Dan Bakkedahl 5/5/06
Dan Bakkedahl is a veteran improviser and actor. He spent several years in Chicago, where he performed with Zumpf, 4 Square and the Second City Mainstage. He currently lives in New York and is a correspondent on The Daily Show. We spoke about 4 Square and Play, both of which appear at the Chicago Improv Festival this year.
Josh Fulton: What’s the background of 4 Square? How did it develop?
Dan Bakkedahl: Peter Gross was doing the ETC at Second City, and John Lutz and Rob Janas were both touring. I had just finished touring, and we were all pretty unhappy with our experience with improv at Second City. We all thought it would be nice to have an outlet, a long-form show at I.O. that would allow us to [push ourselves.]
We had reached a certain level. We had all done Touring Company, and had all understudied and performed on the stages there. I had not yet been put on the Mainstage, but we thought the improv there was kind of weak. We thought that we almost deserved better as far as what to do, so we decided to put a group together. Peter and I toured together, and when Peter left John joined the Touring Company, and when I left Rob joined the Touring Company, so the four of us were all connected that way. Peter, Rob and John were all on JTS Brown together, which was directed by Craig Cackowski. It included Jason Sudeikis, Sarah Gee, Ed Goodman, just an incredible cast of people.
We decided to pull together some of the techniques that they had put together in JTS Brown, along with some of the techniques that Miles Stroth and I used in Zumpf to try to do a four person show to kind of get us out of the humdrum of Second City improv.
JF: So what are some of those techniques that you pooled together?
DB: I think a big part of it is call-backs not having to be linear and story-based, but rather thematic or tangential. I guess would be the term from the Deconstruction. You make a tangential extension. Someone is dealing with an alarm clock problem in one scene, then in the very next scene, or 15 minutes down the road, the same physicality and the same action of getting up and hitting the alarm clock are exhibited, except rather than it being an alarm clock, they’re pushing the button to launch a nuclear attack, or they’re pushing the button to play ‘Deal or No Deal.’ So, one technique was stealing the physicality from one scene and using in another scene in a completely different context.
Another thing would be, which JTS Brown did a lot of, you and I would be in a scene, then Jason Sudeikis would step out in front of me and basically take my character and continue the scene. Nothing changed. It was the same character. The only thing that had changed was the person playing it. We tried to play around with that kind of idea as well, that at any time you could change the scene as you like.
One of the things we did a lot of with 4 Square, which I think we got from JTS Brown, was if Rob Janas and I are in a scene and we’re fishermen. We’re standing on a pier fishing, and John Lutz walks in and addresses both of us, but he addresses us as different characters. We’ve completely changed the scene. We’ve become three fat cats in a board room, having this meeting about funding or whatever. Then John turns around and leaves, then Rob and I go back to being fishermen. So, it’s an edit to this other scene, then he basically edits us again by leaving, back to the scene where we were before.
JF: Had you ever done those kind of transformational edits before?
DB: Yeah, Zumpf was a very technique oriented show as well. Because it was only a two-man show, the only edits could come from somebody who’s already in the scene. So Miles and I would change characters and change scenes simply by changing a small part of your person. If I’m seated, I might cross my legs and start talking a little differently. I’ve just edited the scene, so what we call an internal edit. We brought a lot of that into play in 4 Square as well. We felt that might help move it along. Because in a smaller group, you don’t have six people on the side, ready to jump in at any time. In a lot of our shows three people are in the scene, or four people are in the scene, so the weight of edit is on the people in the scene.
JF: So you guys were an independent team. How did you get a run? Did you contact I.O.?
DB: Yeah, at I.O. they take submissions for shows. If you want to do a show, you submit a form. We knew the 10:30 Sunday night spot was dead. There was nothing in there. There hadn’t been anything in there that had any legs for a long time. So, we went ahead and grabbed that spot. We filled out a form and said here’s what our show is and here are the players.
Peter and Rob and John had all been there for quite a few years by that time. I had been there a good amount of time, but not quite as long as those guys. So, we knew that we’d at least get a shot, and we knew that if we got a shot we would be able to build an audience and build a show that could have some legs.
At some point, Jason Chin, who was in charge of scheduling and stuff at I.O. at the time, he started a new show in the 10:30 spot. Peter Grosz was doing ETC, so he could never get to the theater until 11. So, there was really no point in us having that 10:30 spot. We were always filling that extra space with something else. Jason came along and said he wanted to put another show in there, but our show would be fine. He’s not going to touch it. He’s not going to cancel it. He’s just going to put it a little bit later into the 11:15 spot. We would start at 11:15. It’s a free show, and it’s an open run, because nobody wants that spot.
Once we moved into that 11:15 spot, that’s when we started our own thing. The spot had been used before by Trio, which was Bob Dassie, Rich Talarico, and Stephanie Weir, with great success, because it’s kind of an improvisers spot. It’s a time when only improvisers are going to come watch, which is kind of beneficial to the show.
JF: Did you start to see 4 Square start to have an effect on the improv community? Especially with that time slot? Are people trying to learn how to do transformational edits and stuff?
DB: Oh yeah, for sure. I think we started to see a lot of, not 4 Squares knock offs or anything like that, but you started to see a lot of shows that started to exhibit the same techniques and characteristics. I think Switchboard came out of that, that’s three women, Jean Villipique, Deb Downing, and Rebecca Sohn. Then there were groups like Lanky, which was Hans Holson, Joe Canale, Matt Craig, and I’m forgetting someone. I think Rob was in that group. I’m not sure, but there were a lot of all these other smaller, unisex groups, groups of four or less.
I don’t look at that as ‘oh, they’re copying what’s working.’ What it is we think of those things then we think ‘oh, nobody’s going to come see that.’ Then you see it works and you go ‘well shit, so we can do this. People are going to be interested.’ For so long, I think the stigma was that with any group less than ten, ‘I don’t want to go and see you guys struggle to try to pull off what ten people pull off.’ I feel just the opposite. Having done three years with Miles in Zumpf, two people was the most comfortable experience I’d ever had, until I started doing 4 Square, then that was the most comfortable experience I ever had. The numbers just stack up right.
JF: Did you find it difficult to do transformational edits when you first started? What were some things that helped you get into what 4 Square does?
DB: Well, my experience with Zumpf, basically. Let me take you back to the very beginning of 4 Square. We got together and said ‘well, what do we want to do.’ And we said ‘why don’t we do what you learned in Zumpf, and what you learned in JTS Brown and make a four person show out of it.’ JTS Brown was a ten person cast. Zumpf was a two person cast, so we said let’s mix it together. Let’s meet next Wednesday, bring in an exercise and we’ll work on it. I brought in a technique from Zumpf and we worked on it for a full two hours. Then the next week we said ‘John, bring in a technique from JTS or from your other experiences, and we’ll work on it.’ We all worked on it, then we threw it together with the other thing, and we’d do a piece at the end of the rehearsal. We did that for about two months, where each of us would bring in an excursive each week.
So, I was learning JTS stuff, having watched the show almost every single performance, and I was teaching them Zumpf stuff, having performed in it for three years. How we got comfortable with 4 Square was watching each other’s shows, doing our own shows, then working on it in a classroom.
JF: Can you describe what Play is?
DB: Play is a fully improvised 2 act play.
JF: Who’s in the cast?
DB: There’s Damian Reynolds, TJ Jagadowski, and I’m not even sure if these guys are all still in the show. Damian Reynolds, TJ Jagadowski, Peter Grosz, Deb Downing, Holly Laurent, Alex Fendrich, Jet Eveleth, and myself.
JF: So what techniques from theater do you guys use in the show?
DB: Essentially, the hang-up of a show like that is that plays are about narrative. That can kind of trip you up. Often that’s what we’re taught in improv, if you’re focusing on the narrative of the storyline, you’re going to get in trouble. We have to be true to that, otherwise how can we call ourselves an improvised play?
Bill Arnett was our director for a long time, before we got started. We found that what real plays and what our thing have in common is there’s a central character maybe, or a central theme or something going on, that you can revolve around without having to talk about all the time. People have their own storylines on the side, and because at the beginning of the scene you mention the main character, then you go off on your own thing, talking about your own life and the person right in front of you, you have thereby connected it. You’ve made it a cohesive unit.
JF: So how do you deal with the plot? Is it just committing to your character and that kind of takes care of the plot?
DB: Well, we generally don’t even bother to think about plot. Plot is something by definition that is a plan. It’s predestined. It’s something that you plan out ahead of time, and that’s impossible to do in improv. I think our plot kind of comes out in the end. There’s no plot until it’s over, then you can look back and see what the theme was of the show. I mean, we can identify a theme developing and try to aim for it, but very rarely will we spend time back stage during a show saying ‘ok, well here’s clearly what’s going on. Let’s aim for that,’ because in improv [that’s counter-productive.] Maybe somebody else has learned how to do that, but we just found that any time we tried to purposely aim for ‘hey let’s make it so that Billy dies at the end, and Mr. Campbell comes home and reunites with his wife.’ It’s just too impossible, or too cumbersome to deal with in improvisation. What we would often do is that ‘we know Billy’s a troubled kid. We know Mr. Campbell and Mrs. Campbell are having problems. Go.’ [laughs] That’s all. We only deal with what has already happened. Period. At the intermission break, we’ll talk a little bit about ‘here’s what happened. Here’s what everybody’s names are. Here are some common themes going throughout. Who wants to start the second act?’
You don’t know what the plot is when you go see a movie ahead of time. You see the commercials and you get an idea of what it is. You don’t need to know the plot ahead of time to enjoy something, so the players don’t need to know the plot ahead of time either. We don’t know the plot of any real event in life. We don’t go through life thinking ‘oh today’s the day I get hit by a bus, so let me make sure I’m on the right corner at the right time.’ Life just happens, so that’s the kind of way we treat it with Play too. The life of these characters just happens, and we have to stay on our toes to keep up with it.
JF: What’s the difference between the first act and the second act? Do you guys change locations? Or is it the same location at a different time?
DB: It really depends on the individual piece. We’ve had pieces that were one location the entire time. We had one that was in a garden in the first act. These characters just kind of kept coming in and out and one central character stayed there. It was really more a story about community, then in the second act all the characters had dinner together that night. So it was a very linear, time-wise piece. It was one day, then that night. We’ve had other pieces where it’s completely unrelated. We had a science lab, where something had obviously gone wrong. We didn’t go into what had gone wrong, just that the monkeys were dying. People’s relationships were showing up within the context. We could see that this assistant had sex with this scientist, and that this scientist was clearly planning on killing himself that night. These little idiosyncrasies and personality traits kept popping out. Then in the second act we played the monkeys. We didn’t say ‘hey, we’re monkeys or hey we’re escaping.’ We played people who were in prison. Whether those were actually, directly related or not is left up to the audience member to determine.
There are lots of different kinds of plays. There’s Ionesco who I’m baffled by. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but there are many who love it. There’s a reason why the guy’s considered a master. And it’s absurdist. Then there’s Our Town which has a narrator walking throughout the whole thing, starting action, stopping action. There are so many different kinds of plays. We tried to cast a wide net in the course of the full run. I was there for 7 months probably. Some nights we would have just straight relationship drama plays that had funny moments. Other times we’d have long 1 sceners. We had a lot of bedroom farces. Like in through the out door, lots of big closing doors, and promiscuity, people meeting in the closet and getting caught by someone else. We never know what it will be, but we get into it. We never say ahead of time ‘oh, we’re going to do a farce tonight.’ You just realize when the first word comes out of the first character’s mouth with the way they’re speaking and the way the other person reacts, suddenly we’ve got a farce on our hands.
JF: So these aren’t necessarily even comedies. You could have an entire play without a laugh.
DB: I don’t think we’ve ever had one that didn’t have a laugh. I think they’ve all been comedic. I think that’s another word that’s been fairly misunderstood. There’s drama and there’s comedy. There are a lot of comedies by Shakespeare where there aren’t any laughs in them. They’re comedies because nobody dies.
JF: How has doing Play changed you as an improviser? Or has it changed you?
DB: I think Play kind of brought me back to acting. That was the main reason that we wanted to do this show. We saw that so much of what was being done [didn’t involve real acting.] Again, it had the same kind of birth as 4 Square, where it’s like ‘what’s my main issue with improv right now?’ Well, it’s I don’t believe a fucking word coming out of anybody’s mouth on stage. Everybody’s playing in their improviser voice, and trying to make every line a joke, as opposed to giving the audience a little credit that they might be able to figure out and enjoy something that isn’t spelled out for them.
So, that’s why we started that show. ‘Let’s do a show where we act and the laughs are earned.’ In the old days of Second City, that was being taken [seriously.] They would do a 7 minute scene and the only laugh would come at the end. It was a 7 minute set up for a laugh, then you’d get a huge laugh. And we’ll get that. We’ve had that in Play, where we can go 5 or 6 minutes without a laugh because it’s all building toward something.
JF: Does that influence what you do with John Lutz in 2 Square at all and how you improvise in general? Have you noticed a change?
DB: I think the way I improvise in improvise in 2 Square, the way I improvise in 4 Square, in Play, in Zumpf are all pretty similar, because they’re all the way I improvise. I don’t think we notice the changes happening in ourselves as we improvise. If we’re lucky, we’re getting enough reps and we’re doing enough shows that we don’t realize we’re growing. We just are. I was told before moving to New York: ‘well, you can’t play that shit in New York. They won’t buy that. They want fast, funny, loud.’ I was like ‘well, then they won’t like me.’ Whatever. I don’t give a shit. I’m not going to change the way I improvise because this city does this or this city does that. I didn’t improvise the way I improvised in Chicago because that’s what Chicago liked. Because I can tell you that’s certainly not the way Chicago is. Chicago’s not a lot of very patient, relationship based, realistic moments. It’s just not. It’s a lot of whatever the fuck it is. So coming here people were like ‘you’re going to have to change your game when you go to New York.’ I said ‘I guess people won’t like the show, because I’m not changing how I play. I going to play the way I play.’
You see a lot of this in 2 Square, same as with 4 Square, it’s a balance. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t want to see 45 minutes of loud, fast, funny. Because all it will be is loud and fast. It will kind of cease to be funny to me. Miles had a metaphor that it was it was like shifting gears. You’re doing 55 going down the highway. You get off the highway. You’ve got to shift down to 3rd before you hit that stop sign. Then you have to shift down to 1st before you leave that stop sign. And that’s the journey. You’ve got to keep shifting gears constantly. It’s also better for us if we’re going from 1st to 2nd to 3rd to 4th to 5th to 10th, back down to 8th, back down to 5th, back down to 1st, 3rd, 8th, 10th. You’ve got to move it around. Hitting the same note over and over again is just the same note.
JF: It seems like 4 Square and Play are two very different shows. Do you see any similarity between the 2, or are they totally different?
DB: All improv shows have many things in common. There’s no script. [laughs] You know? There’s that. I think another thing they have in common is that they’re incredibly talented groups of people getting together on purpose, not being put together by a 3rd party, not being asked to handle somebody else’s vision, but rather a group getting together and developing that vision together. One person might have the first kernel of the idea, but everyone else throws their hat in the ring and you get the full idea.
I think one way they’re very different is that Play is far more patient. The scenes are there to be scenes. We do not fuck with the scenes in Play. They have to be there to present information. Whereas in 4 Square, there are times where we can have a fifteen minutes string of group games, the four of us jumping around onstage acting like monkeys, then stopping and acting like we’re playing chess, then singing a song, then going to a board room, then the monkeys come back, then a series of five second scenes that are all related by the first line of dialog.
It that way they’re very, very different, but the similarities way out number the differences.
JF: Where would you like to see improv go in the future?
DB: South America. [laughs] I don’t know.
JF: South America? [laughs] Well, you seem to have some pretty strong opinions on where it should go artistically.
DB: If I had my druthers, there’d be a lot fewer of us. I appreciate that so many people are interested in it. If it weren’t such an opening and welcoming community, I wouldn’t have gotten involved in either. But that is probably my number one complaint, that we have too many improvisers. But if we didn’t then most of the shows I do wouldn’t have audiences. To be honest, I prefer to have improvisers, students, and performers in my audiences rather than Joe Blow.
JF: Why is it a problem if there are a lot of improvisers?
DB: I’ve only been in New York seven or eight months now, and I’ve invited people to see shows. I’ve been like ‘hey! Want to come see this show?’ And they’re like ‘Eh, yeah, I’ve already seen improv.’ And that’s the problem with too many improvisers. [People’s] impression of improv is like ‘I’ve seen it.’ It’s like, ‘well, no you haven’t.’ I’m not saying ‘no, you haven’t because you haven’t seen this show.’ It’s just ‘no, you haven’t,’ because you haven’t. You have to realize that even if you watch the same exact group try and do the exact same show every night of the week and some nights it’s going to be brilliant. That’s what’s always drawn me to improv. When I was in Chicago, I spent most of my nights at Improv Olympic watching the same teams over and over again, hoping for that same 10 seconds of bliss, and it happened, often.
Josh Fulton: What’s the background of 4 Square? How did it develop?
Dan Bakkedahl: Peter Gross was doing the ETC at Second City, and John Lutz and Rob Janas were both touring. I had just finished touring, and we were all pretty unhappy with our experience with improv at Second City. We all thought it would be nice to have an outlet, a long-form show at I.O. that would allow us to [push ourselves.]
We had reached a certain level. We had all done Touring Company, and had all understudied and performed on the stages there. I had not yet been put on the Mainstage, but we thought the improv there was kind of weak. We thought that we almost deserved better as far as what to do, so we decided to put a group together. Peter and I toured together, and when Peter left John joined the Touring Company, and when I left Rob joined the Touring Company, so the four of us were all connected that way. Peter, Rob and John were all on JTS Brown together, which was directed by Craig Cackowski. It included Jason Sudeikis, Sarah Gee, Ed Goodman, just an incredible cast of people.
We decided to pull together some of the techniques that they had put together in JTS Brown, along with some of the techniques that Miles Stroth and I used in Zumpf to try to do a four person show to kind of get us out of the humdrum of Second City improv.
JF: So what are some of those techniques that you pooled together?
DB: I think a big part of it is call-backs not having to be linear and story-based, but rather thematic or tangential. I guess would be the term from the Deconstruction. You make a tangential extension. Someone is dealing with an alarm clock problem in one scene, then in the very next scene, or 15 minutes down the road, the same physicality and the same action of getting up and hitting the alarm clock are exhibited, except rather than it being an alarm clock, they’re pushing the button to launch a nuclear attack, or they’re pushing the button to play ‘Deal or No Deal.’ So, one technique was stealing the physicality from one scene and using in another scene in a completely different context.
Another thing would be, which JTS Brown did a lot of, you and I would be in a scene, then Jason Sudeikis would step out in front of me and basically take my character and continue the scene. Nothing changed. It was the same character. The only thing that had changed was the person playing it. We tried to play around with that kind of idea as well, that at any time you could change the scene as you like.
One of the things we did a lot of with 4 Square, which I think we got from JTS Brown, was if Rob Janas and I are in a scene and we’re fishermen. We’re standing on a pier fishing, and John Lutz walks in and addresses both of us, but he addresses us as different characters. We’ve completely changed the scene. We’ve become three fat cats in a board room, having this meeting about funding or whatever. Then John turns around and leaves, then Rob and I go back to being fishermen. So, it’s an edit to this other scene, then he basically edits us again by leaving, back to the scene where we were before.
JF: Had you ever done those kind of transformational edits before?
DB: Yeah, Zumpf was a very technique oriented show as well. Because it was only a two-man show, the only edits could come from somebody who’s already in the scene. So Miles and I would change characters and change scenes simply by changing a small part of your person. If I’m seated, I might cross my legs and start talking a little differently. I’ve just edited the scene, so what we call an internal edit. We brought a lot of that into play in 4 Square as well. We felt that might help move it along. Because in a smaller group, you don’t have six people on the side, ready to jump in at any time. In a lot of our shows three people are in the scene, or four people are in the scene, so the weight of edit is on the people in the scene.
JF: So you guys were an independent team. How did you get a run? Did you contact I.O.?
DB: Yeah, at I.O. they take submissions for shows. If you want to do a show, you submit a form. We knew the 10:30 Sunday night spot was dead. There was nothing in there. There hadn’t been anything in there that had any legs for a long time. So, we went ahead and grabbed that spot. We filled out a form and said here’s what our show is and here are the players.
Peter and Rob and John had all been there for quite a few years by that time. I had been there a good amount of time, but not quite as long as those guys. So, we knew that we’d at least get a shot, and we knew that if we got a shot we would be able to build an audience and build a show that could have some legs.
At some point, Jason Chin, who was in charge of scheduling and stuff at I.O. at the time, he started a new show in the 10:30 spot. Peter Grosz was doing ETC, so he could never get to the theater until 11. So, there was really no point in us having that 10:30 spot. We were always filling that extra space with something else. Jason came along and said he wanted to put another show in there, but our show would be fine. He’s not going to touch it. He’s not going to cancel it. He’s just going to put it a little bit later into the 11:15 spot. We would start at 11:15. It’s a free show, and it’s an open run, because nobody wants that spot.
Once we moved into that 11:15 spot, that’s when we started our own thing. The spot had been used before by Trio, which was Bob Dassie, Rich Talarico, and Stephanie Weir, with great success, because it’s kind of an improvisers spot. It’s a time when only improvisers are going to come watch, which is kind of beneficial to the show.
JF: Did you start to see 4 Square start to have an effect on the improv community? Especially with that time slot? Are people trying to learn how to do transformational edits and stuff?
DB: Oh yeah, for sure. I think we started to see a lot of, not 4 Squares knock offs or anything like that, but you started to see a lot of shows that started to exhibit the same techniques and characteristics. I think Switchboard came out of that, that’s three women, Jean Villipique, Deb Downing, and Rebecca Sohn. Then there were groups like Lanky, which was Hans Holson, Joe Canale, Matt Craig, and I’m forgetting someone. I think Rob was in that group. I’m not sure, but there were a lot of all these other smaller, unisex groups, groups of four or less.
I don’t look at that as ‘oh, they’re copying what’s working.’ What it is we think of those things then we think ‘oh, nobody’s going to come see that.’ Then you see it works and you go ‘well shit, so we can do this. People are going to be interested.’ For so long, I think the stigma was that with any group less than ten, ‘I don’t want to go and see you guys struggle to try to pull off what ten people pull off.’ I feel just the opposite. Having done three years with Miles in Zumpf, two people was the most comfortable experience I’d ever had, until I started doing 4 Square, then that was the most comfortable experience I ever had. The numbers just stack up right.
JF: Did you find it difficult to do transformational edits when you first started? What were some things that helped you get into what 4 Square does?
DB: Well, my experience with Zumpf, basically. Let me take you back to the very beginning of 4 Square. We got together and said ‘well, what do we want to do.’ And we said ‘why don’t we do what you learned in Zumpf, and what you learned in JTS Brown and make a four person show out of it.’ JTS Brown was a ten person cast. Zumpf was a two person cast, so we said let’s mix it together. Let’s meet next Wednesday, bring in an exercise and we’ll work on it. I brought in a technique from Zumpf and we worked on it for a full two hours. Then the next week we said ‘John, bring in a technique from JTS or from your other experiences, and we’ll work on it.’ We all worked on it, then we threw it together with the other thing, and we’d do a piece at the end of the rehearsal. We did that for about two months, where each of us would bring in an excursive each week.
So, I was learning JTS stuff, having watched the show almost every single performance, and I was teaching them Zumpf stuff, having performed in it for three years. How we got comfortable with 4 Square was watching each other’s shows, doing our own shows, then working on it in a classroom.
JF: Can you describe what Play is?
DB: Play is a fully improvised 2 act play.
JF: Who’s in the cast?
DB: There’s Damian Reynolds, TJ Jagadowski, and I’m not even sure if these guys are all still in the show. Damian Reynolds, TJ Jagadowski, Peter Grosz, Deb Downing, Holly Laurent, Alex Fendrich, Jet Eveleth, and myself.
JF: So what techniques from theater do you guys use in the show?
DB: Essentially, the hang-up of a show like that is that plays are about narrative. That can kind of trip you up. Often that’s what we’re taught in improv, if you’re focusing on the narrative of the storyline, you’re going to get in trouble. We have to be true to that, otherwise how can we call ourselves an improvised play?
Bill Arnett was our director for a long time, before we got started. We found that what real plays and what our thing have in common is there’s a central character maybe, or a central theme or something going on, that you can revolve around without having to talk about all the time. People have their own storylines on the side, and because at the beginning of the scene you mention the main character, then you go off on your own thing, talking about your own life and the person right in front of you, you have thereby connected it. You’ve made it a cohesive unit.
JF: So how do you deal with the plot? Is it just committing to your character and that kind of takes care of the plot?
DB: Well, we generally don’t even bother to think about plot. Plot is something by definition that is a plan. It’s predestined. It’s something that you plan out ahead of time, and that’s impossible to do in improv. I think our plot kind of comes out in the end. There’s no plot until it’s over, then you can look back and see what the theme was of the show. I mean, we can identify a theme developing and try to aim for it, but very rarely will we spend time back stage during a show saying ‘ok, well here’s clearly what’s going on. Let’s aim for that,’ because in improv [that’s counter-productive.] Maybe somebody else has learned how to do that, but we just found that any time we tried to purposely aim for ‘hey let’s make it so that Billy dies at the end, and Mr. Campbell comes home and reunites with his wife.’ It’s just too impossible, or too cumbersome to deal with in improvisation. What we would often do is that ‘we know Billy’s a troubled kid. We know Mr. Campbell and Mrs. Campbell are having problems. Go.’ [laughs] That’s all. We only deal with what has already happened. Period. At the intermission break, we’ll talk a little bit about ‘here’s what happened. Here’s what everybody’s names are. Here are some common themes going throughout. Who wants to start the second act?’
You don’t know what the plot is when you go see a movie ahead of time. You see the commercials and you get an idea of what it is. You don’t need to know the plot ahead of time to enjoy something, so the players don’t need to know the plot ahead of time either. We don’t know the plot of any real event in life. We don’t go through life thinking ‘oh today’s the day I get hit by a bus, so let me make sure I’m on the right corner at the right time.’ Life just happens, so that’s the kind of way we treat it with Play too. The life of these characters just happens, and we have to stay on our toes to keep up with it.
JF: What’s the difference between the first act and the second act? Do you guys change locations? Or is it the same location at a different time?
DB: It really depends on the individual piece. We’ve had pieces that were one location the entire time. We had one that was in a garden in the first act. These characters just kind of kept coming in and out and one central character stayed there. It was really more a story about community, then in the second act all the characters had dinner together that night. So it was a very linear, time-wise piece. It was one day, then that night. We’ve had other pieces where it’s completely unrelated. We had a science lab, where something had obviously gone wrong. We didn’t go into what had gone wrong, just that the monkeys were dying. People’s relationships were showing up within the context. We could see that this assistant had sex with this scientist, and that this scientist was clearly planning on killing himself that night. These little idiosyncrasies and personality traits kept popping out. Then in the second act we played the monkeys. We didn’t say ‘hey, we’re monkeys or hey we’re escaping.’ We played people who were in prison. Whether those were actually, directly related or not is left up to the audience member to determine.
There are lots of different kinds of plays. There’s Ionesco who I’m baffled by. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but there are many who love it. There’s a reason why the guy’s considered a master. And it’s absurdist. Then there’s Our Town which has a narrator walking throughout the whole thing, starting action, stopping action. There are so many different kinds of plays. We tried to cast a wide net in the course of the full run. I was there for 7 months probably. Some nights we would have just straight relationship drama plays that had funny moments. Other times we’d have long 1 sceners. We had a lot of bedroom farces. Like in through the out door, lots of big closing doors, and promiscuity, people meeting in the closet and getting caught by someone else. We never know what it will be, but we get into it. We never say ahead of time ‘oh, we’re going to do a farce tonight.’ You just realize when the first word comes out of the first character’s mouth with the way they’re speaking and the way the other person reacts, suddenly we’ve got a farce on our hands.
JF: So these aren’t necessarily even comedies. You could have an entire play without a laugh.
DB: I don’t think we’ve ever had one that didn’t have a laugh. I think they’ve all been comedic. I think that’s another word that’s been fairly misunderstood. There’s drama and there’s comedy. There are a lot of comedies by Shakespeare where there aren’t any laughs in them. They’re comedies because nobody dies.
JF: How has doing Play changed you as an improviser? Or has it changed you?
DB: I think Play kind of brought me back to acting. That was the main reason that we wanted to do this show. We saw that so much of what was being done [didn’t involve real acting.] Again, it had the same kind of birth as 4 Square, where it’s like ‘what’s my main issue with improv right now?’ Well, it’s I don’t believe a fucking word coming out of anybody’s mouth on stage. Everybody’s playing in their improviser voice, and trying to make every line a joke, as opposed to giving the audience a little credit that they might be able to figure out and enjoy something that isn’t spelled out for them.
So, that’s why we started that show. ‘Let’s do a show where we act and the laughs are earned.’ In the old days of Second City, that was being taken [seriously.] They would do a 7 minute scene and the only laugh would come at the end. It was a 7 minute set up for a laugh, then you’d get a huge laugh. And we’ll get that. We’ve had that in Play, where we can go 5 or 6 minutes without a laugh because it’s all building toward something.
JF: Does that influence what you do with John Lutz in 2 Square at all and how you improvise in general? Have you noticed a change?
DB: I think the way I improvise in improvise in 2 Square, the way I improvise in 4 Square, in Play, in Zumpf are all pretty similar, because they’re all the way I improvise. I don’t think we notice the changes happening in ourselves as we improvise. If we’re lucky, we’re getting enough reps and we’re doing enough shows that we don’t realize we’re growing. We just are. I was told before moving to New York: ‘well, you can’t play that shit in New York. They won’t buy that. They want fast, funny, loud.’ I was like ‘well, then they won’t like me.’ Whatever. I don’t give a shit. I’m not going to change the way I improvise because this city does this or this city does that. I didn’t improvise the way I improvised in Chicago because that’s what Chicago liked. Because I can tell you that’s certainly not the way Chicago is. Chicago’s not a lot of very patient, relationship based, realistic moments. It’s just not. It’s a lot of whatever the fuck it is. So coming here people were like ‘you’re going to have to change your game when you go to New York.’ I said ‘I guess people won’t like the show, because I’m not changing how I play. I going to play the way I play.’
You see a lot of this in 2 Square, same as with 4 Square, it’s a balance. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t want to see 45 minutes of loud, fast, funny. Because all it will be is loud and fast. It will kind of cease to be funny to me. Miles had a metaphor that it was it was like shifting gears. You’re doing 55 going down the highway. You get off the highway. You’ve got to shift down to 3rd before you hit that stop sign. Then you have to shift down to 1st before you leave that stop sign. And that’s the journey. You’ve got to keep shifting gears constantly. It’s also better for us if we’re going from 1st to 2nd to 3rd to 4th to 5th to 10th, back down to 8th, back down to 5th, back down to 1st, 3rd, 8th, 10th. You’ve got to move it around. Hitting the same note over and over again is just the same note.
JF: It seems like 4 Square and Play are two very different shows. Do you see any similarity between the 2, or are they totally different?
DB: All improv shows have many things in common. There’s no script. [laughs] You know? There’s that. I think another thing they have in common is that they’re incredibly talented groups of people getting together on purpose, not being put together by a 3rd party, not being asked to handle somebody else’s vision, but rather a group getting together and developing that vision together. One person might have the first kernel of the idea, but everyone else throws their hat in the ring and you get the full idea.
I think one way they’re very different is that Play is far more patient. The scenes are there to be scenes. We do not fuck with the scenes in Play. They have to be there to present information. Whereas in 4 Square, there are times where we can have a fifteen minutes string of group games, the four of us jumping around onstage acting like monkeys, then stopping and acting like we’re playing chess, then singing a song, then going to a board room, then the monkeys come back, then a series of five second scenes that are all related by the first line of dialog.
It that way they’re very, very different, but the similarities way out number the differences.
JF: Where would you like to see improv go in the future?
DB: South America. [laughs] I don’t know.
JF: South America? [laughs] Well, you seem to have some pretty strong opinions on where it should go artistically.
DB: If I had my druthers, there’d be a lot fewer of us. I appreciate that so many people are interested in it. If it weren’t such an opening and welcoming community, I wouldn’t have gotten involved in either. But that is probably my number one complaint, that we have too many improvisers. But if we didn’t then most of the shows I do wouldn’t have audiences. To be honest, I prefer to have improvisers, students, and performers in my audiences rather than Joe Blow.
JF: Why is it a problem if there are a lot of improvisers?
DB: I’ve only been in New York seven or eight months now, and I’ve invited people to see shows. I’ve been like ‘hey! Want to come see this show?’ And they’re like ‘Eh, yeah, I’ve already seen improv.’ And that’s the problem with too many improvisers. [People’s] impression of improv is like ‘I’ve seen it.’ It’s like, ‘well, no you haven’t.’ I’m not saying ‘no, you haven’t because you haven’t seen this show.’ It’s just ‘no, you haven’t,’ because you haven’t. You have to realize that even if you watch the same exact group try and do the exact same show every night of the week and some nights it’s going to be brilliant. That’s what’s always drawn me to improv. When I was in Chicago, I spent most of my nights at Improv Olympic watching the same teams over and over again, hoping for that same 10 seconds of bliss, and it happened, often.
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