Given the current rate of our culture’s collapse, I expect it won’t be long before our entertainment options are reduced to their Neolithic origins, with itinerant storytellers sharing sacred parables to keep the shadows at bay.
When that happens, there’s no troubadour whose campfire I’d rather be sheltering around than Paul Strickland (ainttrue.com), an award-winning featured performer at major national and international storytelling festivals who first found his footing right here in Orlando. And if you don’t want to wait until the post-electric apocalypse, you can enjoy Strickland’s musical yarn-spinning in grand Gilded Age style Wednesday, March 19, when the Dr. Phillips Center’s luxe Judson’s Live hosts him for an intimate evening of Half Truths and Full Of-Its.
I was among the eight or so patrons in attendance when Strickland first took up storytelling nearly 15 years ago, on opening night of the 2010 Orlando Fringe Festival. “That was my first ever performance, and it was great,” Strickland recalls during a recent conversation at my home, where he and his partner, Erika Kate MacDonald, have frequently billeted over the years. “It was really cool, because y’all were a good audience. So that was my first ever performance there, and at the time it was my first solo show that involved any kind of narrative whatsoever.”
Strickland, who had previously been touring comedy clubs with a divorce-centric stand-up set, “couldn’t really talk about my divorce in a way that was satisfying for me in the comedy club setting, because I didn’t hate my ex-wife. Maybe if I’d stayed with stand-up longer and grown with it more, maybe I could have done more with that. But at the time I just felt very limited by the form to talk about what I wanted to talk about, which was the complicated relationship I had with my divorce.”
Taking inspiration from solo performers like Kevin J. Thornton, and “just the normal amount of ignorant optimism with which I start any project,” Strickland channeled his experiences into 2010’s Brighter Shade of Blue, which I named an Orlando Weekly “Best of the Fest” pick. He says that initial show’s success “went beyond my wildest dreams,” and solidified his drive to further experiment with fictional storytelling.
Mining content from an “unreadable novel” he’d written, Strickland then debuted his breakout hit Ain’t True and Uncle False in 2013, kicking off his “Trailer Park Trilogy” of magical-realist tall tales featuring the Big Fib Trailer Park cul-de-sac. “That launched essentially my entire national/international Fringe career [and] was my flagship show for a long time. That’s the show I took all over the continent, and also introduced me into the traditional storytelling world, which is where I do a lot of my work today.”
After more than a decade on the storytelling circuit, Strickland says he’s grown “less scared to trust an audience now than I was when I started coming from a stand up-world, where it’s instant gratification — where everything I say culminates in a laugh, or I’ve failed. I’m still using a lot of the comedic techniques that I learned over that time, but I’m focusing more on creating arcs and taking the audience on a journey, and allowing that to take the time that it takes.”
Although his earlier shows centered around his original characters, lately Strickland has been on a quest to reconnect adults with traditional southern American folktales. “Adults think they won’t like a folk- or a fairytale until you show them otherwise,” he says. “I am trying to show you that you can see yourself inside these stories, and that there are very valuable lessons [and] ideas from the past that we can contemporize and still use today.”
COVID crippled the careers of many storytellers, but Strickland says his 2024 was even busier than 2019. He spent 174 days performing in theaters and libraries across the country, and barely 100 nights in his own Covington, Kentucky, home. Strickland’s solo Judson’s appearance showcases his newest concept, which he says is “mostly going to be straight-down-the-middle tall tales,” including one about an abandoned baby lightning bolt that was a highlight of his last FestN4 show, Untroubador 2.0.
“If you are a person who has seen a lot of my shows over the years, it’ll be a little bit of a greatest hits with at least one or two brand-new stories in there, and quite a few songs thrown in the mix as well,” he says.
Judson’s Live is likely the poshest Orlando venue Strickland has ever played, but he’s certain it won’t be his last. “Being a ‘true fictionalist’ full-time is not a thing that your guidance counselor suggests; I feel like it’s a thing that you have to find over time, and the Orlando theater community — specifically the Fringe community — was really integral in that process for me,” says Strickland. “It took me a while to really feel like I was at a proficient level doing it, but Orlando was where it started, [and] we come here often to premiere material — multiple times in a year, sometimes — because there is audience here that is willing to take the journeys that we’re excited to take them on.”
Judson’s Live, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts
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This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.