Eric Hunicutt - Part 2 - 2/14/07
JF: Do you think that’s helped you? Or hurt you? Or both?
EH: What’s that?
JF: People needing to like what you do.
EH: Gosh, both. I think having that be important to me makes me worry a lot, but it also makes me appreciate and want to give back to the people I play with. I think that’s why I connect so much to this kind of work, because it’s about the people you’re up there with, what you can do together. I love getting somebody’s eyes and they’re like ‘I want to hear what you have to say on stage right now,’ or ‘Let’s build this together.’ I love that. I love it when that happens, but at the same time if I feel like I’ve let people down or I’m not up to speed with the people I’m supposed to play with ...I think I assume people are being more judgmental than they are probably, so that’s where it hurts.
JF: So, when did you start performing? Was it at IO? The Playground?
EH: The first shows that I did were the Second City Conservatory shows. I went through classes there and at IO at the same time, the summer of 99 through the end of the year. Then my 5B show at IO was the following spring, because it was prom season. The show got put up at midnight on Friday upstairs at IO. At 1 o’clock, if you were the second group up, you could count on half the audience getting up and leaving. So, these floods of high school kids would come to the show after prom, then at 12:45 or 1 or whenever they had to be back for curfew, the entire audience would get up and leave. It was hilarious.
JF: How come kids would go to Improv Olympic after prom?
EH: I think it was free. Or, I don’t know. I don’t know if some of the burbs have their proms downtown or what. It’s probably like ‘Oh, we can go to this thing and it’s all ages, so we can get in, and it happens late night,’ so they would come to those shows, but they were some pretty bad shows. I think my first IO team was a lot later than that, because I didn’t get put on a team after class. I guess I started performing and have been performing regularly since the middle of 2000.
JF: What was your first Harold team like?
EH: I got put on a team that already existed, so I wasn’t on it from the very beginning. I knew some of the people from my classes. Again, again, a theme, it was very intimidating. Now, it was just like ‘Ok, well, now do it. Just do it.’ I was really grateful to have the opportunity, but I was really, really in my head about it, because of the fact that out of classes I hadn’t been asked to be on a team. You can put all this weight on it when that’s all you’re doing. It’s a lot like high school in that way, where little things mean a lot. It was like the girl I asked out said no, but now she’s like ‘Oh, come hang out with me and my friends.’ That’s a terrible metaphor, but I guess it kind of felt like that. And I was super-young at that point, twenty two or twenty three. It just seemed like such a big deal. In retrospect, it was a bump if anything. A bump that taught me something I needed to know, which was hang in there. Do your thing.
JF: So, how did you get put on the team then? Did you audition?
EH: I went to IO and said ‘I went through the program, and I wasn’t put on a team. I want to know what I need to do to stay active. I want to be involved. I like what this place is about. I really want to perform here, and I really want to be a part of it. Should I retake the classes, or go elsewhere? What’s the story here? How do I stay involved and give myself a shot?’ They were like ‘Oh, why don’t you go sit in with this team?’ So, it worked out well.
JF: Problem solved.
EH: Problem solved. So, who knows? That was definitely the first time I learned maybe it’s good to put out what you want once in a while, which is a hard thing for me to do. I’m not good at asking people for opportunities. I’m definitely not good at marketing myself, which I’m finding out here. It’s one of those things I constantly have to get better at.
JF: What was the name of that team?
EH: It was either one of two. I think it was Bob, from Accounting. I think. That team ended up getting broken up. I was on three teams in six months after that. They just kept getting broken up, so you restart with a different one. It’s like one of those guys who gets traded a lot, one of those NBA players or I guess minor league players who’s on every team, that’s what it felt like. But it was good, because I was playing with a lot of different people.
JF: Why were they broken up that quickly?
EH: I have no idea. A lot of times when people get added to groups it’s because that group needs new energy, or needs another ingredient. If that doesn’t cause the team to gel in the right way, it’s like ‘Ok, well that was our attempt to throw that in there, to see what’s ailing it.’ I think with several of those they’d be around and it was an attempt to see if maybe it could work, and it didn’t work.
JF: So, what did you do before The Reckoning and how did you grow as an improviser during that time?
EH: Before The Reckoning I just finished playing with two different teams for about a year each, one called Minor Relatives and Local 914. Local 914 got broken up. The Reckoning was about six months old at that point. [The Reckoning was] the real turning point for me in becoming someone who was willing to take more risks and willing to be myself, willing to be the improviser that I actually am rather than fit into something or to be the improvisers that I admired. Prior to that, I think I was still trying to figure out what kind of player I wanted to be. Being with them really allowed me to [pursue that]. It’s like being in a good relationship. You get to be yourself finally.
JF: How did they encourage that in you?
EH: The level of willingness to try anything, the willingness to fail together or succeed together is incredible with that group of people. We’re all friends. That’s a team that’s never given each other notes back stage, or complained about somebody making a move that took focus from another person. You would never hear any of go ‘You ruined my bit,’ or ‘You edited my scene too early.’ It’d just never happen. It was always whatever was going on was exactly what was supposed to be going on. There was no judgment. There was definitely a high standard after a while, because we found ourselves doing things that we liked and were like ‘Let’s do more of that.’ But there was never judgment, and there was never ego.
JF: How did you guys try to encourage that? Did you try to develop it within the group or was it just there because of the personalities of the players?
EH: I think we tried to develop it. We tried to spend a lot of time with each other off stage and really know each other. We also tried to push each other to do things that were scary. I remember rehearsals where we’d pick another person in the group and try to perform like them. ‘Ok, tonight I’m going to perform like Holly.’ That kind of stuff was so cool, because it really made you appreciate what that person brought. It also made you realize that you can’t get caught as role players, or else it stagnates. We got to work with great people. Our coach Shad was always our biggest cheerleader, so supportive. For a while, we were doing two rehearsals a week, one with him and one with TJ, trying to work different things in different rehearsals and see where they met in the middle. He was really supportive of us working with different people and trying to do new things. Always saying ‘Yeah, go. Do that. Try that.’ I think once we all realized that we were all cool with succeeding together and failing together it was something we tried to capitalize on. We tried to make that a goal. We’ll all just go big and see what happens.
JF: Were you guys ten people at that point?
EH: Yeah, we were ten people.
JF: How important do you think the off stage aspect of being friends to being a good group?
EH: I don’t think it’s a requirement. I’ve played with groups where I didn’t know the people that well off stage. You have to be colleagues. You can’t be enemies. Or maybe you can, I don’t know. I’m sure people pull it off just fine. There are people who are ex’s who play together just fine. But for me, I need to be accepted as a performer on stage and off. I need the respect of the people I play with, or at least the acceptance. [laughs] That speaks to what we were talking about earlier, where I care about whether or not people want to play with me. I care whether or not people want to be around me.
I don’t think it’s a requisite though. I’ve been on groups where it’s very cordial. It’s not like we had picnics and barbeques and the shows were fine. I’ve had better shows and better ensembles with people that I am friends with off stage, because I think I’m more comfortable and willing to be pushed by them and to push them when the lights are up. But I don’t think it’s the secret or anything like that.
JF: Was The Reckoning handpicked? Or were you guys just a normal Harold team at the beginning?
EH: It depends on who you ask. I think that initially it was picked out of classes and then a couple people from other teams. Several people on The Reckoning, that’s their first team. Then a couple other people had been pulled from other teams. Charlie [McCracken] and myself were both added late. I was the last person to join. Once they figured out they had a pretty cool energy going, they added, I think, people that supplemented that well. It certainly wasn’t one of those things where we were doing great shows right off the bat. We had a lot of really crappy shows, and still do I think. I don’t know. I haven’t been there in a while. But really struggling for a good solid year, after I joined them. We had a lot of really bad shows. There was a lot of frustration, not knowing what wasn’t working.
JF: What do you think wasn’t working? And what changed?
EH: I think we were just figuring out how to negotiate the energy of the group. Ten people is a lot to work with. Ten people’s strengths and weaknesses and fears and ideas of what they want the team to be, that’s going to take time to work out. I think everybody wanted it to be something special, so figuring out how to get there as a group helped the growing pains.
JF: What form were you guys working on?
EH: Pretty much Harolds the whole time, but the thing that we really wanted to do was to make each Harold different. Over time it became less and less and less about adhering to that classic structure, and more about trying to use that as our North Star and work the material around what we were doing on any given night. Some nights it was dark. Some nights it was a show that would go to the midpoint, then we’d re-do the scene in the second half or something like that. Definitely, over time it became less important to have it be recognizable as that Harold structure and more important to just have it be engaging and different every night.
JF: You guys had a show where you re-did the scenes of the first half in the second half?
EH: We did a show, I don’t want it to be like ‘We did the perfect show,’ but we did a show at the Dirty South Improv Festival, I think it was two years ago, where the suggestion was ‘palindrome.’ The show began with the opening, worked its way to the middle, then started working its way back and ended with the opening again.
JF: Wow. How did you guys figure out to do that?
EH: I think it happened because we tried crap like that a million times and failed at it. We were pretty good after shows at going ‘Here’s what we did. Was anybody trying to do anything that didn’t work, trying introduce this element of it and it got ignored or dropped or not supported properly.’ We really liked doing that. So, I can go ‘Ok, Eddie was trying to make this happen, so next time he tries to make that happen I’ll be more open to that idea.’ I think that particular show was a result of falling short on bigger ideas in other shows, and having had those conversations of: ‘Well, ok,’ Del uses this example in an interview, ‘We had the suggestion of chess board. We could have done a light scene, then a dark, a light scene, then a light scene next to each other, instead of just a bunch of scenes about chess.’ Having those discussions lends itself to having shows where you can pull off something that is maybe a little more interesting. In that show, when you see that scene in the middle of the piece repeat the first scene, you go ‘Oh, ok, they’re trying to go back the other way.’ Obviously, it can fall apart at any moment, but for some reason that particular time it didn’t. It worked out. It was a fun one. It was a cool one. It was one of those ones where it was like ‘Oh, alright. We should try to do that more.’
JF: How important is opening? And it sounds like the suggestion is really important to you guys too.
EH: It is. The suggestion is important. The opening is everything for us. We pride ourselves on doing openings that are as much a part of the piece as any scene. We wanted to be a group that was good at openings. So many people hate them. So many people shy away from them. The opening is not something to be endured. It’s the first thing you show your audience. It’s the first thing you do for yourself on stage. It should probably not suck, and you should probably not hate it. That’s a pretty deep hole to get out of, if you hate the first three minutes of the performance.
JF: So is there a typical Reckoning opening?
EH: I think there became one, but I don’t know if that happened on purpose. At some point we realized we were doing a particular style, and we tried to get away from it. I don’t know what they’re doing now, but it involved a lot of scene painting, and setting up these different planes that were somehow related by a common theme, which sounds way more high-brow than it is.
Say the suggestion was remote control. It can be something to the effect of ‘ok, here’s a guy sitting on his couch. He’s watching television instead of talking to his family, who’s in the other room eating dinner. Here’s another guy somewhere else who gets stuck watching the security monitor all night. He doesn’t have any friends or family. He’s named all the people that he watches on the security monitor.’ So, there are these different themes or different ideas that are somehow bonded by the theme of technology replacing relationships or something like that. Our opening became that sort of style. We’d paint these three different people and endow them with things, which would then find their way into the Harold. It sort of introduced theme right away, which was something we became interested in working with. ‘Ok, this whole Harold is going to be about technology, or something like that.’ And a lot of times it was way less interesting than technology. A lot it was like saying fuck a lot or something like that. [laughs] It wasn’t always intellectual. It was often times really ridiculous.
JF: Yeah. ‘On his couch, there’s a man saying fuck. Elsewhere, there’s a man watching a monitor saying fuck.’
EH: Yeah, I think we tried it. If we have our choice, I think we try to shy away from that, try to play a little smarter than that, but at the same time we all have filthy mouths and love blue humor, so it’s bound to seep its way in.
JF: So how did you guys work on getting the theme to be so important to a piece? Were there any concrete steps that you guys took to get away from a standard Harold and make it more open-ended?
EH: Yeah, we had several people who were coaching us who were pushing us to do that. Certainly Shad and TJ were, and we worked with Peter Gwinn for a while on finding ways to make the show something bigger than just a collection of scenes. He would push us to find reasons to break the fourth wall, reasons to come on and be part of the environment. The environment would become really important, rather than just have it be scenes with walk-ons and tags.
I think that had a lot to do with coaching. The coaching got us to a point where we realized how much fun it was for us, so we wanted to do more of it, to the point the where in a lot of shows it got to become hard to have a two person scene in a show. Because there was always someone coming in and being the wind, or someone coming in and being an object, or the beat of a heart. There was a lot of off-stage support with sound effects or objects. Then the focus became ‘ok, how do we do that without overwhelming the relationship? How do we continue to keep the relationship at the forefront of the scene?’ But I think we owe a lot to the coaches we worked with at the beginning.
JF: How important do you think it is for a group to have a sense of self-direction, as opposed to simply being led by a coach? Or is it important?
EH: For people to lead themselves?
JF: For people to develop their own vision together.
EH: I think it’s super important. To me, that’s the point of a group. Your loyalty should be to your group. Your loyalty should be to each other and what you guys are trying to do. That’s if you’re interested in ensemble work. If you’re interested in showcasing yourself, that’s fine, but realize that’s what you’re in for. Be honest as a group: ‘we want to get a tv show’ or ‘we want to do shows we can be proud of.’
EH: What’s that?
JF: People needing to like what you do.
EH: Gosh, both. I think having that be important to me makes me worry a lot, but it also makes me appreciate and want to give back to the people I play with. I think that’s why I connect so much to this kind of work, because it’s about the people you’re up there with, what you can do together. I love getting somebody’s eyes and they’re like ‘I want to hear what you have to say on stage right now,’ or ‘Let’s build this together.’ I love that. I love it when that happens, but at the same time if I feel like I’ve let people down or I’m not up to speed with the people I’m supposed to play with ...I think I assume people are being more judgmental than they are probably, so that’s where it hurts.
JF: So, when did you start performing? Was it at IO? The Playground?
EH: The first shows that I did were the Second City Conservatory shows. I went through classes there and at IO at the same time, the summer of 99 through the end of the year. Then my 5B show at IO was the following spring, because it was prom season. The show got put up at midnight on Friday upstairs at IO. At 1 o’clock, if you were the second group up, you could count on half the audience getting up and leaving. So, these floods of high school kids would come to the show after prom, then at 12:45 or 1 or whenever they had to be back for curfew, the entire audience would get up and leave. It was hilarious.
JF: How come kids would go to Improv Olympic after prom?
EH: I think it was free. Or, I don’t know. I don’t know if some of the burbs have their proms downtown or what. It’s probably like ‘Oh, we can go to this thing and it’s all ages, so we can get in, and it happens late night,’ so they would come to those shows, but they were some pretty bad shows. I think my first IO team was a lot later than that, because I didn’t get put on a team after class. I guess I started performing and have been performing regularly since the middle of 2000.
JF: What was your first Harold team like?
EH: I got put on a team that already existed, so I wasn’t on it from the very beginning. I knew some of the people from my classes. Again, again, a theme, it was very intimidating. Now, it was just like ‘Ok, well, now do it. Just do it.’ I was really grateful to have the opportunity, but I was really, really in my head about it, because of the fact that out of classes I hadn’t been asked to be on a team. You can put all this weight on it when that’s all you’re doing. It’s a lot like high school in that way, where little things mean a lot. It was like the girl I asked out said no, but now she’s like ‘Oh, come hang out with me and my friends.’ That’s a terrible metaphor, but I guess it kind of felt like that. And I was super-young at that point, twenty two or twenty three. It just seemed like such a big deal. In retrospect, it was a bump if anything. A bump that taught me something I needed to know, which was hang in there. Do your thing.
JF: So, how did you get put on the team then? Did you audition?
EH: I went to IO and said ‘I went through the program, and I wasn’t put on a team. I want to know what I need to do to stay active. I want to be involved. I like what this place is about. I really want to perform here, and I really want to be a part of it. Should I retake the classes, or go elsewhere? What’s the story here? How do I stay involved and give myself a shot?’ They were like ‘Oh, why don’t you go sit in with this team?’ So, it worked out well.
JF: Problem solved.
EH: Problem solved. So, who knows? That was definitely the first time I learned maybe it’s good to put out what you want once in a while, which is a hard thing for me to do. I’m not good at asking people for opportunities. I’m definitely not good at marketing myself, which I’m finding out here. It’s one of those things I constantly have to get better at.
JF: What was the name of that team?
EH: It was either one of two. I think it was Bob, from Accounting. I think. That team ended up getting broken up. I was on three teams in six months after that. They just kept getting broken up, so you restart with a different one. It’s like one of those guys who gets traded a lot, one of those NBA players or I guess minor league players who’s on every team, that’s what it felt like. But it was good, because I was playing with a lot of different people.
JF: Why were they broken up that quickly?
EH: I have no idea. A lot of times when people get added to groups it’s because that group needs new energy, or needs another ingredient. If that doesn’t cause the team to gel in the right way, it’s like ‘Ok, well that was our attempt to throw that in there, to see what’s ailing it.’ I think with several of those they’d be around and it was an attempt to see if maybe it could work, and it didn’t work.
JF: So, what did you do before The Reckoning and how did you grow as an improviser during that time?
EH: Before The Reckoning I just finished playing with two different teams for about a year each, one called Minor Relatives and Local 914. Local 914 got broken up. The Reckoning was about six months old at that point. [The Reckoning was] the real turning point for me in becoming someone who was willing to take more risks and willing to be myself, willing to be the improviser that I actually am rather than fit into something or to be the improvisers that I admired. Prior to that, I think I was still trying to figure out what kind of player I wanted to be. Being with them really allowed me to [pursue that]. It’s like being in a good relationship. You get to be yourself finally.
JF: How did they encourage that in you?
EH: The level of willingness to try anything, the willingness to fail together or succeed together is incredible with that group of people. We’re all friends. That’s a team that’s never given each other notes back stage, or complained about somebody making a move that took focus from another person. You would never hear any of go ‘You ruined my bit,’ or ‘You edited my scene too early.’ It’d just never happen. It was always whatever was going on was exactly what was supposed to be going on. There was no judgment. There was definitely a high standard after a while, because we found ourselves doing things that we liked and were like ‘Let’s do more of that.’ But there was never judgment, and there was never ego.
JF: How did you guys try to encourage that? Did you try to develop it within the group or was it just there because of the personalities of the players?
EH: I think we tried to develop it. We tried to spend a lot of time with each other off stage and really know each other. We also tried to push each other to do things that were scary. I remember rehearsals where we’d pick another person in the group and try to perform like them. ‘Ok, tonight I’m going to perform like Holly.’ That kind of stuff was so cool, because it really made you appreciate what that person brought. It also made you realize that you can’t get caught as role players, or else it stagnates. We got to work with great people. Our coach Shad was always our biggest cheerleader, so supportive. For a while, we were doing two rehearsals a week, one with him and one with TJ, trying to work different things in different rehearsals and see where they met in the middle. He was really supportive of us working with different people and trying to do new things. Always saying ‘Yeah, go. Do that. Try that.’ I think once we all realized that we were all cool with succeeding together and failing together it was something we tried to capitalize on. We tried to make that a goal. We’ll all just go big and see what happens.
JF: Were you guys ten people at that point?
EH: Yeah, we were ten people.
JF: How important do you think the off stage aspect of being friends to being a good group?
EH: I don’t think it’s a requirement. I’ve played with groups where I didn’t know the people that well off stage. You have to be colleagues. You can’t be enemies. Or maybe you can, I don’t know. I’m sure people pull it off just fine. There are people who are ex’s who play together just fine. But for me, I need to be accepted as a performer on stage and off. I need the respect of the people I play with, or at least the acceptance. [laughs] That speaks to what we were talking about earlier, where I care about whether or not people want to play with me. I care whether or not people want to be around me.
I don’t think it’s a requisite though. I’ve been on groups where it’s very cordial. It’s not like we had picnics and barbeques and the shows were fine. I’ve had better shows and better ensembles with people that I am friends with off stage, because I think I’m more comfortable and willing to be pushed by them and to push them when the lights are up. But I don’t think it’s the secret or anything like that.
JF: Was The Reckoning handpicked? Or were you guys just a normal Harold team at the beginning?
EH: It depends on who you ask. I think that initially it was picked out of classes and then a couple people from other teams. Several people on The Reckoning, that’s their first team. Then a couple other people had been pulled from other teams. Charlie [McCracken] and myself were both added late. I was the last person to join. Once they figured out they had a pretty cool energy going, they added, I think, people that supplemented that well. It certainly wasn’t one of those things where we were doing great shows right off the bat. We had a lot of really crappy shows, and still do I think. I don’t know. I haven’t been there in a while. But really struggling for a good solid year, after I joined them. We had a lot of really bad shows. There was a lot of frustration, not knowing what wasn’t working.
JF: What do you think wasn’t working? And what changed?
EH: I think we were just figuring out how to negotiate the energy of the group. Ten people is a lot to work with. Ten people’s strengths and weaknesses and fears and ideas of what they want the team to be, that’s going to take time to work out. I think everybody wanted it to be something special, so figuring out how to get there as a group helped the growing pains.
JF: What form were you guys working on?
EH: Pretty much Harolds the whole time, but the thing that we really wanted to do was to make each Harold different. Over time it became less and less and less about adhering to that classic structure, and more about trying to use that as our North Star and work the material around what we were doing on any given night. Some nights it was dark. Some nights it was a show that would go to the midpoint, then we’d re-do the scene in the second half or something like that. Definitely, over time it became less important to have it be recognizable as that Harold structure and more important to just have it be engaging and different every night.
JF: You guys had a show where you re-did the scenes of the first half in the second half?
EH: We did a show, I don’t want it to be like ‘We did the perfect show,’ but we did a show at the Dirty South Improv Festival, I think it was two years ago, where the suggestion was ‘palindrome.’ The show began with the opening, worked its way to the middle, then started working its way back and ended with the opening again.
JF: Wow. How did you guys figure out to do that?
EH: I think it happened because we tried crap like that a million times and failed at it. We were pretty good after shows at going ‘Here’s what we did. Was anybody trying to do anything that didn’t work, trying introduce this element of it and it got ignored or dropped or not supported properly.’ We really liked doing that. So, I can go ‘Ok, Eddie was trying to make this happen, so next time he tries to make that happen I’ll be more open to that idea.’ I think that particular show was a result of falling short on bigger ideas in other shows, and having had those conversations of: ‘Well, ok,’ Del uses this example in an interview, ‘We had the suggestion of chess board. We could have done a light scene, then a dark, a light scene, then a light scene next to each other, instead of just a bunch of scenes about chess.’ Having those discussions lends itself to having shows where you can pull off something that is maybe a little more interesting. In that show, when you see that scene in the middle of the piece repeat the first scene, you go ‘Oh, ok, they’re trying to go back the other way.’ Obviously, it can fall apart at any moment, but for some reason that particular time it didn’t. It worked out. It was a fun one. It was a cool one. It was one of those ones where it was like ‘Oh, alright. We should try to do that more.’
JF: How important is opening? And it sounds like the suggestion is really important to you guys too.
EH: It is. The suggestion is important. The opening is everything for us. We pride ourselves on doing openings that are as much a part of the piece as any scene. We wanted to be a group that was good at openings. So many people hate them. So many people shy away from them. The opening is not something to be endured. It’s the first thing you show your audience. It’s the first thing you do for yourself on stage. It should probably not suck, and you should probably not hate it. That’s a pretty deep hole to get out of, if you hate the first three minutes of the performance.
JF: So is there a typical Reckoning opening?
EH: I think there became one, but I don’t know if that happened on purpose. At some point we realized we were doing a particular style, and we tried to get away from it. I don’t know what they’re doing now, but it involved a lot of scene painting, and setting up these different planes that were somehow related by a common theme, which sounds way more high-brow than it is.
Say the suggestion was remote control. It can be something to the effect of ‘ok, here’s a guy sitting on his couch. He’s watching television instead of talking to his family, who’s in the other room eating dinner. Here’s another guy somewhere else who gets stuck watching the security monitor all night. He doesn’t have any friends or family. He’s named all the people that he watches on the security monitor.’ So, there are these different themes or different ideas that are somehow bonded by the theme of technology replacing relationships or something like that. Our opening became that sort of style. We’d paint these three different people and endow them with things, which would then find their way into the Harold. It sort of introduced theme right away, which was something we became interested in working with. ‘Ok, this whole Harold is going to be about technology, or something like that.’ And a lot of times it was way less interesting than technology. A lot it was like saying fuck a lot or something like that. [laughs] It wasn’t always intellectual. It was often times really ridiculous.
JF: Yeah. ‘On his couch, there’s a man saying fuck. Elsewhere, there’s a man watching a monitor saying fuck.’
EH: Yeah, I think we tried it. If we have our choice, I think we try to shy away from that, try to play a little smarter than that, but at the same time we all have filthy mouths and love blue humor, so it’s bound to seep its way in.
JF: So how did you guys work on getting the theme to be so important to a piece? Were there any concrete steps that you guys took to get away from a standard Harold and make it more open-ended?
EH: Yeah, we had several people who were coaching us who were pushing us to do that. Certainly Shad and TJ were, and we worked with Peter Gwinn for a while on finding ways to make the show something bigger than just a collection of scenes. He would push us to find reasons to break the fourth wall, reasons to come on and be part of the environment. The environment would become really important, rather than just have it be scenes with walk-ons and tags.
I think that had a lot to do with coaching. The coaching got us to a point where we realized how much fun it was for us, so we wanted to do more of it, to the point the where in a lot of shows it got to become hard to have a two person scene in a show. Because there was always someone coming in and being the wind, or someone coming in and being an object, or the beat of a heart. There was a lot of off-stage support with sound effects or objects. Then the focus became ‘ok, how do we do that without overwhelming the relationship? How do we continue to keep the relationship at the forefront of the scene?’ But I think we owe a lot to the coaches we worked with at the beginning.
JF: How important do you think it is for a group to have a sense of self-direction, as opposed to simply being led by a coach? Or is it important?
EH: For people to lead themselves?
JF: For people to develop their own vision together.
EH: I think it’s super important. To me, that’s the point of a group. Your loyalty should be to your group. Your loyalty should be to each other and what you guys are trying to do. That’s if you’re interested in ensemble work. If you’re interested in showcasing yourself, that’s fine, but realize that’s what you’re in for. Be honest as a group: ‘we want to get a tv show’ or ‘we want to do shows we can be proud of.’
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