren’t the only ones listening. A hole in the screen paid admittance to moths, attracted to the light and ambiance. Hence, the group’s nickname. Soon, it was audiences who were drawn to the stories, Ms. Burns said, like moths to a flame.

Since 1997, nearly every performance of The Moth has sold out. And storyteller Simon Doonan, who splits his time between Manhattan and Shelter Island, isn’t surprised.

“I’ve lost count of the number of Moths I’ve done, and I’ve never been to one with an empty seat,” he said last week during a telephone interview from his home in Manhattan. “You meet all these interesting people. It’s never boring. It’s always stimulating.”

This time around, at Stony Brook Southampton on Friday, the English-born Moth veteran—who is the creative ambassador for clothing giant Barneys New York and a style columnist for Slate—will tell a cheeky story about his time in the fashion world, mixed with a “bit of surrealism,” he said.

And that’s all he’ll say.

“I don’t want to spoil the surprise,” he said. “I feel like, through The Moth, storytelling has become central again. But it’s really scary, because you don’t have notes. It’s a bit like jumping off the top diving board. Anticipating it is pretty terrifying—but once you get going, it’s fine.”

Ted Conover likes to think he gets nervous enough to pay very close attention, he said on Monday during a telephone interview, to both the story he’s telling and his audience’s reaction. He was one of the storytellers at Ms. Burns’s first Moth experience just over a decade ago, recounting an experience he had while working at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. He had no way of knowing that, by sharing his story, he was changing the course of Ms. Burns’s life.

For his next performance, he’ll be revisiting that same prison in upstate New York, this time in Southampton, and with a new memory: New Year’s Eve.

“It is unlike New Year’s Eve anywhere else,” said Mr. Conover, an author and journalist. “Everything there is about counting the days and counting the months and counting the years. But what I found on New Year’s Eve totally blew me away. This is going to be so much fun to tell, for someone like me, who is mostly just talking to himself.”

Preparing for The Moth is closer to memoir writing than journalism, he explained, except he has an open, real-time channel between himself and the listeners without revision. Once it’s out there, it’s gone forever.

Typically, the storytellers memorize their first and last sentences in order to ground their stories, Ms. Burns explained. Despite much preparation—the longest took 17 hours, she said—the rest is up to them.

“It’s not like a test, and it’s not like a lecture. It’s more like, ‘Okay, your turn. What happened to you?’” Mr. Conover said. “It’s a very visceral form of communication that has a long history in humanity—one that predates writing. There’s something about it that feels very essential and natural. And I’m excited that I get to do it again.”

“Fish Out of Water: The Moth in Southampton,” featuring Adam Gopnik, Ted Conover, Simon Doonan, Meg Wolitzer, Wendy Suzuki and Tara Clancy, will be held on Friday, July 18, at 7:30 p.m. at Avram Theater on the Stony Brook Southampton campus. Tickets are $50. For more information, visit themoth.org.