i double dare you: cleaning up messes with marc summers

Marc Summers looks to the past and the future in Life & Slimes at New World Stages (photo by Russ Rowland)

I was not expecting to be the target audience for The Life & Slimes of Marc Summers.

Born Marc Berkowitz in Indianapolis in 1951, Summers is more than a decade older than me, but I was too old for his first stint as host of the wildly popular Nickelodeon game show Double Dare, which ran from 1986 to 1993. Following that, he had a pair of Lifetime shows, then several successful programs on the Food Network, two stations I rarely if ever watch.

I of course knew about Double Dare, which was famous for its bizarre physical challenges — including hilarious obstacle courses — and kids getting slimed by a green viscous goop (among other strange liquid and semisolid concoctions).

I brought along a friend who was a huge Double Dare fan to what I assumed was more or less a traditional, nostalgiac one-man show. When you enter the theater at New World Stages, a video monitor is playing highlights of Summers’s appearances as a guest on various talk shows and morning news programs. There are cardboard cutouts of green slime hanging all around the space. And audience members are invited to sign a small disclaimer and put it in a goldfish bowl to make them eligible to be called up and participate in the festivities. Both my friend and I did so, though neither of us had dressed to be slimed.

As Summers makes clear early on, Life & Slimes is not a confessional solo performance. In the opening scene, he asks G-d upon his birth, “What is my purpose? What if life is hard? What if there are too many obstacles? What then?” The Supreme Being — voiced by Alex Brightman, the two-time Tony-nominated actor who wrote the show — responds, “Marc . . . life is full of disappointment, heartache, pain, and regret. But it is also full of humor, wonderfulness, and joy. It’s all obstacles, Marc. The only question is . . . are you ready for it?”

Summers then steps out of that moment to tell the audience, “I know I scared the hell out of you with that ‘one man show’ crap. I assure you, this is not that kind of show.”

For the next ninety minutes, Summers describes his childhood dream of performing magic and comedy on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, speaks in detail about his relationship with his mother, tries out for a musical, goes off to college, gets a job as a page at CBS, and falls in love.

He also admits to experiencing regular pain in his stomach, having intrusive thoughts, and feeling a desperate need to clean things, which is ironic because he’s soon the host of the messiest show on television. Despite the breakout success of Double Dare, he is haunted by anxiety.

Now I felt like the target audience: I immediately sympathized on a personal level with Summers, having had a pain in my gut and intrusive thoughts almost all my life. However, I don’t have cleaning issues, as I previously wrote about in “what i need: danny devito, dostädning, and hoarding” and “rhapsody in blue: oscar levant, ocd, and me.” I have other “stuff.”

Marc Summers makes a series of revelations in Life & Slimes (photo by Russ Rowland)

Summers reaches an epiphany when, in 1995, on an episode of Biggers & Summers on Lifetime, his guest is Dr. Eric Hollander, a psychiatrist who treats obsessive compulsive behavior spectrum disorders. After Dr. Hollander lists some symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, Summers suddenly admits, “I think I might have OCD.” The revelation instantly changes his career as well as his interaction with friends and family. “I make this one little announcement and everyone looks at me differently,” he says. “How the hell did Howie Mandel get away with it for all of these years!”

Next he finds out what is wrong with his gut: He has chronic lymphocytic leukemia in his colon. In my case, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when I was twenty-one, although my current gastroenterologist says it was, and is, IBS. In either case, it sucks, although not as much as cancer. But you don’t have to have intestinal issues and OCD to relate to Summers’s battles with psychological and physical challenges; most of us have something inside of us that we have to fight.

(By the way, there is a link between digestion and obsessive thoughts, affected by stress and anxiety. As noted in a 2022 Nature magazine Scientific Report, “There is a well-known bi-directional interaction between the gut microbiota and brain activity. Brain function can be affected by endocrine-, neurocrine-, and inflammation-related signals from the gut microbiota, while psychological and physical stressors can affect the composition of the gut microbiome.”)

I then started having second thoughts every time Summers reached his hand into the glass bowl to pull out names for contestants from the audience, worried that if he picked mine, I might have an episode onstage in front of everyone. The first name of one of the winners was indeed Mark, which made my stomach turn over, but the last name was different, leading to relief. (I guess it could have been Marc, although the correct way to spell it is with the k.)

My guest, who was the ideal target audience for Double Dare and watched the competition scenes at New World Stages with sheer glee, was so disappointed when Summers read off a name that began like hers before veering off course. She really wanted to play the game.

The Life & Slimes of Marc Summers features re-creations of Double Dare game (photo by Russ Rowland)

Even though neither of us got to participate onstage, we had a blast. Summers, wearing jeans, sneakers, a colorful tie, and gray blazer (the costumes are by Scott Jones), is an easygoing guy who connects well with the audience. Director Chad Rabinovitz ably balances the serious and the silly, although it’s not the tightest of plays; the show features original music by Drew Gasperini, who has previously collaborated with Brightman on such projects as It’s Kind of a Funny Story, The Whipping Boy, and Make Me Bad. Several stagehands and a second banana perform minor roles, from portraying other characters to helping change sets as the narrative shifts from Indiana to New York City to Hollywood and physical and mental obstacle courses take center stage. (The set design is by Christopher Rhoton, with lighting by Jeffrey Small and sound by David Sheehan and Hide J Nakajo.)

Although it’s not part of the show, Summers did finally make it onto The Tonight Show, when Jay Leno was the host. In one of his appearances he had a memorable exchange with Burt Reynolds that got a bit messy. And in 2017, a documentary came out about him, titled On Your Marc.

Now he has made it to off Broadway, with his self-deprecating sense of humor intact. Discussing where he is today, he says, “I’m still working my ass off. . . . I even auditioned for a couple Broadway shows. And you know what? I still can’t sing!”

And he answers the question we all have of our ourselves, “Who am I?,” while giving us each the opportunity to figure out who we are in the process.

[You can follow Mark Rifkin and This Week in New York every day here. The Life & Slimes of Marc Summers continues at New World Stages, 340 West Fiftieth St., through June 2; tickets range from $49 to $299, with the latter including a meet-and-greet with Summers, premium seats, and a gift bag.]