Nick Offerman

I mean, you know, all these Illinois kids basically are suddenly learning this traditional Japanese art form.

And his genius, he's an award-winning theater artist, and his genius was for taking the plays of Shakespeare or Greek dramas and interpreting them in the kabuki style.

So the makeup, the wigs, the presentational movement and voice work is

It was fantastic.

You know, Kabuki Othello, Kabuki Aristophanes, the frogs or what have you.

It was such profound lessons in showmanship in so many ways.

The reverence with which the Kabuki artists, the way they treat the stage and the audience and the art form felt holy to me.

In a way that church – they always said church was supposed to, but that never really clicked because it lacked the passion of the theater.

And I think that's part of what led me to this stage was growing up in the Catholic church and I got – I appreciate the values, the lessons of –

of the church but it just didn't you know nobody was juiced nobody was like man that sermon really uh blew me away or made me cry so i wanted to take the sort of values of of a religion and and take it to a different kind of barn and that's what they taught me in kabuki was

Before every show, everyone would do this stretching exercise where you line up all the way across the stage, kneeling in front of a towel, and you do this sort of stretching.

It's sort of yogic.

You push the towel, then do kind of a salute to the sun kind of pose until you push yourself all the way across the stage.

So the whole company cleans the stage before every show.

So, I mean, it really has this reverential sort of shrine atmosphere.

And then when we started a theater company in Chicago, me and my friends, a lot of us had come from that Kabuki training.

And so we were able to bring that a lot of the same aesthetic to our own, you know, crappy little Chicago company.

You earned your degree in theater, but have said that in the four years of theater school, it became clear that you were trying too hard to be hip and cool and urbane and had unwittingly thought that your sort of country-rude persona would not be interesting to an audience.

When did you realize otherwise?

Uh...