Steve Burns Alive doesn’t demand that you watched Blue’s Clues, the children’s television show that Burns hosted from 1996 to the early 2000s, as a kid. Which is good, because I admit, I’m too old for that–in 1996, I was already an adult, if not a fully fledged one–but too young to have kids of my own who watched it, either. Roughly, I’m a peer of Burns, its host for most of its run (okay, a few years older, don’t remind me). But even if you don’t know this show, you’ll be familiar from another context with the weird intimacy between a star and his audience, especially the uniquely parasocial relationship fostered by a children’s TV host who relates to his audience as an amalgam of friend, teacher, and guru. Blue’s Clues directly addressed its viewers, asking them to help Steve the character and his cartoon dog, Blue, solve life’s small mysteries, and it’s that TV audience of children/friends that we in the theater are explicitly standing in for. Blue’s Clues was, outside of Steve, an animated show, so the audience members literally were the only humans to whom Steve was ever speaking–which contributed to the spooky isolation of the whole endeavor for Burns. It was always just Steve and his green screen. (Or, as Burns explains, technically a blue screen, since his shirt was green-striped.)

It’s fair to say that my twenty-something +1, who did spend his childhood with Steve and Blue the dog and the other animated household objects that populated the show, like Mailbox and Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper, saw Steve Burns Alive through a different lens. He had his own memories of Steve the character (as Burns describes him, a “happy jackass boy” with jazz hands) to compare to Steve the middle-aged man standing before us (sometimes only metaphorically standing before us, though; we’ll get to that). I was viewing the whole thing through a more cerebral, less nostalgic lens: Burns’s philosophical exercise of coming to terms with his own existence as an early-internet pre-meme entity.

What Steve Burns Alive—co-written by Burns and his childhood friend, playwright Matthew Freeman, and directed by Freeman—claims to be is an investigation into the weirdness of grappling with your own internet-constructed reality even when it conflicts with the facts of your life. Toward the end of his run on Blue’s Clues, Burns faced a rumor of his own demise so pervasive that his own mother once called him in a panic to make sure he was alive. The show wants to investigate how you live in a world where your public identity and your fictive social connections take on more reality and emotional significance than the relationships you as a human person have. But while Burns talks a lot about the feeling of incipient unreality that came alongside this dynamic, he doesn’t ever really dig far enough under the surface of that feeling to explain it to us, or even to himself. Instead, the piece becomes most emotionally vivid as a meditation on grief–and even a little bit of a PSA for mental health treatment. “It hurt to conjure boundless enthusiasm for shapes and colors and vegetables and graham crackers when I was living in the midst of a grey hum,” he says, describing his time on Blue’s Clues; the years immediately after turn into even more of a featureless, submerged blur, until he is finally able to recognize his own deep clinical depression.

Both of these investigations have value; both are imbued with considerable pathos in the hands of Burns’s seeming transparency and vulnerability, and in the way he and Freeman have crafted these stories to take us on a journey of intimacy. But neither feels entirely realized as a theater piece. 

One key dynamic of the show, thematically enough, is between literal presence/ intimacy and screen-mediated connection. For much of the—live, onsite—piece, Burns is technically in the room but effectively not. He’s addressing us on camera from behind a projection screen, and occasionally a hand waves to us to prove he’s really here. He’s speaking live, but we see and hear him in a tight filmed closeup on his magnified face rather than actually onstage. The curious thing is that his presence—his present-ness—feels stronger onscreen than live. His emotional register feels more legible; his tone more conversational. He’s talking with us rather than at us, intentionally using the fake intimacy of that parasocial connection to juice the real intimacy of the interaction we’re having. 

When he emerges from behind the screen, he seems less confident, lower-energy, more deliberate in his storytelling–more abstract somehow. The stories that he’s telling “in person” are often more detailed, more narratively constructed, than what we hear from behind the screen; they feel more polished, even as they’re more harrowing. He mostly emerges to talk about death: his journeys to meet with dying children who’d requested a visit with Steve from the Make a Wish Foundation, and his experience with his own father’s slow death from cancer. 

While there is something effectively stark about ratcheting down the intimacy to deliver the rawest narrative material, the balance feels off; every time Steve retreats back behind the screen, we’re reminded again of that barrier, and of the falseness of the intimacy being created here. It starts to feel awkward to sit in a theater and watch a live person talk about a TV character onscreen, especially when, with a few exceptions, the video is pretty much just a straight-up closeup on Steve’s face. I have no doubt that discomfort is intentional, but the shuttling back and forth feels like a frustrating tease rather than a provocative refusal to provide the intimacy the audience expects.

And if that dynamic between screen-mediated and live presence is going to be a key theme of the show, I wanted the technology itself to be more sophisticated. Even without a substantial technology budget, I think being able to see the camera, and see the physical Steve simultaneously with the filmed Steve in some way, would have been a more layered, richer approach that played on that tension more effectively. 

The show gestures toward how much the internet has changed in twenty years: “Stop letting the pixels confuse you and the algorithms put you in a bubble,” Steve says. But it’s a brief mention, paired with a lament for the sense of connection we lose by abjuring screens that feels too casual to really grapple with how our online life has been warped by the omnipresence and pernicious effects of algorithmic content. If a pervasive online rumor caused Burns to question reality in a pre-meme, pre-Reddit world, it’s a little terrifying to think how much more damage could be done now. Steve Burns Alive never really cracks the conundrum of why the nascent internet seized on Burns’s demise as a topic of obsession. And the show makes it clear that while Steve Burns the person never really has, either, he’s ready to stop wrestling with that question alone. This show feels like an important step on that journey, but it’s got a little way to go before the audience really feels like part of the story.