Ira Glass brings his famed radio show This American Life to the Days and Nights Festival. With dancers. And confetti.

Ira Glass sounds over the phone just like he sounds on the radio – a staccato, lilting monotone accented with underwhelmed inflections. I don’t know why I expected him to sound differently. Maybe because TV and movie celebrities in real life supposedly don’t look like they do in person – they’re shorter or older or plumper. But Ira even talked at the same speed. And in conversation, he was what his famed public radio show and podcast This American Life has always delivered – erudite, ironic, amused. But the dance performance/radio show hybrid called Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host that he’s bringing to his cousin Philip Glass’ Days and Nights Festival this Sunday at Sunset Center. Well… I didn’t see that one coming.

Maybe others did. His show won a Peabody Award for the way it “captures contemporary culture in fresh and inventive ways that mirror the diversity and eccentricities of its subjects.”

For show No. 241 he did away with his usual M.O. of three to four stories on a single theme and unloaded 20 stories in 60 minutes. Another one, from November 2001, is an infamously unnerving piece called “House on Loon Lake,” about a group of boys who broke into and explored a house whose family seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

As of last week, he was on show number 535. Maybe that kind of staying power had gone to Ira’s head, giving him the confidence to put together, in his own words, “two mediums that have no business being together.” But the show’s been killing it, he says. It just recently played in New York City, near Broadway – that’s an important distinction.

I interviewed Ira inside my car on a warm afternoon, parked in front of a restaurant in Sand City’s Sand Dollar Shopping Center. I had him on speaker phone while typing on a laptop, the windows rolled up and the interior broiling (running the AC created too much noise). The relevance of this, and the near-Broadway theater’s location, will become evident.

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Where are you now?

I’m at my office in New York City. I moved the show [This American Life] from Chicago to New York to do TV.

Did you like the experience of doing the show on TV?

[Laughs.] It’s complicated. It was good, especially with the production company and network, they were totally supportive. It’s hard to do a TV show in our format. The things that make our stories work is that people tell very dramatic stories about things that happened in their lives. It’s hard to do radio and TV at the same time. The other thing hard to manage was the format of is very traditional journalism. We hear about something, we go out and talk to witnesses that saw it. To do TV well, you don’t want people telling stories that happened in the past, but in the present. The production problem of that was, we ended up looking for stories [where] something dramatic would happen and it would change lives, but the story hadn’t happened yet. We found ways to do it, but it was extremely difficult.

You performed onstage in high school. Have you performed since, in front of an audience, prior to Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host?

I was in high school plays. I was not onstage again until I started the radio show in 1995. I went back on stage now and then to promote the show. Once I started radio I would occasionally take the show on the road. This dance thing is different. It’s a real show in a more traditional way than a radio show on stage. The dance show feels like an episode of the radio show when it’s going great. [Except] there are costume changes and sound cues.

Specific aspects of the show seem to be guarded. Is that intentional or is the show just hard to explain?

That’s not it. I’m on stage with an iPad, hitting sound cues and quotes. It sounds like This American Life. The [dancers] don’t literally enact what I’m saying. That would be kind of corny. It was important for the dancers to have a thing to do, their own stories that would dovetail with what I’m doing. That sounds artier than it is. Sometimes it will just be me telling a story and they’ll do a dance after.

Over the course of an hour and a half, we go through different topics. The first is about how to be a dancer, as a job. The second half is about love, staged in a middle-school dance. The last act is about losing what you love, a beautiful story. It’s a very traditional theater show. We try to have a tremendous amount of funny stuff that gets more emotional as it develops.

You’ve done a lot in entertainment. [For instance, he appeared in a green motion-capture suit on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart playing the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City]. What do you look for in a project or an appearance?

To do something I’ve never done before. The dance show is perfect – to combine two mediums that should not be combined at all. It doesn’t seem like it should make sense.

What’s your relationship to Philip Glass like? Do you see each other?

We hang out a little. I didn’t know him much at all until I moved to New York City. I’ve gotten to know him better since. It’s one of the nice things about having moved.

Have you been to Carmel or Monterey County before?

I’ve performed in that theater in Carmel [Sunset Center]. I love it. It’s beautiful. I fly in the day of the show and then fly out on the red eye, less than 24 hours later. We’re starting a new podcast Oct. 3, all these things happening in New York to launch the new show. I feel sad about that. One of the reasons to do [Days and Nights] was to come out there.

What’s the podcast going to be?

It’s called Serial. Experiments in doing a story. Instead of every week a different theme and story, we come back and give you the next chapter of the same story.

[For this next question, I tried my own experiment, which Ira was kind enough to indulge. I plugged the phone into the car speakers and lo, Glass’ voice surrounded me, just like when I’m listening to This American Life. I wanted to tell the diners on the restaurant patio in front of me, “Hey, this is Ira Glass on my speakers, but he’s talking to me, just me, right now.” But that seemed crazy.]

Anything else you would like to say?

Can you hear me?

Yes, I can hear you.

We’re about to do this show at a theater that’s near Broadway. Our hope [has been] to bring the show to Broadway. We all live in New York and we’ve been talking to Broadway producers. We used our own money to book a theater less than 200 steps from Broadway on 43rd Street in New York. It’s called the Town Hall, it’s from the ’20s. You can book yourself. We’re doing three shows this week [Sept. 10-12]. It doesn’t count as a Broadway theater, even though it’s closer than many real Broadway theaters. It’s closer than Les Mis, than Phantom. We shot a little video to capture how crazy that seems. Why can’t we live in a world where geography determines what is a Broadway theater? We cannot say it’s a Broadway show. That’s my little soapbox. Join me in my mission to right this wrong. Stand up! [For a video of Ira’s rant, go to bit.ly/irasrant].

THREE ACTS, TWO DANCERS, ONE RADIO HOST is performed 7pm Sunday at Sunset Center, Ninth and San Carlos, Carmel. $45-$65. 620-2048, www.daysandnightsfestival.com