Ed German, who has been a radio host on the East End's public radio station since 1996, published "Deep Down in Brooklyn" in 2011, a memoir about his life in that borough, moving on to New Jersey, and then to Vietnam, where he was wounded and received a Purple Heart. He eventually landed at Southampton and WPPB-FM, now WLIW-FM.
Bonnie Grice, a radio host on WLNG, began her career at WPPB two years after German. A 30-year friendship took a fortuitous turn in 2016, when Grice, having just founded the Boots on the Ground Theater, was at the station with German during a fund drive. "We were standing around, and I said, 'Ed, you've got a memoir, what do you think of bringing it to the stage? You've had acting experience, right?' " Grice recalled during a three-way phone conversation.
"I graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1978," German said. "Bonnie's company was just getting started. And that was the debut."
Grice explained that at the time Guild Hall's John Drew Theater was hosting the JDT Lab, a workshop devoted to supporting performing artists by providing them with the resources of the theater on Tuesday evenings. "We selected a Tuesday and Ed and I brought the show to life," Grice said. "It was standing room only."
"Near the end of the show there were some people near the front who were crying," said German. "There was a lot of laughter in the show, of course, but some people were really moved and that caught me by surprise."
As a result of a conversation between Grice and German on July 4, "Deep Down in Brooklyn" will return for a new iteration on Saturday and Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. "There are a lot of things I didn't mention in the first show, and there are lot of new things I'll mention in this one," German said. As with the first show, there will be no script, just extemporizing.
Of the 2016 performance, German said, "I had memories beginning in childhood that are so vivid to me, and once I start talking about them they come out very easily because the things I saw and witnessed, the things that happened, were things that made an imprint." One memory that came up during the conversation dated from 1952, when he was 2 years old in rural South Jersey. Living with his grandfather, who was a sharecropper, German was attacked by a rooster.
He went on to talk about more serious elements of the new version of the show. "It's deep and it's unique. And it's not for kids. Sometimes it's raw and it's dirty and it's full of street things people don't talk about much these days, like pimping, hustling, gambling, and playing the numbers. It's also about how people dressed."
And about music, which plays a big part in the performance. "If this were a film, we wouldn't be able to afford the music. The royalties would run us out of business," said German. The show features music of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, as well as projections on a big screen of photographs from the memoir. And, Grice said, some props, especially from his time in Vietnam.
During his years at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, German studied stage acting, which included speech and onstage movements. "We did a couple of productions there, and after graduation I did a couple of Off Off Broadway productions. I played a West Indian butler in an Agatha Christie murder mystery." More recently, he appeared along with Richard Kind and Tovah Feldshuh in the film "Not Dead Yet," a narrative feature by Eric and Nick Weber that just played at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Tickets are $25, free for veterans and their families.
