Todd Stashwick 11/15/06 Part 2

JF: So how long did you work with those guys?


TS: I hung out with them in Scotland. We were there for a month and I saw them early on. I just started hanging out with them and picking their brains. I came back from Scotland that summer with a really reinvigorated creative eye. It sort of put to rest everything that I had done before that. Not put to rest, but at least it sort of closed it off, and I said 'ok, you're done doing things like that. The world has changed for you.' [laughs] So, I moved to New York. While I was in New York, I said 'ok, I want to improvise. I don't know what I want to do, but I know that I don't want to do scene, scene, black-out, black-out, scene, scene. Harold. Give Me a Line. Party Quirks.' [laughs] I knew that I wanted to do something fun, more theatrical and probably physical.

In 96, I was in New York, living with a guy I went through Second City with: Kevin Scott. John Theis had also moved to New York. I said to these guys I wanted to do a slash-and-burn, more physical improvisation show, that's kind of where the name Burn Manhattan came from. I called up Adam [McKay], who had been dating Shira [Piven] at the time. He was working for Saturday Night Live and I knew that he had really nice experimental views on improvisation, which he had been doing in Chicago with Del and the UCB and all that. Adam said, 'well, my girlfriend Shira has been working with experimenting with improvisation.' So, I had lunch with Shira and pitched my idea to her. She said great, and we started rehearsing and didn't know where we were going. It was me and John, and Mark, our musical director, and Kevin Scott, then we brought in Matt [Higgins] and Jay [Rhoderick].

Shira started bringing in all this physical, organic-style, Spolin work. Shira's very steeped in Commedia and Viola Spolin. We brought fast and funny stuff from the Second City. That was kind of how Burn Manhattan got born. It was a synthesis of different styles, between what I saw with the Rejects, what I knew about Second City and Improv Olympic, and Shira's Spolin work, and those other guys' mask work and Commedia D'ell Arte. Bringing it all together and spitting it out onto a stage, putting real raw, Spolin-based improvisation into a 40 minute set, that was the genesis of Burn Manhattan, where I truly felt like I was going out there and doing something I had never done before. I don't know other people had been doing this off and on in other places, but it was brand new to me and brand new to the things I had learned in Chicago. It was my second awakening towards improvisation.



JF: So what is Spolin-based improv and how is it different from IO or Second City?


TS: The Spolin DNA is in all improv. You can't get around it. To address specifically Spolin-based improvisation, it's connecting to your environment, observing your partner, grounding yourself in a where, in activity, in a character, exploring the relationship. She's got a game to address every aspect of improvisation and a method to teach it.



JF: And it winds up being more physical typically?


TS: Physical in that she wants to know what you're doing in the scene. You're not just standing and talking. You are unpacking groceries. You're building a bunker. You're doing something. We engage in activities while we have relationships, and often we can express our relationships by how we're doing that activity. If you're building a barn while angry, you're going to hammer differently, and if you hammer differently, it's going to cause complications, and deepen the relationship and heighten the emotional stakes. You're going to explore things in the context of your environment. It's how the character shapes the space. How the room is shaped. What is the relationship, and deepen all those things.



JF: I've heard people talk about specific things they've seen Burn Manhattan do, like one time some was walking up a spiral staircase and you guys formed the stairs for the person to actually rise up and get off the ground. How do you guys encourage that and work on that in practice?


TS: You're limited only by yourself. What are your parameters? In rehearsals, we would explore what we could create. Once we had 'The First Flight of Orville Wright,' I believe, and Kevin Scott was on a chair. We turned the chair upside-down. Kevin laid on it and grabbed a hold like it was the first byplane. Me, Jay and Matt grabbed the sides of the chair, then John came in as Wilbur Wright instructing him what it would be like to go down the hill. We then picked Kevin up and flew the chair over the audience.

In rehearsal, we would take the chairs and would have entire weeks of rehearsal dedicated to 'how many different ways can we use these chairs?' 'What different things can the chairs be?' 'What different locations?' 'How can we recreate a car crash with someone crashing through the window?' 'How do we do swimming?' I think a lot of that, for me, came from Rejects Revenge. Watching those guys create passages and different ways of showing locations. Most of it would come in performance, but what we did was create physical language that we all shared. So, when it came time to perform, we understood the mechanics of how we worked together. If someone's over here, then I go over there, then great, that becomes stairs, then we would fine-tune it in performance. We rarely would do something that we did in rehearsal again on-stage, but we opened up the possibilities in rehearsal, so that we knew how to immediately work together physically to create something.



JF: Were there anythings that you tried to work on and you were like 'I don't know how to represent this physically. It's just too difficult?'


TS: No, because you never knew what you couldn't do. We always said 'there's always a way. There's always a way.' Again, most of it was discovered in performance. We suddenly would have to become these things. So, you just find a way with your partners through mirroring and trust to create those things. There were never times when we said 'we didn't pull that off,' or 'that was difficult,' because it was what it was. It was whatever happened to be in that show, that's what was happening. It was never like 'it should have been this,' or 'it could have been that.'



JF: Could you describe the typical Burn Manhattan show?


TS: Scott would make video that would have some sort of political bent, with graphics flying in and electronic music. We would project that. While that was projecting, we, dressed in our black suits and black ties, would flank the stage. At a certain point in the music, we would take the stage, and discover each other in space, mirroring, creating shapes, just building little moments, then abandoning them, keeping the kinetic energy going, until we would sort of spiral into one point which would be the opening scene if you will. The video would fade out. Mark Levinson would start up with the piano. Then we would kind of cycle through ideas create scenes from monologues and songs and shapes and whatnot for a good fifteen minutes, then at a certain point the show would sort of double back on itself. The Harold is the blueprint, I think, for all long-form improvisation. It sort of sets up the rules. Although we didn't have any strict structure, just what we were discovering in performance. As the show would go, we would discover characters, then the show would start to mirror itself, calling back characters, rediscovering, reinvesting and reinvestigating what we discovered earlier until ideally it would all coalesced into an image that we got from the opening.



JF: Interesting. A closing image?


TS: Yeah, you have an opening a physical shape. Somebody would be held up above somebody's head and another person is in a chair. You're not exactly sure what it means. You discover what the scene is slowly. The whole show would go on, and 45 minutes later we suddenly found out what led up to that event. Why these people were standing on a chair. Why is this person being held above people's heads. What that guy is doing squating over there. You find out what a show means by going through the whole show.



JF: And would you guys freeze in an image to end the show?


TS: You know, it was never decided. We had a guy working lights, but how the show ended was different from week to week to week. Sometimes it was one person saying one line and it was a fast black-out. Sometimes it was almost screaming and wailing to death and it was a slow fade. It never ended the same twice.



JF: How would you guys edit scenes?


TS: Escalation for the most part. It would transform. Let's say you're doing a scene in a wedding chapel. There's 2 people creating the wedding chapel, while one couple is standing inside the wedding chapel. When that scene is done, the couple will fade out. The people who were creating the chapel will discover the characters they are based on their physical positions, but they will be in a different location.



JF: Would you guys ever take the positions and stuff that you were doing before the starting scene and use those positions at different times in your show?


TS: Oh absolutely. We never took suggestions.



JF: So the movement was like your opening.


TS: Absolutely.



JF: Ok. What was New York improv like at the time you were doing Burn Manhattan?


TS: I think the main people in the New York improv scene were Chicago City Limits, Gotham, Tom Soder. It was very game-based, short-form improv. A little bit of the Harold was sneaking into stuff. We moved there at the same time the UCB moved there. I think our two groups were able to show an alternative to improvisation. We moved there at the right time. There wasn't anything like this already going on. It would have been harder for Burn Manhattan to come out of Chicago, because there's just so many groups. It was better for us to stand out in New York. I guess, on some levels we didn't really know what we were doing, therefore nobody else could know either. [laughs] We knew what we weren't doing, and that was short-form improvisation.



JF: What kind of impact do you think that you guys had on the New York improv community?


TS: Ahhhhh, I hazard to comment. I don't know, but I know that we got to teach a lot of classes, and we got to do a lot of shows and a lot of people enjoyed what we did. As far as impact, there was a group called 'Goga' that performed there, a group called Johnny Lunchpail performed there. We had a direct lineage with those groups. Centralia still performs in New York, and that's basically Burn Manhattan.

I don't know about impact. I think in a grander sense of things, I know there's organic improvisation being done in Seattle. The two biggest things for me have been moving to L.A. and opening the Hothouse, which gave me a homebase for this philosophy of improvisation. Now we've had many, many students go through. Then I was invited a year and a half ago to go to Liverpool and teach the Beast, which is the form that Burn Manhattan does, to Rejects Revenge. They created a show called Hoof! with it. So, the thing that they inspired 9 years ago that I turned into an improvisation, I went back and taught to them, so they could do their shows but improvised.



JF: Were the same 3 people there?


TS: I got to work with Ann and Tim, two of the three people. One of them moved to Japan. That was really thrilling. Now they are touring England with their show. There's some talk about them coming to L.A. and some workshops here at the Hothouse and performing in L.A., so it sort of full-circled the work.



JF: So what are the classes like that you try to teach, both with Burn Manhattan and the Hothouse? How do they differ from classes that people may have taken elsewhere?


TS: At Second City, like I said, the goal is to do sketch comedy. The goal of Improv Olympic and the UCB is to teach the Harold. The goal of the Hothouse is to teach the Beast. So, we have different games and different and excersizes and focii, after you get done with teaching people the basics, which I think every improv school is going to teach. We're all just teaching people how to play, no matter what school you go to. How you play and how you want to play differs from school to school to school.

Obviously, our emphasis is very big on physicality and shaping the space and creating those relationships through characters, environment, action and object work, and a sense of theatricality that you might not find at other schools.



JF: What are maybe some specific excersizes that you guys do to kind of distinguish what you guys do from what other people might do?


TS: Well, transformation is a big thing. We teach a lot of transformation physical, verbal, emotional. We also inject a good bit of Commedia D'ell Arte into our work, try to give things stakes emotionally. We teach people how to improvise for 40 minutes without a suggestion. There are a lot of specifics that go into getting somebody to do that, getting them to listen with their whole body, with their eyes, and really, really rely on the ensemble for their inspiration.



JF: How do you find experienced improvisers respond to that when they're in your classes? It seems like it might be a total shock to some of them.


TS: It's just another tool. It's just another way to do it. It's a different aesthetic. We're all just trying to teach people how to play. I think on some level it might be like learning to drive in England. It's like you know how a car works, but the traffic is coming from the opposite direction, so it's going to take time to readjust. I've found that some people feel liberated by it. Some people feel it's not for them. It's definitely a different perspective, right or wrong. I find it much less competitive. Some people really respond to competition and it helps makes them better, and other people don't want competition, because it's such a fragile thing to improvise, learning to trust your partners and being inspired by them. It breeds a different kind of improviser.

We don't get a lot of quote unquote improvisers at the Hothouse. There are places that those people gravitate to, and I was one of those people in Chicago. The Hothouse tends to appeal to people that never thought themselves improvisers. Maybe it's because it doesn't have that comedic emphasis. It's not a comedy theater like I think a lot of the other schools have a reputation for being. It's much more about teaching the actor how to improvise, regardless of what your goals are. You don't want a show on Comedy Central. You don't want to get on Saturday Night Live but you want to learn how to improvise. It gives people a place to feel non-competitive in place where they can learn want to learn.



JF: Can I call what you guys do 'organic' improv?


TS: William McAvoy coined that phrase in an interview years ago. My first response what 'I thought all improv was supposed to be organic,' but I think as a tool to delineate what we teach and what other people may teach, that's fine. We've been using the phrase ever since.



JF: Do you prefer to do organic improv with smaller groups? Do you find there's a difference in the way that it works with groups of different sizes?


TS: That's true of everything. We found, and probably just because I got spoiled with Burn Manhattan, that the ideal ensemble group tended to be 5 people, because it was a little off-balance. It's enough for two-person scenes, then someone to come in and edit. It's enough to create a crowd. It's enough where people can share stage time. There's not a lot of competition to get stage time. I think the larger the group the harder it becomes, doesn't mean it's impossible. More people in a group lends itself to competition. I've done 2 person shows. I've done 3 person shows. I've done 5 person shows. I've done 7 person shows. I did a 20 person piece once at a festival, and it was amazing.



JF: Really?


TS: Yeah, the techniques that we teach how to organize yourselves simply onstage, how to make each other look good apply whether there are 2 people, 3 people, 20 people.



JF: I imagine it'd be pretty easy to make somebody fly with 20 people.


TS: [laughs] Oh absolutely.