A Reckoning of A Life: Marc Smith Tells His Story

by billy lombardo

Full disclosure: I’ve had a few narrow escapes in my life, and Marc Smith is one of them. I went to the dress rehearsal of his one-man show on January 21.

The start of the first act of Marc Kelly Smith’s one-man show begins in a set that represents the living room of his current home in Savanna, Illinois—an easy slingshot’s reach from the Mississippi River.

If you’re lucky enough to see the show this weekend, before you cross your legs a second time you’ll know you’re in for a meditation on the full arc of an accidental poet’s life; and whether you’ve known him since he put down his construction belt in the mid 80s and started his literary life at the Get Me High Lounge or you’ve never seen him on any one of more than 2,000 stages he’s graced around the world, you’ll be drawn in—and there’s nowhere to hide in a living room.

The show is called Shards, and it’s as much a retrospective reckoning of a life as it is a repeated look at the gauge to check on how much fuel is left in the tank. It’s as much about the ways we hold on to the remnants of childhood as it is about the beautiful and surprising ways we change.

 “Artistically,” Smith says in the opening, “there’s a lot I haven’t explored in myself.”

He would be pleased to know, I think, that some part of you—sitting on one of the fifty folding chairs in the production’s space at the Kimball Arts Center—will be made to feel there’s still time to do some exploring yourself.

The workshopping production is constructed of a dozen or so poems and monologues, and if you know anything about Marc you know that he could build a hundred one-man shows and never run out of material.

The poetry and prose are punctuated with video clips of Marc from shows in the late 80s and early 90s, clips of his visiting his high school alma mater, clips of him sitting in the passenger side of a car heading to the South Side and talking about walking around with a paperback in his back pocket. And there’s a short film with Marc playing a role you never thought he could pull off.

The show was originally entitled Emergence to Light, but neither that title nor Shards is quite right. One suggests the jaggedness of the man at the left end, and the other suggests his arrival near the end on the right. More precisely, the show is about what time and waves and poetry, what trouble and fists and sand and hearts, what sons and daughters and women and men, what pickpockets and princes do to the edges of us. Sea glass, then.

A Nelson Algren award winner, billy lombardo is the author of five books, including The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories and The Man with Two Arms. He founded Polyphony Lit, a student-run literary magazine for high school writers and editors, and has taught at Chicago-area high schools and universities since Prince dropped “When Doves Cry.”