David Byrne has a mind to change who you are | John Moore

A few years back, some of my siblings were comparing stories about how we first found out our parents were getting divorced after 25 years of marriage. For me, it happened on a crowded Thanksgiving afternoon. I was 14, the youngest of eight. I distinctly remember walking downstairs to the basement rec room where my two older sisters and some cousins were dancing to the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s well-worn album “1, 2, 3, Red Light.”

When I heard the word, I butted in. “Wait … whose divorce?” I asked. My sister Theresa turned to me and said, without even slowing her dance groove, “mom and dad’s.”

Theresa listened to my version of these events with a curious compassion. “I don’t doubt for a second that is your memory of how it happened,” she said to me gently, as if talking to a kid who sees dead people. “But I was living in North Carolina at the time … and I didn’t come home that Thanksgiving.”

It could not have happened as I still remember it to have happened.

David Byrne would not be surprised to hear that story.

“Our perceptions in our brain is not reality. It is a show that is being put on for us,” the introspective former frontman of the adolescence-defining band Talking Heads told me recently.

It’s all theater, what’s going on up there: Theater of the mind.

Byrne isn’t the first to say it. The late Dr. Oliver Sacks, a British rock-star in the world of academic neurology and the inspiration for all kinds of popular movie plots like “Awakenings” and “At First Sight,” titled a chapter in one of his books “Theater of the Mind.”

Sacks wrote in his memoir about the 1940 night when a 1,000-pound chemical bomb tumbled out of the sky and set fire to his North London neighborhood. He was just 7, but years later he could still describe in vivid detail seeing how neighbors pouring water on the fire only fed its brilliant vengeance. It was only after reading the book that Sacks’ brother informed him that on the night that bomb fell, they were both away at boarding school. His memory had irrefutably deceived him. But even after Sacks came to accept that as fact, a visual image of that fire still burned in his memory.

It is a given, Sacks said, that there is far more going on inside our own minds than we are even remotely aware of – or will ever fully understand.

Sacks took his inspiration from Charles Bonnet, a Swiss scientist and philosopher who back in 1760 discovered that complex visual hallucinations – far more realistic than common daydreams – occur in psychologically normal people all the time. Bonnet openly wondered “how the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain.”

Now, more than 260 years later, Byrne, co-writer Mala Gaonkar and boundary-pushing theater director Andrew Scoville are trying to demonstrate exactly how that might happen by taking audiences, just 16 at a time, into the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ “Theater of the Mind,” the largest immersive theatrical adventure ever attempted in Denver.

The experience is described as an interactive deep-dive into the science of the human brain that will take place throughout 12 intricately designed rooms taking up 15,000 square feet at the York Street Yards, a mixed-use industrial complex at 38th Avenue between York and Steele streets.

And from the start, Byrne’s driving, haunting artistic question has been this: “Are our identities fixed … or are they constantly changing?”

At 70, Byrne is certainly not the same as he ever was. He’s not the same as he was yesterday. Or will be tomorrow. And, he believes, he has the science to prove it.

Gone is the Byrne who burst onto the American pop-culture landscape 45 years ago with his darting eyes, paranoid cynicism and marketable mistrust of authority. As the frontman of Talking Heads, Byrne emerged as his generation’s counter-culture answer to the Cold War Reagan 1980s. Dwarfed inside his signature oversized business suit, Byrne embodied a prevailing anxious spirit that was perfectly captured in Jonathan Demme’s time-capsule concert film “Stop Making Sense.”

The silvery-haired Byrne you meet today is genial, thoughtful, intelligent and yet still unavoidably if unintentionally intimidating. And after two hugely successful runs of his Broadway musical “American Utopia,” which used his song catalog to ask fundamental questions about the meaning of home; and the release of a book of his drawings titled “A History of the World (in Dingbats),” his full focus is now on “Theater of the Mind,” which has been in pandemic-delayed development for four years.

When it finally opens for preview audiences on Wednesday (Aug. 31), Byrne said it will be a “pinch me” moment. “It’s kind of amazing … like, wow,” said Byrne, who is rarely at a loss for fully articulated sentences. “This thing is very ambitious and very complicated, but yeah, it’s really gonna happen.”

And it’s only happening in Denver because Charlie Miller, who co-launched the Denver Center’s adventurous programming wing called “Off-Center” in 2010, lobbied hard to get it.

“When I was passing through Denver on a concert tour in 2018, I was approached by Charlie about a possible collaboration,” Byrne said. Miller, recently promoted to the Denver Center’s Executive Director and Curator of Off-Center, took Byrne on a field trip to a local warehouse and opened his mind to the creative possibilities of staging the piece here.

“Off-Center is nationally admired for its immersive work, and they have the skill and experience to bring this complex production to life – and a committed audience who will appreciate it,” Byrne said. “They know what they are doing.”

So what is “Theater of the Mind” as a theatergoing experience? Miller describes it as unlike anything you have ever seen before. It is essentially a one-person play that will be separately and simultaneously performed by 13 Colorado-based actors. Over the course of an hour, each actor will guide 16 audience members through 12 rooms while essentially telling the story of one life lived backward. And not necessarily an altogether happy life. After all, "nobody wants to go see a movie about a happy family,” Byrne joked. “It's boring.”

Each room is distinct and detailed. One might be an impossibly saturated American backyard; the next an “Alice in Wonderland”-like rabbit hole where everything is freakishly oversized. “And along the way, you get to experience neuroscience phenomena through a series of experiments that show you how easily manipulated our brains are, and how unpredictable and untrustworthy our senses are,” Miller said.  

Byrne calls the adventure “an immersive science theater project.”

“You will experience a different kind of perception,” said Byrne. “You will question your own identity. The hope is that by the end of the journey, you will have a different idea of who you are and how you relate to the world than you did at the beginning.”

Well … how did I get here?  

Byrne, born in Scotland and raised in Ontario and Maryland, became interested in live theater after he moved to New York and started Talking Heads. “I started going to check out the downtown theater groups in New York like Mabou Mines and the Wooster Group, and they kind of blew my mind,” he said. “It felt like, 'Oh they are doing to theater what rock ‘n roll or punk rock was supposed to do to music.' It was supposed to shake things up and completely reimagine how this thing can be done.”

That theatricality, Byrne said, naturally rubbed off on his performative frontman persona. He even conceived the driving Talking Heads classic "What a Day That Was" as a dance piece for legendary Broadway choreographer Twyla Tharp.

In the years since Talking Heads disbanded in 1991, Byrne has explored a variety of international musical styles while also working in theater, film, photography, opera, fiction and nonfiction, winning Academy, Grammy, Tony and Golden Globe awards along the way. Talking Heads was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. In late 2005, Byrne and Fatboy Slim wrote “Here Lies Love,” an operatic disco musical about the life of former Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos.

It all started with a Barbie Doll

The spark for “Theater of the Mind” was lit when Byrne read in a magazine about a series of experiments called “Being Barbie” in Stockholm.

“It was a fairly simple set-up, but it essentially allowed you to be embodied in the body of a doll,” said Byrne, who thought that concept was cool and mentioned it to Gaonkar. “She said, ‘I've always wanted to find a way to bring the creative side of science outside of the lab to make it accessible to a larger public,’” Byrne said. “And with that doll experiment, I thought, 'The best way to understand this stuff is to experience it. Nothing makes you really deeply understand something until you have experienced it.’ ”

When Denver audiences finally get to experience “Theatre of the Mind” starting this week, Byrne’s greatest hope is that people have a good time. “And that maybe they get to have a bit of a wild moment, or that some funny stuff happens that will leave them with some empathy for the stories that are involved,” he said.

But more than anything, because this story is one of transformation, he hopes the audience, too, will be transformed.

“The Guide becomes a different person by the end of this,” Byrne said, “And my hope is that the audience member also becomes a different person by the end of it.”