“PostSecret: The Show” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday night in Rudder Theatre as a part of its 22-city tour and the first time the show has been to Texas. The show features actors and actresses who play out secrets sent to creator Frank Warren’s house by random strangers, a project Warren started about 10 years ago and transformed into a performance five years ago. Battalion life and arts editor Jack Riewe talked with Warren, who will be speaking at the second performance Wednesday, about the project.
THE BATTALION: Can you give a brief summary of the show for those who aren’t aware of the project?
WARREN: It’s a multimedia performance based on the PostSecret Project, which is a collection of over a million secrets mailed to my home anonymously on post cards. We dramatize and bring to life the most compelling, funny, shocking, romantic stories behind the secrets. We invite audience members to write their secrets on postcards and some of those are read by the actors to the audience.
THE BATTALION: How did you come up with the idea?
WARREN: I think I had secrets in my family growing up and then later I realized there was other family secrets that were kept from me. So that instilled a desire to see secrets I think that’s never going to die.
THE BATTALION: When did this idea come about?
WARREN: There’s the PostSecret Project, which I started about 10 years ago. I invited strangers from all over the world to mail me a postcard with a real secret written on it, something they’ve never told anyone before. Most people put artwork on the postcards, decorated it and in 10 years I’ve received over a million and we have a huge pyramid of postcards on exhibit in THe Smithsonian in Washington D.C., and I still get postcards everyday. The postcards are a part of a blog that’s been visited over six million times. They’re a part of six bestselling books and now PostSecret: The Show that got started about five years ago.
THE BATTALION: So how did you start advertising for people to send secrets to your house?
WARREN: I printed 3,000 self addressed postcards, they were blank on one side, on the other side I invited people to share a true secret and decorated the card and put my home address on it. I handed these postcards out to people on the streets of Washington D.C. and Baltimore, between the pages of library books and restaurants and slowly these secrets slow found their way to my mailbox, just a slow trickle at first, but then when I scanned and posted them on the web, hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people began to post secrets on postsecret.com and that’s whe the project really went viral.
THE BATTALION: Weren’t you scared about giving out your address to strangers?
WARREN: My wife was, that’s for sure. But we haven’t had any incidents. Sometimes people come by and take a selfie with the mailbox or to come get book signed. There’s a real positivity to the project and so it’s always been something people have the right spirit about.
THE BATTALION: Describe the layout of the show. How do actors come in?
WARREN: The show has three actors and a musician on stage and they bring the secrets and stories behind them to life. Everything you see on stage has come from an email comment, a Facebook post, a story behind a secret. It’s really a crowd sourced play.
THE BATTALION: Can you give me an example on the top of your head of what kind of secrets are shared with you?
WARREN: I’ll give you two. One was mailed to me on a Starbucks cup, they turned the cup right into a postcard and the secret on the cup said, “I serve decaf to customers who are rude to me.” Another one arrived on a postcard that had pictures of the twin towers in Washington D.C. that said, “Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I’m dead.”
