BASH Alums Raise the Curtain on "Steve Burns Alive"

by Lesley Misko

The comfortable familiarity of youthful friendship often leads to successful collaboration in adulthood.

Such has been the case for Boyertown Area Senior High (BASH) grads Matt Freeman (’94) and Steve Burns (’92). The duo forged a friendship when they were in eighth grade and later, during the early 1990s, worked on several BASH theatrical productions.

Today, nearly three decades later, they are bringing to the stage Steve Burns Alive, a one man -show resulting from their first writing collaboration. Directed by Freeman, the show opens at The Club at LaMaMa in New York City on Wednesday, July 23 and continues through Friday, July 25. Recommended as a show for adults, all performances begin at 7:30 pm and run for about an hour without intermission.

Burns’ theatrical career took off in 1996, when he starred as the only adult on the hit children’s TV show Blue’s Clues. He and his dog “Blue” won the hearts of viewers across the nation as they solved puzzles. Burns appeared in more than 100 episodes.

Oddly, even as Burns beamed into millions of home screens across the nation, a bizarre rumor began spreading on the Internet:  that the rugby-shirt clad hero of the show had died.

“The world decided I died in season two of Blue’s Clues,” Burns recently told writer David Gordon of Theater Mania. “What made it even more perplexing was that I was actively making new episodes, and there were millions of people invested in this counterfactual narrative that became indelible and unthwartable.”

The more time that passed, the more elaborate and persistent the rumor became. It left Burns wondering if the world didn’t want him to exist.

“When a rumor like that persists for three or four years, it stops being funny," Burns explained to the Soul Bloom podcast. He added, “I didn’t recognize me. Everyone thought I was dead, and eventually I started playing along.”

This dynamic became the inspiration of the play, Steve Burns Alive. “It’s very much about the fact that he managed all of those rumors,” explains Freeman. “But there’s no worry that these rumors will be rekindled. In fact, I think the show puts them entirely to bed.”

Freeman explains that the play is built out of “this idea that he [Burns] has a relationship with the audience that is primarily on a screen. He spends a lot of time on the screen and then we bring him out at strategic moments to remind us that he’s really here. That he’s a real person.”

Burns and Freeman are not strangers to the stage. Local hometown residents got an early look at Burns’ acting skills when he was cast as Scrooge in the BASH class of 1992’s senior production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Freeman’s roots also go back to at least senior high when he began a career as a playwright by co-writing the BASH class of 1994’s senior class play.

As high school friends, Burns and Freeman also joined forces with several other classmates to create and produce the school’s first-ever Arts Expo, during which they performed Edward Albee’s play, Zoo Story. Entirely student-run, the multi-day event gave students an opportunity to showcase their unique creativity in visual, preforming, and even culinary arts. It remains an annual BASH event to this day.

Following high school, Burns and Freeman took different roads as Burns attended DeSales University and Freeman attended Emerson College. But their early friendship and shared passion to carve out a theater career continued to unify them.

Freeman has garnered progressively more critical acclaim for several of his plays that have been published and produced at off-Broadway venues. The Ask, his most recent, was awarded the 2021 Kesselring Prize by The National Arts Club. Established in 1980, the award honors and supports “playwrights on the brink of national recognition.” Describing The Ask for Vulture, New York Magazine’s entertainment site, critic Sara Holdren said, “The achievement is not only to capture two voices with both precision and spiky humor, but also to venture on a generous exploration of two full, wildly different humanities.”

In part spurred by the Internet rumors of his demise, Burns’ career evolved in a different direction. “It was difficult to be the happiest man in North American when I did not feel that way. Every day on Blue’s Clues, I would sit in a chair and look at someone in the eye and ask, ‘Will you help me?’ It wasn’t until I did that in my life that things changed.”

Last month, Burns announced the launch of a new weekly podcast, Alive, where he and guests will discuss “what it means to stay human in a complicated world.”

But for three days next week, these two BASH friends will be back together again, bringing their creative vision to life and sharing their love of live theater with audiences.

IF YOU GO:

Steve Burns ALIVE

18 and Over

Jul 23rd - Jul 25th, 2025, 7:30 pm.

The Club at La MaMa, New York, NY

Buy Tickets online here.

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