Slash Coleman shelves his 'Neon Man' persona for a storytelling show

Slash Coleman is putting those dazzling fluorescent lights behind him. For much of the past decade, he has been caught in their blaze, but now it's time to move on.

"I was just, like, Slash Coleman, the Neon Man," the lanky, soft-spoken 43-year-old says as he sits in an art-bedecked studio in Richmond's Fulton Hill. "That's what my card said. That's what my identity was. I have more to say — but I just didn't know how to break out."

The Chester-bred artist is referring to "The Neon Man and Me," the nationally traveled one-man show that was his response to the death of his best friend, Mark Jamison, a neon artist who died while installing a sign. Coleman's funny, poignant piece, a meditation on friendship, insecurity and loss, with songs of his own composition, played in central Virginia, off-Broadway and across the country. A version also aired on PBS. It was a tough act to follow.

But Coleman has high hopes for the new fare he's about to unveil to hometown audiences. On Friday and Saturday, the Chrysalis Gathering Space will host "An Evening with Slash Coleman," featuring his new storytelling shows "The Last American Gladiator" and "Odd Time Signatures," which include material also found on his newest CD (also titled "The Last American Gladiator"). The new pieces are coming-of-age tales that recall Coleman's colorful family history, Jewish heritage and youthful obsessions with Evel Knievel, Rick Springfield and other phenomena of the 1970s and 1980s.

The new acts, which Coleman plans to tour starting in the fall, are testaments to his newly embraced identity as a storyteller: not some fuddy-duddy librarian reciting yarns, but a member of the flourishing contemporary movement, as seen at high-profile forums like New York City's The Moth.

"All these places around the country have started to pop up and embrace storytelling," Coleman said.

Not that the former writer, jazz musician and visual artist jumped on the storytelling bandwagon because it was hip. A few years ago, as he was searching for a follow-up to "Neon Man," Coleman was invited to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn. He wasn't exactly elated.

"To me, storytellers were all women with gray hair reading books to kids," he says. He took in some of the festival's other performances, and something clicked.

"I felt like I finally knew what I was, after all these years," he said.

"Neon Man" had been relatively theatrical, but this new medium — just words, a microphone and a narrator — felt more compelling.

"This is what I've been looking for through my painting, through my jazz piano, through all my incarnations as an artist," Coleman said. "This is what I wanted: to stand up and have this conversation with the audience, and have it be really honest."

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In some ways, storytelling is a return to his roots.

"I grew up in this environment where stories were told around the table," he said. His father's side of the family was of Sicilian extraction, and fond of trading narratives after heavy Sunday dinners.

His mother and grandparents were French Jews who escaped the Holocaust and eventually immigrated to the Richmond area. With that sobering experience in her background, his mother "groomed me to be able to take really heavy subjects and present them in a way that would not turn people off," he says.

His Jewish heritage has been important to him: After his bar mitzvah, he legally changed his first name to Slashtipher, a moniker built from his favorite letters of the Hebrew alphabet. (His given names had been Jeffrey Markous.)

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A shy and somewhat alienated youth, Coleman thought he might become a visual artist like his father, a sculptor who shares the Fulton Hill studio.

"My dad taught me that you wake up, you eat, you take a breath, and then you start creating," he said.

As Slashtipher Coleman grew older, his creative impulses shifted. He studied writing and jazz piano as an undergraduate at Radford University, where he met Jamison, and later focused on the same subjects as a grad student at Columbia College Chicago.

During his student days and afterward, living in Portland, Ore., where he got married, he made money by playing piano in a jazz band. He also found that shoppers at open-air markets would buy the cartoon-style pictures he drew with oil pastels.

But doubts crept in. Would a real artist be hawking wares outdoors? Tickling the keys in a smoke-filled bar one night, he realized that he was a morning person who hated cigarettes.

"This is going to be my life?" he remembers wondering. "I was, like, 'I don't want to play piano for money any more. If I play piano, I want it to be just for fun.' "

Fortuitously, his musical gigs had opened a new theatrical avenue for him: Because he had stage presence, his band mates had often recruited him to do the introductions to numbers, and he had taken to weaving stories and fictional characters into his talk.

About this time, he moved back East. His marriage ended, and he channeled his sensations of loss into "Love in Boxes," a one-man show that he briefly toured.

"It was a mess of a show," he remembers.

* * * * *In 2004, Jamison died, and Coleman moved back home. Long ambivalent about Richmond, which had seemed too parochial to him in his youth, he found the area "more cosmopolitan" in the 21st century.

While working as an upholsterer at Tinker and Company, a décor boutique and furniture-refurbishing business his family owns, he began scribbling down memories of Mark on scraps of paper and fabric, intending to give them to his friend's young son.

He put the scraps in a box that he planned to mail to Jamison's family. But at the last minute, he had second thoughts, wondering if it was "just going to be too bizarre for his son to read all this stuff," he said. "So I called (Mark's) parents, and said, 'I think I want to do a one-person show about my friendship with Mark.' And they gave me their blessing."

"Neon Man" premiered at Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanoke in 2005. Coleman thought he would just be performing the piece a few times. To his surprise, audience feedback suggested otherwise.

"People who didn't know Mark said, 'You've really touched us,' " he said. "That's when I said, 'I've created something that's really universal here. It's not just a story about me and my friend.' And then it just took off."

After performing the piece, by his estimate some 1,400 times, earning about $100,000 that he says he donated to Jamison's family and to nonprofit organizations, Coleman began to feel that he had fulfilled his emotional and spiritual compact with his deceased best friend. But the budding thespian struggled to find his next step. A solo show that riffed on his Jewish roots, "Slash Coleman Has Big Matzo Balls," performed in Richmond and at the Capital Fringe Festival in Washington, received mixed reviews. ("Alternately corny and incomprehensible," sniffed one D.C. critic.)

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So his storytelling epiphany was all the more welcome. Coleman is gaining traction in the new medium, having appeared this year at the Stone Soup Storytelling Festival in South Carolina; Riverway Storytelling Festival in New York state; and the Singlehandedly! solo festival at Oregon's Portland Story Theater.

"He has such an interesting body of work," said Susan O'Connor, director of programs for the International Storytelling Center, where Coleman was Teller-in-Residence last May. She praised Coleman's ability to weave family lore and personal experience into an engrossing performance. "I'm a real fan," she said.

Coleman has found a way to turn his tale-spinning abilities and general know-how to the benefit of others. For instance, applying the knowledge he gleaned while promoting "Neon Man," he has become something of an arts-marketing authority, holding workshops on the topic at the Capital Fringe Festival and at Richmond's Crossroads Arts Center.

"He's good at making the artists think outside the box to market themselves," said Jenni Kirby, the center's owner. Coleman's experience with a range of artistic media makes him well-equipped to share tips with all kinds of creative people, she said.

"He can relate to someone who's trying to put a play together just as well as someone who's trying to sell a piece of artwork," she said.

In an initiative aimed at youth, he has participated in a series of residencies at area high schools, helping students develop autobiographical performances.

"He really connects with the students," said Susan Damron, a dance and drama specialist at the Arts and Humanities Center, a resource agency for Richmond public schools. She has attended Coleman's school workshops (and worked to secure grants for them), and she sees the residencies as valuable tools for teaching communication skills and nurturing student confidence and maturity.

"It allows students recognition that they are unique and their stories are important," she said.

Coleman's storytelling work has gone beyond the schools, too.

"He's an inspiration," said Rhona Arenstein, a Virginia Holocaust Museum volunteer who recruited Coleman to help with the programs for the solemn Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day of Remembrance). On that occasion, she said, he gave a "riveting" impromptu speech that approached the genocide in an interesting and nonthreatening way, tying in anecdotes from his own family history.

"I see him as an educator, but also as someone who fosters healing," she said.

Obviously, Slash Coleman has a lot of irons in the fire, and the fire is burning bright enough that he won't miss all that neon. The performer (who plans a move to New York City) doesn't think the public appetite for storytelling is going to abate anytime soon. Even in an era of short attention spans — of hurried emails, and texting and Twitter — he says, "People are still really hungry for something real."