Gary Austin - Part 1 - 2/19/07
Gary Austin is a long time improviser, actor and teacher. He was a member of The Committee in San Francisco during the 60’s and 70’s and was the founder of The Groundlings in Los Angeles. He currently directs and performs in various shows, in addition to teaching workshops across the country. His website is www.garyaustin.net.
JF: Where were you born?
GA: Tulsa, OK.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor growing up?
GA: My father was one.
JF: How was he an influence?
GA: It was important to him to be funny, to say funny things. They often weren’t funny. Part of the humor was the fact that they weren’t funny.
JF: I remember reading that you had a very strict upbringing. How did that play a role on your sense of humor, or what you thought was funny?
GA: I used to do things in Church that would ridicule what was going on when I was a little kid.
JF: Did you ever get in trouble for it?
GA: Sure.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
GA: From the time I could think.
JF: Ok, so were some early steps that you took…
GA: I would do things to entertain people when I was little. For instance, in class, I would do and say things to get laughs in school, also at Church.
JF: When did you start taking steps to more public or official performances?
GA: Well, starting out in Church when I was a little kid at the age of four there would performances like on Christmas for instance. Each child of the Church would get up and recite a poem or do something like that. I remember my first performance was at the Nazarene Church in Oakland, California in 1945. My father had just returned from WWII. He was in the sailor uniform. I remember looking at him in the audience while I did the poem. I loved being up there. I would create performance situations for myself. For instance, when we moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, I was probably five years old. I would get up on the porch, which was like a stage, or a platform. In Church, we didn’t call it a stage. We called it a platform where the preacher preached from, which a level higher than the audience. I would get up on the porch and I would seat other kids in chairs on the lawn. I would preach to them and pretend to be an Evangelist at the age of five.
JF: Do you think that some people are born performers?
GA: Well, I don’t know how to answer a question like that. Are you born with a gift? Are you born talented? Are you born a performer? The way I like to put it is people are born with different facilities, different abilities, different skills, so when we take those tests in high school to find out what your occupation should be of course people are different. Somebody who’s great at math naturally might not be great at writing poetry naturally. So, I believe that people are different, yeah, from the time they’re born, yeah. What causes that? I have no idea. I guess it’s everything from DNA to the influences around you when you’re growing up.
JF: How did you get involved with improvisational theater?
GA: Accidentally. I had a degree in Theater from San Francisco State University. My classmates are some of the most successful people in show business today. It was an amazing Theater department. High percentage of success came out of that theater department. That was in the 60’s. I had never improvised, except on my own like preaching to the kids and whatever I would do to act silly when I was in public. So, that was improv in a sense, but I never thought of improv as a formal thing that one did onstage with an audience that paid money. What happened was that I accidentally got involved with The Committee, and that changed my life.
JF: In college,…
GA: There was no improvisation in college in those days. There were improvisational exercises in acting classes, but they weren’t the same kind of improv that’s done at Second City, as is now done in America. It was a different kind of improv and there was very little of it. As far as I know, there was not a single college or university in this country that had an improvisation course. It was not legitimate, even though Second City had started in the late 50’s and had become very famous and very successful actors were coming out of it. It was still not considered a legitimate course for college in the 60’s.
JF: How did you accidentally get involved with The Committee?
GA: I had a very close friend named Christopher Ross. Christopher Ross was a classmate of mine in college. Towards the end of my college career, he went off and became a member of The Committee in San Francisco, which is the same town we were going to college in. I never went to The Committee. I didn’t care to. I didn’t even know what it was. I just knew it was successful and I saw the ads everywhere. I never went and I even did the annual talent show at San Francisco State called ‘Kampus Kapers’ with a sketch that somebody else wrote that satirized The Committee. So, I’m onstage satirizing The Committee, not knowing that one day I would be a member of it.
What happened was I moved to Los Angeles. I became a social worker in Watts, which is South Central Los Angeles, in order to make a living while doing theater at night and taking classes. I was driving down Sunset Boulevard one day and I saw on the marquee of the Tiffany theater, a movie theater, the marquee said ‘Opening Tonight: The Committee,’ which was the San Francisco company that Christopher Ross was in. I thought ‘Wow, I want to see Chris perform in this, whatever the hell it is.’
So, I found him having lunch with the rest of the cast. It was the middle of the day. I asked him if he would comp me, so I got a comp to go to go to the opening in the night. Carl Reiner was in the audience. Rob Reiner was up there on stage as a member of the company. Christopher Ross was up there. It was the first time I had ever seen this kind of theater and wanted to be a part of it. I went backstage after it was over and found out that there was a workshop every Saturday afternoon taught by some member of The Committee, different members of The Committee. It cost $1 to join, $1 per Saturday. Usually, about 50 people would show up, and they would all work. 50 of us would get up on stage, not at once, but we would all get a big work-out. They ran it very fast.
Eventually, Del Close, who was from Second City and helped create Second City, came to the Committee and started teaching the workshops, and also helping Alan Meyerson direct the Committee. He became my first improv teacher. Out of the about 50 people who attended these workshops, including Ellen Burstyn, who was not yet a movie star and David Landers, Squiggy on Lavern and Shirley, who was not yet a professional actor, myself and other, about 12 of us were selected, including David, Ellen and me, to perform every Monday night, which was the dark night at The Committee. We were called ‘The Committee Workshop.’ We performed and Del directed us.
During that time, I became the light man for The Committee. My title was Stage Manager. My main job was to run the lights. Well, in improv theater, as you know, whoever runs the lights, usually, certainly in The Committee, determines when the scene is over. So, I had this tremendous responsibility to determine when the scene is over. So, I with my improvisational instincts would do that and I was very successful at it. The reason I took that job is because I found out that about half of the male members of The Committee, like Howard Hessman, Carl Gotlieb, Christopher Ross, had gotten into The Committee by being light men first. They proved their skills that way and also got their education, because you have to watch everything that goes on on the stage, thirteen shows a week.
So, for a year I did that job and learned so much watching, because I was in the wings, off stage left with the light board. I did sound-effects, lights, voice-overs on the mic and got $10 a night, while being a social worker in downtown Los Angeles. I eventually started improvising with the cast in the second show. The second show was the improv show. The first show was to present the material that had been created through improv and a little improv was done then, but the second show was where we created the material through improvisation in front of the audience that eventually became part of the next written show.
I started creating my own characters and material and I was eventually invited to join the company. They closed in L.A. They had split the company actually. The San Francisco company was split in half. They kept two companies going. The Committee was in LA for two and a half years. Part of that time they were guest starring every week as regulars on The Smothers Brothers Show on CBS, while I was lighting them. I was asked to join the cast. I became a member of Actors’ Equity, moved up to San Francisco and did that for a couple of years. That’s where my show business career really started. Because of that experience and the reputation I had, when I moved back to L.A. I had the credibility to teach acting and improvisation, which I’ve been doing since 1972.
JF: So, what was so appealing to you about that first show that you saw in Los Angeles?
GA: Boy, I don’t know. I loved everything about it. I guess, let’s start with the style of acting. I had never seen that style of acting that the people did. Understand that, except for one or two improvs, they were doing written material, but the material they were doing had been developed through improvisation. In other words, they did the improvisation in the second show in San Francisco so many times that it eventually became the same every night.
Nothing was ever put on paper in The Committee. We had ten years of material. It went from 62 to 72. There were only forty members of The Committee during that entire ten years. And all of the material was in people’s brains, in their memory. Nobody wrote anything down. That fascinated me.
There was a certain style to it that could only come from having been improvised. It couldn’t have been written. You couldn’t write that kind of material. Just like Nichols and May, you couldn’t really write that material. It had to come from improvisation. The techniques of improvisation create a certain kind of material, and I had never seen that kind of material before. So, the style of acting, the kind of material. It was incredibly entertaining stuff. Everything worked. Nothing was boring. There was no waiting for the piece or waiting for the next scene. There were no dull moments. The actors were incredibly real and natural. There was no pretense or façade or fakery. There was no stagey-ness to it. It was all real people whether they were playing themselves or characters. Real people who were totally present with each other. I had never seen that kind of theater and I wanted to do it. It had nothing to do with whether it was funny or not, nothing to do with that at all. Comedy, the word comedy, I never use the term. I don’t care about the term. I don’t care about funny. I just care about telling the truth onstage, holding an audience’s attention and having fun doing it. That’s all I care about. I don’t care if it’s funny or not. And I’ve done the classics. I’ve done Chekov, Shakespeare, Ibsen, you know.
JF: So, what were those early workshops like, especially with Del Close?
GA: Outrageous. They were very free. I had never been allowed to be that free on a stage. And it was the 60’s, so it was very touchy-feely, and very psychological and emotional. …What do I mean by psychological? I don’t really mean that. It was doing things onstage that you wouldn’t normally think would be entertaining to an audience. We had a piece called ‘Loving,’ an improv piece. This was the Monday show. This isn’t The Committee. This would never have been done in The Committee. The Committee workshop was very experimental, much more than The Committee was. ‘Loving’ was an exercise where you put 4 couples on stage or maybe 6 or 8 couples even, it was all heterosexual couples, and you have them make-out for ten minutes without talking in front of the audience. The task of the exercise was to touch your partner in ways that you hadn’t touched someone before, in new experimental ways, to find new ways to touch your partner in love-making, fully-clothed of course. And the audience loved it. Keep in mind this was the 60’s. I don’t think that could happen now. I don’t think actors would care to do it. Well, they might. But certainly an audience wouldn’t sit for it.
That was one thing. Many of the games were Viola Spolin games and games that Del had created and games that The Committee had created over the years. See this was 1968. The Committee had started in 1962, so they already had 6 years of history and things they had developed. So, we were doing scenes, and monologues and characters and theater games and so on.
JF: So, how did you take to improvisation and how did you incorporate it with your acting training?
GA: At the time, I don’t know if I thought a whole lot about it, except that I remember the first time I got onstage in the very first workshop I went to in The Committee. We did a Spolin game called ‘Madam in the Middle.’ Now we call it ‘Person in the Middle’ to be politically correct. It was my first time improvising on stage in front of all those 50 people and got huge laughs. I went off stage and the guy who was the light man/stage manager at the time, who was the guy who gave me the job as light man/stage manager. The light man/stage manager got to pick his next successor, which was very odd. The director of The Committee didn’t even pick that. He allowed the light man to pick his next guy. Anyway, Jim Crana, who I hadn’t met until that day, said ‘You’re really good at this. You’re terrific at this.’ I said ‘I am?’ He said ‘Yeah.’
What immediately occurred to me was that I didn’t have to rehearse for that. I didn’t have to prepare for that. I didn’t have to study the play or study the character in order to entertain an audience. I got up there and simply by following the task of the exercise, doing the rules of the game I was able to entertain an audience just as fully as I ever had in my life when I had done a play that I that had rehearsed six weeks for four hours a day. I thought ‘Wow, that’s very cool. I can do the same thing without rehearsal. Yea!’ [laughs]
JF: Who were some of the influential teachers you had when you were at The Committee?
GA: Del Close and Alan Meyerson, and Larry Hankman, who was one of the original cast members of The Committee and part-time was director. Those three people had a great influence on me. Alan Meyerson was the owner and creator of The Committee, and Del was, well, Del was Del.
JF: How did Del become involved with The Committee?
GA: Well, he was already involved in The Committee, because The Committee came from Second City. Alan Meyerson was helping Paul Sills direct Second City. Paul Sills was the director Second City, but very often in The Committee or Second City there was someone else around who would be a second director, almost a co-director. Well, Alan was helping Paul at Second City and they had a philosophical disagreement, which led to Alan leaving and forming his own company called The Committee in San Francisco, which was named after The House ‘Un-American Activities Committee.’ Well, Alan had already been working with Del, because Del had been at Second City since day one. It was already a big family. So, Alan took several Second City people from Chicago took them to San Francisco, and hired some people who lived in San Francisco and put them together. That was The Committee in 1962.
So, in a sense The Committee and Second City were one big happy family. Well, I shouldn’t say happy. They were one big family in a way. They were extended family. We had Second City people like Peter Boyle coming onstage and joining us all the time in the shows. Avery Shreiber, Peter Boyle, and just before I joined Bill Cosby would improvise with us. Lots of big stars would come in and improvise with The Committee.
JF: Where were you born?
GA: Tulsa, OK.
JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor growing up?
GA: My father was one.
JF: How was he an influence?
GA: It was important to him to be funny, to say funny things. They often weren’t funny. Part of the humor was the fact that they weren’t funny.
JF: I remember reading that you had a very strict upbringing. How did that play a role on your sense of humor, or what you thought was funny?
GA: I used to do things in Church that would ridicule what was going on when I was a little kid.
JF: Did you ever get in trouble for it?
GA: Sure.
JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
GA: From the time I could think.
JF: Ok, so were some early steps that you took…
GA: I would do things to entertain people when I was little. For instance, in class, I would do and say things to get laughs in school, also at Church.
JF: When did you start taking steps to more public or official performances?
GA: Well, starting out in Church when I was a little kid at the age of four there would performances like on Christmas for instance. Each child of the Church would get up and recite a poem or do something like that. I remember my first performance was at the Nazarene Church in Oakland, California in 1945. My father had just returned from WWII. He was in the sailor uniform. I remember looking at him in the audience while I did the poem. I loved being up there. I would create performance situations for myself. For instance, when we moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, I was probably five years old. I would get up on the porch, which was like a stage, or a platform. In Church, we didn’t call it a stage. We called it a platform where the preacher preached from, which a level higher than the audience. I would get up on the porch and I would seat other kids in chairs on the lawn. I would preach to them and pretend to be an Evangelist at the age of five.
JF: Do you think that some people are born performers?
GA: Well, I don’t know how to answer a question like that. Are you born with a gift? Are you born talented? Are you born a performer? The way I like to put it is people are born with different facilities, different abilities, different skills, so when we take those tests in high school to find out what your occupation should be of course people are different. Somebody who’s great at math naturally might not be great at writing poetry naturally. So, I believe that people are different, yeah, from the time they’re born, yeah. What causes that? I have no idea. I guess it’s everything from DNA to the influences around you when you’re growing up.
JF: How did you get involved with improvisational theater?
GA: Accidentally. I had a degree in Theater from San Francisco State University. My classmates are some of the most successful people in show business today. It was an amazing Theater department. High percentage of success came out of that theater department. That was in the 60’s. I had never improvised, except on my own like preaching to the kids and whatever I would do to act silly when I was in public. So, that was improv in a sense, but I never thought of improv as a formal thing that one did onstage with an audience that paid money. What happened was that I accidentally got involved with The Committee, and that changed my life.
JF: In college,…
GA: There was no improvisation in college in those days. There were improvisational exercises in acting classes, but they weren’t the same kind of improv that’s done at Second City, as is now done in America. It was a different kind of improv and there was very little of it. As far as I know, there was not a single college or university in this country that had an improvisation course. It was not legitimate, even though Second City had started in the late 50’s and had become very famous and very successful actors were coming out of it. It was still not considered a legitimate course for college in the 60’s.
JF: How did you accidentally get involved with The Committee?
GA: I had a very close friend named Christopher Ross. Christopher Ross was a classmate of mine in college. Towards the end of my college career, he went off and became a member of The Committee in San Francisco, which is the same town we were going to college in. I never went to The Committee. I didn’t care to. I didn’t even know what it was. I just knew it was successful and I saw the ads everywhere. I never went and I even did the annual talent show at San Francisco State called ‘Kampus Kapers’ with a sketch that somebody else wrote that satirized The Committee. So, I’m onstage satirizing The Committee, not knowing that one day I would be a member of it.
What happened was I moved to Los Angeles. I became a social worker in Watts, which is South Central Los Angeles, in order to make a living while doing theater at night and taking classes. I was driving down Sunset Boulevard one day and I saw on the marquee of the Tiffany theater, a movie theater, the marquee said ‘Opening Tonight: The Committee,’ which was the San Francisco company that Christopher Ross was in. I thought ‘Wow, I want to see Chris perform in this, whatever the hell it is.’
So, I found him having lunch with the rest of the cast. It was the middle of the day. I asked him if he would comp me, so I got a comp to go to go to the opening in the night. Carl Reiner was in the audience. Rob Reiner was up there on stage as a member of the company. Christopher Ross was up there. It was the first time I had ever seen this kind of theater and wanted to be a part of it. I went backstage after it was over and found out that there was a workshop every Saturday afternoon taught by some member of The Committee, different members of The Committee. It cost $1 to join, $1 per Saturday. Usually, about 50 people would show up, and they would all work. 50 of us would get up on stage, not at once, but we would all get a big work-out. They ran it very fast.
Eventually, Del Close, who was from Second City and helped create Second City, came to the Committee and started teaching the workshops, and also helping Alan Meyerson direct the Committee. He became my first improv teacher. Out of the about 50 people who attended these workshops, including Ellen Burstyn, who was not yet a movie star and David Landers, Squiggy on Lavern and Shirley, who was not yet a professional actor, myself and other, about 12 of us were selected, including David, Ellen and me, to perform every Monday night, which was the dark night at The Committee. We were called ‘The Committee Workshop.’ We performed and Del directed us.
During that time, I became the light man for The Committee. My title was Stage Manager. My main job was to run the lights. Well, in improv theater, as you know, whoever runs the lights, usually, certainly in The Committee, determines when the scene is over. So, I had this tremendous responsibility to determine when the scene is over. So, I with my improvisational instincts would do that and I was very successful at it. The reason I took that job is because I found out that about half of the male members of The Committee, like Howard Hessman, Carl Gotlieb, Christopher Ross, had gotten into The Committee by being light men first. They proved their skills that way and also got their education, because you have to watch everything that goes on on the stage, thirteen shows a week.
So, for a year I did that job and learned so much watching, because I was in the wings, off stage left with the light board. I did sound-effects, lights, voice-overs on the mic and got $10 a night, while being a social worker in downtown Los Angeles. I eventually started improvising with the cast in the second show. The second show was the improv show. The first show was to present the material that had been created through improv and a little improv was done then, but the second show was where we created the material through improvisation in front of the audience that eventually became part of the next written show.
I started creating my own characters and material and I was eventually invited to join the company. They closed in L.A. They had split the company actually. The San Francisco company was split in half. They kept two companies going. The Committee was in LA for two and a half years. Part of that time they were guest starring every week as regulars on The Smothers Brothers Show on CBS, while I was lighting them. I was asked to join the cast. I became a member of Actors’ Equity, moved up to San Francisco and did that for a couple of years. That’s where my show business career really started. Because of that experience and the reputation I had, when I moved back to L.A. I had the credibility to teach acting and improvisation, which I’ve been doing since 1972.
JF: So, what was so appealing to you about that first show that you saw in Los Angeles?
GA: Boy, I don’t know. I loved everything about it. I guess, let’s start with the style of acting. I had never seen that style of acting that the people did. Understand that, except for one or two improvs, they were doing written material, but the material they were doing had been developed through improvisation. In other words, they did the improvisation in the second show in San Francisco so many times that it eventually became the same every night.
Nothing was ever put on paper in The Committee. We had ten years of material. It went from 62 to 72. There were only forty members of The Committee during that entire ten years. And all of the material was in people’s brains, in their memory. Nobody wrote anything down. That fascinated me.
There was a certain style to it that could only come from having been improvised. It couldn’t have been written. You couldn’t write that kind of material. Just like Nichols and May, you couldn’t really write that material. It had to come from improvisation. The techniques of improvisation create a certain kind of material, and I had never seen that kind of material before. So, the style of acting, the kind of material. It was incredibly entertaining stuff. Everything worked. Nothing was boring. There was no waiting for the piece or waiting for the next scene. There were no dull moments. The actors were incredibly real and natural. There was no pretense or façade or fakery. There was no stagey-ness to it. It was all real people whether they were playing themselves or characters. Real people who were totally present with each other. I had never seen that kind of theater and I wanted to do it. It had nothing to do with whether it was funny or not, nothing to do with that at all. Comedy, the word comedy, I never use the term. I don’t care about the term. I don’t care about funny. I just care about telling the truth onstage, holding an audience’s attention and having fun doing it. That’s all I care about. I don’t care if it’s funny or not. And I’ve done the classics. I’ve done Chekov, Shakespeare, Ibsen, you know.
JF: So, what were those early workshops like, especially with Del Close?
GA: Outrageous. They were very free. I had never been allowed to be that free on a stage. And it was the 60’s, so it was very touchy-feely, and very psychological and emotional. …What do I mean by psychological? I don’t really mean that. It was doing things onstage that you wouldn’t normally think would be entertaining to an audience. We had a piece called ‘Loving,’ an improv piece. This was the Monday show. This isn’t The Committee. This would never have been done in The Committee. The Committee workshop was very experimental, much more than The Committee was. ‘Loving’ was an exercise where you put 4 couples on stage or maybe 6 or 8 couples even, it was all heterosexual couples, and you have them make-out for ten minutes without talking in front of the audience. The task of the exercise was to touch your partner in ways that you hadn’t touched someone before, in new experimental ways, to find new ways to touch your partner in love-making, fully-clothed of course. And the audience loved it. Keep in mind this was the 60’s. I don’t think that could happen now. I don’t think actors would care to do it. Well, they might. But certainly an audience wouldn’t sit for it.
That was one thing. Many of the games were Viola Spolin games and games that Del had created and games that The Committee had created over the years. See this was 1968. The Committee had started in 1962, so they already had 6 years of history and things they had developed. So, we were doing scenes, and monologues and characters and theater games and so on.
JF: So, how did you take to improvisation and how did you incorporate it with your acting training?
GA: At the time, I don’t know if I thought a whole lot about it, except that I remember the first time I got onstage in the very first workshop I went to in The Committee. We did a Spolin game called ‘Madam in the Middle.’ Now we call it ‘Person in the Middle’ to be politically correct. It was my first time improvising on stage in front of all those 50 people and got huge laughs. I went off stage and the guy who was the light man/stage manager at the time, who was the guy who gave me the job as light man/stage manager. The light man/stage manager got to pick his next successor, which was very odd. The director of The Committee didn’t even pick that. He allowed the light man to pick his next guy. Anyway, Jim Crana, who I hadn’t met until that day, said ‘You’re really good at this. You’re terrific at this.’ I said ‘I am?’ He said ‘Yeah.’
What immediately occurred to me was that I didn’t have to rehearse for that. I didn’t have to prepare for that. I didn’t have to study the play or study the character in order to entertain an audience. I got up there and simply by following the task of the exercise, doing the rules of the game I was able to entertain an audience just as fully as I ever had in my life when I had done a play that I that had rehearsed six weeks for four hours a day. I thought ‘Wow, that’s very cool. I can do the same thing without rehearsal. Yea!’ [laughs]
JF: Who were some of the influential teachers you had when you were at The Committee?
GA: Del Close and Alan Meyerson, and Larry Hankman, who was one of the original cast members of The Committee and part-time was director. Those three people had a great influence on me. Alan Meyerson was the owner and creator of The Committee, and Del was, well, Del was Del.
JF: How did Del become involved with The Committee?
GA: Well, he was already involved in The Committee, because The Committee came from Second City. Alan Meyerson was helping Paul Sills direct Second City. Paul Sills was the director Second City, but very often in The Committee or Second City there was someone else around who would be a second director, almost a co-director. Well, Alan was helping Paul at Second City and they had a philosophical disagreement, which led to Alan leaving and forming his own company called The Committee in San Francisco, which was named after The House ‘Un-American Activities Committee.’ Well, Alan had already been working with Del, because Del had been at Second City since day one. It was already a big family. So, Alan took several Second City people from Chicago took them to San Francisco, and hired some people who lived in San Francisco and put them together. That was The Committee in 1962.
So, in a sense The Committee and Second City were one big happy family. Well, I shouldn’t say happy. They were one big family in a way. They were extended family. We had Second City people like Peter Boyle coming onstage and joining us all the time in the shows. Avery Shreiber, Peter Boyle, and just before I joined Bill Cosby would improvise with us. Lots of big stars would come in and improvise with The Committee.
posted by JoshFult at 9:38 PM
1 Comments:
Please do not take this interview seriously. It is not factual.
....Gary Austin
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