Many people know Chris Hayes from his MSNBC political news show All In With Chris Hayes. But he actually started out wanting to be a playwright.

“I was the associate artistic director of this small new works theatre company called Walkabout Theater [in Chicago],” he recalls. “We did this production that got a lot of play; it was called Downsize, which was set in an office holiday party in the bathroom as layoffs were about to be announced. And we staged it in an actual bathroom. We would take, like, 20 people in at a time.”

At the same time, Hayes was also working as a freelance journalist, eventually working as an editor at the progressive political magazine, The Nation. His paid writing gigs eventually superseded the low-paying theatre gigs. Hayes, however, has kept one foot in the theatre world—he’s good friends with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who he met at Hunter College High School and whose first musical he directed in high school. “It was called Nightmare in D Major, and it was a musical sung through the whole way. It was probably, I want to say, 15 to 20 minutes. Its Iead figure, Dylan, was having a nightmare, and the villain was, like, a fetal pig in a nightmare from his biology class who he had dissected.”

And when Miranda was working on a little musical about Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, he called his high school friend to come and take an early look. “I went to see Hamilton being done in a workshop space on the West Side before it premiered [Off-Broadway] at the Public Theater, and Stephen Sondheim was there,” Hayes recalls. What did he think? “I literally sat down on a stoop after I got back. I was just like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’”

But now, he’s getting to combine his political punditry work with performance. In recent years, Hayes had been doing more live events, recording his podcast Why Is This Happening? live in front of audiences around the country. And on September 7 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hayes will take part in MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024, an all-day event that will also feature MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, Jen Psaki, and others. They will break down the current state of the 2024 election—which, in recent weeks, has experienced a much-needed jolt of energy with President Joe Biden exiting the presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris entering.

As Hayes puts it, there’s been a “vibe shift,” and he’s expecting a different mood from the audience at the event. “I think, generally, people—what you might call the sort of broad pro-democracy coalition in American politics—feel more optimistic and energetic and upbeat, and that's good,” he explains. “And I'm not sure what specifically will change about the programming, but I do think that that energy shift is great.”

This transition to more live events is part of a new initiative at MSNBC—this week, August 21, they're hosting a live event in Chicago timed to the Democratic National Convention. In a world where a majority of Americans are getting information through a screen, and their interactions with other people occur via a screen, Hayes thinks in-person events are more valuable than ever. 

“There’s nothing like being in a room with people,” he says emphatically. “I know that theatre is still sort of struggling to come back from the aftermath of Covid. There's part of me that thinks the more mediated our lives become and the more digitally dominated they become, the more valuable (in a relative sense) flesh and blood becomes…I think and hope we're going to see more of that.” 

What Hayes has found most valuable about doing his live events is getting to have in-person conversations with audience members, even the ones that don’t agree with him—it feels democratic. “I think that we've got a whole variety of communication technologies that remove IRL interaction and physical interaction and actual conversation,” he says. “And I think that's been pretty deleterious to our civic fabric. So that's part of the reason I really like doing events, because I like hearing people's questions…getting different feedback from different perspectives.”

Now that he’s doing live events, is a play in the picture? Hayes isn’t ruling it out. “​​I still feel like, someday, I'll maybe try to write something for the stage or try to go back to the theatre a little bit,” he says. “I still have a few ideas in the back of my head that I think about. So I don't think I'm necessarily out forever. I love it.”

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