Susan Messing - 6/4/07 - Part 1

Susan Messing is a veteran improviser and actor. She studied with Del Close and Charna Halpern and has taught at iO, Second City and The Annoyance Theater. She performed with Blue Velveeta and is a founding member of The Annoyance Theater, where she has appeared in many productions. She currently performs in 'Messing with a Friend' at The Annoyance Theater.



JF: Where were you born?


SM: Perth Amboy General Hospital, Perth Amboy, NJ.


JF: What were some early influences on your sense of humor?


SM: My father and ‘I Love Lucy.’ My father was the smartest and driest man I’ve ever met. My mother was humorless at the time. That was probably a good thing. And I just watched a lot of ‘I Love Lucy.’


JF: How did they influence you? Do you see their influence at all now-a-days?


SM: Sometimes. Charna will say that I make a stupid face, and it probably looks a little like Lucy. [laughs] I think it appeals to the five year old in me more than anything else. Now when I watch it it’s hard to watch. I still respect it, but I think it appealed to the five year old in me more than anything else.


JF: When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?


SM: My whole life probably. I was either going to be an actor, a hockey goalie or a swimming coach, and I thought the acting thing would probably fit best.


JF: Were you interested in sports growing up?


SM: Just the New York Rangers. [laughs]


JF: So, were you involved with theater in high school and stuff like that?


SM: I was a cheerleader, ironically. I couldn’t do anything, but I smiled like I had gas, so people overlooked my lack of talent. And yeah, I was doing plays forever. I went to a camp in the summer called Belmore Terrace in Lennox, Massachusetts. It was a Fine Arts camp, so I was doing that kind of shit from an early age.


JF: How did you get involved with improv?


SM: I went to Northwestern. I was a mediocre actress. After I graduated, I started taking classes at iO and went ‘Oh, I don’t have to memorize shit. I can just make up crap. This is fun.’


JF: How did you hear about iO? Did you have any training in improv during your acting training?


SM: I did a thing at Northwestern called ‘The Me-ow Show.’ It’s a comedy thing. I guess there’s some improv, some sketch, improv games probably. I just never thought of myself as a comedienne necessarily. Every time I was in a play it just happened to be a comedy for the most part, but I didn’t go ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’

I think my junior year at Northwester I heard there was an audition downtown for an improv group, and that was Improv Olympic. I didn’t really know it at the time, so when I took classes I didn’t put two and two together.


JF: What was your experience like when you started at Improv Olympic?


SM: There were very few teams. It was tiny, tiny, tiny. There were really just three teachers. [disconnected] …I just went home crying every night, but I had little voice inside my head that said ‘I can do this shit one day.’ And Charna was really, really mean to the few women who were around. She was one of those women who hated men. [laughs] Or women. She liked men, a lot. Then one day I had a class where you do musical improv, and that was like breathing to me. She said ‘ [inaudible]. One day you’re going to be invaluable to me. ’ Apparently, I became that, so God bless. …I think the masochist in me stayed.


JF: What were the other levels like? You said there were three teachers.


SM: It was Charna, then you had this guy named John Harisol, who was terrific, then you would take Del. I had John twice because Del was kind of M.I.A. for a while. Maybe he was in a play or something. And you would just take Del to infinity. You would just take his class until you stopped taking classes, and that was really your choice after a while, I guess. Although I think she threatened you that if you didn’t take classes, you weren’t on a team or something like that. There were very few teams, no more than maybe five when I started. And every time there was a new team it was called ‘Blind Faith.’ I was on about 11 ‘Blind Faiths.’ She decided then to get even worse and only gave names to what she perceived to be the great teams. Everybody else was on the ‘D Team’ or the ‘F Team’ or whatever.

I was on the D Team. It had Jay Leggett, Mitch Rouse, Brian Blondel, later [Brian] McCann joined, Brendan Sullivan, Kevin Dorff and myself. I was ‘the girl.’ They just looked at me and said ‘Oh, ok, you’re the girl,’ and they didn’t yell at me or tell me I sucked, so within a day I was a million times more brilliant than the day before. Our coach was Mick [Napier], who I guess hadn’t really coached before but he was fucking brilliant, and we became a really good team called ‘Blue Velveeta.’


JF: Why were you more brilliant the day after you joined than the day before?


SM: Self-permission is probably one, but I think acceptance. In it, I heard I was fine. I was. You can only take so much negative reinforcement. Some people need to be kicked and some people need to be stroked. At the time, Charna had kicked me so many times to look at me and not kick me was considered a real soft touch. [laughs]


JF: Was that ever a turn off for some people?


SM: Yes, women left in droves. Women would leave in droves and became actors. There were maybe two women at the time that I started who were consistently still there, that was Madeline Long and Honor Finnegan. Honor was not a very good improviser but she was a brilliant singer, the kind of singer that would make your hair stand on end. They put [Madeline Long] and Honor Finnegan in The Brain Galaxy that Del created with a bunch of people.


JF: Blue Velveeta wasn’t expected to be a great team at first?


SM: Nooo, not at all. We were rug rats. Nobody respected us. They all laughed. Mick didn’t judge it, and we had an incredible work ethic, an amazing desire to get better. By shear work ethic and ultimately self-permission, we started flying.


JF: How long did that take?


SM: Because we took ourselves really seriously, we just got infinitely better. I don’t think it took us too long of a time. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe if you asked Dorff how long it took he’d say ‘Oh, at least it took at least 7 months or something.’ I just remember having such a good time. The consequence of joy is a good show. I think we got what would be perceived as good pretty quickly. We were also working really, really hard. Those guys were real tough nuts about succeeding, whatever that means to you. I was just happy to play, to be a fly on the wall in the boys club.


JF: So, you guys were doing it more than once a week?


SM: Oh definitely. I’m not sure how many shows we had, but we were definitely working with Mick at least once a week, then whatever shows we had as well.


JF: So, what were those early days at iO like? Were they competitive?


SM: They were. It was only because Improv Olympics was a competitive sport. A team would be pit against a team. What are they called now? When they have those competitions?


JF: Cagematch?


SM: Cagematch. Every night was a cage match. It wasn’t just your friends voting per se. There were four criteria. I think they were ‘Theme,’ how closely did you hit the theme on the head, ‘Originality,’ and two other tiresome things. It was stupid. Even at the earliest stage I knew that it was a stupid move to make. It’s like saying ‘This apple is better than this orange.’ So, it was kind of silly to try to pit people against each other. I don’t think we bought into it too much. I don’t think we got off stage and said ‘We lost today.’ However, once she phased that out, which happened a year or two after I started improv, she would have these semi-annual, or annual competitions, where she would pit us against each other. There would be a final on the Main Stage of Second City. But I remember they would say it was a ‘Just because you performed at Second City doesn’t mean you’re in Second City’ type of thing.


JF: How did your experience with improv start to change you or change what you wanted? It seems like it became a really big part of your life suddenly.


SM: Yeah, well, first of all, it becomes a huge part of your social life. It’s always in a bar-like situation, so it didn’t feel as heady I had to deal with in undergraduate in Northwestern. So, I liked the loose structure. I liked that I didn’t have to memorize anything. I liked that I could show up, do it, then leave. So, socially, it became your world, because everybody was friends with everybody else. A lot of partying. A lot of insane partying. A lot of ooo… a lot of debauchery. So, that changed immediately. Then I started realizing that this make-believe crap I had done all my life actually had a name. It just gave it validity, even in its nascent years. The only game in town was Second City and improv really wasn’t really what it was about. It was used as a creating device or used to do a set and let off a little steam and call it a day. So, it became something like ‘Oh my gosh, we’re onto something artistically pretty here,’ especially later on with Del when he would push us to do new forms and stuff, which really didn’t interest me as much as an opportunity to be around Del, but he was pushing the agenda that way.


JF: How did you become involved with The Annoyance Theater?


SM: Once I started with iO, that’s where I met Mick. He was one of the first three improvisers I met: Richard Label, Dave Razowski and Mick. You can imagine what my life was after that. [laughs] And I was young. Mick was hateful, but delicious. They used to have a group called Metraform. They were a bunch of people out of the University of Indiana. They did a show called ‘Splatter Theater,’ which was brilliant. It was a lot of fun. They also had something called ‘Nimbus,’ new forms night. You would get together and rehearse, but not really. A bunch of people would get together and someone would direct, like Pete Gardner or whatever. They would say ‘Your show is called ‘Clown.’’ It’s like ‘What’s that?’ They’re like ‘Figure it out.’ Then you perform it. [laughs] It was experimental. Then I got involved in Splatter Theater 2, which was a horrible show. There were too many people. Financially, it was taking blood out of us. Then Mick took 9 people who he tolerated out of this experience and that’s how we created ‘Coed Prison Sluts,’ and that’s how Metraform ultimately turned into The Annoyance.


JF: So, what was Coed Prison Sluts, and why was it such a big deal for The Annoyance?


SM: First of all, it was our first show. It was our flagship show under the Annoyance banner. Secondly, it was the way it was created. People really didn’t create musicals this way. All Mick said to us was, he sat us down, and said ‘I to do a musical. I want my dog to be in it. I want a fight between a clown and a drag queen, and I want there to be tap dancing, and I want it to be called ‘Coed Prison Sluts.’’ We just went ‘…Ok.’ [laughs] You know what I mean? We made it up and two nights before it went up, the last dress rehearsal, I think we invited people in. And I had just passed a kidney stone that night. So, I had gone to the hospital and crawled back. It went horribly. It was just like crickets chirping in the Hollywood Bowl. It was miserable. So, Mick and Mark Howard left-brained it for a whole night. The next night it was opening night and it was perfect from then on. It was very sweet and cheerful and happy and smart. It doesn’t sound like it, but even my mother who is a New York Times culture vulture would sing ‘Shit Motherfucker’ gaily along with the rest of the crowd. It was happy.

I think Mick started Metraform and The Annoyance because he was pissed at Charna. A lot of people start theaters because they’re angry at Charna. That’s certainly possible. Or at least they go ‘This ride is over for me.’ I think it was really important to be uncensored for Mick, to be able to say everything he wanted to say, but in a way that people would be willing to watch. I think Mick said in The Second City Almanac ‘If you want to alienate your audience, you might as well stand on stage and say ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you,’ until everybody leaves. The heart of The Annoyance was that it just doesn’t mean anything anymore, like when 5th graders learn the words ‘fuck’ and ‘fart’ and they’re so delighted with themselves. If they needed an adverb for a madlib it’d be ‘fuckingly’ and ‘fartingly.’ That kind of tickled us, and I think that’s how it started out. I think a lot of people think The Annoyance is about saying ‘Cunty cunty, titty titty.’ It really isn’t. It’s about saying whatever you want to say and understanding that it will be protected by the very nature of you playing in that space.