You Can't Be Yourself If You Don't Know Who You Are | Authenticity with Carlo D'Amore

TRANSCRIPT: You Can't Be Yourself If You Don't Know Who You Are - Authenticity with Carlo D'Amore

[Carlo]

The potential problem with being yourself is that most of us don't know who we are. But it's taken me a while to really authentically be myself. That is my superpower, to be completely myself, because there's literally no one like me.

Like, there's no one like you. It doesn't mean that everyone's going to want what Roger has. Not everyone's going to like what Carlo is.

That's okay, because there's a really big, big audience out there.

[Roger]

“Be yourself.” It’s some of the most common advice out there. And yet, it doesn’t help much if you’re not sure who that is.

My guest today is actor, director, playwright, and founder of Live in Theater, Carlo D’Amore. He’s spent his career becoming other people and creating make-believe worlds.

Not as an escape, but the opposite: as a way to live into his truth and discover his authentic, unique self.

I invite you to listen for how he got there. The honest feedback that stings. The way he invites his actors to make his ideas better. And his belief that taking action precedes knowing.

Together, they point to a path for discovering your own truth and having the courage to be the hero in your own story.

Hi, I’m Roger Kastner, and this is What Do You Know To Be True? a leadership and personal development podcast for people who are discovering, building, or already living into their purpose and possibilities. I’m glad you’re here, let’s dive in.

[Carlo]

Okay, hi everybody. My name is Carlo DeMora.

I am an actor, writer, director, producer. I'm the creative director and founder of a lovely little company called Live in Theater. We create immersive true crime experiences for companies all over the world.

We also perform in-person events in New York and the LA area. The thing that makes me most happy, I know you didn't ask this, but I'm going to tell you, is creating work that is connected to truth and emotionally resonant. I like to break someone's heart.

[Roger]

Well, let's start with that. So you created Live in Theater back in 2009 after a night of immersive theater that left you unimpressed. What was it about that experience that made you think, I could do better?

[Carlo]

I've been reading Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act. He talks about this idea that if you have an idea, if you don't actually do it, make it come to fruition, somebody else will. And it isn't that somebody else has stolen your idea.

It's that that idea is time. Back in the early aughts, the idea that was percolating out in the cosmos, in the world, was immersive work. If somebody had said to me, you're going to be making interactive, immersive mystery, that would have been like, you're insane.

But here I am. So I had this idea, and I was super jacked about this idea. I didn't really know what it could be, how it could materialize.

But again, it was just these ideas were in the ether. And I was just like, oh, it can happen in the real world. And it's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I shared my excitement about this half-baked idea with a friend. And then weeks later, he said, look, somebody's doing something similar. And they were doing this show, which became very successful.

I'm not going to call it out, because that's kind of shady. But I went, and I got super excited about going, because, oh, you know, I want to see. The buildup was really great.

And I was super excited. And then all of a sudden, I go. And within 10 minutes, the last five minutes, I was like, oh, my god, it's horrible.

And yet, it worked. And yet, people loved it. I have a really high bar of excellence, right?

I'm a storyteller. And I'm a taskmaster. You know, I grew up loving the art form, and loving what storytelling can do, and good storytelling.

So I don't like everything. And I did like it, but I saw it. And the best thing about that was like, oh, my god, yeah, I can do this.

I can do this so much better. So much better. I almost left.

I almost left the middle of the production before it finished. But it gave me the energy to be able to go, I got it. I'm going to make this happen.

And then that's how I created our first experience called the Ryan Case 1873.

[Roger]

And this desire to bring truth into it's a made-up murder mystery experience. Let's pull on that thread of how does truth show up when you're creating these experiences?

[Carlo]

Most companies that do theatricalized mysteries are playing farce. I always do this gesture. They're at the surface.

They're barely scratching the surface. They don't play it for real. It's full of puns.

It's cringy. It's hammy. It's quite honestly, lame.

It's like, oh, my god. Like somebody with a magnifying glass, an inspector gadget, kind of like trench coat. It's bad.

It's bad. There's no nice way of saying it. It's horrible.

Because when you're trying to mass produce theater like that, those mysteries, it's just bad. So we don't do that. And the significant difference is A, there's several.

Everything that we do is actually based on real cases. And the most significant difference, the actors are not playing, ha, ha, oh, oh, oh, it smells fishy in here. Someone must have died from the salmon.

It's not that. It's actors who are directed to coming from the place of this really happened. So these people think that you are responsible for this murder.

You're going to be hung. Or you're going to go to jail for the rest of your life. Your whole family will be destitute.

You will be ashamed. So the actors are coming at it from like, what, what, what? They're ready to fight.

Just as they would if they were connected to a real murder and you were interrogating them. And that's a significant difference. I think why most companies do farce, I think it's a mistake.

Honestly, I think it's a horrible mistake. Because then you get cheesy, corny, lame. And contemporary audiences don't want that.

Contemporary, I think the reason those companies do that, to be honest, Roger, I think it's because it's murder. Potentially, people are like, well, we have to be delicate about it. No, this is where I am a business owner, right?

This is where I'm always thinking true crime is everywhere. There's a fascination with true crime. It's called true crime for a reason.

It's not called hammy crime or phony crime or lame crime. It's not. It's called true crime.

So we are the only company in the world with theatricalized true crime mysteries. And because of that, we're still in the game and in many ways flourishing.

[Roger]

A couple of things came up for me in that response. One, mystery, it's almost in the name in that mystery takes you from a place of uncertainty to clarity. Like it gets you to a place of truth.

And also this idea that other theaters, theater groups are leaning into the farce, leaning into the softer side and not going to the truth, not going to that emotional experience is because maybe they think the goal is to entertain. And your goal is different. You know, immersive.

[Carlo]

No, that's great. I love it. I love that you bring that up.

I think this is where I'm going to toot my own horn. You can cut this out if you want.

[Roger]

But toot away.

[Carlo]

Listen, I have actors who have been working with me who are fantastic since 2009. I love them to death, you know, and they're wonderful and they're fantastic in our show. And yet they work for other companies that do theatricalized mysteries or they themselves create theatricalized mysteries.

And I've seen the ones that they've created or the ones that they work in. And those other shows are doing those things that I think are like, oh, my God, why are you doing that? Why are you playing farce?

You're missing an opportunity here to really elevate the work, to really to get the audiences to be like, wow, that was amazing. As opposed to, yeah, I think I think it's twofold. I think it's those other companies are other companies because they don't have me and they don't have my dedication to.

It has to be fantastic, the acting has to be so out of this world that we I always say this, we don't we never see the acting. We don't see the acting because the minute you as an audience, you're watching somebody act, you're like you're out of it. What we do see in our live in theater shows is we see people living through extraordinary experiences.

And we go from this sometimes to people going, oh, my God, oh, and then they're part of it. While our shows are mysteries, while they're immersive, while they're interactive, the audience plays a big part in it. They're also highly, highly entertaining.

You're laughing your butt off. And here's the thing, you're not laughing your butt off because there's a lot of funny jokes. You're laughing many times because of what you and your audience, what the audience is doing, what the audience is doing is making it funny, what the actors are doing, it makes it dynamic and live, visceral.

[Roger]

So this this drive towards truth and excellence. I mean, it's those two things that seem to be coming together that really push you, compel you to create something that no one else is creating. I'm curious about where did that come from?

Where does that, you know, go back and tell us a story about where you started realizing not only the truth needed to come out in the storytelling, but that that had to have this element of excellence and of tenacity to make it better.

[Carlo]

I'll start with excellence. And I know exactly where that comes from. I started acting professionally when I was 18.

I read really young, which means I looked really young. So even into my late 20s, early 30s, I could play a teenager because I was little and young looking, right? And I was very fortunate, and this doesn't happen very often, very fortunate that a local Bay Area actor, Luis Oropesa, shout him out.

He's been dead for years now. He was an incredible actor and older man, also a little guy who's shorter than me, and a legend in the Bay Area. And he said, he took me under his wing.

He became my mentor. I had a mentor who was a traditionalist, like theater professional, who'd been a theater professional for 50 years. This is that time when I literally had never read a book.

I was 19 when I met him, never read a book from cover to cover. And he took me to the drama bookshop and he said, you have to read that. You have to read that, that, that, that.

And he schooled me on what it really means to be an actor. He literally would say to me, you have to be willing to die on stage. When I say really like die, you have to be willing to die and say, yes, you have to be willing to die to be on stage.

It was that kind of, uh, fervor to value the art form that was just imprinted on me. And so I come to it, even though we're creating theater off, off, off, off Broadway with this respect for the art form and nothing but excellence will do. And I, I would just, I fire people all the time.

I would fire people all the time. Sometimes you make mistakes in casting. Sometimes somebody like comes in and they're fantastic.

And then, and then they never step up, you know? And then, and then if you won bad Apple, you wrote everything, you know, so I would be tyrannical. I could be about like the quality, the quality had to be top notch.

And that, to be honest, it's typically not something, something somebody expects in a theatricalized murder mystery. People like, you know, we used to call our shows immersive interactive experiences. I'm sorry.

What? I don't know what the hell that means. Immersive interactive experience.

People are like, huh? What do you do? And then the minute we started calling the murder mystery, oh yeah, murder mystery.

Even if you've never done one before, you understand what that means. And yet most people who've gone to a theatricalized murder mystery have experienced, forgive my French, crap. This really bad, hammy, you know, inspector gadget, a magnifying glass, crap.

So here I am in this world full of crap, which is a really good lesson for anybody. You don't have to invent something brilliant. Take something that's mediocre and make it better.

You can, you can have a whole career doing that. And so in this world of mediocrity, I was, I was creating excellence by working really hard and being diligent and like collaborating and bringing the right teams together and being, no, no, that person doesn't work for X number of reasons. Now we have a team.

Now we have a team. What do you guys think? How can we make it better, better, better?

And reiterating constantly, constantly.

[Roger]

You've talked about acting as being heroic and being courageous. And I think the last response really sort of talked about that, that willingness to die on stage, to embody a character and to feel the emotions. And when you're on stage to show those emotions, you, you have to, again, to show them, to present them, you have to embody them.

You have to be willing to step into those emotions. That probably feels pretty scary. It probably feels intimidating to do that at the beginning.

And then it's, okay, how do I do more of that? Because I imagine when you're off stage, you can feel into your own emotions. And I want to test this.

A while ago, Dede Halfhill was on the podcast and she was a U.S. Air Force Colonel who was an advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So she's been around a lot of military leaders and she noticed the difference between the most effective military leaders was the ability to identify the emotion in the room and to speak to it, not ignore it, not downplay it, but to speak to it. So I'm thinking with the work that you do as an actor and the work you do as a director with actors to encourage them to maybe sometimes push them to step into that emotion.

What can you share with the leaders in the audience of this conversation who are trying to identify the emotions in the room and step into that space authentically and effectively?

Q: How do leaders address the emotion in the room?

[Carlo]

I think we all hear, we all sense, we all feel the emotion that's in the room. All of us. All of us in any room, we feel it.

So as a leader, as a director, as somebody commanding a space or commanding is not the right word, but orchestrating or leading a space to call out what everybody's feeling allows people to be like, oh, okay, yeah, we all see it. It allows us all to be seen, to understand that, yeah, we're all feeling this emotion and to face it head on. That's what I said earlier is this idea of like, I think people are afraid.

People are afraid. I think we all know what's in the room. What is the thing that's sticky that we potentially are afraid of or don't want to address?

So by the leaders addressing it directly, it makes us all collectively sigh. Oh, yeah, we know it's there. And it makes us feel like, yeah, this person is willing to go there.

This person is willing to be honest when we are potentially collectively not or are uncomfortable or think that we can't address the issue, right? While we do our mystery that's our big bread and butter because of the huge team building component in those mysteries, we also do programming that, again, always utilizes actors and role playing and scenarios. But we do something called DEI conversations at work where we tackle really difficult things and we do it all through role play.

There's two actors and everybody turns their cameras off and mutes themselves and watches these scenes. And the scenes get uncomfortable on purpose and then we all talk about it. And it's distance because they're actors.

They're not real people. But the beauty of theater, it's an incredible tool to be able to teach. So we go to those uncomfortable places and we talk about those things and we find solutions to it.

And we find that so many people today are afraid of conflict. So basically, HR departments are overburdened because everybody, oh, Roger said something really, really offensive to me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I go to HR because I can't say to Roger, hey, Roger, can we just have a conversation about what's happening?

To address the elephant in the room is a huge step in allowing people to go, oh, good. If she can do it, then I can too. At the end of the day, I think that as a leader, just being able to talk about stuff that nobody's willing to do is huge.

[Roger]

The purpose of memories, there's lessons in those memories. Our brain stores those memories for the reason of helping us not do that thing again or to do that thing again, whether it's helpful or hurtful. And so I think storytelling is the outward expression of the same purpose.

We tell stories to connect, to inform, inspire, to create awareness, all that good stuff. Every story has a purpose, whether we're aware of it or not. And so I totally think that the reason why you shared that with me is that there's a reason why.

[Carlo]

There is a reason why. That's fascinating. Yeah.

I've been a teacher in one way or another for 30 years. And when working with younger actors, sometimes doing script analysis or there's a moment that's difficult to try to understand really what the writer was trying to get across and what the fullness of that moment. And so many times you would see a young actor struggling with it and yet their body would actually know.

If we're talking about flow, they're trying to understand that this character is in flow at this moment. And the words are like, yeah, I don't know, but their body's doing this. I'm like, stop.

Look at his body. Look at her body. What's happening in the body?

The body knows. The body knows oftentimes before the brain.

[Roger]

The body knows and the body will tell our truth. Whereas sometimes the conscious part of our brain gets in the way of us allowing the truth to flow.

[Carlo]

Truth is scary. People are scared of the truth. I think it was for my birthday party.

I had a bunch of friends come over and somebody decided, let's go around the circle and talk about how great Carlo is, which was amazing and lovely. And nobody said a lot of horrible things, which was great. But one friend and he called me a sledgehammer of truth, which I totally fucking love.

I'm so much like my parents. My dad would come into a room and just say something like, who's a fucking ugly baby in the court? And I'd be like, oh my God.

And then he'd turn around and go, what? Because he came from a generation where there was like no self-awareness. You just say what you thought.

And it was completely normal. And because I tell the truth and I'm not, I tend to not try not to be clueless and insensitive. That's been a whole journey for me.

But telling the truth is people have an aversion to the truth or people, especially in the climate that we're in, consider the truth to be, forget about the tone. Anyway, you hear it. The truth is sometimes aggressive or mean.

[Roger]

Yeah. Why do you think there's an increased sensitivity to hearing the truth?

Q: Why is honest feedback so hard to give today?

[Carlo]

I think we're in a climate where people are scared. We are, everybody's walking on eggshells. You don't want to say the wrong thing.

You don't want to be, I find it fascinating if you have any opportunity to engage with young people. And I'm talking about like, you know, teenagers to like early twenties. I'm making a gross generalization.

Not everybody's like this, obviously. Right. But I find a lot of young people are so sweet.

They're so, there's like, it's nice. It's nice. They're so sweet, so conscientious.

And I was meeting somebody about her podcast and we're talking. And at some point, I don't know how we got to this moment. I said, yeah, I'm from the generation where I grew up, you know, with the saying sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt.

And without missing a beat, as soon as she heard words will never hurt, she said, oh, but they do hurt. And I think, I think a lot of people, not just young people are in that place of like, you have to be kind. And we hear that everywhere.

You have, yes, you should be kind. You should not be a dick. Of course.

Duh. But there's so much, like so much onus on that and that it makes people, they confuse, I think, kindness with being very cautious, very careful not to hurt people. Right.

Not to, and it goes, the pendulum swings, you know, now it's just swung in one direction for a while now where people are hypersensitive. You can't critique things anymore. So I wrote a sub stack that I think it's called the peer pressure standing ovation.

So because I'm in New York half a year and I go to see shows in New York all the time, what's happened in the last year and a half is whether, whether the show is, there's a scale, obviously, right there, there was a scale, right? Fantastic. Incredible.

Right. Where you can't help. This is back, I'm a dinosaur, but when I was a kid, if the show was so fantastic that the end of the show you stood up and you're like, wow, it's called a standing ovation as a theater maker in a very kind of like, I don't know, maybe it's egotistical.

I don't care. One of the goals for me in our production was to get to a standing ovation because it was a clear indicator that the audience was just, oh my God, an audience would give us that consistently because we worked really hard. Oh my God.

And when it wasn't working, I was always there. I was in the field as it were working on making sure because that was the response that we needed to get to be able to stay alive. Love of all those things.

Nowadays, at least for the past two, three years, you go see a show and even if it's just like, it's okay. Theater is really hard. It's an incredibly hard thing to do.

It's complex. One bad apple will ruin the whole thing. One miscast person, one moment that it used to at least, but now even if the show is just okay, everybody jumps onto their feet.

Wow. At the end. And everybody feels peer pressure.

You're pressured. Even if you're a discerning theater person, a practitioner of theater, you feel like, oh, okay, now I'm addicted to sitting down here. Now I have to stand up and now I have to clap.

Everybody feels the pressure. So guess what? Quality of theater in the toilet.

Are there incredible productions? Of course. When you're talking about New York City, Broadway, off-Broadway theater, where everybody, every production, I'm not generalizing things.

This is my experience. It's the first sub stack that I write where I get so much people going, oh my God. Yes.

Yes. What is happening? Why are people doing that?

Everybody feels like we're in this. It's mediocrity. So what you're doing is you're saying that everything's great.

It's the same thing. Everything's great. No one should be mean to people.

You can't tell the truth because it might hurt someone. You know what I mean? So to be called a sledgehammer of truth, I own that.

I love it.

[Roger]

The artists that I've known, whatever medium that they work in, will talk about the experience of going through art school or doing collaborative projects where there was always an element of critique that was involved and it was brutally honest and it was required. This is how you got better. When you were in front of your peers and it felt like you were getting your ass kicked, but it wasn't to kick just to get your ass kicked.

It was to get better. It was to improve. Back in the 80s, they put these biodomes in the desert to try to see could we sustain life on Mars?

They had trees that would get to a certain height and they would just fall over because there was no wind. Trees get stronger by those windstorms, by getting pushed back and forth all the time. That's how they get to a certain height.

I think that's very much like us. We get stronger when we get our ass kicked, when we get the truth, when we get critiqued, when we fall down. A thousand percent.

And the thing is, are we stronger from that experience?

[Carlo]

A thousand percent. But when you're in the performing arts, it's in the name, performing arts, you're putting it out, right? So you're supposed to, hopefully you get critique.

And as an artist, one of the things that have always like kept me going is my desire to be great. I want to get to a level of excellence that I'm really super proud of. I feel really bad for young actors who are studying in this time and age because I mean, I've heard horror stories of like, you know, any kind of critique and the students just shutting down or the teacher getting in trouble for critiquing the work.

What is the point? Why are you in school? Why are you spending all that money in school if you're not trying to get better?

Being an actor, at least I grew up with it, knowing it's a heroic act. It is a heroic act. The task, I mean, when the Greeks started the theater, I'm sure I'm not a scholar, but I'm sure there's a part of it that was entertainment and, you know, and having, you know, commerce and charged tickets.

Part of it was also to bring the elderly to the theater, to bring the infirmed and have them vicariously live through the heroes on stage who back then were wearing masks, but they were burying their souls. This whole idea of like unzipping yourself and burying your soul. That is what you want.

What you want is those roles that are like, oh my God, well, we don't, we don't perform everyday people. No, the characters that you can think of right now that are film and TV and plays and novels that are just like, oh my God, what a character. Our characters were living through extraordinary experiences and are challenged and they're broken and they survive or they don't, or they're villains, like horrific villains that you understand and you understand why they're doing it.

They can't stop doing it. Those are the characters you want. So if you don't have the strength to be able to tackle those human beings, then you shouldn't do it.

Do something else. You know what I mean? Because it takes a lot.

That's why we celebrate. That's why we celebrate the big stars. And the only way to do that is to be critiqued.

Whenever I was critiqued, and I was critiqued a lot, I would, as a young actor, when a director would beat me up and back then they'd beat you up, for sure. You know, I mean, I beat up, I used to beat up actors. Are you doing, what are you doing?

Are you serious? What is happening here? Nothing is happening.

And then so when stuff like that would happen to me, guess what? I'd go to the corner and I'd figure it out. I'd figure it out.

I was the first one there, the last one out. And it's through that criticism, you know, of course, you want to find a balance. You don't want somebody that just destroys you to the point where you can't get up anymore.

But a little beat up is good for you because it makes you stronger.

[Roger]

I want to pull on the thread, this idea of getting beat up makes you stronger. Did you have a sense that the directors that were beating up on you were doing it out of malice or because they wanted to make you better?

[Carlo]

Not out of malice. I think out of so many different things, right? I'm thinking of one particular person.

He was a very respected playwright. And it was one of the first times he was actually directing his own play. So I think it was his inability to communicate what he wanted.

That's part of it. And part of it was that I was 19. I was very young, very green.

And while I was a natural, there's things I didn't know how to do. You know, so I think it was just him wanting the production to be better, him wanting his work in this moment to be better. Their inability to be able to direct or their inability to be able to communicate.

And sometimes now that I think of it, you know, there's the other directors who like the worst, I think the worst thing you could tell an actor. And he wouldn't do it, this other director wouldn't do it with me, but he would do it with other actors. He'd say, I don't believe you.

Oh, that's malicious. That's, in my opinion, coming from his ego. So yeah, there's sometimes it could be misguided criticism.

Q: What is the best way to respond to feedback?

But I think for the most part, when you're, you know, working on something collaborative like that, being able to, I used to say, I've said this so many times to actors when giving notes, you know, that means, but just in case your listeners don't know, when you're giving, as a director, I'm giving an actor notes, I want them to implement what I'm saying right into this moment in the production. I've always said to actors, sometimes in the beginning of the rehearsal, of the rehearsal process, when I give you notes, there's three things that you can do. You have three options.

Number one is take the note that means implement it to the best of your ability. Number two is if you're confused about the note, ask for clarification. So you take the note you implemented, you ask for clarification, or the third one, and these are in any particular order.

And the third one is my favorite one. Come up with a better solution. Because if you come up with a better solution, I'm going to be like, yes, I love you.

I'm going to hire you time and time and time and time again. Right? Because it's only those three options.

Because for you not to take it to be like, to be combative with the person that's putting the whole thing together is a waste of time. Unless you're like, I have an idea, and then we can have a discussion. Why do you think that?

Because like, oh my God, oh my God. Yeah, you come up with a better solution. I want to be like, yes, Roger, that's the one.

We want that kind of action.

[Roger]

I love that third one. I'm totally right there with you. Because this idea of giving feedback and having the person implement feedback, if it's, hey, the way you're doing it right now isn't hitting what we're looking for.

Here's the way to do it. That feels a little egotistical. That feels a little bit like one direction.

I know what's right. I'll tell you when you get it right. Whereas that third piece of if you can come up with a better way to do this, let's go for it.

That's more conversational. That's more relational. That's more, hey, I see the potential for you to come up with something better.

And the research is clear out there that what makes for great people leaders is the ability to show people, the people that you lead, that you matter and your work matters. And Gallup, the organization that measures engagement and performance, will say the number one habit for people leaders to drive engagement and performance is being willing to have the meaningful feedback conversation. And it's that conversation piece that's really the most important part, that this is dialogue.

This is not me telling you how to do the job, but this is me telling what I'm observing, telling the impact, and then talking about, okay, what were you trying to do? And then how can it get better? And before you could even enter into that space, there's the development of the relationship.

And Drs. John and Julie Gottman of the Gottman Institute, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're the ones who Malcolm Gladwell in Blink talked about being able to identify, after hearing a couple speak for 60 seconds, be able to identify within like a 95% accuracy rate whether or not they will stay together or get divorced. So they know relationships pretty well. And they have this magic ratio of five positive interactions to every one negative interaction.

And they talk about that in terms of the feedback we give to our partners. If we get five positive pieces of feedback of five positive interactions, we've developed enough relational capital to be able to say the one critical thing. And if you can think of it like if you've had those five positives that someone else has noticed about the work you do or how you show up in a relationship, that one critical is like, okay, no, no, I trust this person actually notices me.

I feel seen, valued, and heard. Well, maybe this critical piece, like it kind of just, I can take off the armor and accept it. Did you see something like that in the theater community when you were growing up?

Or do you use something like that today where it's, you have to build the relationship and then you could be that sledgehammer of truth?

[Carlo]

It's a collaboration. It's best when it's a collaboration. It just makes me think of like, you know, with Limit Theater back in the day when we started in 2009, right, I'd say for the good first five years, I was doing everything.

You know, it went from a Broadway theater company to a business, right? And then transition was really quick. It happened really quickly.

And I literally was wearing all the hats. So oftentimes I would be, and this is just my temperament, short tempered and like, you know, moving really quickly. Also, I would say to everybody, we're going to move really fast.

And the reason we would move really fast is because I couldn't afford to pay for an extensive, luxurious rehearsal process. You know what I mean? So I'm being really fair with you actually, but it's really like, like, like bats out of hell.

I'm going to layer in another challenge in a positive way, because the work that we're doing is non-traditional. This is not sitting in a darkened theater watching this thing happen. You are interacting with the audience.

The audience is not just an audience. They're your audience while also your scene partner. New layer, new layer of wonderful challenges.

And then on top of that, originally the shows happened on the streets of New York City, right? So you don't have the containment of a theater, of the safety of a theater. There are moments in the pieces where actors were interacting with other actors in front of the audience, but mostly it was actor interacting with audience.

So if I was in the shows and I was often inside the shows, not watching it, but actually being one of the actors while doing all those other things, I couldn't see what was happening. So to have really clear communication, how's it going out there for you? What's happening?

You know, decompressing, what's happening? Or, or we would like collectively be like, we would be in the green room, right? At an interval in the production.

And we'd say, oh my God, that woman in the red hat in the orange team, she is hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that person. So we would confer and we would just have open, clear communication about this new world that we were traversing.

[Roger]

So what or who inspired you to have this superpower of storytelling and especially the truth in storytelling?

[Carlo]

My mom and my mom was a big, my big hero for sure. She was, had she known she could have been an actress, had that presented itself, she would have been an incredible actress. At one point, my mom and my two siblings, younger siblings, were living in Rome and they were in this attic apartment and the TV wasn't working.

My mom, every night, my siblings still talk about it, would make up a story like a soap opera. And every night she would add chapters and they, the kids couldn't, when they got home from school, they're like, what's the next chapter? And I, and I, now I know my mom was just making stuff up.

And so that, that, that comes from my family. Just, I think it's one of those things that while you can learn, I think it's like acting. Some people are just born into it, born storytellers.

So I think it's my, my family, my mom predominantly, which that's, that's where it all comes from. Everything I do, is grounded, not only on, in my real life, but I think the reason I started doing mysteries is because I'm a very emotional person. Because I'm so emotional, I think this idea of murder just made sense to me.

When someone's dying in murder, the stakes are higher than they've ever been, or somebody has died. I typically say to my actors, hopefully we will never experience murder like this. But when creating a piece of art that is surrounding murder or this murder, oh my God, all of the emotions are on the table, everything, everything, right?

So it gives us a really rich, for me, in my opinion, very rich palette of paint to play with. Because it's heightened, it's the most heightened, it's murder, for Christ's sakes. You know what I mean?

So that's one of the reasons I've done murder, because I like things to be highly emotional. Again, this is not something people typically expect when they go to see a theatricalized, anybody hears theatricalized murder mystery. They don't expect high emotion.

And yet our shows are very emotional. And the fact that we do them in corporate settings is hilarious to me.

[Roger]

Well, I love that, that you are priming people to be tapped into a heightened state of emotion because of the subject matter. And then from that place of emotion, you're helping them improve their capabilities around collaboration and communication and connection.

[Carlo]

And that, you know, the fact that our shows just became such great team building is, I would love to take full credit for it, but it just kind of happened. It was certainly not the intention. I literally, I started Live in Theater because I wanted, I stopped, I just worked on a Broadway show.

And as an actor, that was like, wow, you know, I can die now. I've been on a Broadway stage. Oh my God.

Amazing. I achieved the pinnacle of, you know, theater, but it wasn't enough for me. And more than anything, because I was always meant to be a creator.

I wasn't just meant to be an actor. I love being an actor. That's my one first love, right?

But there was more for me to do and more really means me telling my own stories. So I started the company because I wanted to create work opportunities for myself. And I wanted to put my stories out in the world.

And I wanted to create opportunities for actors. CBS came to one of our shows early on, maybe 2011, 12. And they named it, I didn't even know they were there.

They named it top six attractions for groups in New York City. Game changer. Because all of a sudden we're popping up on Google for the first time ever.

You know, anybody that's coming into New York City, capital of the world, and they're putting in fun group activity, boom, we get corporate, corporate groups, corporate group to the point where we stopped doing general public performances. And they'd only private events, which was so from a business standpoint, so much easier. That's how that's how it started.

And then during COVID, oh, okay, so we're doing our shows virtually now. And then we started to realize what these shows really do to audiences. So the shows are, we're going on this ride, it's a live theater experience, right?

We're going on a ride. The shows are very fun. Fun.

They're very entertaining. They're very, they're theater. They're all these things.

But beyond that, it just so happens, all the things that we talked about, the realness, the authenticity of the work, the high level of the acting, the how it, the emotional richness of the experiences challenges audiences. And then there's the mystery that they're really having to put your head together to problem solve these intricate puzzles. Only like 40% of the people get it right.

But it doesn't matter because you're still like growing so much. All of these things together combined to make the shows something that in my opinion, it's really high level team building.

[Roger]

This path of superpower is not only the talent that we have, but once we do it in service of other people, then it becomes a superpower. All the way to the impact that this has with teams. And there's all the emotions.

And yet when we go to work, we're often told, leave your ego at the door. Like ignore the emotions. So getting people to laugh together is probably better than crying together.

But still feeling an emotion and a leader who can speak to the emotion in the room, that's going to bring us together way more than any other type of textbook academic team building thing that ignores those emotional components. So Carlo, in this moment, what do you know to be true about your superpower of storytelling?

Q: How do you be authentic if you don't know who you are?

[Carlo]

If I'm genuinely honest, if I'm unapologetically myself, it lands better. That's what makes me, me. That's what makes you, you.

This whole idea of like being yourself, the potential problem with being yourself sometimes is that most of us don't know who we are. One of the things that makes me an artist is that I'm like a kid. People tell me all the time, I don't know when you're being serious or not because I'm always joking around.

I'm always playing. I'm literally always playing. I've had relationships I've been in.

People have said to me, why can't you be serious? My response is always whether I verbalize or not, like why? It's my curiosity that keeps me creating, that keeps me completely fulfilled.

So I think it's being myself, it's taken me a while to really authentically be myself. And I think that is my superpower to be completely myself because there's literally no one like me. Like there's no one like you.

And the more that you can celebrate that, it doesn't mean that everyone's going to want what Roger has. Not everyone's going to like what Carlo is. They won't.

And that's okay. That's okay because there's a really big, big audience out there.

[Roger]

The problem with showing up authentically is that most people don't know who they are.

[Carlo]

That's true, right? Think about it.

[Roger]

That is so profound. I'm going to be chewing on that idea for a while. So what did you believe early on about your superpower that you've come to learn to not be true?

[Carlo]

That I wasn't going to be able to do it. That was my thing for a long time. I don't know how.

I don't know how.

[Roger]

So how did you?

Q: How do you start when you don't feel ready?

[Carlo]

I just did it. This is not a commercial for Nike, but just do it is my motto. In my New York place, I have a little piece of paper on the wall.

Basically talks about commitment and the just do it. You don't have to know everything. Those people who are just like, yeah, but I'm not ready.

I'm not ready. You're never going to be ready. You're never going to be ready.

You're never going to be ready. I had an actress, my first film that I directed, a short film about my mom, an incredible actress in it, just amazing actress. She was getting frustrated because she felt I was like, yeah, it's good.

It's good. It's good. It's good.

This is from years of directing and coming to it from a place of like, I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing and I know what I want. But she was coming, her ego was coming from the place of like, he's just saying these things.

Like he does not really challenge me enough. And I said, you realize that this is art, right? That this is a scene, right?

This is a scene. Well, the reason I'm telling you that is because it's never going to be done. You're never going to be finished.

We could literally be working on this five minute scene for 125 years. We could be working on it forever. And you're never going to, it's art.

You're never going to get to a place where like, oh, I'm done with it. No, you're never going to be ready. So you might as well just jump in, jump in.

The net will catch you. Again, I don't come from here. I come from here.

So for me, it's not about like, oh, well, I don't know how to do it. I just do like, boom, you start it. You start it.

That's what you need to do. Every day, just chip away at something.

[Roger]

That's been one of the big lessons in this last year of these conversations of taking action, of giving yourself permission to take a step and then see what happens. And if it's the wrong step, control Z, undo, go back and take a different step. But it's taking steps.

It's giving yourself the permission to take a step and then see what happens. It's not overthinking it. And that's come up in so many of the conversations.

I heard someone once say, I'm an artist. The art might be shit, but I'm an artist. And it's that idea of going out and just putting paint on canvas, putting words out there, recording podcasts and whatever our art is.

There's an artist out of the UK, Amy McNee, who had a wonderful TEDx talk where she talks about the world needs our art more than ever. But she defined art as anything we create with the intent to connect. And when I think about you and what you're doing, you're trying to connect, you're trying to create, you're trying to not only work through your truth in live in theater, live with other people, but you're creating the space for other people to experience these emotions, to be immersed in the storytelling.

And by doing so, they're learning more about themselves. They're learning more about each other and they're coming away from it a more collaborative, a more relational and connected unit. And what a fantastic gift to give to the world and to yourself.

And that's the story of Superpowers. So Carlo, thank you so much for being here today, for sharing this with us. And I look, I really, I'm excited to jump into the editing bay and go through this conversation again to pull out some of the just amazing lessons that you've learned, that you've shared with us here about storytelling, about truth, about what it takes to show up in a moment that's not working out and how to work through it, through guidance of others, through feedback, but ultimately from our own heart center to know, okay, what am I going to do with the information in front of me, the reflection, the results, and how do I take that next step to make it even better? That's what I'm taking from this and I'm so excited to pull it all together.

Carlo, thank you so much for being here with me.

[Carlo]

Roger, my pleasure, anytime.

[Roger]
Thank you all for being in this conversation with us, and thank you, Carlo, for showing us how art doesn’t reflect truth, it reveals it.

What Do You Know To Be True? is a Three Blue Pens production. I’m your host, Roger Kastner.

We are recording on the ancestral lands of the Duwamish and Suquamish people.

After this conversation, why don’t you check out this one

On the power of being ordinary with Lisa Hallett. And you might also want to check out this conversation with Brooklyn Dicent on how to change your limiting beliefs.

OK, Be well, my friends, and, love you, mean it!

QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS
Q: How do you be authentic if you don't know who you are?
A: Carlo D'Amore says authenticity is a practice of getting to know yourself, and it took him years. His superpower became being completely himself, because there's no one else like him, and he accepts that not everyone will like it.

Q: How do leaders address the emotion in the room?
A: Carlo says everyone already senses it. When a leader names the sticky thing people are afraid to address, the room collectively exhales and people feel safe enough to face it.

Q: What is the best way to respond to feedback?
A: Carlo gives his actors three options when they get a note: implement it, ask for clarification, or come up with a better solution. The third is his favorite, because it turns feedback into collaboration.

Q: Why is honest feedback so hard to give today?
A: Carlo believes many people now confuse kindness with avoiding any critique. His example is the peer pressure standing ovation: when every show gets one, quality drops.

Q: How do you start when you don't feel ready?
A: You're never going to be ready, Carlo says. Art is never finished, so jump in, trust the net, and chip away at something every day.