For comedian Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show at Steppenwolf, there’s a lot of planning and honing: ‘OK, Mike, now yell’

The first thing that appears to happen when Mike Birbiglia begins his new one-man show at the Steppenwolf Theatre is that he walks out on stage. Of course. He says hello and thanks and whatnot. Which sounds obvious, except no, it most certainly is not! To the naked eye, a humble comedian of average height steps on stage and performs for 85 minutes, when in fact, just before the show — titled ”The Old Man and the Pool” — began its monthlong run, that casual, unassuming entrance required planning, honing.

To watch this honing was not unlike watching a Birbiglia one-man show.

It had a narrative thread woven throughout — get Mike on that stage in the best possible way — and periodically there were pauses, digressions and the mundanity of every day.

“What do you think?” he asked, his arms draped in new shirts with tags still attached.

Seth Barrish, who has directed each of Birbiglia’s wildly popular stage shows for the past decade, sat in the center seat of the center row of the auditorium, and frowned and nodded, and Birbiglia walked off stage to try on the shirt he might wear for the show.

“Is this close?” he asked, returning with his arms out, presenting himself.

Close, Barrish said.

Birbiglia walked off and then returned in a short-sleeve button-down covered in a confetti motif. He held his arms out again. “Seth, I think this is the shirt you were mentioning, but there are other pant combos, one is a darker blue and one is a camel ...”

Let’s decide this when lights are fully on, Barrish said.

Birbiglia nodded and paced the dark, empty stage. A handful of stagehands and lighting people and production assistants waited to one side, sizing up the comedian in this empty space and the look of it all and the sound of it all and the general vibe it gave off. Was it cold? Warm? Tidy? Details count.

The only prop was a stool and so the only indication that this would be less like a typical night of stand-up and more like a typical night of Birbiglia offering his signature poignancy sprinkled atop stand-up was the large screen behind him, a light ocean blue onto which the title of the show was projected.

Barrish explained that there needed to be a very specific order of events when Birbiglia walked on stage. He needed to walk out 30 seconds into the song that was playing, at the very start of the third verse. Those words on the screen would fade out. Then lights in the theater would go down. Then lights on the stage would come up.

But all at once, seamlessly.

Everyone nodded.

Actually, even before this, they needed to check Birbiglia’s headset, a slender, near-invisible microphone curling toward his mouth. “Seth,” he asked, “should I just talk?”

Yes, talk, talk.

“So at the beginning of the show,” Birbiglia said, giving the sound people something to work with while relaying exactly what he would say before each show, “at the beginning, I do this announcement where I explain ‘Do me a favor and turn off your phones and don’t photograph things and all these logical things that you don’t really need me to tell you about but for some reason, we say at the beginning of shows. I’ll be on soon.’ Like that?”

Seems fine, Barrish said.

Birbiglia agreed and paced and continued to speak to no one: “So Seth and I came in and then we went to the hotel, which is a mile from here, and this guy goes, he told us, walk straight down Wells, and eventually we would arrive at this theater. And we didn’t. It was the other way. I’m not sure how to square that. Maybe don’t trust that man again.”

Beautiful, a stagehand said, meaning the sound.

They had six hours to get this right, including a few projected slides. But compared with the usual not-one-man-shows at Steppenwolf that feature more than a stool, this was nothing. Just in need of tweaks. And so Birbiglia stood, and stood, for so long one’s eyes blurred. He began to look like Bob Odenkirk. A prototype Odenkirk, almost there, not quite. Which maybe is what Barrish was thinking. Apropos of nothing, he asked: “Mike, when you did the infamous pilot that didn’t go, did Odenkirk play your brother?”

“Yeah,” Birbiglia said. “You know he’s from Naperville, right?”

“Where is that?”

“It’s a suburb of Chicago.”

“I was going to say ... I mean, he has the accent.”

“Naperville is also where my character goes at the end of ‘Don’t Think Twice.’”

“That right?”

Birbiglia is a curious kind of contemporary comic, in that he slides in and out of the role of the observational stand-up comic even within a story, often so smoothly — relaying a doctor’s concern in one breath, and the awkwardness of a swim lesson in the next — that the effect is intimate, more like a live diary entry. “Don’t Think Twice,” the 2016 film he directed about an improv troupe roiled by the success of a member, seemed of a piece with this persona, set in a world of comedy that loses its cheer the longer you stare at it. Ira Glass, the creator of “This American Life” and an early mentor to Birbiglia, once told him the best way to deliver a story was to give a piece of plot, say how you feel about it, then another piece, say how you feel, etc. Birbiglia adapted that: His jokes are how he feels, and how he seems to feel, to judge from his shows, is uncertain.

Talking to him during a short break in rehearsal, he had the same mumbly, melancholy politeness he uses on stage. Asked what he would do while he was here for a month, a congenital digressiveness kicked in.

“That’s a good question. I have never been here for a month. I don’t know. There are pros and cons living in a city you don’t live in. The pros are you get to live in a city you sort of always vicariously wanted to live. I’m a big improv buff. So I always thought of living here. One of my life plans out of college was to live here. Charna Halpern (who founded iO) did a workshop with my improv group when I was at Georgetown and when she signed her book for me, she signed: ‘See you in Chicago.’ So I spent a lot of time here. (John) Mulaney — I’m old friends with him and his family here. My sister worked for Oprah and waited tables at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba! I have these pictures of me and my brother Joe at Wrigley from long ago, when you could get tickets for $10. When I’m here now I head to Second City, where my improv group in college had made a pilgrimage, and that completely changed how I viewed sketch comedy. Last time I played the Chicago Theater, I invited (improv director) Mick Napier, and he came! And so I told him how much he changed how I thought about sketch, which I had thought of as this disjointed form and he showed me that it could have a narrative through-line, exactly when I was in college and basically a sponge of a person. I took in everything here.

So I guess, to answer your question — pizza, coffee, theater. That’s what’ll do.”

Standing there quietly on stage as lights and sound are tweaked, he thinks of how he tells a story, the structure, the digressions, when it feels like a story, when it feels like jokes. “The Old Man and the Pool” is 9,500 words; after 20 performances, maybe 300 will change. Similarly, the shape of the shadow given off by the stool, the speed the lights cut to black at the end, even the exit signs that Birbiglia addresses when he looks in the balcony and seemingly speaks to someone — once set, for the most part, it stays.

So they get it right.

Barrish turned to a production assistant. “There are points where Mike will yell.”

Birbiglia asked, “Do you need me to yell?”

“I do.”

“‘VANESSSSSSSA!’”

“Is that a volume you’re cool at?”

“Yeah — ‘VANESSSSSSSA!’”

Barrish explained to the assistant: “See, the idea is, he is taking a swim lesson and says a joke to the instructor, who goes ‘What?’ So he yells the joke ... Mike, just talk again.”

Birbiglia continued, in a near-mumble: “So a few years ago I went for my annual checkup which I always dread because I have a lot of preexisting conditions, which I call conditions. Because everything is pre unless it happens on the way to the appointment.”

“OK, Mike, now yell.”

“‘VANESSSSSSSA!’”

“Good.”

“‘VANESSSSSSSA!’”

“Great.”

Birbiglia walked off and his intro music, from the Jack Antonoff band Red Hearse, rumbled out loudly. Then Birbiglia walked back on, pretended to say hello to an audience, and in all, to a casual observer — it was straightforward, pleasant enough, no fuss. But then Barrish said, “So, wait, a few tweaks. For one, Mike — come out a hair later. And there’s something funky about that text fade.”

Birbiglia walked off and the music began again and then walked on, and Barrish said, no, he’s seeing the lights go up a beat too late, which the production assistant repeated into her headset. They tried it without the music, then Barrish said the lights came up too fast. All of which sounds like nitpicking, but as this continued, the slight, rough edges you took for granted vanished. “So is there a way to split the difference,” Barrish said, “to speed up the house light a little downstage and slow down the upstage just a hair?”

The production assistant relayed this too into her headset.

The music started and Birbiglia walked out for the sixth time.

“OK, do you feel what I felt?” Barrish said. “I notice the house lights still moving, and could we speed up the house lights to off, but that front was great. You feel it synch?”

They went again.

Then once more.

On opening night, it seemed to go perfectly. But then, Birbiglia didn’t stumble and the lighting rig didn’t collapse and his microphone didn’t short out. So who could tell?

During rehearsal, Birbiglia walked off again and didn’t come out. Instead, a beat later, his voice came over the speakers: “Good evening. Welcome to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Before we get started, a few notes. Wear a mask. Second note: No food or drink. Third note: No filming, obviously. Fourth note: Turn off your phone. That’s kind of covered by the previous note. Fifth note: If you must leave, please don’t leave. But if you do sadly leave, do so through the door through which you entered. Also, if you leave again ... please don’t leave. There is no guarantee of reentry. So think twice.”

And there, Barrish concluded, is our show.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com