Cover Image: Andrea Gibbs at The Rechabite, Northbridge, home of Barefaced Stories. Photo: Lewis Martin

When Barefaced Stories moved into its first full year of operation in 2011 the last thing co-founder Andrea Gibbs expected was for the breakout star to be her dad.

Gibbs also did not expect Geoff, a Margaret River-born, Northcliffe-reared forklift driver and a legendary footy fanatic, to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers squeezed into the tiny Northbridge music venue The Bird and tell a story so dark, so disturbing, so gut-wrenching he hadn’t even told it to his own two children.

“Before I start, I must just let you know that I’m a very emotional person,” began Geoff, whose career playing and umpiring country football had inspired Gibbs’ first play Barracking for the Umpire, which won rave reviews during its 2022 run at the Subiaco Theatre Centre. 

“I cry at funerals, I cry at weddings, I cried when both my kids were born, I  cried when both my grandkids were born. I cried at my own wedding. They were tears of joy, I promise you. But there’s one funeral I know I will not cry at,” said Geoff, before telling the story of his violent alcoholic father that had the audience holding its breath for the next ten minutes.

Geoff then described the night his drunken father returned home after another day’s work at a Northcliffe timber mill, lined up his 12 children in a passageway of the family home and aimed a rifle at the back of their heads.

A horrible rural tragedy was averted when Geoff’s long-suffering mother brought down her damaged husband with a verbal volley of her own, calling him a coward and “everything under the sun” and forcing the former POW to block his ears and drop the gun.

“Jeez — I better cut this short,” Geoff told the audience as he struggled to keep it together before moving onto a breathtaking climax involving a fight on the front lawn and an astonishing change of heart.

Gibbs tells me that her father’s on-stage confession stunned her because it was the first time she’d heard him recount the incident in detail.

“Dad had briefly touched on the story when me and my older brother Brendon and I were growing up but he had never fully told it until that night. People came up to dad afterwards and shared their stories with him. It was wonderful,” remembers Gibbs.

Word quickly got out that something amazing was happening at The Bird and crowds flocked along each month to hear six locals tell their stories, coming in such large numbers that in 2020 Gibbs moved her operation up the road to the newly refurbished and re-imagined Rechabites Hall.

And they have kept coming, with their monthly events continuing to draw upwards of 300 people each month without very little media and marketing and during a time when the streaming revolution has eaten away at the traditional audience for live performance.

When I sit down with Gibbs at the cafe in the Alex Hotel — a fitting locale as it smack in between the State Theatre Centre, where her second play Carol recently debuted to rave reviews, and The Rechabite, which will host her final show of the year — she says the success of Barefaced Stories is a combination of quality control and great timing.

“At the time people were beginning to realise that our own stories matter,” remembers Gibbs. “They were coming to see what is happening to us here in Western Australia is just as important as those stories that take place in Sydey or New York or Los Angeles.

“It was also a time when people were beginning to share more of their lives online. They were becoming more comfortable with airing their dirty laundry to the wider community when it is not something they would have been comfortable doing with their family. We came at the right time.”

However, it’s not enough to have people spill their guts on stage, explains Gibbs. It has to be entertaining for the audiences, which is why Gibbs carefully vets potential storytellers or puts them through workshops, where she instills the art and craft of storytelling.

“Right from the beginning we knew it had to be a quality show. We couldn’t afford to do any marketing so it would depend on great word of mouth. It was literally a case of build it and they will come,” says Gibbs.

“You can’t be too close to your material,” she says. “You need to have time away from it. There’s no point in getting up there and having it hit you and you start blubbering and you can’t bring yourself back. 


“There is nothing wrong with crying on stage or allowing those moments to impact you while you’re telling a story. That is authentic; it is what audiences want. But if you have done the work and shaped the story it will have meaning for the audience and it will be funnier or more powerful. It’s not just about the storyteller. It’s also about the audience,” says Gibbs.

“When I am running workshops the first thing I get participants to do is get them to imagine they’re stepping out of their own bodies and looking across at themselves, wondering who this person is or what is their character.”

Gibbs is perfectly placed to tutor and showcase storytellers of all ages and backgrounds because of the dazzling diversity of her CV.

After graduating from drama at Curtin University, Gibbs had considerable success in both stand-up and improv comedy, leading to high-profile radio gigs — first on  96FM and then on the ABC, where she enjoyed an eight-year stint presenting her own weekend show that was broadcast nationally.

While stand-up got her laughs Gibbs was hungry to explore longer-form storytelling. So she applied for and won a grant to study on=stage storytelling in the United States, which was far more advanced in this space than Australia with organisations such as The Moth gaining international attention.

When Gibbs returned to Perth she joined forces with Blue Room executive director Kerry O’Sullivan, with whom she had worked on stage, and launched Barefaced Stories, an once-a-month event in which performers are given around ten minutes to tell a true story from their own lives.

Realising that being yourself as well as entertaining in front of a live audience is a skill — it is what Gibbs spent years refining — her first move was to max out her credit card and bring her American mentor Margot Leitman from New York to conduct a series of workshops during Fringe World.

“Initially we had trouble explaining to funding bodies the concept of on-stage storytelling. Hard to believe now! Having Margot here helped consolidate the idea and create a pool of people who would fill the first year of Barefaced Stories,” explains Gibbs.

The first performance at the Northbridge live music venue The Bird drew a good audience. And they kept coming and coming — lured by word of mouth because they had no budget for marketing.

And the low-key start is exactly what Gibbs wanted. “I always want it to feel intimate and comfortable for performers. It is a huge thing for them to open up the way they do, especially if they’re not used to being on stage. They are basically reading pages from their diary. So  you have to make it feel comfortable,” says Gibbs.

So when local arts and culture dynamo Marcus Canning (he is the man who transformed Fringe World into an empire) invited Gibbs to bring Barefaced Stories to The Rechabite, which he was in the process of transforming into the hottest live entertainment and food venue in Northbridge, she admits to be filled with trepidation.

“I was excited but I was shitting my pants,” recalls Gibbs. “We were spilling out of The Bird into the wine bar next door, but that is not a great achievement because it is so small. The Rechabite holds 300 people so it was a huge leap.

But the audience followed Gibbs across William Street, with each of Gibbs’ assigned topics — she throws out a new theme each month — continuing to attract full houses.

But even with this success Gibbs still fights to retain the intimacy that she believes is one of the reasons Bareface Stories has worked so well.

“At The Rechabite we use a lower stage and push it out into the audience so they are wrapped around the performers. I never want it to have the feel of a stadium and our storytellers strutting around like rock stars. It is a night of people telling stories to their equals,” says Gibbs. 

The sense of community that has built around Barefaced Stories is one of the most gratifying aspects of pouring so much timea and energy and love into the event.

“You look at the audience while they are listening to some of the more difficult stories we have been telling lately and you see them touching their friends and holding them. And afterwards they will often go up and speak to the storyteller.”

Gibbs agrees with my notion that her passion for storytelling is grounded in her upbringing in Donneybrook in Western Australia’s South-West.

“Stortytelling was definitely a big part of my childhood. I would listen to my dad and my uncles and my older brother tell the kind of tales they would have told down the pub. To be able to hold a room with a good yarn is definitely a part of the country experience in Australia,” says Gibbs.

“And there is something about the way country people tell stories. There is no big-noting of yourself. That is the one difference I found when I was researching storytelling in the United States. They tend to tell everyone what a great story they have. People know they have a great story but they don’t oversell in case it doesn’t land right. It gives them a way out,” says Gibbs.

To reinforce the low-key approach Gibbs forbids storytellers from taking the microphone off the stand. “That’s a cocky move. That is telling the audience, ‘I am better than you. I have more power’. It is not what Bareface Stories is all about.”

While Gibbs is prepping for her final show of Barefaced Stories 15th anniversary year and Carol has just concluded a season at the Heath Ledger Theatre the hyper-active Gibbs refuses to take a holiday, slipping straight into the development of a new work for Perth Festival.

According to the Performing Lines website, Gibbs’ Fire Project is “an immersive audio-journey through the urgent issue of escalating bushfires in WA and across Australia. Through powerful first-hand accounts, it immerses listeners in the realities of fire, offering an understanding of its effects whilst proposing pathways for regeneration and hope.”

Gibbs says that her project extends her storytelling practice into an immersive space, where audiences don’t just hear stories but physically step inside them.

“I’ve worked a long time now with real people’s stories. This just lets me tell them in a way where the audience feels them in their body more fully. I’m good at meeting people where they are — literally. And when you sit in someone’s kitchen or shed long enough, they start telling you the truth.”

Barefaced Stories’ always popular end-of-year music edition is on at The Rechabite on December 18.