No one tells a story like Christopher Brett Bailey. One minute he’s buying eggs at a gas station and the next he’s careening down the highway with the devil, the car deliberately swerving to increase their body count. Though it doesn’t quite match the motor-mouthed intensity or blinding climax of his 2014 beat-poet monologue, This Is How We Die, this live reading of his surreal 2023 novella is a free-wheeling piece of storytelling, vividly and viciously told.
There’s no music nor much set. It’s just Brett Bailey reading from his script at a table, slurping and hissing and whispering into the microphone as he weaves a story of modern America and a man literally dancing with the devil. In a fringed leather jacket with snakeskin boots and his signature freshly electrocuted hair, Brett Bailey recounts with eerie calmness an accidental road trip with his overheated companion in small town America, “two miles north of hell”.
