Prove it on the stage

GUY SMILEY Reidy’s ready for the publication of his first book.

Dave Reidy isn’t big on expectations.

It’s a theme that recurs in his debut story collection, Captive Audience (Ig Publishing, $14.95). A screenprinter reveals his art to an audience of three; an NBA guard retires into summer camps and fatherhood; Abe Vigoda (yes, Det. Fish of Barney Miller) contemplates his final performance and his real death. From his apartment above open-mike nights at a new comedy club in the title story, an agoraphobe mentors a hack stand-up with Bob Newhart albums.

The detail of the characters’ varied processes and the strain of trying to connect with someone through his art make Reidy seem like a savant on all things performance.

“I spent my early adulthood trying to figure out what I was willing to be really, really bad at before I became decent,” Reidy says from the Green Door Tavern, a central location between his job as a health-care marketing writer and his River North home. A Notre Dame alum and M.F.A. grad from the University of Florida, where he wrote three of the seven stories that would be Captive Audience, Reidy played violin from ages 3 to 17. “I was never better than mediocre, but the Suzuki method enabled me to be mediocre at other things like guitar.”

He had a stint with Dunbar, a band he’s sure we’ve never heard of, and as the firstborn of four in an Irish Catholic family, learned to respect his parents’ bygone entertainers, like Newhart, and watched Barney Miller with his grandfather.

“That which is old can also be interesting,” he says with the charming calm and humility that infuses his writing. “I sponged that stuff up.”

A voracious learner and reader of music profiles, Reidy figured out in grad school not how to write but how to be a writer and accept the challenges of the craft. “Rejection is the usual state,” he says with a shrug. This sentiment—that it’s hard and no one really cares how hard it can be, along with Reidy’s curiosity for the unseen or forgotten artists, are at the heart of the collection.

“I have a lot of respect for anybody who gets up and performs, because the stakes are already set high—one person in front of other people sitting back expecting to be entertained,” he says.

The young male narrators in Captive Audience aspire to rise from the fringe of their crafts to some kind of spotlight but often find their success comes in ways other than planned. In “Dancing Man,” a sideman organist hits the road with ska band Sod Off Shotgun, but instead of playing the keys, he energizes the crowds with his lone dance move, the running man. Soon enough, he’s opening as a dancer for R.E.M., his idols.

The attention to detail that illuminates such esoteric arts as screenprinting is laid out so specifically that you can imagine performing them yourself. Even if you’d be nothing but mediocre at it, you might as well try.

Reidy launches Captive Audience Saturday 27 at darkroom.

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