‘Nothing overlaps’

“I know,” Glass joked. “Like all of these years I’ve been feeling like there’s just something missing. What is it? What is it? Oh, wait a second, dance!”

Saturday’s show at the Wharton Center pairs the radio host with dancers Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass. Glass admits that it is not most natural pairing.

“Maybe this is kind of a nerdy, math class metaphor, but in the Venn diagram of what they do and I do, nothing overlaps,” he said. “They are all movement, no words. I am all words, no visual movement.”

Glass feels, however, that there is a connection — perhaps an intangible one — between what he does and how Barnes and Bass dance.

“I saw them perform, and I thought that there was something in the feeling their work had that felt exactly like the radio show to me. Except they don’t use any words,” he said. “I find that very interesting.”

This stage show is the result of a collaboration that started three years ago, as Glass searched for ways to incorporate the dancers into a show that is made for radio.

“I thought, if I could get them in front of our audience, our audience would really love them. And I tried to invent ways to do that,” Glass said. “We did a thing where we put them on stage and did a show and beamed it into movie theaters around the country a few years ago. That was our first attempt. And then this is the second attempt to figure out some way to work together.”

In his nearly 20 years at the helm of “This American Life,” Glass has grown the show from a local public radio showcase to an international model for radio storytelling.

Glass virtually launched the career of author David Sedaris and gave comedian Mike Birbiglia a national audience. The show spawned a Showtime television series, and “This American Life” producer Sarah Koenig went on to create the popular “Serial” podcast. (“The single most popular podcast ever done,” Glass interjected.)

When Glass began his career as an intern at NPR in Washington, this sort of success was not even on his radar.

“It’s just amazing,” Glass said. “I could not have imagined it. I didn’t want it to happen, and I didn’t not want it to happen. It was literally beyond thinking.”

After nearly two decades and over 500 episodes of “This American Life,” is Glass afraid he might run out of stories to tell?

“I did have that fear at one point, but that was four or five years into it,” Glass said. “And it did seem like maybe the premise of our show was such that you could run out of things to do. You could only tell so many stories of people’s relationships with their parents and money scams, you know, all the things we tend to be obsessed about on the show.”

As the show grew and developed, however, those fears subsided.

“At some point, the staff got bigger, and we became interested in doing stories from the news — but in our style,” Glass said. “We expanded our notion of what we were doing, and became better reporters, I think. And the show just changed into something else. Now it feels like there’s all this stuff to do that no one’s done. It seems exciting.”

This expansion of the show’s vision creates opportunities like the stage show, and Glass’ cultural cachet affords him the chance to take on risky, outside-of-thebox projects.

“There’s no reason for a show like this to exist,” Glass said. “There’s no market demand at all. It’s just a labor of love, and kind of like an art/science project. It’s been fun to do. At this point we’ve performed it three dozen times, and it just kills. It feels like nothing else on stage, in this very nice way.”

Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host

8 p.m. Saturday, April 18

Tickets starting at $28/$15 students Wharton Center 750 E. Shaw Lane, East Lansing (517) 432-2000, whartoncenter.com