On the ‘Nights’ shift

From left, “Nights of Our Lives” regulars Curtis Gwinn, David Martin, John Flynn, and Chris Gethard

Nothing is off limits at UCB’s storytelling show

By Will McKinley

It’s 9:30 p.m. on a chilly winter Wednesday and a long line of expectant audience members files into the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the improv mecca located in the bowels of a Chelsea supermarket. Inside, five of New York City’s top improvisers prepare to take the stage for the first anniversary installment of “The Nights of Our Lives,” UCB’s monthly storytelling show.

“We’ve all done great things,” deadpan host David Martin tells the capacity crowd. “But some of us are lucky enough to present those great things in the basement of Gristede’s.”

There are a million stories in the naked city, and an equal number of live shows in which those stories are told in Downtown performance spaces. But “The Nights of Our Lives” has found its niche as a go-for-broke celebration of unforgettable nights, or rather, nights we’d like to forget. On the last Wednesday of each month, Martin and a cast of (mostly male) UCB regulars and honored guests bare their souls — and sins — for our amusement and edification.

Great live theater can teach you things, and I learned a lot from “The Nights of Our Lives.” For example, you know how there are certain embarrassing things that you’ve done in the your life — transgressions so profoundly awful that you wouldn’t even share them with your best friend, your shrink or your clergyman? Audiences love to hear about those things. And the more debauched, disgusting and disturbing they are, the better.

Case in point: John Flynn’s story about his “night” as a gay hustler. Flynn, a clean-cut, thirty-ish white man, was introduced by Martin as the “only speck of diversity on this stage.” He was also the only of the evening’s five storytellers who didn’t look like he was dressed to clean out his garage. Flynn shared the sordid story of his brief but memorable career as a male prostitute working for a pimp named Billy.

“I’m flattered that someone in the business thinks I would make a good whore,” Flynn quoted his younger (circa 2006), more foolish self as thinking. “But what am I going to wear? I really don’t have anything slutty.”

Flynn reported on a truly disturbing evening spent in the erotic service of an elderly gay man with a fetish for redheads, Van Johnson and obscure jazz music.

“It’s hard to do a striptease to ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess,’ ” Flynn laughed.

Thankfully, Flynn’s foray into the world’s oldest profession lasted only one night. Anthony Atamanuik’s career as an inconsiderate alcoholic went on for years. Atamanuik has the disheveled patina of a homeless mental patient, but the story of his affair with a married, restaurant co-worker while studying at Emerson College was a work of pure genius.

“I was a 20-year-old f*cking a 37-year-old Cambodian woman who was married to the French pastry chef,” he snarked. “I’m a bag of good ideas.”

More than a decade after his youthful indiscretion, Atamanuik confessed his many sins to the divorce-seeking, cuckolded husband of his former mistress.

“This is the story of my ninth step toward recovery,” he said. “The ninth step is where we make amends.”

Gregg Gethard may need to make amends with his ex-girlfriend Julie for his tale of an early sexual encounter interrupted by ill-timed flatulence. Yes, it was as disturbing as it sounds, but apparently not to the twenty-something audience who shrieked with delight at every last, mortifying detail.

Gethard’s brother Chris told an amusingly tense tale of troubled teens on a school bus in New Jersey, the only story of the evening that didn’t involve sex. This struck me as odd, considering that “Gregg and Chris GetHard” sounds like a great name for a gay porn. (I’m sure I’m the first genius to think that one up.)

Curtis Gwinn closed the show with a whack-job epic that began with his adolescent discovery of a dirty book about incest and ended with him in bed with his father (not in that way, thankfully). Gwinn’s meandering rant of a story was both laugh-out-loud funny and twice as long as it needed to be.

Nowadays, discretion may no longer the better part of valor. But brevity is still most definitely the soul of wit.