Wild and Crazy Guy

To paraphrase Psycho’s Norman Bates, “We all go a little wild sometimes.” At least, that’s the thinking behind Matthew Maguire’s new one-man show at The Wild Project, Wild Man.

Recounting for the audience tales from a lifetime spent pursuing risks and collecting stories, Maguire’s show is not only a glimpse into one man’s determination to wring experience out of life, but a call to arms to start getting a little wild ourselves. Whether remembering pissing off Scientologists, sneaking a watermelon into prison or clinging to a runaway horse, 57-year-old Maguire brings alive that Auntie Mame-esque zest for life that’s become increasingly buried beneath caution and reluctance.

“There’s something curious about this piece,” Maguire says recently over the phone. “Many of these stories are quite humble. It isn’t like I’m an Evil Knieval. What I try to do in the piece is take a moment that anybody might have experience and see if I can alchemically distill just the kernel of wildness within it.”

Of course, Maguire does have some genuinely heart-pumping stories in his repertoire, though you’ll be hard pressed to elicit anything salacious out of him. “I’m somewhat coy in the piece letting the audience know that there’s just hundreds of my partners still out there, sexually, and I can’t afford getting sued,” he says with a laugh. “So I hope that’s a tongue-in-cheek way of letting the audience know that there are certain areas that I’m not going to go, and that’s in deference to my family.”

But as anyone knows if they’ve ever pursued a risk or felt free to “abandon themselves in the moment when it arrives,” as Maguire puts it, the outcome isn’t always an amusing cocktail party anecdote. Actions have consequences, and doing something for the adrenaline rush or the story can backfire. Even for a semi-professional wild man like Maguire.

“I have moments of shame that hit me so heavy sometimes,” Maguire says, “I’ll be walking down the street and just flinch, over something that happened 30 years ago. The memory comes up and I go, ‘Oh, my God!’ and I slap my head and swear at myself right on the street. Stories take on a life of their own, and it’s difficult to actually report what happened. But you tell a story and you have to try to be truthful to the way it leads. And it’s not all wish fulfillment.”

Wild Man is certainly not about wish fulfillment, or even a performer bragging about having led an interesting life for an audience content to live vicariously through him from their comfortable seats; it’s hard to imagine Maguire doing anything so self-serving. “It’s asking questions as much as it’s telling stories about wild moments in my life,” he says firmly. “It’s asking the question, ‘How can we all get more wild?’ And that question intrigues me because it’s so thorny. What’s the difference between the wildness when we were kids and it was just hormones, and what’s the wildness when you decide to take the big risk completely cognizant of the consequences? It’s not just reportage of things that happened to me, but asking honest questions and hoping to take the audience with me. And I hear almost all of them say, ‘I’m sitting there, and wondering how I can take a little more of a risk.’”

Maguire himself, now that he has a family and a respectable job running a theater program at Fordham, has found himself asking the same question. As he says, “There are no retirement homes for wild men. I have enormous responsibilities and I can’t really take the same insane risks that I did. But I am afraid of no longer taking risks. So in my mind, the biggest risk I can possibly take is get on stage in front of an audience and celebrate stripping my masks.” And maybe the wildest thing you’ll do this month is to buy tickets to Wild Man. But after spending time with Maguire, seeing his show definitely won’t be the last wild thing you’ll want to do.

>Wild Man Through Jan. 26, The Wild Project, 195 E. 3rd St. (betw. Aves. A & B), 212-352-3101; 8, $15.