Miles Stroth 11/16/06 Part 1
Miles Stroth is a long-time performer and teacher with Improv Olympic. He performed with The Family and in the two person improv show Zumpf with Dan Bakkedahl. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he continues to perform with the Armando show.
JF: Where were you born?
MS: I was born in Oak Park, Illinois.
JF: Is that near Chicago?
MS: Yeah, it's one of the first suburbs west of Chicago. It's right on the boarder.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
MS: Definitely my family. My three older brothers, older sister, younger sister.
JF: Was there a lot of competition for attention or to see who was funniest in the family?
MS: Not really, if there was I wasn't really aware of it. I had three older brothers and they gave me a lot of shit I suppose, probably well-deserved. That's the things with kids. The first thing was sort of the put-down, or being self-depricating. Slamming each other was par for the course.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
MS: I don't know that that happened early at all. That might not have happened until I was in my late 20's or something, when I'd been doing it for a while. I started performing in High School, mainly because I could and there were girls. That's why I started.
JF: What were your interests during that time, before you wanted to become a performer?
MS: I was a basketball player. I got a letter from Ray Meyers saying I could play Big 10 basketball if I wanted to. I was kind of everything but a good student. [laughs] There was a blurb about me in the yearbook back in High School my Freshman year. I was in the chess club. I was in the dance troupe. I was in the choir, the plays, the musicals. I was on the basketball team. It was like 'How does he do all these things?' And my mother was like 'He doesn't go to class!' She was pretty much right.
JF: How did you get involved with improv?
MS: That was when I was twenty-one. I didn't have a lot going on. I said I just wanted to try something. I took a class over at the Player's Workshop, a Second City affiliate, just to see what it was like. Thankfully, I was hit by a car and broke both my legs and laid up for a year and a half, so I had time to think about it. I decided not to continue with the Player's Workshop, because it was just the most terrible kind of simple training, insulting training. It's just not something that needed to be done, I don't think, unless it's being done for people who are mentally slow. Being laid up for a year and a half gave me time about what I want to do with my life. I guess that's when I said I want to be a performer of some kind. I want to be an improviser. When I got better I lied my way into an audition into Second City.
JF: Oh really?
MS: Well, it wasn't exactly lying. I had to convince them that I had some kind of training to audition to their Training Center. It was ridiculous. Rachel Dratch and I auditioned in the same group actually and she didn't make it. Another classic Second City story.
JF: When you got hit by that car and were in the hospital bed, how long had you been studying improv at that point?
MS: A couple months maybe. All I knew was that the classes struck me as stupid. They were a lot of petting an invisible kangaroo in front of you, or passing a tea cup, exploring the space, which was basically walking around the room and getting up into the corners, basically giving the teacher time to drink their coffee and wake up.
JF: So then what about the concept of improv then appealled to you so much that after only a few months you wanted to pursue it more seriously?
MS: I suspected what I had been a part of over there was horse shit, because I had seen some shows at Second City. I remember seeing Dave Pasquesi do a show. He was on the Mainstage at Second City around that time. He just did some small gesture. He was playing a bum, and he conveyed a thought to the other person just by miming that he was asking for a cigarette. It was very realistic and subtle and it just caught my eye. I was like 'that's what I want to do, that kind of thing.' Then I started asking around about how I go about studying it, or go about getting there basically.
JF: What was your experience like in the Second City Training Center? How did you grow from it?
MS: There were some good experiences, but it was more ...how can I describe it? It was more kind of in High School way kind of clique-ish. It never felt quite right. I was learning but slowly. All the improv that was used was used to create sketch. The primary focus was to do improv a little bit to come up with an idea, then try to turn that idea into a sketch, then work on the sketch.
JF: Would that be done in the class? Would you guys improvise scenes then immediately try to write it up?
MS: No, you wouldn't try to immediately write it up in class. The class, it seemed like a lot of the levels was the same thing a lot of the time. It was trying to get you to play some game of improv, or maybe learn something more about improv, but at the end of the class you had to put up a show. So whole idea was to get your material ready up and ready for the show. So, the classes were filled with things like 'oh, that's a keeper. Hold onto that one. Maybe we'll develop that one into one of the scenes to go into our show at the end of the class.' It's not a training center to teach improvisation. It's a training center to use improv to produce a sketch show, so you can't fault them for that.
JF: What did you do after the training center and what brought you to Improv Olympic?
MS: There was a kid in my training center class. I forget his full name. Ben something. He mentioned to me that this other place, Improv Olympic, had this guy named Del Close, who Belushi and all the greats studied with. I had no idea. I saw a show at Chow with Harold teams competing, and it was interesting to me. There was really at that time, that I knew of, nowhere else for study to continue. I had finished my 2 years at Second City and got my t-shirt, so I was looking for another avenue and that was really the only one that I saw being open. So, I signed up to take a class there.
JF: What year is this? Or roughly?
MS: It was probably around 91.
JF: What was your experience at Improv Olympic like, and especially with Del Close?
MS: By the time I got to Del, well, the experience was very good up to that. The first one was Charna, who was very good at introducing somebody to the idea of improv just for improv itself. You started doing scenes right away, instead of all these ridiculous games. It was much more interesting. I enjoyed that. I had Noah Gregoropoulos for my second level. He was interesting. He thought about it more. Then I had Del.
The story I've always told is about Del is the first thing I ever heard him say. We were waiting to start the class and he eventually came in. We were like 'I guess that's Del, the old guy with the beard.' He was clearing his throat and waiting for things to start, then everyone settled down and he was standing on stage. Just then this really hot waitress from Papa Milano's, which is the restaraunt where their classes were at that point, she walked behind the class on her way upstairs to the restaraunt. Del watched her all the way across. He watched her go upstairs, then he turned to the class and said 'well, she was pretty enough to kill.' I remember when he said that it was just like shocking, but I was immediately like 'I'm in. Whatever you have to say, I'm in, because what you just said was wonderfully awful.' I don't know why, but the door opened right then.
Then in class the first time I got on stage, he just reamed me. I played some big character teaching his son how to build a campfire. I over-played the hell out of the character, but I'm like 'I'm playing a big character. Isn't that comedy? A big character?' Del just stopped the scene and said 'what the hell are you doing?' In no uncertain terms calling me out on what I had done. So, I said 'well, I'm playing a big character.' 'Ahhh, comedy. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. No one would ever behave like that. How do you think somebody would behave?' 'Well, they'd probably behave more reasonably.' Then he asked me to just do what you think somebody would actually do. Then I just did a very real scene that wasn't particularly funny, but it wasn't a bad scene. It accomplished what a basic scene should accomplish. It was easier and it felt better. I didn't quite realize what it was yet, but I took the note.
The one thing about Del, especially since that was my first experience with him, everybody else in the improv community had coddled me and coddled everybody, saying things like 'hey, you were up there. Way to go. You tried.' But if Del didn't like something, you heard about it. He was angry at you for having done it. So that was a refreshing change.
JF: Did that ever polarize the class? Could some people just not take that kind of criticism?
MS: There were probably people who didn't enjoy that I'm sure. I don't know any of them any more. Because if you're the kind of student that signed up for a class and you don't want to take notes, why the hell did you sign up for the class? I'd much rather have a class where somebody criticizes my work than just praises it, because that means I've just wasted my money. I knew everything I knew when I came in.
JF: It sounds like working with Del made you a more realistic actor and changed what you wanted from improv a little bit?
MS: It made me a more realistic improviser. I'm making the distinction between improvisation and acting, although they are related. Anyway, in acting in my improvisation, I keyed in more on the idea of being realistic. Del was the one who gave me the idea, and apparently gave everyone the idea in a very clear way, that this was an artform. This wasn't just games to get to punchlines. This was a process. Here's what really attracted me to improv in the first place, and this was really what solidified it for me: no matter what you know in life it counted on stage. It was all useable on stage. In my teenage years, I was kind of of Jack of All Trades, master of none. I liked the idea that I didn't have to focus on just one thing. You could use anything. Anything you were able to do. Anything you knew came into play, and you explore it in this process. That's what Del gave me.
JF: When did you start performing at Improv Olympic?
MS: If I got there in 91, then I was performing either later that year or in 92, because there were only 3 levels and maybe a handful of teams. I got put up with a couple of teams that I sat in with, but I wasn't very good at improv. I was just beginning to understand it. The first 2 shows I did I didn't speak. I stood on the back line, back when we used the back line, then at the end of the show I stepped out and took a bow. 'Alright, that's my show.' Thanked my parents for coming. This is what I'm doing: watching the show with the best seat in the house.
JF: Were you just nervous?
MS: It was partly nerves. It was partly I was put on a team with some people who were pretty good. They moved so quickly to me I didn't know when to get in. When I was trying to think of an idea, there'd be something else going on before I could finish the thought. By then I'd missed my chance. That kept happening. I had some walls to break through for myself. I think it was the 3rd show I was in where I finally spoke, and it got a laugh because it was real and it was true. It was one of those epiphany type moments in improv. This is back during the initial thing in Iran or Iraq. The line was saying all these seemingly unrelated but very smart political things about the war, and I wasn't very politically-minded. Again, I was falling into that spiral of I don't know what they're talking about, so I'm not sure what to say, but I knew I had to say something because I was not going to stand up there for another damn show and take a show. And this was just the opening. I'm already starting to freeze up and it's moving too fast for me, then I just blurted out in the middle of something 'that's the one on the left, right?' That was back when the map was just being put out there all the time, before we had all seen way too much of the Middle Eastern map. That was like birth, speaking on stage for the first time finally. Once I spoke, the walls came tumbling down. I was able to keep speaking, because I was like 'hey, what I say does matter.'
JF: So it was that immediate? During that show, you felt fluid and confident enough to do what you wanted?
MS: No, I felt fluid and confident enough to speak [laughs] and to get into a scene. Basically, I felt confident enough to not stand on the back line through the whole time then take a bow. It took me 2 more years before I felt confident in doing things on stage. I was not a particularly clever or funny person. I was interested in this idea of process and exploration. Some people come in and they're very clever and they're very funny and they succede very quickly in improvisation. I wasn't like that. What was good about that for me was that I figured out formal things that other people weren't paying that much attention to, because I had to figure out how to survive on stage without being funny or clever. I just started noticing what made pieces work, making an edit on time, playing support to someone else's character; these things that to me were more like math. I understood the form of the piece that I was in. I held onto that for a long time, that was the wonderful side-effect. With long-term study of improvisation, you wind up a clever or funny person, because you're surrounded by them. You can't help it.
Because mine was just a formal study, I started piecing apart the great players, saying 'what is it formally that they're doing formally that I can take for myself? I have the form of the piece. Now what can I take from individuals that I can copy or ape that will slowly become something that is my own.' After I started Improv Olympic, it took me another 2 years before I would call myself a competent player. At this point you're looking at, including Second City, I had been doing it 4 years before I felt like I wasn't an idiot on stage.
JF: What were some of the things from other improvisers that you tried to emulate?
MS: Everybody has something. Adam McKay was, I still believe he is, the most inventive improviser I'd ever played with or ever seen. I started thinking 'how is he doing that when he comes up with these wonderful, crazy things? Where is that coming from?' Part of it came from the things that he read. Part of it was these strange connections he would make. I started thinking 'what is it with those connections? What is it to make a strange connection?' I would make up excersizes for myself and sort of train my brain to make connections it wouldn't normally make. I would sit in my room. I lived with my parents until I was twenty seven years old. I would sit up in the attic just saying disparate words and try to create a mental image of them. I would sit there alone and be like 'cat. Clock. How do I put those together?' then I would imagine a clock made out of a cat. I would just put strange little connections together constantly, training my brain to be open to the idea of making a connection with something I didn't expect.
Someone else, Ian Roberts, the way he played straight characters or victims. It was really strong. A lot of my play is straight, absurd based, and a lot of my straight person persona on stage is what I gleamed of Ian way back then.
JF: Did you create any excersizes for that or did you just kind of observe it?
MS: It wasn't as tricky as invention. It had more to do with progressions of reacting to something. When to blow up, when to be suspicious as a straight man, when just recognize something and just call it out, when to go along. A good straight man has to bend and fold with the absurdity of the scene. He still has to be the reality of the scene, but he can't just stand there saying 'this is stupid,' because then the scene wouldn't go anywhere.
JF: That excersize with trying force connections between two disparate things would that help you primarily with initiations or scenework?
MS: That helped me when I thought it was time to invent. Again, that was a silly little excersize. It was something I put myself through. All the excersizes that I teach, basically, are excersizes I've done to myself. I don't make my students do that excersize. I might mention it: 'here's something you can do on your own.' Because you should be thinking of doing things on your own to make yourself better. That was really just toward invention, which is usually the last tool that I use in a scene, because it can be too strange a tool if you use it early. There comes that point in the scene where you have your relationship, you have what's going on, but there's no hook to the scene yet. There's nothing that makes it odd or unique, that's perhaps when it's time to invent, to make a connection to something that you wouldn't normally this moment to, because if you always make connections to the moment that are expected then that's not very interesting.
At first you start by randomly connecting things to that moment and that's interesting enough, but the more you do that the more you sift through all these random connections the more you realize 'wow, there are some random connections are are just really pretty and are really interesting.' What kind of random connections are those? For example, way back when on our team, [The Family], it was different kind of animals. We all hung out after the shows and drank and did bits. We would go like 'a puma is a cool animal. A dog not so cool. But if it's a dog with wolf yellow eyes then that's kind of cool.' What are the cool animals? What are the not so cool animals? A tarantula is funny in a way, but, to me, a brown recluse spider is funnier. It's kind of what it's called. It sounds more sinister.
That's the thing. In a lot of ways, you're training yourself off-stage. You're filling your arsenal. If you're thinking about funny connections and about things that strike you as funny all the time, they're going to be in your brain available when you go on stage. If you're not doing that, they won't be there. That's one of the things I've always said, if you want to be a better improviser, be a more interesting person. It's who you are off the stage that you bring to the stage.
JF: It sounds like it would help a lot with specificity.
MS: Yeah, it would help with that, depending on what you're describing, sure.
JF: So what were you doing before The Family formed and what brought together The Family?
MS: Well, I was on The Victim's Family, that was the first team I was put on. I sat in with 2 teams just for a couple shows, then Charna put together this new team. I don't remember all the names anymore, but I remember most of them. It was me, Noah Gregoropoulos, Matt Meade, Jodi Lennon, Gina something, Pat McCartney, and some blonde kid whose name I can't remember, but that was the original Victim's Family, which Matt Meade wanted to call the Fruit Police. I thought that was also a funny name, but we wound up calling ourselves The Victim's Family.
I played with that team. Eventually, people were put on and kicked off the team, until it became the final incarnation of The Victim's Family, which was: me, Adam McKay, Ali Farahnakian, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Rick Roman, then Rick Roman died in a car crash and we picked up Neil Flynn. We dropped the Victim's out of the Victim's Family. It was too bitter sweet. We called ourselves The Family.
JF: So, how did that happen? How did all of those people gravitate to that team? Was Charna trying to put together a really strong team or did you guys have some say on who came in?
MS: Charna was always trying to put together good teams. We had says in it, but it was largely her decision. There were some pretty big moves that were made back then. The best team when I came through was Blue Velveeta, which for my money is still the best Harold team that ever was. As far as just doing the straight Harold, they were the best. When they left and started to do their own thing, that left this big hole to fill. It was to be the House team. Teams were vying for it. It wound up kind of being between Corky's Callback and The Victim's Family. We would do shows and compete with each other, trying to become the House team.
At one point Matt Besser and Ian Roberts were on Corky's Callback. They became friends with I think it was primarily McKay, and McKay pulled them off that team [laughs], and they came over and played with The Victim's Family. That was the major turning point. You're talking about 2 of the strongest players on their team. We just gutted their team basically. It became pretty clear in probably the next couple months when we were playing a little stronger. [Corky's Callback] just kind of fell off then.
JF: What the point when you guys became "The Family?" When you guys started doing shows that influenced everyone?
MS: What you're talking about I think is when we did '3 Mad Rituals,' that was the show that really turned it around. What I think really turned it around was the way we were doing our Harolds, because we weren't particularly good at doing a classic Harold, in the sense of opening, three scenes, game, three scenes, game, three scenes. We weren't very good at doing openings at the time. We didn't like doing openings as a result of that. We would sort of just do a quick opening, just something totally bizarre that would fall apart. We'd turn it into a big story. The shows were always different, and they were always fast-paced. They had all the elements really that went into 3 Mad Rituals that we did with Del. In 3 Mad Rituals, we basically took everything out of our Harold that we were doing and separated it into two other forms. We did a Harold, a Desconstruction and a Movie as a show. We did it back to back, a half hour, half hour, half hour, an hour and a half of being on stage with two black outs.
I remember Craig Cackowski said 'that was the show that made me want to start there [at Improv Olympic], because that's what I wanted to do.' I think that was the show that built the house over there. That's why Charna called the downstairs room the Family Room cabaret.
JF: Where were you born?
MS: I was born in Oak Park, Illinois.
JF: Is that near Chicago?
MS: Yeah, it's one of the first suburbs west of Chicago. It's right on the boarder.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
MS: Definitely my family. My three older brothers, older sister, younger sister.
JF: Was there a lot of competition for attention or to see who was funniest in the family?
MS: Not really, if there was I wasn't really aware of it. I had three older brothers and they gave me a lot of shit I suppose, probably well-deserved. That's the things with kids. The first thing was sort of the put-down, or being self-depricating. Slamming each other was par for the course.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
MS: I don't know that that happened early at all. That might not have happened until I was in my late 20's or something, when I'd been doing it for a while. I started performing in High School, mainly because I could and there were girls. That's why I started.
JF: What were your interests during that time, before you wanted to become a performer?
MS: I was a basketball player. I got a letter from Ray Meyers saying I could play Big 10 basketball if I wanted to. I was kind of everything but a good student. [laughs] There was a blurb about me in the yearbook back in High School my Freshman year. I was in the chess club. I was in the dance troupe. I was in the choir, the plays, the musicals. I was on the basketball team. It was like 'How does he do all these things?' And my mother was like 'He doesn't go to class!' She was pretty much right.
JF: How did you get involved with improv?
MS: That was when I was twenty-one. I didn't have a lot going on. I said I just wanted to try something. I took a class over at the Player's Workshop, a Second City affiliate, just to see what it was like. Thankfully, I was hit by a car and broke both my legs and laid up for a year and a half, so I had time to think about it. I decided not to continue with the Player's Workshop, because it was just the most terrible kind of simple training, insulting training. It's just not something that needed to be done, I don't think, unless it's being done for people who are mentally slow. Being laid up for a year and a half gave me time about what I want to do with my life. I guess that's when I said I want to be a performer of some kind. I want to be an improviser. When I got better I lied my way into an audition into Second City.
JF: Oh really?
MS: Well, it wasn't exactly lying. I had to convince them that I had some kind of training to audition to their Training Center. It was ridiculous. Rachel Dratch and I auditioned in the same group actually and she didn't make it. Another classic Second City story.
JF: When you got hit by that car and were in the hospital bed, how long had you been studying improv at that point?
MS: A couple months maybe. All I knew was that the classes struck me as stupid. They were a lot of petting an invisible kangaroo in front of you, or passing a tea cup, exploring the space, which was basically walking around the room and getting up into the corners, basically giving the teacher time to drink their coffee and wake up.
JF: So then what about the concept of improv then appealled to you so much that after only a few months you wanted to pursue it more seriously?
MS: I suspected what I had been a part of over there was horse shit, because I had seen some shows at Second City. I remember seeing Dave Pasquesi do a show. He was on the Mainstage at Second City around that time. He just did some small gesture. He was playing a bum, and he conveyed a thought to the other person just by miming that he was asking for a cigarette. It was very realistic and subtle and it just caught my eye. I was like 'that's what I want to do, that kind of thing.' Then I started asking around about how I go about studying it, or go about getting there basically.
JF: What was your experience like in the Second City Training Center? How did you grow from it?
MS: There were some good experiences, but it was more ...how can I describe it? It was more kind of in High School way kind of clique-ish. It never felt quite right. I was learning but slowly. All the improv that was used was used to create sketch. The primary focus was to do improv a little bit to come up with an idea, then try to turn that idea into a sketch, then work on the sketch.
JF: Would that be done in the class? Would you guys improvise scenes then immediately try to write it up?
MS: No, you wouldn't try to immediately write it up in class. The class, it seemed like a lot of the levels was the same thing a lot of the time. It was trying to get you to play some game of improv, or maybe learn something more about improv, but at the end of the class you had to put up a show. So whole idea was to get your material ready up and ready for the show. So, the classes were filled with things like 'oh, that's a keeper. Hold onto that one. Maybe we'll develop that one into one of the scenes to go into our show at the end of the class.' It's not a training center to teach improvisation. It's a training center to use improv to produce a sketch show, so you can't fault them for that.
JF: What did you do after the training center and what brought you to Improv Olympic?
MS: There was a kid in my training center class. I forget his full name. Ben something. He mentioned to me that this other place, Improv Olympic, had this guy named Del Close, who Belushi and all the greats studied with. I had no idea. I saw a show at Chow with Harold teams competing, and it was interesting to me. There was really at that time, that I knew of, nowhere else for study to continue. I had finished my 2 years at Second City and got my t-shirt, so I was looking for another avenue and that was really the only one that I saw being open. So, I signed up to take a class there.
JF: What year is this? Or roughly?
MS: It was probably around 91.
JF: What was your experience at Improv Olympic like, and especially with Del Close?
MS: By the time I got to Del, well, the experience was very good up to that. The first one was Charna, who was very good at introducing somebody to the idea of improv just for improv itself. You started doing scenes right away, instead of all these ridiculous games. It was much more interesting. I enjoyed that. I had Noah Gregoropoulos for my second level. He was interesting. He thought about it more. Then I had Del.
The story I've always told is about Del is the first thing I ever heard him say. We were waiting to start the class and he eventually came in. We were like 'I guess that's Del, the old guy with the beard.' He was clearing his throat and waiting for things to start, then everyone settled down and he was standing on stage. Just then this really hot waitress from Papa Milano's, which is the restaraunt where their classes were at that point, she walked behind the class on her way upstairs to the restaraunt. Del watched her all the way across. He watched her go upstairs, then he turned to the class and said 'well, she was pretty enough to kill.' I remember when he said that it was just like shocking, but I was immediately like 'I'm in. Whatever you have to say, I'm in, because what you just said was wonderfully awful.' I don't know why, but the door opened right then.
Then in class the first time I got on stage, he just reamed me. I played some big character teaching his son how to build a campfire. I over-played the hell out of the character, but I'm like 'I'm playing a big character. Isn't that comedy? A big character?' Del just stopped the scene and said 'what the hell are you doing?' In no uncertain terms calling me out on what I had done. So, I said 'well, I'm playing a big character.' 'Ahhh, comedy. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. No one would ever behave like that. How do you think somebody would behave?' 'Well, they'd probably behave more reasonably.' Then he asked me to just do what you think somebody would actually do. Then I just did a very real scene that wasn't particularly funny, but it wasn't a bad scene. It accomplished what a basic scene should accomplish. It was easier and it felt better. I didn't quite realize what it was yet, but I took the note.
The one thing about Del, especially since that was my first experience with him, everybody else in the improv community had coddled me and coddled everybody, saying things like 'hey, you were up there. Way to go. You tried.' But if Del didn't like something, you heard about it. He was angry at you for having done it. So that was a refreshing change.
JF: Did that ever polarize the class? Could some people just not take that kind of criticism?
MS: There were probably people who didn't enjoy that I'm sure. I don't know any of them any more. Because if you're the kind of student that signed up for a class and you don't want to take notes, why the hell did you sign up for the class? I'd much rather have a class where somebody criticizes my work than just praises it, because that means I've just wasted my money. I knew everything I knew when I came in.
JF: It sounds like working with Del made you a more realistic actor and changed what you wanted from improv a little bit?
MS: It made me a more realistic improviser. I'm making the distinction between improvisation and acting, although they are related. Anyway, in acting in my improvisation, I keyed in more on the idea of being realistic. Del was the one who gave me the idea, and apparently gave everyone the idea in a very clear way, that this was an artform. This wasn't just games to get to punchlines. This was a process. Here's what really attracted me to improv in the first place, and this was really what solidified it for me: no matter what you know in life it counted on stage. It was all useable on stage. In my teenage years, I was kind of of Jack of All Trades, master of none. I liked the idea that I didn't have to focus on just one thing. You could use anything. Anything you were able to do. Anything you knew came into play, and you explore it in this process. That's what Del gave me.
JF: When did you start performing at Improv Olympic?
MS: If I got there in 91, then I was performing either later that year or in 92, because there were only 3 levels and maybe a handful of teams. I got put up with a couple of teams that I sat in with, but I wasn't very good at improv. I was just beginning to understand it. The first 2 shows I did I didn't speak. I stood on the back line, back when we used the back line, then at the end of the show I stepped out and took a bow. 'Alright, that's my show.' Thanked my parents for coming. This is what I'm doing: watching the show with the best seat in the house.
JF: Were you just nervous?
MS: It was partly nerves. It was partly I was put on a team with some people who were pretty good. They moved so quickly to me I didn't know when to get in. When I was trying to think of an idea, there'd be something else going on before I could finish the thought. By then I'd missed my chance. That kept happening. I had some walls to break through for myself. I think it was the 3rd show I was in where I finally spoke, and it got a laugh because it was real and it was true. It was one of those epiphany type moments in improv. This is back during the initial thing in Iran or Iraq. The line was saying all these seemingly unrelated but very smart political things about the war, and I wasn't very politically-minded. Again, I was falling into that spiral of I don't know what they're talking about, so I'm not sure what to say, but I knew I had to say something because I was not going to stand up there for another damn show and take a show. And this was just the opening. I'm already starting to freeze up and it's moving too fast for me, then I just blurted out in the middle of something 'that's the one on the left, right?' That was back when the map was just being put out there all the time, before we had all seen way too much of the Middle Eastern map. That was like birth, speaking on stage for the first time finally. Once I spoke, the walls came tumbling down. I was able to keep speaking, because I was like 'hey, what I say does matter.'
JF: So it was that immediate? During that show, you felt fluid and confident enough to do what you wanted?
MS: No, I felt fluid and confident enough to speak [laughs] and to get into a scene. Basically, I felt confident enough to not stand on the back line through the whole time then take a bow. It took me 2 more years before I felt confident in doing things on stage. I was not a particularly clever or funny person. I was interested in this idea of process and exploration. Some people come in and they're very clever and they're very funny and they succede very quickly in improvisation. I wasn't like that. What was good about that for me was that I figured out formal things that other people weren't paying that much attention to, because I had to figure out how to survive on stage without being funny or clever. I just started noticing what made pieces work, making an edit on time, playing support to someone else's character; these things that to me were more like math. I understood the form of the piece that I was in. I held onto that for a long time, that was the wonderful side-effect. With long-term study of improvisation, you wind up a clever or funny person, because you're surrounded by them. You can't help it.
Because mine was just a formal study, I started piecing apart the great players, saying 'what is it formally that they're doing formally that I can take for myself? I have the form of the piece. Now what can I take from individuals that I can copy or ape that will slowly become something that is my own.' After I started Improv Olympic, it took me another 2 years before I would call myself a competent player. At this point you're looking at, including Second City, I had been doing it 4 years before I felt like I wasn't an idiot on stage.
JF: What were some of the things from other improvisers that you tried to emulate?
MS: Everybody has something. Adam McKay was, I still believe he is, the most inventive improviser I'd ever played with or ever seen. I started thinking 'how is he doing that when he comes up with these wonderful, crazy things? Where is that coming from?' Part of it came from the things that he read. Part of it was these strange connections he would make. I started thinking 'what is it with those connections? What is it to make a strange connection?' I would make up excersizes for myself and sort of train my brain to make connections it wouldn't normally make. I would sit in my room. I lived with my parents until I was twenty seven years old. I would sit up in the attic just saying disparate words and try to create a mental image of them. I would sit there alone and be like 'cat. Clock. How do I put those together?' then I would imagine a clock made out of a cat. I would just put strange little connections together constantly, training my brain to be open to the idea of making a connection with something I didn't expect.
Someone else, Ian Roberts, the way he played straight characters or victims. It was really strong. A lot of my play is straight, absurd based, and a lot of my straight person persona on stage is what I gleamed of Ian way back then.
JF: Did you create any excersizes for that or did you just kind of observe it?
MS: It wasn't as tricky as invention. It had more to do with progressions of reacting to something. When to blow up, when to be suspicious as a straight man, when just recognize something and just call it out, when to go along. A good straight man has to bend and fold with the absurdity of the scene. He still has to be the reality of the scene, but he can't just stand there saying 'this is stupid,' because then the scene wouldn't go anywhere.
JF: That excersize with trying force connections between two disparate things would that help you primarily with initiations or scenework?
MS: That helped me when I thought it was time to invent. Again, that was a silly little excersize. It was something I put myself through. All the excersizes that I teach, basically, are excersizes I've done to myself. I don't make my students do that excersize. I might mention it: 'here's something you can do on your own.' Because you should be thinking of doing things on your own to make yourself better. That was really just toward invention, which is usually the last tool that I use in a scene, because it can be too strange a tool if you use it early. There comes that point in the scene where you have your relationship, you have what's going on, but there's no hook to the scene yet. There's nothing that makes it odd or unique, that's perhaps when it's time to invent, to make a connection to something that you wouldn't normally this moment to, because if you always make connections to the moment that are expected then that's not very interesting.
At first you start by randomly connecting things to that moment and that's interesting enough, but the more you do that the more you sift through all these random connections the more you realize 'wow, there are some random connections are are just really pretty and are really interesting.' What kind of random connections are those? For example, way back when on our team, [The Family], it was different kind of animals. We all hung out after the shows and drank and did bits. We would go like 'a puma is a cool animal. A dog not so cool. But if it's a dog with wolf yellow eyes then that's kind of cool.' What are the cool animals? What are the not so cool animals? A tarantula is funny in a way, but, to me, a brown recluse spider is funnier. It's kind of what it's called. It sounds more sinister.
That's the thing. In a lot of ways, you're training yourself off-stage. You're filling your arsenal. If you're thinking about funny connections and about things that strike you as funny all the time, they're going to be in your brain available when you go on stage. If you're not doing that, they won't be there. That's one of the things I've always said, if you want to be a better improviser, be a more interesting person. It's who you are off the stage that you bring to the stage.
JF: It sounds like it would help a lot with specificity.
MS: Yeah, it would help with that, depending on what you're describing, sure.
JF: So what were you doing before The Family formed and what brought together The Family?
MS: Well, I was on The Victim's Family, that was the first team I was put on. I sat in with 2 teams just for a couple shows, then Charna put together this new team. I don't remember all the names anymore, but I remember most of them. It was me, Noah Gregoropoulos, Matt Meade, Jodi Lennon, Gina something, Pat McCartney, and some blonde kid whose name I can't remember, but that was the original Victim's Family, which Matt Meade wanted to call the Fruit Police. I thought that was also a funny name, but we wound up calling ourselves The Victim's Family.
I played with that team. Eventually, people were put on and kicked off the team, until it became the final incarnation of The Victim's Family, which was: me, Adam McKay, Ali Farahnakian, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Rick Roman, then Rick Roman died in a car crash and we picked up Neil Flynn. We dropped the Victim's out of the Victim's Family. It was too bitter sweet. We called ourselves The Family.
JF: So, how did that happen? How did all of those people gravitate to that team? Was Charna trying to put together a really strong team or did you guys have some say on who came in?
MS: Charna was always trying to put together good teams. We had says in it, but it was largely her decision. There were some pretty big moves that were made back then. The best team when I came through was Blue Velveeta, which for my money is still the best Harold team that ever was. As far as just doing the straight Harold, they were the best. When they left and started to do their own thing, that left this big hole to fill. It was to be the House team. Teams were vying for it. It wound up kind of being between Corky's Callback and The Victim's Family. We would do shows and compete with each other, trying to become the House team.
At one point Matt Besser and Ian Roberts were on Corky's Callback. They became friends with I think it was primarily McKay, and McKay pulled them off that team [laughs], and they came over and played with The Victim's Family. That was the major turning point. You're talking about 2 of the strongest players on their team. We just gutted their team basically. It became pretty clear in probably the next couple months when we were playing a little stronger. [Corky's Callback] just kind of fell off then.
JF: What the point when you guys became "The Family?" When you guys started doing shows that influenced everyone?
MS: What you're talking about I think is when we did '3 Mad Rituals,' that was the show that really turned it around. What I think really turned it around was the way we were doing our Harolds, because we weren't particularly good at doing a classic Harold, in the sense of opening, three scenes, game, three scenes, game, three scenes. We weren't very good at doing openings at the time. We didn't like doing openings as a result of that. We would sort of just do a quick opening, just something totally bizarre that would fall apart. We'd turn it into a big story. The shows were always different, and they were always fast-paced. They had all the elements really that went into 3 Mad Rituals that we did with Del. In 3 Mad Rituals, we basically took everything out of our Harold that we were doing and separated it into two other forms. We did a Harold, a Desconstruction and a Movie as a show. We did it back to back, a half hour, half hour, half hour, an hour and a half of being on stage with two black outs.
I remember Craig Cackowski said 'that was the show that made me want to start there [at Improv Olympic], because that's what I wanted to do.' I think that was the show that built the house over there. That's why Charna called the downstairs room the Family Room cabaret.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home