Let's Get Intense

FOUR MONTHS LATER… It feels a lifetime ago since my...

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 23:09:00 -0500

FOUR MONTHS LATER…

It feels a lifetime ago since my experience in Chicago. A lifetime of things have happened, I guess. Looking back on the writing and the things that have happened to me, it’s strange. I remember fearing this me before starting out, being crushed by the uncertainty of how I would feel being back in Houston and trying to live my life as it used to be but knowing that I couldn’t.

My improv was all jumbly for a long time after returning. Things with The New Movement were equally jumbly. Houston ended up splitting off. We were on our own again and calling ourselves Station Theater. They put me in charge of hosting the Sunday night show and teaching the free one-hour introductory class. It’s been okay, but odd. I find myself not wanting to be terribly involved beyond that. I’ve dropped out of Heroes of Milkton and put Call Center Mafia on hiatus. I received a couple of invites from Jet Eveleth to return for a new workshop focused on generating material. I turned it down in October and again in December but I plan to take it eventually. I’ve signed up for a week-long intensive with TNM New Orleans in December, mainly as a way to spend time in NOLA and reconnect with those people. Lisa’s leaving us for them in April. It seems Houston has killed too much of her joy.

Everything changed. Rylie had her kid, Margaux Corinne LeBlanc. I’m the godfather. I can’t help but love her. Others seem to find that weird. I guess I just find it typical, Rylie and those associated with her hijacking my heart. Others began getting pregnant and having kids, too. The Valentines are expecting in April. My Bonnaroo friend Alex is expecting in February. Nature of the beast, I guess. People will be popping out kids for a few years yet.

Moreover, everything about the way I view the world is so, so different. A part of me longs for the simplicity of past ignorance, when I knew nothing. The better part of me knows that’s stupid, though.

Everything is improv. The whole of the entire world. The presidential election, new friendships, love, all of it is rooted in improvisation. It’s beginning to make sense, or rather I’m beginning to be okay with it never making sense. No person is beyond the scope of what improv is. Every moment I’m awake I’m learning more about improv, about the world. Most of all I find myself afraid. Afraid of what I know now. Afraid that I can use what I know now to do the thing I’ve always wanted to do. I’m afraid I have the ability to change the world and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not or worse, that I can change the world and my personal shortcomings will keep me from doing it.

I wonder if this is how a lot of people feel.

I’ve thought a lot about what to do with this blog, now that my first experience in Chicago is over. Do I edit and then publish this? Would that be a thing to do? I don’t think I want to, just yet. In fact, I have an even better idea.

From this point forward, this blog is my never-ending improv journal. Photos, video, writing, anything I think is pertinent to the growth of an improviser in the mind I will put on this blog. If you’re reading this and are interested, click the follow button and read along. If you have something to add, send it to me and I’ll put it up. This will be the ultimate sounding board for any idea. Never forget: Improv is still a new art form. That means we have the ability to change it, to grow it beyond what it currently is. No, we have a DUTY to grow it. We are improvisers and we have a mission. We are going to change the world.

On the Road Again

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:25:00 -0400

I woke up in Lauren’s bed at 9:15, my arm around her and the sun in the window obscured from my eyes by a bit of her hair that made it over my face in the negotiations of the night. My body felt incredible; it dawned on me that this was the first time in five weeks I’d known the comfort of an actual bed. I rolled on my back and thought for a bit, about the immensity of last night and the road ahead, and opted to get up and go to the restroom. Lauren stirred awake with a groan.

“What time is it?” her voice withered with contempt for consciousness.
“9:30.”
“11:30?”
“No, 9:30.”
“Oh. I have to be at the gym at noon.”

I slowly dressed and thought about my plan for the day and talked a bit about things of no consequence.

“I’d lean in to kiss you goodbye,” I said, “but I currently possess the most wicked case of morning breath.”

Lauren laughed and got up to let me out, tightening her lips when she kissed me at the front door. She reiterated her plan to be in Houston the following Thursday so we agreed to continue exploring whatever it was we still had together then. We exchanged I love you’s, I stepped into the elevator and in 30 seconds I was in the street again. The morning actually possessed a slight chill, 66 degrees. It was the coldest Chicago had been the entire time I was there. It was mid-August and summer was beginning its exit.

I passed a street festival on Halstead that was setting up for the day and made my way down Cordelia to Seminary and cut over to Newport and Eric’s apartment. He was still asleep so I quietly checked my computer and texted Aaron about meeting up. Eric opened his door as I was brushing my teeth and prepping for a shower and we talked a bit about the Second City show and some of the night’s events. He threw on some clothes and headed out to a rehearsal and I turned on an episode of Radiolab pertaining to Wagner’s Ring Cycle to gain more Harold insight as I showered.

Aaron showed up around 12:15 and I loaded his car with my bag and books and various other things I collected the past five weeks. My original stack of four books somehow grew to seven, plus two DVD’s and a computer game. I stacked the books in the back seat in case I wanted to read them.

We went over to the Ukrainian Village, a small Polish community in West Chicago, to drop off a bag of Magda’s stuff. I don’t recall if I talked about this or not but Aaron and Magda got together during the intensive. Aaron is a bit of a private individual, though, so I never pried on specifics that were none of my business.

It turns out, as I learned from Aaron, that the Polish government paid for them all to be here and set them up with housing in this small ethnic community. When we arrived she and some of the other Polish guys (joined by Kimberly the Australian) were on their way out the door to deliver a thank you present to their host’s work down the street.

The host was an affable middle-aged dentist. She wore a cute green summer dress, 2-inch platforms ready for the beach, long blond hair, a lab coat and a surgical mask that hid a cute smile for all of three seconds before she ripped it off to greet us. I couldn’t tell what they were saying but she seemed like one of the most pleasant women you’d be likely to meet.

We returned to the dentist’s house to gather the rest of the Polish envoy’s things for their impending flight. We passed the time talking and joking and Aaron and Magda went somewhere private to say their goodbyes. Kimberly shared with me her plans to stay in America as long as possible and to keep studying in Chicago. I jokingly brought up the idea of marrying an American and she said she was setting it up as a last resort, reminding me of Dan’s passing comment about an Australian girl that asked him to marry her and connecting those dots.

They piled their things into another Polish volunteer’s van (who are these people I now know??) and we said our final goodbyes and worked our way back to Lakeview so Aaron could drop his apartment key off at the place he stayed. By this time we were starving so we stopped at Giordino’s for some authentic Chicago deep dish pizza pie. It was more authentic than we bargained for; the pizza took 40 minutes to make and was literally in pie form. I got through three slices and Aaron was only able to handle two so we boxed up the remaining three to eat on the road. We paid the bill and piled in the car and finally started in the direction of Texas, my phone reading 5pm.

Chicago, however, didn’t seem interested in letting us go. Every light we came across turned red instantly. When we finally made it to Lake Shore Drive it resembled a parking lot for no discernible reason. A limo holding newlyweds stopped in the middle of the road seemingly because they could. I hate false starts to long trips. They annoy me to no end. Then again, it sometimes makes it sweeter when the trip begins. When the road opens up and the city begins to drop behind me, I feel alive.

The highway was different this time, peaceful. I took over driving midway through Illinois and fell into a concentration trance and suddenly it was nighttime and we were in Joplin, Missouri preparing to cross into Oklahoma. I’d been listening to Radiolab episodes meditating on the nature of time and the lost hidden life of a woman who wrote servicemen in WWII. Aaron and my thoughts on what we learned the past five weeks were coalescing and any time we spoke that wasn’t idle chit-chat was utterly consumed with improv and where we wanted to take our art next. It was as if a dam burst. We’d talked about it a lot in past weeks but to hear us talk sounded like two old friends who were sequestered in study for a year and sharing things for the first time. I shared my Harold revamp idea and he discussed some of the things he wanted to try out with Sticky Boys and Disco Box. I mentioned Call Center Mafia and how lucky I was to have those guys behind me.

Aaron took over in Oklahoma and I tried to sleep a little bit. Before I knew it we were leaving the turnpike and it was my turn to drive again. I started driving and made it about 35 miles into Texas before I had to stop and let Aaron drive. The road was getting weird and beginning to express certain invisible colors. It took me a solid 10 miles to wake Aaron up. We stopped at a McDonald’s for breakfast (the sun had risen) and I passed out the second we were on the road again. When I woke up, we were 20 miles from Austin.

We pulled into Aaron and Hubbell’s driveway at 11:45am and my truck was missing. In a panic I burst in the house to find Michael’s friend Polaris shirtless and sleeping on the couch. It was as if the apartment was frozen in time where we’d left it. A girl rounded the corner from Aaron’s room (she had been subletting while we were in Chicago) and I tried my best to politely demand the location of my truck.

“Excuse me, what happened to the red pickup truck that was parked outside?”
“Oh, I think Jon took it to get gas,” she replied.

Jonathan Hubbell, that considerate badass.

I walked back outside as Hubbell pulled up in my truck. She had definitely spent five weeks underneath a tree. Pollen and sap laid thick on the windows and bird poop streaked down the paint.

“I used it a few times while you were gone,” Hubbell said, “so I filled it up to half-way because I think that was what it was on.”

We all sat and relaxed and caught up for a couple of hours and Aaron wanted to see the video of the performances on Thursday. We watched mine and I was reviewing my performance in my head when I got a call from Chris Steckel. Aaron and Hubbell had a lunch date so we said our goodbyes and they left. I chatted with the girl for a while (Rachael; she goes to school in London and is spending the summer interning with an artist named Dax that Hubbell and Aaron have worked with in the past) then got in my truck to head to San Marcos. When I turned the engine over the battery fought to start. Five weeks unmoving in the heat seemed to put it on its last leg.

I met Steckel at his apartment in San Marcos and we ventured down to Rio Vista to go swimming in the river. The second my body hit the water it instantly relaxed. I was back in Texas and doing a wonderfully Texan thing. After the swim we grabbed a bite to eat at Taco Cabana and went back to his place and took a nap. Steckel got a cat recently, a little gray and white thing named Daphne, and she curled up on my neck as I was sleeping. When I woke up it was evening so we decided to hit up Cat’s Billiards for some pool. After enough games to get us drunk we went over to Showdown and had a couple of Bloody Marys. We laughed and talked and existed in a daze. All of the traveling put me in a strange headspace. Here I was, my old home, but I wasn’t home yet. I still had a bit of a way to go to be back.

I passed out on his couch for the evening and was awoken by Steckel at 9:30am. We were meeting our friend Ben down the street for kolaches. While there we were met by Melissa, a childhood friend of Steckel’s that now lived in San Marcos, and went out to Steckel’s work to rent kayaks for the day. We drove back down to the river and embarked on an 11-mile kayak adventure. Steckel went into tour guide mode and told us all about the plant life, animal life, river history and proper kayak use. We passed through private land at one point and worked our way around a cow standing in the middle of the water drinking. As my skin burned, my body took on the role of an oiled machine. I surprised myself immensely by how sore I wasn’t at the end of the day. In fact, I felt incredible and alive.

We dropped Melissa off at her car after returning the kayaks and went back to Steckel’s so I could hit the road again. I gave him a hug and an invitation to come to Houston soon and piled back in my truck and headed for I-10, the clock reading 6pm.

The drive passed by calm and uneventful. The stereo played Buxton and I was alone with my thoughts and non-thoughts. What happened to me? What does it all mean? Where do I go next? I wasn’t sure of anything. All I knew was that there were new things that I had to do.

I turned onto Hawthorne Street at 8:30pm and parked in front of a small Saturn next to some dug up grass. I opened the car door and slung my laptop bag over my shoulder and grabbed a couple of the bigger books. As I walked closer to the house I could hear Oddo inside practicing bass and backup vocals for Mikey and the Drags. U turned the lock and pushed the door open.

“HEY!” Oddo exclaimed in the middle of an extended “Ooooooooh” into the microphone. “You want a beer?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I do.”

To Dig Chicago, Part 3: Finish It All Before You Can't Anymore

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:20:00 -0400

I woke up at 10, dehydrated and feeling like hell. I lied back on the couch and surfed the internet trying to unfuzz myself and planned out my last day in town. I had Second City tickets that night and was going with a girl named AmyJo, a friend of Robert’s from Houston, so I knew I had to be back by 6 to shower and such.

THINGS TO DO:
Eat a slice of deep-dish pizza
See Chicago from the Hancock Observatory
Check out some art at the Art Institute of Chicago and feel like Ferris Bueller
Go to Chicago Comics one last time
Get some souvenirs

I set off fairly late and waited in line at the Hancock for a long time, but the view was worth it. All of Chicago stretched out before me in four directions. I snapped and uploaded a few photos and took in the majesty of urban collectives and decided to get back down in it at once. A hop onto the Red Line put me right next to the Art Institute but the line for tickets was out the door and I didn’t feel like going through something like that again. I sat on the steps and listened to a hipster tear up a fiddle. I noticed, of all things, a Bennigan’s across the street so I Instagrammed it and continued walking.

I found a place called Lou Malnati’s that did deep dish so I ordered a personal size and dozed off in the booth as I waited 35 minutes for it to come out, as was advertised on the menu. It was good enough pizza but I wasn’t blown away. I found myself wishing that I’d taken more time to get authentic Chicago pizza other than this one experience. Oh well.

I went to a t-shirt shop and had a Chicago flag printed up on a gray tee and walked down to Chicago Comics for one last look around. I convinced myself not to buy a $100 brick that collected all 100 issues of Batman: Shadow of the Bat but failed when it came to a replica of Matt Smith’s red bow tie from Doctor Who. As I was browsing I was pleasantly surprised to see Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby collection in the Humor section. I talked to an employee about how good it is, hoping that he’d use some of the things I said as selling points, and made my exit when I discovered the time.

I was dead tired so I took a quick nap that made me run late. AmyJo was texting so I took the cab down to Second City and met her in the downstairs lobby. She’s a beautiful girl with a great smile and joyous presence so all was well fairly quickly. She’d just got to town at the beginning of the week and was doing two weeks at Second City for writing. She had the glow in her eye that I had at the beginning, star-struck and surreal. It was a good thing to see and be around on my last day in town.

The main stage show was way better than the ETC show I’d seen when I first got here. The theme was more coherent, the players more confident, the tech even more spot-on. It had its share of strange sour notes, though. They nearly alienated the audience at times by being a little soap-boxy and breaking into strangely bitter anti-Republican taglines. Some of the physical comedy was too “clever,” as Jet would say. Some scenes, though, were hilarious and are making me laugh as I’m typing this and remembering it. Steve Waltien was in it also, creating a bit of full-circle apropos to be in the same room with him at the end.

As we filed out AmyJo asked me what was playing at iO. When I told her it was Improvised Shakespeare she flipped and we took a cab down and squeezed in. I saw Caitlin and some other intensive students and I turned my head to avoid them. It was an unexpectedly close feeling to saying bye to a friend after lunch and then walking off in the same direction towards your respective cars. I already said goodbye. I didn’t want to say it again.

Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, blew AmyJo’s mind. They did a Tempest-influenced play called “The Funky Monkey” and my favorite performer Ross was pimped out to sing a great many amount of songs. It was definitely the weakest of the shows I’d seen but it was still awesome.

I walked AmyJo to the Red Line and waited for her to catch the train. As we talked and she gushed about Improvised Shakespeare and expressed a desire to sign up for Haterade the next day, Ross walked up and sat down at a bench waiting for another train. After some prodding I got her to walk up and talk to him, which made her day immensely. I smiled wide. Coming off of what just happened to me, to hang out with someone at the beginning of it all just felt good.

She got on the train and I was about to head home and call it a night when I got a text from Lauren to meet up at Joe’s. I got there and waited for her in the 66 degree weather as a group of drunken partiers left to go to Big City Tap. When Lauren arrived the atmosphere was perfect. We talked and relaxed and were ourselves, a thing I’m finding easier and easier to be when I’m around her. At 2am we walked over to her apartment. I used the restroom and when I came out she’d gone to her room. I went to open the door and she stopped me. “Don’t come in, I’m changing!”

I could see her body, breasts bare and pants halfway down. I had a choice of barging in like I did in the old days, something I knew would garner a positive response, or respecting her privacy and going to the couch to sit down and wait for her to come out. I chose the latter.

She came out in loose-fitting cotton shorts and an oversized A&M shirt and lied down in my lap as I was watching Seven on her digital cable.
“You know after all this time I still love you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied, relieved. “I love you too.”
“I don’t know if I ever stopped.”
“I didn’t either. It’s so silly.”
Then I leaned over and we kissed for real. And we meant it.

Before we knew it we were asleep in weird positions on the couch so I stirred us awake and we moved over to her bed. I stripped down to my boxers and climbed in after her and we played around tickling each other and laughing before I put my arm around her and we spooned each other to sleep in the quiet apartment. We told each other we were still in love and I thought back to a line about Lauren that I wrote in a letter to a friend. “I get the feeling that if Lauren and I were to continue our relationship further we would end up married.”

Then I was taken away by the silent whisper of sleep.

The Really Big Shew

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:15:00 -0400

Craig began class in a state of attrition. He seemed to have spent the previous evening hating himself for the way that he came off on Wednesday and operated with a tenderness that bordered on the unnatural (for him).

“You guys are all poets, artists and geniuses,” he said. “I have full confidence in you tonight and I love you as a group together. Whatever you do it will fucking rule.”

We played around with some ideas and experienced some other forms and settled on an interesting little piece Craig called the Typewriter. It starts with an organic opening and the cast splits to one side. As each scene is played out and edited, the people who participate in the scene (characters, scene support, tag outs, walk-ons, etc.) run to the other side of the stage and “sit out” until everyone has been in a scene. After the last people finish their scene a group game is initiated and everybody resets for the next round. It was simple and fun and it assured that everybody got at least one scene in where they were contributing. It seemed the fairest thing for an intensive performance.

Kevin showed up wearing a nicely rounded-off mustache. He’d initiated an idea that all the men were to grow mustaches for the performance and ended up being the only one who did it. I’d planned to shave as well but hadn’t showered yet. Everybody else backed out on the idea, though, so Kevin decided to keep the ‘stache for the show and be the only one doing it so I kept my beard intact.

People seemed preoccupied all day long with the idea of the show that night but I couldn’t bear to really think of the concept. I just continued to recite to myself to have fun. Just have fun. I had a grilled cheese and fries at Salt and Pepper for lunch and just kept myself in a Zen zone. I went back to Eric’s after class and turned on Buxton while I showered and jammed my favorite songs. There was no way that I was going to let this night become anything but a blast.

Through some weird scheduling mishaps our performance time was changed to first, which meant that Eric and Lauren and Aaron could no longer come see it. The only people in the crowd were intensive students and strangers. I think I preferred that.

“It’s awesome that we’re going first,” Craig said. “We won’t get self-conscious after seeing other people’s shows and we’ll be able to start partying first.”

I showed up to the theater at 6:30 and waved at the cute bartender I talked to at the Cabaret the week before. She smiled back and that released any lingering tension about the energy in the room. My mind was calmer than it had been in a long time. It was the kind of calm you realize might be a defense mechanism against an uncontrollable losing of your cool, but I’d take it. The moment of truth was fast approaching.

We warmed up in the green room and began the waiting game. People filed in, bustling and conversing. I went pee to relieve any lingering nervous stress and started a chain of last-minute bathroom usage. I found myself thinking back to the first time I got on stage to do improv, (almost exactly) a year and nine months ago, and how I kept shaking my hands and singing songs to warm up with. I’d been gripped pretty hard with fear at the time and I didn’t yet remember what to do with it.

I think back a lot to when I competed in UIL One-Act my senior year of high school. It was my first starring role and it was in competition against other schools. As we placed ourselves and before the curtain rose I had a handkerchief covering my face and I could see it shake with the beating of my heart. I remember in that moment being alive. I’d never felt like that ever again on stage or screen. When I improvised I felt that way a few times, or so I thought. Considering what I’ve learned now about fear and how I was circumventing it, I understand what Kurosawa truly meant when he said, “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.”

Charna took the stage and quieted the audience. Her introduction was appropriately flattering.
“The basic thing about improvisation is to be a risk taker,” she said. “We have a program that lasts for a year and then people get on stage to perform. These kids came from all over the world and in five weeks they are putting themselves out in front of you. I think that’s really being a risk taker.”
Behind the stage we stood, spread out in a line due to the cramped quarters. We looked each other in the eyes and connected, nodded. I took a deep breath and smiled.
“Without further ado, let’s get to the first of (I think) eight troupes tonight. I present you now with POUND TOWN!”

The first thing I saw when I hit the stage was one of Charna’s dogs, the black one that always sat outside the 3rd Beat Room, scooting across the audience to be with her master. Ten jokes about the dog ran through my head but instead I looked out and really took the audience in. The place was packed. Caitlin was sitting in the front row already laughing. Chris was behind me to the right repeating “YEAH!” as loudly as possible. Kevin clasped his hands and stepped forward.

“Can we please get a one word suggestion of anything at all?”
“Pheasant!”
“I heard pheasant, thank you.”

We all took to holding rifles aimed at the air and firing them indiscriminately.

KEVIN: It’s pheasant season in Oregon!
CRIS: Here we come to mimic what we used to do in the wild, but we’re civilized now.
DAVE: This is how we express how civilized we are.
ALICE: At one point we used to have to do this to survive, but now it is merely fun.
JAVIER: It’s a LOT of fun!
KEVIN: We have a license to do this, so…
CHRIS: We can!
CHARIS: It’s okay.
ROB: The government say it’s fine.
MATT: Governments regulate our fun.
CRIS: And governments are right for doing it!
CHARIS: Yeah, we tell the government what to do, so…
JAVIER: The government’s us, so it’s kind of like us telling us what to do.
JANIE: That’s why everyone should vote!
DAVE: I vote for us!
ALL: YEAH! FOR US! FOR US! FOR US! *firing off rifles in salute*

We broke to stage right to general applause and we were off. We had our themes firmly in place. Government control, being forced to do things for survival, sport, competition, oppression, rebellion. Everything worked its way in. We had a spelling bee coach haunted by the ghost of his old coach who then died and haunted his student. Dan made a bomb to blow up the government. Dave and Charis derailed my presentation at work by preparing me a salad that I couldn’t resist. Deborah tried to force Javier to kill his pet duck Mr. Quackers (Rob). Ken was a chili cook-off champion that gloated over his trophy case. One by one we attacked every theme and everyone got to play one or two extremely meaty characters. Our games were playful. We missed edit points a few times and there were some scenes that definitely hit sour notes, but in general we rocked it. I wasn’t sure that it showcased five weeks of intense study, but I had fun. Realistically, that’s all I needed.

The lights faded away as all 14 of us stood on stage humming the American national anthem and when they came back on I suddenly realized I’d done the thing I came to do. Five weeks of training and it just culminated. As we took our bow and I thought about that, I felt my face grin almost as wide as the night I graduated from the New Movement when I got a room of 150 Austinites to chant “Houston.”

We went out back and I ran into Aaron’s group standing with Miles Stroth preparing for their show. Craig gave us some simple notes and congratulated us on a job well done. We put our hands in the middle one final time and screamed our name to the heavens in victory. We knew then that we’d probably never exist again as a whole but that didn’t matter. Tonight we were Pound Town and we were legendary.

I walked back in and settled next to Jet Eveleth to watch Marissa’s group go up. I relaxed fairly quickly when I deduced that they weren’t doing as well as we did. At one point it got super weird when they threw a darkly comical jab at the Aurora shooting and tensed up the audience. It created a strange recurring character of a scary hitman played by the scariest-looking guy in the troupe. It didn’t go somewhere good, for sure.

Aaron’s group went up next so I took the front row to watch them pull off the Deconstruction as taught by Miles. It was interesting to be sure but the root scene (involving Australians Tane and Kimberly) was a clinic in shitty scene work. They argued about films and never built a real relationship. The rest of the crew pulled out what they could and earned some good responses. Aaron ended up hardly playing and I felt kind of bad for him as he tried his best to work through the piece while struggling not to judge it.

I watched the next group (Senja the Finnish girl was in it) and then walked over to Salt and Pepper for some dinner. Chris, Javier and Janie were there with Janie’s roommates and her brother so we all talked in a daze of just-completedness. After the food I went back over to catch the last few groups. I’m biased of course, but from what I saw I think we ended up being the ones that had the best-received show. I wasn’t interested in thinking about that, though, so I did my best to relax as the last group, Nick and Karen’s, finished up their set.

A party then broke loose that ripped apart much of my final night expectations. We danced and drank and talked and smiled. I was looking at this wall next to the bar that had a lot of pictures and articles of Del Close and someone came up and told me his ashes were sitting inside the book on the shelf above them. I stood and contemplated the idea that I’d spent the past five weeks and performed in the same room as the burned corpse of the father of modern improvisation, then the idea got too strange and I walked back to some other mad revelry.

I saw Miles standing on the sides talking to Jason so I joined the discussion. It’s weird to find myself a fanboy. I didn’t want to be but I had this impending sense that I would never see this guy again who had so much to say about improv and no problem saying it to anyone who’d listen. I showed a little too much eagerness to learn, though, and he pinned me to the wall for it.

“Fuck you! You’re trying to rape me!” he accused. “I believe this guy’s sincere but you just want to rape me!”

I was thrown and tried to recover but I realized he was a bit right so I just said a dumb quip and left the conversation. Aaron later told me that he took them all out to eat and took stabs at every one of them in similar fashion. I guess you don’t become one of the world’s best improvisers by not being observant.

We closed out the night in the Del Close Theater, talking about plans to come to everyone’s cities for festivals and other great ideas. I guess I should’ve felt some sense of weight lifted off my shoulders, of being done with my hard labors and now truly capable of some rest, but I didn’t. I felt more weighted, in fact, like this was the start of something even bigger and more unknown that I may or may not be prepared for. For that night, though, I just tried to drink and have fun. I have all of next week to think about how to change the world.

After 2am we walked out to a cold hard rain that was beating us down in noir fashion. We played in the streets like mad improvisers do, running from awning to awning. Jason and some people started out to Pick Me Up so I tagged along and ate breakfast enthusiastically. We spoke stupidly to crack ourselves up and existed at the height of dumb drowned drunken wit. When I received pancakes Jason was confused because I “didn’t order any,” to which I replied that the “pancakes were implied.”

We paid our tabs and said our goodbyes and I walked home smiling. The weight never left me but it seemed a friend now, a strangely fitting shirt I might get used to wearing and might become my favorite. Again, I thought, all of those thoughts were for the following week when I found myself in Houston wondering what comes next. I slipped up the stairs and peeled off my soaked clothing and climbed under my sleeping bag and dozed off to drunken dream.

Hypocrites

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:11:00 -0400

I’ve officially decided that Craig Uhlir is a fucking dickhead.

Not that he means to be, but he is. There are ways he could go about everything that would give him and everyone around him such less hard of a time. He naturally chooses the most abrasive way to phrase things and then backtracks to what he actually means to say. He reacts passionately, which is his strength and also what makes him an insensitive asshole that’s easy to provoke.

Chris and Javier were talking about the Cook County show the previous night and Chris talked about how he thought the opening Harold team, Uncle Magic, was “terrible.” Craig (who Eric later told me is in charge of the Harold Commission and does the scheduling) inquired as to why and Chris talked about people who jumped into scenes they didn’t need to and how one guy in particular inserted himself into every scene and some other mechanics that he didn’t like. Craig asked what he liked about Cook County that was different and Chris mentioned the flip side of those choices, that people weren’t afraid to jump in and force the scene in another direction.

“That’s interesting to me that you say that,” he said, “because those Harold teams are guys that have worked hard to earn their time and have struggled for years and honestly you’d better fucking bring it tomorrow because you’re talking smack like that I can’t wait to see you fail hard in front of everybody tomorrow because you’re just being a fucking hypocrite with what you’re saying and that just makes me fucking angry.”

This, of course, started off a bunch of people jumping up to defend Chris and his statements and Craig continuing to belittle everybody for their opinions or justifications. At one point, he silenced Javier, saying, “I’m done hearing from you.” He then realized in the moment how much of an asshole he was being so he backpedaled a little bit and kind of apologized (but not really and not saying he was sorry, just self-deprecated for a sentence) but underhandedly implied that he still thought we were hypocrites. Things then cooled for a second and he was about to go into another thing so let him know my real opinion.

“Honestly, it’s a little hard because I came here expecting great Harolds and have encountered only good ones.” I was being generous. “When I found out that most of these teams have only been improvising for a few years, and even less years together as a team, I had to adjust my expectations because I expected to see the best Harolds the world had to offer. Also, of course, we’ve been working at this for five weeks so we easily notice the missteps because it’s all fresh in our minds and we’re looking at it extra-critically. Plus it’s improv so there’s a fair amount of failure involved.”

I was attempting the yes-and-fuck-you thing I like to do on stage when someone’s being a dickhead. I soothe their nerves, make them comfortable and explain very nicely not only why they were being a dickhead but why they have no leg to stand on with this behavior. His actions really poisoned the well of the entire class for the day. Sure, he had a point in that these people work hard for what they are given and we’re harsher sometimes than we should be. However, the fact that they put work and time in doesn’t automatically make their improv better and the fact that I’m supposed to give them the benefit of the doubt because they live in the hardest improv market to break into is patently ridiculous.

I’ve had the luxury in the past five weeks of seeing some of the Harold teams perform more than once. While generally each group performed better the second time I saw them, I felt dead-on in calling out teams when I did so. Fiction for the Poor is light years ahead of any other Harold team out there based on the show I saw. They’re the only Harold team I’ve seen that does a great Harold, which more than partially led me to my conclusion that the form needs to evolve. If iO doesn’t care enough to make each Harold team at least as good as The Reckoning (which I was never blown away by but they do a good Harold) then nobody should get offended when I call iO teams out on being simply average.

Still, I continued to hold to the adjustment I made in my mind on the first day. Craig is a football coach, not an improv teacher. With this mind adjustment I was able to glean the lesson he slipped into his tirade. Even if he didn’t know it, he was telling us that we need to understand the importance of supporting choices. When Cook County does a move that’s uncalled for, that has the potential to “fuck up” a scene, they bear hug that weird choice and take it to the sky. In most Harold shows, weird or risky choices are often left out to dry by the rest of the team and make the person who made the choice look like an idiot and develop a complex; usually because people were judging the scene or show they were in and sold out the other performers.

Again, though, as an educator you have to keep a lid on your outbursts to make sure they don’t come from a place of spite. Chris hit a nerve because he was harshly criticizing Craig’s work to his face, but it’s not the instructor’s job to fly off the handle and yell at a student because of what he thinks. Quite the opposite, in fact. As he said multiple times throughout the day as he was yelling at us in the middle of exercises, “You didn’t pay Charna $1,100 to do bullshit.”

The funny thing about all this, from my perspective, is that I’m not really a fan of Cook County at all. I get what they do and I see that they have fun and that fun is infectious, but I stopped liking aggressive “DudeProv” a long time ago. Sure, it’s fun to do and it’s awesome for what it is. So are well-written teen comedies like Can’t Hardly Wait. I’m more interested in pulling off art, though. That’s not going to be done by being a hooting dickhole, on stage or off.

Despite all of this, class was appropriately challenging today. The well being poisoned, we were afraid to make a lot of moves and Craig yelled at us for being afraid and “putting more rules on it.” The moments where we were freer and played with more abandon were good scenes, but I had to keep pushing down that desire to just walk out the door and say fuck it to the rest of today and tomorrow. I was angry, frustrated and too tired to deal with the heavy amount of fuckery involved.

His negative reinforcement worked, though. I went into baseball player mode, the mode where I get tattooed to the wall for something and then overcompensate to be the best on the team at that thing and therefore showing the coach how much of a dick he was being for being so harsh with me, effectively giving coach what he wanted. In this case, it was looking people in the eyes. My head was on a swivel. I ceased to care about sight lines. I just kept floating from eyes to eyes. It worked magic for me and my brain hurt, for sure. I just wish I hadn’t made the discovery as a way of giving Craig the best example of what he wanted me to do as a “fuck you” gesture. I’d have preferred to discover it in a more nurturing atmosphere.

We decide what form we’re doing for the show tomorrow during class. At this point, we’ve worked so hard and come so far and learned so many interesting forms that I just want to do a montage and play. Maybe an opening, perhaps the Invocation, then just scenes. The show is about playing and having fun. We may as well not overcomplicate it.

I decided to skip Felt and went back to Eric’s to center myself and relax until TJ and Dave. I took a shower and talked with Eric for a little bit about Craig’s outburst and he gave me a good perspective on the whole thing. With another hour to kill I reclined on the couch and surfed around on Facebook and came across a blog post from Chris Gethard that Stephen put in our class group. It was a long-winded answer to the question of fear in improv and what it means to him. I was particularly inspired by a quote that seemed to echo some of Jet’s sentiments on performing with the idea of death around the corner waiting:

“Fear is not to be avoided. It is to be followed. Fear is like the light on the end of Rudolph’s nose - it’s the beacon we follow into a foggy and uncertain place, where we can’t see more than three feet around us, where we know we might spiral out of control and crash at any second, but where we are armed with the knowledge that if we can somehow navigate those storm clouds successfully when we are piloting blind into such a situation, we might just get the job done and we might just do something legendary.”

Around 9:45 I decided to walk down to iO and met up with Kevin and Matt. Alice walked up right afterward and we were able to get Kevin’s favorite seat again. This was the first time I actually got to see TJ and Dave on their own and the theatrics of it hit me yet again. The playing out of the Ike Reilly song, the little talk they have on stage into each other’s ears, TJ putting his hands over his eyes to take in every single member of the audience. It’s the perfect setting of mood.

The show was good as always. TJ was an uncle taking his nephew to go see Body Worlds and couldn’t keep his lunch down because of the grotesqueness. From there they went to get ice cream and ran into a bickering couple who worked in the shop. It was fun and free and I knew again the things I was interested in doing with this art form. I had to wonder, though, if it was something that could be accomplished with a larger team. TJ and Dave don’t have anybody to jump into or edit their scenes so they play without fear of getting to the point. Even when Tracy Letts was in the equation they were able to go nice and slow. If I was to put a 10-person team together like this, it would have to be judiciously cast and there would have to be a large amount of rehearsing that would have to be done.

“It is our understanding that some of you will not be here next week,” Dave said at the closing of the show. “Thank you for being here now.”

I talked a bit outside with Matt Higbee afterward about the pacing of the show and the intensive in general. He said he’d come for the intensive originally as well and ended up staying. That story was starting to become more and more common with other students. At this point I count about 10 people who opted to stay. At least five of them I know for a fact had planned on leaving at the intensive’s end. It gave my already weary minds a lot to think about as I walked back to Eric’s and crashed out immediately.

Deconstructing Love

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:08:00 -0400

I woke up and arrived early. Craig had nicknamed me “Late” the day before and since I was treating him like a football coach I was using his negative reinforcement to fuel myself to do better. Today focused on the Deconstruction, a form developed by Miles Stroth that’s a more structured version of what Omar introduced to Antoine and me for Fade to Black. Two people begin a scene (called the “root scene”) and play for five minutes. The scene gets edited and three scenes are done that explore major themes that arose in the root scene. The root scene then comes back for another 3 or 4 minutes to heighten whatever is going on. After that there are five “world” scenes that expand the universe of the three theme scenes. The root scene returns for one final 2 minute hurrah and then a run begins inside the universes created in the piece.

I really enjoyed playing this way. Craig seemed preoccupied with the fact that it gave two people way more stage time than the rest of the group but I never really cared about that. If I begin to tally how often I’m on stage in comparison to others then I think about that more often than I think about anything else, which is about the time my improv dies. It actually is helping me a bit with my thoughts on understanding other forms as well, especially what I want to do with the Harold. I’ve been making a list of all-important things that need to be accomplished within a Harold and the games/openings. There’s more than a little of the same philosophy in Deconstruction, which I guess is apropos since Miles was Del’s “war chief” and developed the Deconstruction with Del at his side. The concept of exploring theme and world but without an eye for plot, keeping the piece grounded in one element, these are all thoughts that I think make great Harolds. In the best pieces, scenes are strange half-things that bubble to the surface of a writhing piece of themed performance art. In Deconstruction the performance art is a scene that’s broken down to its base elements and it’s something concrete to hold on to. I’d like to inject a bit of that into whatever I do with Harold.

I talked with Alice a bit about what was happening tonight and she told me she was going to a show at the Annoyance that had TJ in it. I had yet to go to the Annoyance and my time was running out so I decided to meet her up there at 8pm. As I waited at the Red Line terminal on Addison I ran into Senja, the Finnish girl taking the intensive as well. We played together in a couple of jam moments and I became slightly enamored with her. She has the kind of smile and eyes that make you want to be her friend and she’s delightfully goofy. We talked on the train and all the way to the Annoyance discussing a festival in Finland that I’m going to try to go to.
“It would be great if you came!” she said.
“Would doing improv in English be accepted there?”
“Definitely. We have a show that we do that is in English and it is very popular. There are a lot of immigrants there and everybody knows English.”
“Wow.”
“Yes! And when you come we will go to Amsterdam as well. There is a very big improv scene there.”

I think that may be my favorite part of this intensive. In the past five weeks I’ve become close friends with people from London, Australia, Finland, Poland, Canada, and everywhere across the US. I have enough contacts to set up a world improv tour if I can swing the cash. At the very least I will be seeing some of these people again in their hometowns.

When we got to the Annoyance the box office wouldn’t accept my credit card.
“Cash is preferred.”
“Does that mean you can do card, then?”
“There’s an ATM over there.”
“I don’t have enough money on this card to use an ATM. I have a check coming in tomorrow.”
“Well cash is preferred.”
Senja finally got annoyed and ended up paying my way in. Smooth move.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, “just buy me a milkshake at Salt and Pepper tomorrow.”

Alice showed up about that time with Charis and Libby. I don’t know why I didn’t expect to see the room filled with intensive students but we seemed to be all that was there. At this point I’d become quite tired and was still feeling kind of bad so I ordered a drink at the bar. It took me a whole thirty seconds after I was in the theater to realize that I’d been served the beer by Mick Napier. He looked like Mark Hoppus got hit with an aging ray, wearing jean shorts, a black t-shirt, a blue baseball cap and a severe look on his face. A wallet chain hung off of his belt loop to complete the ensemble. He was mostly in intense conversation with Noah Gregoropoulos when Noah wasn’t making out with his young girlfriend (wife?) and I didn’t really have anything to say to him so I let it go.

I sat next to Alice in the front row and it ended up spelling my doom. The first group up, Fish Nuts, wasn’t anywhere near the top of their game. They spent a whole 30 minute piece riled in confusion and misunderstood intentions. When that combined with my own fatigue I began dozing. Unfortunately when you doze off in the front row it’s visible to everyone so that was quite embarrassing. Chicagoland came next and though they were mostly solid (Noah’s girlfriend didn’t seem the strongest but she held her own with TJ, Noah and the other guy) the damage had been done. I slept through a portion of the show in direct sight of TJ. Sweetness.

I took the Red Line back to Wrigleyville and was debating finishing out the night with Jet and Susan when Lauren called. She wanted to get together for drinks so I walked down to meet her at Friar Tuck’s. The place was impossibly crowded so we left after one round and ended up at this cool little dive on the corner of Broadway and Addison called Joe’s. We put a bunch of songs in the jukebox (Moondance being one of them again) and talked and smiled. Mills called me at one point to get some strange suggestions for topic discussion back home so I gave him Benjamin Franklin and Lauren gave him in vitro fertilization. He thanked us heartily and hung up the phone.

I’m glad that I’m hanging out with Lauren so much in this final week. The past two days I’ve felt kind of disconnected from improv in general which feels odd to me. Lauren has grounded me, though. She’s the kind of girl that can do that, I guess. Truthfully, though, I think I’m beginning to feel the fear again. I’m not sure if I ever really forgot Lauren. We ended quickly due to circumstances beyond our control as well as general childhood stupidity. Have I still loved her all this time? These thoughts rolled around in my head and mixed with notions on improv as I walked back to Eric’s to prepare for the next day.

Sleeping Through Alarms

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:53:00 -0400

I stirred to waking on the air mattress and blearily glanced at the time to see that it was 11:13am. FUCK. I jumped to standing and threw on clothes and was out the door in two minutes. Class this week was at the Underground Lounge, a closer destination but far enough away to be anxious. I remember Caitlin telling me that the place was a dark pit that had to be locked to keep the homeless out so I spent most of the time getting there hoping they’d hear me when I knocked.

They didn’t. I arrived at 11:20 and began pounding on the door to no avail. There was a key in the mailbox that didn’t fit so I started texting frantically. Finally at noon I pounded with all the might of a SWAT team. Finally I heard steps and the door opened to a confused and annoyed face.

“I’ve been knocking for 40 minutes,” I said as I brushed past Craig Uhlir.
“Are you supposed to be in this class?” he replied.
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, you’re an hour late dude.”

I walked downstairs to find an Armando monologue going on. This whole week was dedicated to forms, culminating in us choosing one to perform on Thursday. Craig sat down in the center of the group of tables and chairs and continued to take notes.

“Sorry I missed most of your monologue. Some dinkel couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.” He called everybody dinkel. It was his favorite word.

As I settled in and tried to catch up to the flow of the class I changed my expectations in my head. Craig Uhlir isn’t an improv teacher, he’s a football coach. He’s the epitome of the stereotypical Chicago sports fan. His personality falls somewhere in the center of Harry Caray and Mike Ditka. It’s motivating to those of us who have a sports background, so long as we make the switch in our heads, but I wonder a bit for the more reserved in our group as to what they’ll be able to get out of this week.

We covered Armando fairly extensively and then went into La Ronde. They teach it a little differently here than they do at TNM. In their La Ronde, once the round has been done the piece is over. Also, the Slacker isn’t the same format, but a La Ronde that can go on forever a la Beer Shark Mice. Craig has an affinity for these formats because they lead to extremely fast and aggressive play which is something he prefers to do.

I knew after seeing Craig in Middle Age Comeback that I wasn’t going to enjoy his teaching style this week. I don’t find a lot of interest in aggressive “DudeProv” anymore. It’s fun to do, sure, but the entertainment value has eroded for me. I’d prefer to see slow play that feels fast because the energy is there. This just seems like guys shouting and jumping on each other. That’s why I wasn’t really blown away by Cook County Social Club.

I headed back to Deena’s after class and packed everything up for my move to Eric’s. Deena wasn’t there so I left the keys (plus a demanded $90 for utilities for the three weeks I was there) on the counter and went out the back door. I left a towel but I didn’t care. By that point I just wanted out of that place. Deena’s weirdness really got under my skin and I wasn’t interested in having it in my life any longer. Eric picked me up at the Walgreen’s like the last time and I got immediately settled back into my little space by the couch. I was anxious all day in general, what with how it started, but being back in a comfortable place relaxed me instantly. The Armando was going tonight and I was somewhat interested in checking it out since I knew Miles and some Week 5 teachers from out of town would be participating but at this point I was so tired that I just wanted to relax. Eric and I went to get wings and beer at Mullen’s and that clinched the idea of not going. “Sometimes you just need a break,” Eric said as we walked back to his place. “I don’t blame you for not feeling into it.”

He had a little more beer at his apartment so I drank a few and reclined on the couch with The Book of Tea until improv was so far from my mind that I was claimed by dreamless sleep.

Last Day at Castle Davis

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 04:50:49 -0400

I had a lot of writing to catch up with and laundry to do so I planted myself firmly on the couch and proceeded to not move for most of the day. Deena was in and out, being strange and awkward and sometimes making terrible jokes that have to do with being a 29 year old Jewish woman with body issues and a biological air horn screaming for her to be married with kids already. I feel like I’ve given an unfair picture of Deena, simply focusing on the struggles she’s having with herself at the moment. She really is genuinely nice. She let essentially a stranger into her house for a month and has been cool with me being a harmless ghost that haunts the place. When I’m not buried deeply into my writing (which I am if I’m here but I sometimes take breaks) we have fun conversations. It just saddens me to see the girl I remember thinking of as overconfident be so completely sad and broken right now. Then again, she sometimes has ridiculously dumb opinions on the world and her body image issues are rooted in a level of narcissism that’s nearly comical. Every photo she has framed in her apartment (and there are a lot of them in only the finest Target/Hobby Lobby frames) has her in it. She has a fierce passive-aggressive streak and is cynical for illogical reasons. For all her great qualities, she seems to be on a holy mission for dissatisfaction. It borders on the weird. Truth be told, I’m glad to have to spend this last week on Eric’s couch again.

As I wrote into the night, I stopped to watch the NASA Curiosity rover land on the surface of Mars and send in pictures. Space was one of the things I contemplated doing with my life at one point. I took classes in middle school that were geared toward the goal of becoming an astronaut. Then my spirit was broken by the bullying I went through in 7th and 8th grade and I ceased to care about grades and school so the concept of going for a number of years and doing math for a living lost its appeal. Space never did, though. To see the things that exist in the universe, the ever-expanding cosmos stretching out, that’s God right there. A tangible deity that is truly knowable and unknowable at the same time. I spent most of my breaks during the day looking up other space photos and secular humanist philosophy.

I’m glad that I’ve made peace with the things I believe. I spent so much of my life thinking that I wasn’t getting something that everyone else was. I tried to will that understanding into existence. I thought that if I just meditated on the subject hard enough that I would discover what everyone else knew. Then I found out that it was okay. In fact, I discovered that the feelings I had were feelings others had as well, that there were whole philosophical movements devoted to these things. More importantly, none of them claimed to be right, leaving it up to me to determine how I felt. The realization that I was free, that I am in control of my own destiny and 100% morally responsible for the things I do, that I am on this Earth because I am and my mission is mine to determine, was beautiful. Sartre talked about discovering this absolute freedom as existential “nausea.” I believe I suffered from existential ecstasy.

Tomorrow begins the last week. I’ll be heading to the Underground Lounge and studying with Craig Uhlir. It’s strange to think about, but amazing as well. I’m nearing the end and I’m staying mad. Soon I’ll be back home and ready to start the next phase of the rest of my life.

A Day of Sloth, A Night of Wonder

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 04:05:00 -0400

I guess I can’t really call it a “Day of Sloth” as I pretty much spent all of it writing, but I didn’t leave Deena’s couch until about 7pm when I decided to shower and head to see the Deltones. I hadn’t seen them yet and it dawned on me that this was my last Saturday in Chicago and I had better see what all the fuss was about with them. I’m lucky enough to have made friends with the door guy (who I discovered trained at the Dallas Comedy House and moved up here a year ago so we talked for a while about Texas improv) so he let me in to see the first half of Whirled News and got me in after intermission just in time.

I passed the interim time chatting with the box office lady who turned out to be the girl from the Shock T’s, a hilarious music trio I saw in Dallas in March when I was covering the Dallas Comedy Festival for Improv Wins. She said they have a show at the Upstairs Gallery on Monday so I’m definitely hitting that up.

The Deltones did not disappoint. Joe Bill was playing this time as well as the extremely physical blonde girl from the Katydids. They did a show about D&D nerds coming out of their shells and discovering that they were cool all the time. There was a song that heavily referenced Game of Thrones and Joe Bill deftly avoided being caught in unknown references that his scene partner was trying to pimp him into.

Chaos Theory was in the late slot so I stuck around and watched them and Henrietta Pussycat. Still coming off of and ruminating on Miles’ workshop, I was able to see exactly when the scenes were derailing and needed saving. I am going to punch this data into me so hard that I don’t even think about it anymore, I just know it. Miles’ theories are the glue that holds every other philosophy of improv together for me.

Haterade came afterward and I stuck around for that. To continue the British audience volunteer streak, Jason got up as MC Self-Deprecation and did just that. Robert Price was the other audience volunteer, as MC Harvey Fierstein. I finally ended up talking to Ross Bryant about all the things he does. He’s a genuinely cool guy.

And then I looked over and Miles Stroth was in the building again.

I’d been hanging out most of the evening with Steve Calamia, an intensive student that went to HSPVA but lives in Virginia now. He was a lot less shy than I was and walked straight up and asked him improv questions. I sat for a minute with the British married couple and Marissa and talked about how we were nervous about approaching him. Finally, like a band-aid, we just walked up and said hi.

“Hi Marissa, hi Cris,” he said.
“That is so amazing that you still remember our names,” Marissa said. “How do you do that?”
“Well, I just bother to.”

We passed the next hour and a half talking improv and hearing a bit more about his story and what he does. As it turns out, he has his own training center in Los Angeles where he spends eight weeks on the stuff he taught us in the workshop. I logged that away to research for the future. We also talked a bit about other forms and he confessed to hating the Bat when I mentioned it in passing.

“I get it,” he said, “but it’s just a radio show! It’s a gimmick form!”

Miles reminds me a lot of Derek Dupuy back in New Orleans. He’s opinionated in the valid kind of way that’s backed up by careful research and experience. He has an air that can come off as condescending because of this but it’s really just that he’s passionate about what he does and has possesses an extreme amount of confidence.

Miles ended up leaving around 2:45 and I hung out until 4am shooting the shit with the bartenders about service industry stuff. I somehow ended up with an umbrella in the process, a large teal one with a broken release button. As I walked back to Deena’s I was doing tricks with it to the amusement of a stranger walking alongside me who it turned out used to intern at iO. “Umbrellas go there to die,” she said. “If you take an umbrella from iO you’re giving it a new lease on life. I can’t tell you how many umbrellas are left there a week.”

Artists, Poets, and Geniuses

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 03:24:00 -0400

Urrrrrgghhhh.

I spent a couple of hours drinking water and getting into a decent headspace before taking a cab down the street to get to Susan Messing’s workshop. It didn’t take long for her to discover that I was hung over and she wouldn’t let me live it down.

“You drank your ass off last night, didn’t you?”
“You said I could.”
“You fucking asshole! What did you drink?”
“I started with beer, moved to giant margaritas, then drank a bunch more beer.”
“Did anybody else just feel sick in their stomach for him? You alcohol mixing idiot.”
“I like to challenge myself.”
“Hahahahaha, Fuck you.”

Despite this gross start to the workshop (the hangover disappeared halfway through), I received a lot more from it than I did last week. It combined with my newfound understanding of group games to broaden in my mind the concept and purpose of playing big games in groups. I dig Susan’s in-your-face style in general, too. I’m not sure if I could handle a whole class with her, but it’s fun to nerd out and download some sweet knowledge from her insane genius brain.

The workshop ended fairly quickly and I grabbed some water and shook off the rest of the hangover and resettled. The next workshop was called “Position Play” with Miles Stroth. I knew nothing about the man when I signed up for it; the description just looked interesting and useful. I talked about it the night before and learned that Del Close referred to him as his “Warchief” so he had at least some cred. I was wholly unprepared for what happened next.

We all settled in and a man the spitting image of Jack Kerouac entered. He had salt and pepper hair and an expression permanently etched across his face that made you think he was looking incredulously into the eyes of the sun. He looked everybody over and began speaking and that’s when everything changed.

“All right, we’re just going to start off with scenes so I can get a feel for how you play and learn your names,” he said.

There were 20 of us in the workshop and two by two we got up and did scenes that lasted about a minute and a half, stating our names at the top. He never gave suggestions, never commented on the scenes, just called them and said thank you. Then when everybody was done he took back the stage.

“Okay, so Cris, Marissa, Georg, Naisrin, Andrew, Ida…”

He named everyone. Perfect pronunciation, even the Polish and the Germans and the people with strange names. After hearing each one time.

“This is the part where I talk at you for a while and then we’ll take a break and then go into scenes,” he said. “Usually I cover all this material in eight weeks, so we’ll see what we can do in three hours.”

He then proceeded to break down scene work into four (almost five) categories and the best things to look for when you play these scenes. It was a concept I’d heard before (one of them was TNM’s favorite, the straight/absurd) but he expanded it into a full-fledged workable philosophy. “You can approach improv any way you want,” he said, “but I guarantee you at the end of the day everything fits into these four categories.”

I was writing furiously in my iPhone. Matt was in the class with me and when I went to talk to him during the break he had four pages filled in his notebook. Marissa just sat there stunned. We knew it. We were sitting in the presence of a genius.

We came back from break and started doing scenes. He’d let it go for about 30 seconds to a minute before stopping and jumping in to guide the scene toward a direction. For the most part we did straight/absurd scenes as they’re the easiest to pull off. Twice I found myself, as Miles put it, “caught between scene types.” As the workshop wore on and I watched people carefully and listened to when he corrected their trajectory I became utterly determined to get one good scene in before the workshop ended. Miles called for one last scene and I attacked the stage and took the persona of an absurd character who broke the tea set in the house because he thought it kept society from interacting as humans. Ida, a girl I didn’t know at all but had seen at the Neo-Futurist show and around the intensive, fell into a perfect straight character after being course corrected and we played it pitch-perfect to the point where I was congratulated by some of the other students after class.

“You see, I like this because he’s doing exactly what she’s telling him to do,” Miles said. “She called him out on something and he responded by embodying that something. It’s just that simple.”

The guy was amazing. For the first time in this intensive I felt like I was sitting in the room with a true Zen Lunatic. Everyone else, including TJ and Dave and Jet and Susan and Colleen and everybody else that’s blown my mind these past four weeks, they pale in comparison to Miles Stroth. They’ve defined improv for themselves and have the ability to share that unique vision with the rest of the world whereas he defines improv as what it is. Every question I asked was met with a wry smile, like he was reminiscing going through that problem himself, then spit out super-intelligence. I’ve never seen anything like it in anything I’ve ever done.

I walked out of that workshop in a daze and found myself at a Mexican place off of Broadway and Diversey. As I was consuming some tacos I looked at the movie theater across the street and decided to check showtimes on my phone. It turned out Moonrise Kingdom was starting in 10 minutes so I went over and got a ticket.

It was a charming little movie theater, the one I was initially going to take Dave to see Batman in before I wised up and showed him incredible American super-cinema. It may have been too small for the Bat-Canvas but it was perfect and intimate for Wes Anderson. Like the wine and the tiramisu at Vivo, my mental state after being obliterated by Miles Stroth paired well with the setting and film to create a beautiful and moving experience. That little girl is a force of nature. I can’t wait to see what she does.

I wandered home and downloaded the soundtrack as well as the Francoise Hardy album that Kara Hayward’s character was listening to, plus two albums from an unknown American folk rock singer from the ‘70s called Rodriguez who went quintuple-platinum in South Africa unbeknownst to him. I drifted around on Facebook for a bit and came across Ween’s “Baby Bitch” that someone had uploaded. In my already compromised mental state I immediately drifted back to the car ride with Rylie where I heard it first, reliving some of the happier times we had together, and downloaded that album as well.

With all this new music and emotional states and philosophy rolling around in my head I took a shower and went to catch the Improvised Shakespeare late show. I sat next to Rob and they did a piece set in Thebes with a theme of gluttony. A particularly amazing moment that almost had me in tears was when they characterized Crete (the sort-of enemy nation) as an ineffectual army of whiny, middle-aged Chicago suburban dads. The short-form jam was afterward so I hung out and participated a little bit but mostly had some beers. Nick and British Andrew showed up at the end and we shared a cab to meet up with Karen and her roommate Kayla at a bar down the way.

I walked in and was immediately assaulted with honkey tonk guitar. It was another Texas-themed bar. Awesome. I ordered an Old Style (still tastes eerily like Lone Star) and grabbed a seat and talked to Kayla for a majority of the time before she got inexplicably depressed and bailed, prompting Karen to go after her. Nick, Andrew and I hung out for a bit longer and then left, Andrew and I sharing a cab ride back to Belmont driven by an Asian guy who laughed at everything.

Gurus and Madmen

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 23:47:00 -0400

“This class takes scene work to the next level by addressing the problems that plague most improvisers. With an acute focus on point of view as well as getting out of your head, this intensive will get you to the next level improvisationally.”

The things you get to read in an improv theater as you take a piss.

I contemplated the image of a lost Level 1 student dumping 100 bucks into that workshop as I got settled in to start the last day of the fourth week. It’s weird having come this far and still a week and a half away from home. I think back to 4th of July playing dominos on Oddo’s bass case in my front yard and that night in Austin with Hubbell talking out my fear of this great unknown adventure that awaited me. A couple of times over the past few weeks Dave related his view on death in the middle of scenes, comparing it to going on a vacation. “When the moment comes you never want to leave because it’s the unknown, but once you’re there you’re having a blast. I’ve never been on a holiday I didn’t have a great time on, so I imagine death to be the same way.”

Today was a series of back-to-back Harolds. I was in two of them. The second time I had a lot more fun, but I didn’t feel the greatest about my scene work. Jeff really liked the scenes, though, and commended me on having the attitude of trying something risky or different when I executed a poorly-conceived tap out that failed spectacularly. I’m sure he wasn’t patronizing me, that’s not his style (if he was I’d be pissed because that’s not what I’m here for), but it’s not the kind of work I want to do yet.

In general, it was a relaxing final day of Level 4. After the lunch break I just committed to having fun and being myself and being natural. I trust everyone in my section implicitly. Ken, Deborah, Janie, Dan, Dave, Rob, Charis, Stephen, Alice, Chris, Javier, Kevin, Matt and I have formed the bond of common experience and we now exist with the luxury to relax into each other’s personalities and blend effortlessly.

As it turns out, Jeff wrote a book called Guru that chronicled the last two years of Del’s life. Jeff was assigned by Charna to help Del run errands since by that time he had been quite impaired by his health issues and rampant insanity. I’d vaguely heard of the book but Jeff brought some to sell if we wanted a copy. Intrigued (and feeling a little bad about my initial negative opinion of him), I decided to pick one up. He signed it, “To Chris, So great having you in class. Keep on improvising. It’ll make you rich! Jeff Griggs” I handed him a 20 and that was it.

After class, backpacks and book in tow, we all went out as a full group for the first time ever. We went across the street to Vines for some food and beer and discussed everything under the sun. We played a few hilarious rounds of “Fuck/Marry/Kill” and “Never Have I Ever” and traded crazy life experience stories. Then, as the sun set, we walked down to Trader Todd’s for karaoke. In the window of a book store a block down from iO I saw gleaming copies of Guru in the window identical to mine with a big sign that said “Del Close: Guru $6.” Motherfu…oh well, it was still cool to get the book directly from the author and even cooler that he taught me for a week and that I got it signed. Rob wasn’t particularly happy, though. “That fucking bastard.”

We got to the karaoke place, a tropical themed bar that smelled like coconut and Jimmy Buffet rejects. The MC of karaoke looked like Michael Domangue’s crazy uncle with huge crazy hair and a giant Lincoln beard. We ended up closing that place down in style. Janie had this huge 18-dollar margarita that she kept refilling that we were all sipping on and I was hammering back pina coladas and beer. I sang “Say It Ain’t So,” “Sweet Caroline,” and a duet with a stranger on Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently.” The whole time Del’s face sat impishly grinning on the cover of Jeff’s book in the center of our table and I imagined him the spiritual guide on this bonding experience, blessing it like he did in his SNL days as House Metaphysician or his times with the Merry Pranksters or those crazy early weird days with The Compass Players, a whole life of creating and sculpting the structures of our art form ahead of him. We weren’t the first group of wayward improvisers being shepherded by him, we won’t be the last, but we exist like those before in a state of limitless potential energy. Somewhere out there, in the future, we exist at the height of our improvisational ability. We 14 may never be in the same room again after next Thursday, but this was the moment when our roads converged. This was the early times. This was the 2012 iO Summer Intensive.

We ended the night with a member of our party scoring the waitress’ number and I stumbled my way toward Deena’s. As I got to walking it suddenly popped in my mind that I’d yet to have a Wiener’s Circle chardog and get yelled at by the servers there so I wandered down and got that taken care of. I was patiently waiting for my two dogs and fries when one of the servers (I thought) asked me a question, to which he quickly said, “Shut the fuck up!” I was really excited to receive this abuse and didn’t have anything to come back with so I just threw my hands up and went, “HAHALL RIGHT!” and stepped to the side. The server standing next to my abuser smiled warmly at me, amused.

I sat out front wolfing down my chardogs and fries and a girl started coming on to me when I heard a lot of commotion at the register.
“Oh, someone ordered a chocolate milkshake,” the girl informed me.
“What’s that?” I asked. I remembered Jeff telling me to order one and see what happens but it had completely escaped my drunken mind.
“You go up to the counter and order a chocolate milkshake, then they flash the lights on and off and make a lot of noise and the girl at the counter shows you her breasts and they tack five dollars on your bill.”
Seriously?

I finished up my meal and started to wander home when the girl ran after me to give me her number. Without thinking, I drunkenly turned around and kissed her, told her to have a nice night, then walked the rest of the way into the night. On the way home, a rabbit hopped out in front of me and I wasted a couple of minutes trying to chase him. Unfortunately, rabbits are Chicago’s answer to squirrels so he wasn’t interested in getting picked up. Oh well.

Week four. In the bag. Let’s hope I’m not too drunk for the rest of Susan Messing’s workshop tomorrow.

The Structure of Memory

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:58:00 -0400

I learned a valuable lesson about being a student today.

I walked into Jeff’s class determined to find the answers to all of my questions about the Harold. I’ve never been the kind of student that’s asked many questions. A consequence of being intelligent is a fair amount of hubris involved in the state of learning. There’s the attitude that if you don’t get it without asking a lot of questions then you’re either an idiot or the teacher is bad at explanations and since you’re so smart it must be the teacher. Silly, I know, but there it is.

A truly intelligent person, though, and this is what I learned today, is someone who will ask the right questions to get the best explanation out of the teacher. It’s the same thing I discovered when I began interviewing people for online publications. If you ask the right question and then remain silent, a person will go off talking and give you everything you need plus a lot more that you didn’t even think was available to know.

I had a sense that Jeff was wildly intelligent in terms of his experience and who he studied under. Nobody else in the class seemed to have the problems with him that I was having, either, so it was shaping up that my frustrations were all deficiencies on my end. With all that in mind, I decided to annoyingly ask every question or state every feeling I had implicitly to see if I could work through it.

Unsurprisingly, it worked. We were studying group games today and I was enlightened as to their original (and basic) purpose within the framework of the Harold which then coupled with what I gleaned from Monday and Tuesday’s lessons about openings and scenes, leading to a deeper understanding of the purpose of the opening and how scenes inevitably play out to make the Harold shine.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The group games, at their inception, were actual short-form games that Charna made Del put into the Harold. When David Shepherd started ImprovOlympic with Charna they were essentially a ComedySportz type of place that only did short-form competitions. When David left after a falling out with Charna, Del was brought on as a replacement and started shifting the company to long-form by introducing the Harold. Charna thought that her students wouldn’t be interested in long-form so as a compromise they would stop the Harold after each beat and play games like “Sit, Stand, Lean” or whatever. Eventually, as the Harold evolved and performers got more into long-form, they decided not to predetermine which games they would play. Then they started making up games on the spot that fit the theme of the show. The group game then evolved into the form we have today.

To listen to the way Jeff talks, Del seemed to not like the idea of group games at first. He relayed an anecdote (that I’d heard before but not in relation to Del) that Larry David used the Harold as a basis for the format of Seinfeld. “That bastard stole my Harold from me,” said Del (according to Jeff). “It starts with a monologue opening, then they begin three separate storylines, then the commercials are Charna’s games, then they advance the story in a second beat, break for more commercials, then everything is tied up at the end.”

It’s immensely helpful to understand the group game as the Harold’s “commercial” for itself with the basic thematic structure of a short-form game. It makes them more like recaps of what’s happened so far. I’ve heard before that the notion of the group game is to clear the slate, more accurately articulate the theme and focus in on where the show will be going next. If you add on the idea that it is essentially a little bit of short-form inside of a long-form show and that it’s an appropriately themed and focused commercial for the Harold, the whole piece gains a clearer structure that can allow the theme to flow through it effortlessly.

The game structure is remarkably similar to the way that UCB approaches scene work. “In the game, you establish a reality, alter it and then heighten quickly,” Jeff said. In that way, the Harold group game can be approached as a one-person UCB scene where the character’s many facets are portrayed by the entire Harold team. So, in effect, the Harold game slot is a short-form game commercial in the structure of a UCB scene where X amount of people portray the point of view of one single person that calls back the suggestion, defines thematic focus and looks cool at the same time. At least, that’s how I view it.

As I continue to enlighten my understanding of the Harold I still hold firm to the idea that it can (and should) evolve a bit more. Knowing the purpose of the group game makes me love it and doing the Speed Harold for the past six months with Rogue has definitely illustrated to me a need for it. I’ve been brainstorming what else could be done in that slot. A good contender is the solo start, essentially boiling the group game down to one person playing, but I think that some of the importance and gravitas is missed by doing that. I’ve only seen one Harold team while I was here execute the organic opening, themed edits and group games in ways that I found theatrically satisfying (Fiction for the Poor) and from that experience I’ve determined that the scenes aren’t what makes the Harold epic storytelling based on Wagner’s Ring Cycle (wiki that shit, it’s true). It’s always been about the framework. My goal now is to make sure that even a six month old improviser can execute one to audience satisfaction.

I walked outside at the end of class after being made to execute a complete Harold in four minutes (my group was the only group that succeeded [FTW!]) and ran into the British married couple whose names currently escape me. Their section was about to participate in a flash mob directed by Jet Eveleth and they were going up to the Del Close Theater to warm up and rehearse so I walked up to watch. As I walked in the door I made eye contact with Jet and she motioned for me to get on stage and join in. We developed a basic language and practiced it for a little bit and then put our belongings in Charna’s office and headed out the back door. We decided to set up outside of the Captain Morgan bar at Wrigley Field. A funk/soul/Motown cover band was playing so we hid Jet’s iPod and went to play. A homeless guy and a bunch of Cubs fans joined in periodically. We jumped, climbed, danced, grooved, made pyramids, lifted people up and carried them for a while (of which I was one such lucky person), performed free-flow rituals and had the time of our lives before doing a big finishing bit as the band closed out a song and then took off in separate directions like we’d never met each other before. At one point I was participating in some impromptu contact improv when one of the girls from the other section started climbing all over me like I was a tree she was scaling. I planted my feet and flowed to her energy as she made it over my head and flipped around to land behind me like a ballerina gracefully being lowered to the floor by her dance partner. It felt just like those freeform dance parties TNM did at FunFunFunFest, a group of people coming together to be ecstatic and share love, fun and play. As I walked back to the theater I was struck by how amazing it was, remembering that today was the day that so many people were showing up at Chick-fil-A’s across the nation to support the persecution of homosexuals and the transgendered. I was amazed that, on a day that many people the country over were dwelling on the pain, sadness and hate that exists in the world, we focused on the celebration of being happy and together in a wonderful ritual of the moment.

I picked up my stuff from Charna’s office, talked a little bit with Jet and the gang about what was so good about the flash mob and how we could make it even better for next time, headed to Mullen’s for a bit with some people to relax and regale in what we’d just accomplished, then wandered back over to iO for the 8pm show. A comic book themed two man group called The Harold of Galactus was in from Canada for two nights so I decided to check it out with my skeptic glasses on. It was a fun concept for a show and while the improv wasn’t mind-blowing it reenergized my passion for comics in the best way and had me brainstorming on a project I’d shelved years ago when I became jaded with the industry. I spent a bit of time trying to place the voice of one of the improvisers and I was nearing the point of insanity when I realized he was the guy that voices Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series. “It was weird,” Jeff said in class the next day, “because I’m really good at making video game characters look exactly like me when I customize them so I heard his voice and kept wondering how it wasn’t coming out of my face.”

I didn’t have TJ and Dave tickets this week so I took the opportunity to see Colleen and Jason Shotts do Dummy again. I was more moved by their show two weeks prior but it was still a home run. I sat next to Caitlin and her roommate the entire show and we bantered for a little bit as we’ve come to do. Caitlin makes me feel like a kid in all of the uncool ways. She’s achingly innocent, the epitome of a 21 year old. She relishes in it, which I’m really happy about. People should always live fiercely in the now and play to the limit of their wisdom, gleefully existing inside the benefits of their age. The downside to that, though, is that she’s just young enough to be eons away from where I am. Seven years will be nothing in ten years, probably, but now it may as well be the other side of everything. Even so, because I am weird that way, I walked her home and made out with her on the front porch like a couple of adolescents outside of her parents’ house. As I did this my spine surged with that element of youth I lost in the interim seven years. The breaking of Ashly’s heart, the move to Los Angeles and subsequent move back when I fell in love with Rylie, the two years following with Rylie and the two years to now I spent putting her behind me and building another life in improv and theatre. There is so much time between then and now, too much time, but then again not enough time to not feel it closely. Maybe that’s an always thing, I don’t know. All I know is I walked back to Deena’s in a haze and slept without dreaming.

Frustration

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 03:46:17 -0400

Now I’m starting to get a little bummed out.

I don’t think I like Jeff Griggs as a teacher. He’s not very good at explanations and when you seek clarification he seems like he intends to confuse you and be vague. It continues to key into my thoughts that the Harold is no longer used to make art at iO. It feels like a lackadaisical version of my old lighting and scene design classes from college where they teach you hand drafting so that you gain a respect for it before moving on to AutoCAD. The Harold is feeling more and more like the thing they have to teach as opposed to the thing they want to.

Talking to other students today, though, it seems like other teachers have more gusto for it. Jet Eveleth and her fiancé are teaching one of the classes (lucky assholes) and they seem to be having a blast. My friend Nick from Austin is being taught by Brett Lyons and he loves it.
“I felt like shit all last week,” he said, “but this week I’m just saying fuck it and having fun and it’s working like crazy.”
I want someone to make me passionate and answer every question that I have about the organic opening. At the moment, I feel like I’m being taught by a Ryan Heine who actually listened and took good notes. It’s good instruction but it’s not making anything clearer.

We worked mostly on first and second beats today. My scenework was worse than it was on the first day. I was uninspired and frustrated. We seem to be avoiding the “gay arc” for the most part (as Susan Messing puts it) but we’ve just straightened it out into a line. We also march a lot, so much so that I got a complaint from half the people in Aaron’s class in the Cabaret downstairs. You know you’re doing something dumb if you’re doing it over and over again to other people’s frustrations.

Jeff’s voice is aural Ambien also, which doesn’t help. After lunch I just want to pass out. Apparently I did for a bit. Javier and Chris were talking about a rant Jeff went on about Scientology (which they said was strangely pro) and I seemed to have missed it all. Maybe he’s crazy?

Or maybe this is me putting prejudice on it. Maybe I need to step back, calm down, focus on my wants and have fun. I don’t know. I do know that I need to ask more questions, at least.

I went back to Deena’s after class and napped for a solid hour. Being behind on blog posts has screwed up my sleep schedule but getting back into writing these has been immensely beneficial in these final heady days. I need some way to organize everything I have rattling around in my head. All this improv stuff and girl stuff and money stuff and weird stuff and who am I even stuff. My body is starting to show signs of wear from sleeping on couches and air mattresses and floors. It’s begging me to keep it in better shape. Deena told me today that I need to be gone by Monday because she’s going to Greece so I’ve set things up to move back in with Eric. I still have to see Michael Pizza, The Second City Main Stage show, Messing With a Friend, Three Sisters at Steppenwolf, Blue Man Group, Delicate Men, The Deltones and a few others. I still have to see and eat some major Chicago stuff. There’s just so much more left to do and learn and be. The pressure is on.

I showered up and got ready to head down to the theater. I’ve decided that my Tuesdays are best spent seeing Jet and Susan. It’s an amazing combination. The show is damn good. It may be my favorite thing I’ve seen here. It’s crazy amazing. I ended up sitting next to Charna the entire evening as well, which was interesting. Birthday Girl opened for them and I really liked their Harold this time. We were a really great audience as well and had an energy that fueled them nicely.

I talked at length with Nick after the show ended about stuff to do once we get back to Texas. He wants to set up times to come perform in Houston and travel a lot. He’s a good guy to work with creatively. I get a good buzz of energy off of him. I have the feeling that we could collaborate on some really cool stuff.

I think I’m going to miss the walks home when I get back to Houston. It’s a good time to mull over everything going on in my head. The more I have going on, the more I need those think times. Maybe when I get back I’ll give myself a mandatory walk around the neighborhood at the end of every night. Maybe.

Organic Openings and A League of Their Own

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 03:44:00 -0400

“Are you the Cris without an H?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Okay, great.”
Coming in late to the first day is the cool kid’s way to always being remembered.

Acting as if I had any time left to rest after everything that happened to me last week, we barreled on through to week four with Jeff Griggs. We’re stationed in the Del Close Theater this time around, a stage that was only a vague legend seen on YouTube a few short weeks ago but now feels like a comfortable chair at home. This new, immediate and shocking familiarity reminded me of the first time I stepped into the New Movement Theater in East Austin and how small it seemed, only to become the place as large and immense as my mind could make it when I was in it for the final time.

“This level is all about the Harold,” Jeff said as he introduced himself to the class. “The past few weeks you’ve been doing scenes and working on yourself and I must warn you that we won’t be doing a lot of that here. We’ll just be working on understanding Harold.”

And away we went to work. The day was devoted entirely to wrapping our heads around the organic opening. We played some intense pattern games that cooked our brains as a warm-up and then began doing openings in rapid-fire succession. We first worked out only doing physical action, moved to action with sound, then we were allowed to move around the space, then we were allowed to use words and statements.

Like in previous weeks that we’ve touched on it, I’m beginning to pinpoint the thing that makes the organic opening worthwhile. The idea of transformation, of taking a suggestion and extrapolating it to the cosmos, to turn potato into a commentary on the widening gap between the 1% and the 99% or goofy cultural differences or whatever, to cast the net wide and then rein in a theme that perhaps says something about the human condition, is an intriguing and powerful notion that should be brought to all of improv. However, I’m still not convinced that the organic opening is perfect as it is.

The Harold needs to evolve again. It’s been fairly the same since Del died and though I see flashes of brilliance in people like Jet Eveleth who are pushing the boundaries of what it is (when they do it), nobody is really focusing on what it could be. That’s not anybody’s fault, really. Charna and the Harold Commission have a business model they’re working on, as does UCB. Most people seem to have left any idea of creating art with the Harold far behind. Two-person groups are (rightly so) where the glory is these days. The Harold is a brand and nothing more. It’s used to weed out the lesser improvisers and find the talented ones. It’s mostly done by people who aren’t doing this for art, and because of that I see even the most talented people tripping in it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of this, actually. When I first joined Rogue and was trying to understand Harold beyond Ryan Heine’s broken explanations I looked at plenty of tape about it and was not convinced. I’ve looked everywhere at teams that people say make good Harolds. I’ve done a fair amount of them myself by this point. I’ve seen some amazing work from people, but it’s usually shimmering through a lot of dirt. The brilliance of the Harold is there, but it’s not fully formed. Perhaps it was once. Perhaps, when it was first invented, it was perfect. However, this is an art form crafted by a madman and I think he designed it to evolve beyond him. At this point, I’m not sure it will ever be evolved to its perfect state. It may just be one of those things that needs redefining every ten years or so. All I know is that it needs to change now.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even Shakespeare gets a new “definitive” interpretation once a generation. That’s probably what Del wanted, even if he didn’t know it himself. I’m going to need some time to process this, though. The greatest heights in our art form are locked inside this puzzle. I just have to crack the safe.

Dave mentioned going to see the Hancock Tower in the evening and I told him to text me. About an hour later he texted saying he wasn’t really feeling like it. I contemplated walking up to catch the Armando but then realized that it was Monday and my friends back home were doing FilmInstant, a sort of RiffTrax/Mystery Science Theater 3000 via Twitter that was created by Dan Woods, Drew Platt, and Cyrus Cooper. At 10pm CST (the Central Stranded Time Zone) you select the film of the week on your Netflix Instant Queue and follow a hashtag with people giving their commentary on it. I did one with them before I left (Robocop) and it ended up being the 2nd highest trending topic worldwide after Anderson Cooper being gay. I told Drew I’d do it from Chicago if I had the chance, but the intensive has been rather, well, intense. However, with last week’s Armando being so weak and already having writing to catch up on, I decided to do it.

The film for this week was A League of Their Own. It’s one of my sister’s favorite movies ever and I honestly like it a lot as well. As I was tweeting and watching I grew a deep nostalgia for 90’s films. It was the time I grew wonder for the power of cinema. Before the onslaught of digital cameras and CGI but at the pinnacle of analog filmmaking. It’s all so grounded. Nobody’s photoshopped, sets were fully built. There’s substance to everything. I miss the attitude as well. The Cold War had ended and it was a full ten years before the War on Terror began. If I’d known that the world would become such a darker place by the time I graduated high school, maybe I would’ve cherished the era more. Well, at least it was fun.

Olympic Sunday

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 03:41:00 -0400

Wake up at 11.
Surf the Internet.
Watch the Olympics.
Avoid Deena’s strange comments.
Write all day.
Never shower.
Never leave the apartment.
Eat a peanut butter sandwich.

To Dig Chicago, Part 2: The Circle Gets Wider

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 03:40:00 -0400

I woke up and decided that, since I had this Saturday and nothing improv-related that I was committed or dying to see, I was going to push out further into the city than I have before. Living so close to iO is a blessing and a curse. There’s convenience but also no need to go outside of Lakeview and Wrigleyville. If I ever move here, Lakeview is definitely where I’m going to move to. I’ve already found my equivalent to many Houston loves there.

I texted a bunch of people and discovered that Stephen was going a food festival called Taste of Lincoln, Caitlin was at a festival in Wicker Park and Karen was throwing a beach party that Dan and Ken were going to. Since my card won’t be working again until Tuesday I was met with few options. I had a prepaid train card and the knowledge that the beach held free food potential so I put on my swimsuit, popped in my headphones and hopped on the Red Line with my copy of Dharma Bums which I was starting over since I’d been unable to concentrate on it for the previous month.

I had my sights set on Millennium Park first. I’d heard tales and seen pictures of that giant metal bean thing (officially called the “Cloud Gate”) and being a lover of weird installed art I wanted to see what it was all about. When I got there I immediately came across a strange amphitheater with a twisted reflective metal design that looked like a Michael Bay Transformer. Walking beyond that I discovered a bridge (that resembled the amphitheater) that led me across a highway to a smaller park where I discovered a lot of women in Victorian garb having a cosplay picnic. I took a few pictures and then backtracked to find the bean when I came across the Triple Crown of Yoyo. That’s right, the Triple Crown of Yoyo, an international yoyo tournament with the best yoyo talent in the world competing. There were Yoyo companies selling different weighted yoyos, other enthusiasts sitting around doing tricks, and a stage where two guys were going nuts with feats of yoyo insanity. I snapped a few pictures and made my way around a corner to finally encounter the bean which did not disappoint. I went directly underneath the large metal thing and used my camera’s zoom feature to find (surprisingly clearly) my own tiny dot in the mob of people. When standing underneath it, the bean distorted my reflection to widen the gap between me and the rest of the crowd. I was literally singled out, one unique soul in a horde of people. Humanity.

I played a little more with the reflective properties on all sides and then heard my stomach rumble. I walked back to the Red Line and had to find another entrance when I discovered a closed subway entrance that was covered by a patch of grass that slid over it. Part of the line was closed for construction so I had to go further south than I wanted to and double back north to make it to Foster Beach to meet the group.
“We’re on the right side of the beach house in the grass,” Karen texted. “Look for the green and white umbrella.”
When I walked up I found a man using a flame thrower to light the barbecue pit while Dan stood wide-eyed with Alex, Nick and Karen.
“We don’t like to wait to eat,” the man said who was apparently a passerby that wanted to show off his new toy.

Dan poured me rum and pineapple orange juice and we talked for a little bit before he, Nick, Alex, Karen and I took off to the water. We played monkey in the middle with a Frisbee and Alex taught us a couple of Ultimate throws. The lifeguards still had us corralled in a small space. It’s such an annoying thing to do. I want to know what lame-ass person sued the city after an accidental drowning to create this law.

We walked back up to camp as more room was created on the grill so Dan threw on some burgers and brats. Ken showed up shortly after on his bike and he and Karen got into an improv discussion as Alex, Nick and I discussed the finer points of organized religion. I was drinking an iced tea and the sun was shining with a cool breeze and I’m certain I could have stayed there forever.

I got a text from Dave and discovered that some of the Brits were playing in Whirled News Tonight at 8 so I took the Red Line back to Wrigleyville and discovered a sold-out crowd. Aaron was there with one of the Aussies and I talked with him for a bit before going downstairs to catch the Deltones. Matt was sitting at the bar so I saddled up next to him. “You know I’d never drank a full PBR before coming here?” he said as he sipped the yellow liquid out of a mason jar.

The first act was a Harold team called Henrietta Pussycat. They had a lot of fun but I’m quickly becoming sick of these teams that don’t have people who listen. They covered well but there was clear confusion in a couple of scenes as to what was being drawn upon.

The Deltones joined them for a Dream and I was surprised to find Tim Soszko guesting in the Deltones cast. After the dream was a slight intermission and I got a call from Lauren asking if I wanted to come to her house and watch the Olympics. I thought about it a minute and decided since I didn’t get a break or a shower in between the beach and iO that I wanted to get out of there so I walked down to her place on Lake Shore Drive.

I mentioned it before, but Lauren lives in an impossibly large apartment. We sat in a room with a TV and a couch and a coffee table that could’ve fit a full-size dining table for 20. It was honestly quite wonderful.

She was sick, so we only watched for an hour or so and then I left so she could go to sleep. I debated going home to clean up but instead went back to iO to catch Chaos Theory. They put on a really enjoyable show that got esoteric and meta and then extra-meta, introducing Bertolt Brecht at one point. Haterade came afterwards and Dave did “MC Hugh Grant Suck My Ballz” again, this time getting so weird that I ended up uncontrollably giggling. After that ended we closed the bar down again amidst dancing like fools to LMFAO and I walked back to Deena’s. As I settled into bed for the night, it dawned on me that I hadn’t spent a single dime.

Too Much Light...

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 03:38:00 -0400

I didn’t feel too terrible when I got up in the morning so I counted a win as I slid into the Del Close Theater at 10am. Susan Messing was there already and showing off her reputation with sweet style.

“I’m going to try to get you fuckers out of here right at noon if you’ve got any more workshops to go to,” she joyfully exclaimed, “and I know you’re all hung over but try your best to focus.”

The workshop was called Group Pretty and it was all about making appealing group shapes on stage. We played a game where we made ourselves into the shapes of various things Susan wanted us to be.

“Hey, that doesn’t suck at all!” she said at our first attempt to make a sailboat. “This is where all that mirroring shit finally pays off! If you just look at your partners and mirror what they’re doing, we’re all going to get off. Make a sense?”

We moved onto techniques to make a person “fly” on stage and physically interpreted narrated dreams in interesting group games which was definitely the highlight of the workshop in that it forced a heightening of listening skills. The workshop continues next Friday and I’m hoping to get a better understanding of the use of it all. So far it’s felt like stuff I’ve been over before (which I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at since she designed the Level 2 curriculum I was subject to last week). Still, it’s good to keep those skills sharp.

I grabbed a small bag of peanuts to hold me over and downed them in minutes as Jet Eveleth walked in and told us to stretch out. This workshop was a personal feedback workshop with Jet in which she distilled us to our personal strengths and weaknesses. Due to Colleen Doyle freshly kicking my ass all week long I was highly aware of the things I needed work on and she nailed them distinctly as well.

“You are one of the most naturalistic people on stage,” she said. “When you work, there’s something about it that feels tangible.”
She subconsciously rubbed her fingers together like she was sifting through dirt.
“Your challenge now is to put everything into the other person. For the rest of the workshop your mission will be to mirror and maintain complete eye contact.”
It was shockingly similar to the notes Colleen had given me. I have the feeling that when I return to Houston I’m just going to be intensely staring at everyone.

I must say, as a quick add-on to all of this, that Jet and Colleen are the two that have had the biggest impact on me through this whole process so far. Colleen took no excuses and no bullshit from me and believed deeply in revealing the truest truth. Jet personifies the agony of doom. In both workshops I took with her she flatly stated multiple times about how she was going to die someday, that we all were going to die, and she didn’t want to waste valuable living time on not doing the best possible art. They are both halves of a philosophy that I perhaps have allowed myself to be scared of falsely.

To know your own mortality is vital to the creation of a life filled with meaning. That we are only here a short time defines us. Rylie hated death, as so many real doctors do, and felt it her mission in life to eradicate it. Family, friends and others through the years have ignored it or changed the subject when it came to their doorstep. Neither of my grandfathers ever shied away from it and they lived with purpose and love and when their respective deaths came they took them standing tall. Gran Gray’s came to him without warning and in immense pain but he lived his life making sure that everyone lived theirs. I couldn’t see it at the time, being impetuous and not understanding half of what he was trying to do for me, but he always knew about death and worked the hardest to make sure I knew enough of the world to find what made me happy. When Papa Whitey got sick, he pragmatically spent the last six months making sure that everyone would be taken care of and never ceased to express his love. “It’s so great that Cris is pursuing the thing he loves,” he told my mom when she said I was going to school for theatre. “You have to do that.”

My grandfathers. Zen Geniuses of America and unknowing improv gods.

I caught sight of the other Texan girl that was at the British show last night (who turned out to be named Karen) and we talked outside for a bit and she invited me to the beach. We went and grabbed Dimo’s and talked for a little bit about the workshops from the morning and I caught sight of her extreme blue eyes. I tried not to stare too hard at the scissortail tattoo on her chest and the ones on her arms but they were quite beautiful. We split up and I went to a surf shop down the street to pick up a bathing suit. I settled on a gray pair from Billabong that looked like regular shorts that the lady behind the counter called “hybrids.”

Osterman Beach is on the north end of Lake Shore Drive and about a 10-minute walk from the place Karen was staying above a shoe repair shop run by an old Slavic man. After spending forever trying to find a cab in the rain in the midst of the chaos of a Cubs game letting out, I met her outside her door and we walked up to her apartment to get some supplies that she forgot for the journey. Karen is renting out a Bohemian haven of an apartment. You walk up a secret and ancient wooden staircase to a series of rooms that look to be retrofitted from storage attics, the Chicago answer to Hubbell’s Zen domain. These are the kinds of places I want to live in forever.

As we walked to the beach Karen and I continued to get to know each other. She’s starting a baking business in Austin called Scissortail Savories and Sweets and told me her specialty is chocolate cream pie. “My dream would be to have a pie shop that had coffee in the daytime, beer and wine at night, and an improv theater in it,” she said. “And I’d rent out rehearsal rooms to whoever needed them and book troupes like you’d book bands. Austin could use a place that doesn’t have allegiance to any of the other theaters but lets everyone come and play together and gives the younger teams a place to perform.”

We set up a little area and reclined in the sand on a couple of towels and talked some more. Her bathing suit revealed an immense back piece of a girl in a tornado and we talked for a bit about the nature of tattoos. Finally, she looked at me with an air of mischief. “Want to get in the water?”

Running as fast as you can towards the ocean is in the top five key experiences of human existence. Scaring seagulls, hopping over mini waves, yelling into the heavens our eternal laughter, the tangible feeling of unending joy, crashing into a body of water so immense that you can’t see the other side of it. Of course, this was a lake and not an ocean, but the only thing letting our senses make that distinction was the fresh water. We swam and splashed and dove and loved everything.

A weird difference in Chicago beaches is that they corral you into a small space. We couldn’t swim out past our waists (and you can be damn sure there was a lifeguard in the water to keep you from it) and we had to stay between two guard towers. It was a prison beach. Lame. Still, it was a beach and it was awesome.

We walked back to Karen’s and hugged our goodbyes and I left with a kiss on the cheek and a bit of a brain buzz. I caught a cab back to Deena’s and washed up and headed down to iO. Eric’s Harold troupe had been cut by the spooky secret masters of the Harold Commission so I booked it to the Cabaret to see their final show, opening for the Late 90’s. Karen told me she’d seen them play before and almost walked out, but I thought they had a solid show. Maybe it was their knowledge that this was their last hurrah but they went all out and just had a lot of fun on stage. Eric disappeared before I could catch him but I texted him my appreciation.

I walked outside and called Karen to see what her plans were for the night. “I’m not sure yet,” she said through crappy reception and the loud noise of Wrigleyville surrounding me, “but I wanted to let you know right now that I’m married.”

Whoops.

About that time Aaron and Magda (the Polish girl) walked outside. They’d just been upstairs for Improvised Shakespeare (which blew their minds, naturally) and were on their way to meet up with Brady James, a TNMer who was in town for the weekend, to see the Neo-Futurist show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. I remember Derek Dupuy freaking out about this show to me when we were on tour last October and I hadn’t responded to Brady’s texts so I decided to tag along. We got a cab from a 20-something Romanian guy that looked dressed for the club that was secretly a front for the Eastern mob. He was listening to old 90’s techno hits off his phone (the highlight was Real McCoy’s “Another Night”) and he and Magda spoke in Polish to each other for a bit.

“It was strange to speak to a Romanian for so long,” Magda said when we were walking up to the theater. “In Poland they are all beggars.”

Brady met us at Simon’s Bar down the street and we watched a bit of the Olympic opening ceremonies before heading to the theater to wait in line. We got there 30 minutes before the doors opened and the line was already around the corner. I caught up with Brady for a bit and met his high school friend (Brady is apparently an Illinois native) until the doors opened up. Apparently, Brady did tech for this show when he lived in New York.
“You know this girl, well at least you’re Facebook friends with her, named Roberta Jofre?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I know Roberta,” I said. “We went to college together. She’s awesome.”
“Oh, cool!” Brady replied. “She’s in the New York cast of this show.”

Well damn. It’s always good to know my old friends are doing so well.

When the doors opened we were led up some stairs and through a hallway with strange paintings on it into a large, un-air conditioned room. I got a snickers and a coke and milled about for a bit before they announced that the house was open. The entry fee was nine bucks plus whatever I rolled on a die. I checked in on foursquare so that I could roll a 5-sided die and ended up rolling a 1, so I floated the guy a Hamilton and he gave me a Neil Rackers trading card from when he was on the Cardinals (oddly synchronistic since he became the star Texans kicker for a few years afterward), a menu and a punch card. I was led to a Hispanic woman who asked me my name and then wrote the word “Sarcophagus” on a nametag and handed it to me to put on, after which I was led into a 200-seat black box stage and took a seat in the front row.

The menu had the titles of 30 plays on it, all with strange and brilliant names like “My Gratitude Will Be Swift and Terrible” and “You Rest, I’ll Take the Wheel.” Strung up on a clothesline above the stage were 30 pieces of paper numbered 1-30. A chalkboard was on the back wall that didn’t look like it had ever been cleaned and next to it was an old darkroom timer. A girl was going around picking up the backings from everyone’s nametags and she had a forceful personality and bizarre platinum Wolverine hair tied up in a bandana that already had me entertained. I busied myself reading over some of the other things on the menu and psyched myself up when suddenly the show began.

As it turned out, every single person who was taking tickets and writing nametags and collecting sticker backings was a member of the show’s cast. It was the very definition of poor theatre, the kind of no-frills stuff that is by its definition hungry.

“Who has never been here before?” Wolverine girl asked. “If you haven’t been here before, let me explain things for you. In your hand is a menu. Fold your menu so that the plays are easily visible to you. 30 plays are on your menu and tonight we will perform 30 plays for you in the space of an hour. When we yell CURTAIN, you shout out the number of the play that you want to see and we will perform whichever one we hear first.”

She then went over to the darkroom timer and set it for 60 minutes. As she punched the time they all screamed, “CURTAIN!”

What came next was a breakneck hour of experiential expressive performance art. My ass hit the edge of my seat and stayed there for the whole hour. There were absurd plays (1. The Neo-Futurists Try to Explain Neo-Futurism to Trevor’s Ass), satires (22. Real life sadness filtered through fake German performance art), political commentary (23. Dictionary Dardai Maintains His Standards). One play saw Wolverine girl singing Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” while making origami that she gave to an audience member. Another had someone pouring Kool-Aid into a clear plastic cup that had the Kool-Aid Man’s face drawn on it with a sharpie that they then dropped a brick block on while Yello’s “Oh Yeah!” played. After each play, no matter how much it floored you or moved you, they yelled “CURTAIN!” and you had to shout out the next play and reset as rapidly as they were so you could experience the next one.

The one that got me the most, that almost entirely killed me, was one called “The Grieve.” They wheeled out two clothing racks with empty coat hangers with clothespins on them and began hanging up various sheets of colored paper while music played and the lights came up and blacked out in a cycle. A girl sat downstage center flipping a notebook full of colored paper as if she was showing the audience. The other cast members were in different parts of the stage also hanging up different things, pieces of paper, etc. and they did it all with solemn seriousness. Then, suddenly, Wolverine girl made us all stand up and put our hands over our eyes and we screamed, a mournful wailing that was reminiscent of Greek tragedy keening. It was suddenly as if the whole of my fear, sadness, pain, everything in emotion I garnered through loss that I ever felt or ever would feel that made me who I am, my old grandparents and the ones I never knew before them, my family, my friends, Rylie, Ashly, Lauren, Amanda, everything came up from where it lived in my stomach and up my spine through my brain and out of my eyes and mouth in a howl that made me understand the intentions of Ginsberg. And before I could even muster up the ability to kick in with my conscious self and cry at the raw power of expression and experience and emotion that just shot through me, I heard, “CURTAIN!” and had to reset.

We said our goodbyes to Brady and his friend and took a cab back to iO in time to see the short-form Jam end. Kevin was hanging out drunk (he’d tried to audition for Second City but had been dropped from the schedule in a clerical error and wasted five hours waiting for a no-show) and Dan was there too. Aaron and Magda went home and I talked for a while with Oopey who’d come from a house party. I walked downstairs to the Cabaret to see what was up and found a guy drunkenly doing an interpretive dance and lip-synching to Mellencamp, Katy Perry, and “Let Freedom Ring” which he ended with a salute that I Instagrammed. Oopey and I tried to get a house party going somewhere but everyone was too tired for it so we split ways and I headed back to Deena’s overloaded with questions about the why of everything.

Personal Feedback with Colleen Doyle, Featuring the British Invasion and Lauren Giarra

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 03:33:00 -0400

We started up class finishing out the worst initiation exercise and then concentrated on two-person scenes in a marathon that stretched to the heart of each of us as improvisers. As Colleen had promised, she took detailed notes about each of us and gave them one-by-one as we went up to do scenework. I’ve never been much of a note taker in terms of physical notes. I usually have a decent enough memory to get it all. However, each person’s feedback was an unending string of useful mantras, pro tips, destined-to-be-famous-if-they’re-not-already quotes, and just plain good life advice.

NOTES FROM MY IPHONE
Specificity, emotion, physicality
Simple movements can speak volumes
Be completely driven by your want
Be the asshole you are at the bar
Play their choice harder than they play it
Play the want hard and let it drive you forward
Reveal something vulnerable about yourself that you’ve never revealed before
Make a huge physical choice for yourself up top
React as you would
Relax your crack
Put your oxygen mask on first before helping others
Make the other person important to you
Chew your food
Never look away or at the floor

I discovered at the end of last week (and through most of this week) that a deep-seated fear has lived inside of me for a very long time, a fear of ridicule, of getting too close and getting hurt, of being an idiot, of saying or doing the wrong thing and being alone for it. If I connect the dots, I’ve always had that fear, the fear of being unliked. It was the fear that got me on the first day of this week, the one that always sneaks up on me and brings me down like a silent tiger and rips me to shreds. This fear drives a great deal of my decisions onstage and off. It would seem that, if I have any chance of progressing further, I need to work through this fear and excise it.

When the class ended we presented Colleen with a card and a present the girls picked up for her. I guess she had a pretty big impact on everybody else as well. I was glad not to be alone (there’s that fear again).

The British Improvisers had organized a show that night at the Chemically Imbalanced Comedy Theater opening up for a two-person group called Howard Cross. Lauren texted me as well and we planned to meet up at 9:30 at a place called Lange’s after the show.

The CIC Theater is a cool little place on the corner of Southport and West Irving. I continue to be amazed at the wealth of little stages that exist everywhere. They put on good stuff as well. Howard Cross was a solidly great two-person group. I’m beginning to notice a trend that two-person groups are the people who are the most successful at doing great shows. Jet and Susan, Waterbed, Dummy, TJ and Dave…every one I’ve seen has been phenomenal.

The Brits weren’t too bad either. There were about 20 of them performing, which wasn’t every Brit that’s here. I got a really awesome button from their London improv troupe that had the words “Yeh! And” on it. They did monologue openings and Dave told a story about a guy he met from Waller, TX that caused a distinctive laugh to come out of me, singling me out in the audience. When the show was over one of the guys from Howard Cross said, “Oh jeez, I think all the Brits think we’re Texans!” to which the girl to the left of me shouted, “Hey! Would that be so bad?”

Another Texas girl. Not too shabby.

I got out right at 9:30 and took a 15-minute walk to an empty bar that Lauren likes to go to. She and her soon-to-be roommate (another gorgeous crazy woman, perfectly Lauren’s type) were sitting there drunk already and I ordered a whiskey to catch up to them. Her friend (I think her name was Nikki) left and Lauren and I played pool and partied with the five other patrons and the bartenders. Lauren loaded up the jukebox and snuck in “Moondance,” the song I used to sing her all the time when we were together. We laughed and played and kissed like the past eight years never happened. I looked her in the eyes and she pushed my face away. “Stop being so intense. You’re such an actor.”

What can I say? She’s a part of the story. Always has been, always will be. I have a lot of Freudian archetypes in my past. She’s the dangerous girl that got away, the dame that’ll never work out. But hey, at least we have Moondance.

Specificity, or TJ and Dave Fuck with a Pulitzer Winner

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 03:31:00 -0400

NOTE: In all honesty, I can’t remember exactly what happened this day in class. There were a lot of exercises that had to do with reacting genuinely, from the core of our beings, but it was all so deep and intense that I can’t remember exactly the details of what caused each breakthrough. Ken has been recording every day, though, so I’ll update this post when I get his recordings. Just know that my explanations on Thursday and Friday’s posts have bit of them in there. SPECIFICITY, EMOTION, PHYSICALITY. — CRS

I had my ticket to TJ and Dave that I’d purchased at the beginning of the intensive, so my evening was certainly set in stone. I walked with Kevin, Alice and Matt to eat at O’Malley’s, which is apparently THE Irish bar in town. I had some sliders that tasted average and a couple of cocktails before 8pm rolled around. Matt went downstairs to see the free Harold shows and Kevin, Alice and I went upstairs to check out Felt. My old friend Seth Dodson supposedly helped start it, but he hasn’t been around iO lately according to Eric. Either way, Felt was hilarious. They got away with a lot of stuff that human improvisers wouldn’t be able to do by virtue of the fact that they were puppets. I’m okay with that, though. Besides, the best scene in the whole piece would’ve worked with humans or improvisers.

I followed Kevin quite closely this time and got a really great seat for TJ and Dave. Robert Price was sitting near me with two cute girls he was in the middle of talking their ears off. One of them, this girl named Molly, showed an overt interest in me so I had fun flirting with her until the Ike Reilly song came on again. I didn’t see TJ make a little ritual this time but I did see Dave and him congregate at the crossroads like last time. As they took the stage, though, they happened to be joined by another figure: Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tracy Letts.

Letts’ work was just blowing up hard when I was graduating from Texas State. I still remember Chris Cornwell explaining this crazy play he went to see on Broadway called Bug that he didn’t know what to make of. A few years later The Alley did August, Osage County with Emily Neves in a great role. A year or so after that Leighza Walker put on Killer Joe (which is about to be a movie) at Obsidian Art Space.

The lesson of specificity was still rattling around in my head as TJ and Dave (and Tracy) gave a perfect example of why it needs to be done. The whole set centered around Tracy’s character going to ream out his boss Chuck on a topic and then backing down from it, much to the chagrin of the rest of the office who baked a cake and made a banner. Through the whole piece, they never stated what it was the company did or what Tracy’s character wanted to talk to Chuck about. About 35 minutes in or so, after a couple of rounds of other people talking to Chuck, Tracy’s character said, “You didn’t talk about the thing I wanted to talk about?”

TJ and Dave’s eyes lit up when this happened. They fell on Tracy, begging him to tell them what it was that he wanted to talk to Chuck about. TJ was doing lunges for no reason as a way to heighten his character. It was amazingly hilarious and an underline to Colleen’s notes about specificity. No matter what it was, Tracy’s conversation with Chuck had been built up to the point that revealing what it was would become detrimental to the piece. Of course, they’re each professionals and so they made it work like crazy, but specificity is clearly the better way in general.

I walked outside to discover Robert getting nervous and bombing with Molly’s friend Brittany so I told him we should go to Dimo’s as that’s what Molly said they were doing. I ate an interesting pizza with peppers and fresh mozzarella on it and wingmanned for Robert quite fiercely for a bit before walking home tipsy at a fairly late hour. I crashed out on the air mattress and was soundly asleep until about 4:30am when I was awoken by the feeling of daggers in my stomach. I tried for a bit to get comfortable and hold things down but it reached a fever pitch and I ran to the toilet and began uncontrollably vomiting. Since I was in such a rush to get to the toilet, my stomach muscles clenched when I was in a strange position and I ended up pulling an oblique muscle.

FYI: If sliders taste slightly weird and have off-color avocado on it, don’t glance over it and eat it. Investigate.

Diagonal Dave Gets a Birthday

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 03:29:00 -0400

It turned out to be Dave’s birthday so we all went over to Vine’s across the street and celebrated. I had a buffalo chicken wrap that was fair and we talked a great deal and I met more of the Brits. I’m really enjoying hanging out with the British. I want to travel to London sometime soon to perform with them. I think it’d be a blast.

Last week’s show being so amazing, I opted to go ahead and buy a ticket for Jet and Susan. It turned out to be an even better idea than I’d thought. The opening group was a Harold team called Fiction for the Poor, which Jet Eveleth very obviously coached. She was right to do so, though. They have the absolute best Harold I’ve seen at iO. Their opening looked beautiful, the themes they explored were meaty and heavy, their themed edits were the first that I’ve ever seen work and their games were super fun. I found myself screaming afterwards, “Now THAT’S how you do it!” I’d watch tape from them forever.

Jet workshopped a couple of insane characters for a sketch show she’s doing later, one of which was a spot-on high school theatre teacher that was too close to my own for comfort. She had this bit with glasses being pushed all the way to the edge of her nose and then down to her chin that had me in love. The more and more I see her, the more I’m enamored with her philosophy on performance.

Susan Messing then came out and they launched into a show every bit as strong as last week’s. These women are consummate pros and I dig it. I hung out and talked for a little bit after the show and then realized I was fading pretty fast so I walked back to Deena’s and instantly passed out.