The Details

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, The Music Hall has added a fourth show – Saturday Sept 10 at 9pm to its weekend run of Meredith Vieira Productions: Life in a Marital Institution which has had sold out runs in New York City. Good seats are still available for the one-hour show Friday Sept 9 at 8pm and the Sunday Sept 11 at 7pm.

Meredith Vieira Productions presents Life in a Marital Institution (20 Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Hour). Monologist James Braly’s show about “sex, love, family, betrayal, death…and dinner parties”

First comes love. Then comes marriage counseling. After a sold-out run in New York City, This American Life contributor James Braly is on tour with his darkly comic story of what 13 couples counselors have called a passionate, bi‐polar relationship. Hailed as “never less than excellent” by The New York Times, Braly dives head first into a tale of attraction, repulsion, death, and the afterlife. It’s 20 years of monogamy in one terrifying (hilarious) evening.

ABOUT THE SHOW
“The poignant, darkly humorous autobiographical comedy is set improbably in a hospice, where James sits at the bedside of his dying sister, who asks him to trade places with her. Until she realizes that would mean trading places with him…being in his marriage…a fate worse than death! The monologue cuts back and forth between the hospice, where his sister is engaged to be married, and scenes from his marriage, exploring infidelity, near-death childbirth and other high-stakes yet hilarious adventures. In the process, the comedy explores the roots of romantic love in familial love, and the notion: not only can you go home again, you can’t not go home again; you can’t escape your past. Until you confront it…which James does through his sister’s deathbed wedding, before returning home to confront whether his own marriage should come to an end.”

ABOUT JAMES BRALY
Braly’s stories have been broadcast nationally on “This American Life,” NPR, “The Moth” and “Marketplace,” and his essays appear in the recently published anthologies “Afterbirth” (St. Martin’s Press) and “Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood” (W.W. Norton). He has performed autobiographical stories at The Whitney Museum, Long Wharf Theatre and The Moth, where he was featured on the TNT National Story Tour and is the first two-time winner of the Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition. His full-length monologue, The Monthly Nut, directed by Seth Barrish (director of the Off-Broadway hit Sleepwalk with Me) is in development at The Barrow Group Theatre. His full-length monologue, Asylum, premiered at Dixon Place April 2010 and is in development as a television series with Meredith Vieira Productions.