Joe Iconis returns to Long Island for a dynamic homecoming. The Tony-nominated writer, performer and Garden City native is set to perform his first full solo concert, “Joe Iconis: Live on Long Island,” on Oct. 16-17. He’ll bring the songs, stories and theatrical sensibility that have defined his career to East Rockaway’s Strongbox Theater. For the writer behind Broadway’s “Be More Chill,” the occasion is both a long-overdue local debut and an opportunity to reconnect with the place that helped shape the songwriter and performer he would become.
“I can’t believe it has taken me this long,” Iconis says of bringing an entire concert of his own material back here. Although he has made occasional appearances in the area, including debuting a new musical in Babylon, he had never performed a proper solo concert on his home turf. The opportunity came together almost spontaneously after he became aware of the new Strongbox Theater and he knew it would be a good fit.
The significance of performing on Long Island goes beyond geography.
“Long Island is just kind of baked into who I am as a person,” Iconis says. Growing up in Garden City, which he calls “the ultimate suburban area,” he was surrounded by a large Italian family and the particular social dynamics of suburban life. Those experiences, he says, helped shape both his worldview and the people who populate his writing in musicals such as “The Black Suits” and “Love in Hate Nation.”
“I write a lot about suburban characters and suburban ennui, as well as people who feel just outside of something,” Iconis relates.
For him, that feeling is particularly connected to “being just outside of the city, so close that you can touch it, but not quite there.”
The proximity to Manhattan was another formative part of his childhood. Iconis was able to see theater frequently and became fascinated by the city and its creative energy. At the same time, he came to recognize that Long Island could feel like its own universe. That tension between the familiar world of the suburbs and the seemingly limitless possibilities of New York became part of Iconis’ artistic DNA. Yet the younger Iconis might never have imagined that he would one day be performing his own songs in front of an audience.
“He would blush!” Iconis says when asked what his aspiring songwriter self from Garden City would think of his current career. “I was never someone who identified as a performer.” As a child, he participated in theater because it was a way to be a part of the environment he loved, but he remembers being terrified onstage.
It was eventually his songwriting that pushed him toward performing.
“I became a performer out of necessity when I got to grad school,” he explains. “It was like, ‘I’m writing these songs, I have to be able to perform the songs, so I should try to get better at doing that.’”
Developing his craft as a writer also helped him find greater confidence as a performer, which is regularly exhibited at popular concerts at 54 Below and many theaters around the U.S. “Finding my voice allowed me to start feeling comfortable in my own body and I started getting comfortable on stage,” he says.
The Strongbox concert will offer audiences a glimpse at what is next for Iconis. He is currently writing an original musical inspired by Robert Altman, set in one weekend in the New York theater world in 1982. He is also working on “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” which has already been presented in several locations and is now moving toward New York.
The exchange of energy between himself and his live audiences has also given Iconis the unusual experience of learning that his work has affected people he has never met.
“It’s so strange to me to think that there are people whom I don’t know, who listen to my stuff and it does something for them,” he says.
Iconis wants his concerts to appeal not only to theater devotees, but to people who may not consider themselves musical-theater fans.
“I hope that the evening opens people up to different ideas to what musical theatre can be and what it is,” he says.
The thought of returning home carries a certain vulnerability for an artist who has spent so much of his career writing about outsiders and people searching for where they belong.
“My artistic home feels like it’s New York City,” he says. “I can’t escape it.” But Long Island remains an essential part of that story. “[Both places] are different parts of me.”
Now those two worlds will meet on a Long Island stage. And perhaps, for two nights, the distance between Long Island and the city that inspired so much of his work, will disappear entirely.
Visit strongboxtheater.com to purchase tickets for Joe Iconis: Live on Long Island.
