Periodic reminder that the Hideout Theatre is continuing to raise funds to move to its new home: if you haven’t, or haven’t in awhile, donate a few bucks here.

For all my time at the Hideout, I was a supporting player there in a lot of ways. Some of my improv pals would be shocked to hear that I went something like ten years without ever being cast in a mainstage show, despite over a dozen auditions.

I’m not bitter about this…and I’m aware that makes it sound like I’m bitter about this. But I’m not. Here’s some unsolicited advice: the next time you’re not picked for a show, scan the cast list and decide which of those players you honestly, in your heart of hearts, think you’d do better than. Maybe you’ll find somebody, but I never did. The bench of talent at the Hideout was deep and wide, including players (Shannon Stott, Cat Drago, Bill Stern, Ace Manning, Rachel Austin) whom I was lucky to get to watch, let alone play with. 

That rambling intro is just a bit of background. Let’s get on topic and go back to 2016, when my longtime improv pal Peter Rogers¹ announced his directorial debut on the Hideout mainstage: “Fiasco: An Improvised Crime Caper Gone Wrong.”

There are plenty of comedy shows that should never be tried again. Sometimes it’s because they’re perfect unique pearls that could only be dimly imitated; I’m looking at you, “Time Hobo.” More often, it’s simply because they haven’t aged well. I’ve got some hilarious memories of Blue Maestro, but I wouldn’t share them in mixed company (or on this blog!) and nobody’s rushing to re-mount it. So it is with History Under the Influence, my long-running improvised version of the TV series Drunk History. 

It’s awkward to reminisce about a show format that met a (predictably!) unpleasant ending², but it’d be dishonest not to include the show on my Hideout top-ten-ish list. It was the only time that a format of my devising got a dedicated run at the theater. And it was the format that got me invited to IMPRO Amsterdam 2016, where I first met Kiki Hohnen. 

Periodic reminder that the Hideout Theatre is continuing to raise funds to move to its new home: if you haven’t, or haven’t in awhile, donate a few bucks here.

Improv marathons are nothing new; many theaters around the world have them in various incarnations.³ The Hideout’s annual version, running since 2010 or so, features eight top-notch improvisers (some local, some visitors) who are invited/dared to perform 48 shows in a row—50 minutes onstage, a 10-minute break, and repeat—from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. Each hour features a different guest troupe bringing a new improv format, ranging from the mundane to the insane, sometimes specifically calculated to mess with the marathoners’ sleep-deprived brains. (Imagine being awake for 30 hours and then asked to perform improv in the dark. Imagine doing improvised Shakespeare in hour 47.)

I was never invited to be a marathoner, and I’m more than okay with that, for two reasons. First, there always were and always will be better choices. Second, just as importantly: if I were ever asked, I would say yes. And I’ve been too old for that shit since some time in my late 20s.

It would be silly, and objectively incorrect, not to include the closest thing the Hideout ever had to a house team on my Hideout love list.⁴ Parallelogramophonograph is one of the best in the world, and they’ve traveled the world to prove it. 

The team started in 2005 the same way most teams do, as a group of eager new improvisers who liked each other enough to practice regularly and create their own formats. Their very name—universally shortened to “Pgraph”—was a result of a silly yes-and session early on and remains proof positive that you can be a great troupe with a ridiculous name.

Originally with six players—Kaci Beeler, Kareem Badr, Phil Aulie, Roy Janik, Valerie Ward, and Wesley Bain—Pgraph was bubbling with talent and chemistry from the start, the two essential elements to any great troupe. Wesley left the group and Phil tragically passed away. But Kaci, Kareem, Roy, and Valerie continued on and turned out to be an undeniable quartet.

Pgraph’s big break was a mainstay regular gig at Coldtowne Theater (something I’d forgotten!). They then shifted to the Hideout when two of their four members bought the place, a valid reason if there ever was one. From there they performed every Friday night for years, and it’s my personal failure that I didn’t take advantage of that opportunity more often. There’s no greater compliment for an artist than to see them perform 10 or more times and feel sad I didn’t see them more.

Gotham City needs to be saved once again. As the set begins, Commissioner Gordon (Curtis Luciani) thanks Batman for offering to help and hangs up the iconic red phone. For the next 25 or so minutes, he and police officer Clancy O’Hara (Eric Heiberg) just… wait for Batman. 

Obviously “Waiting for Batman” is a riff on “Waiting for Godot,” and they share absurdist DNA that is perfect for the duo’s unique styles. Curtis is pure chaos broiling beneath a dizzying intellect. Heiberg meanwhile has astonishing emotional commitment—he once told me that he literally doesn’t hear the audience’s reaction when he’s onstage, a claim that will shortly become relevant. And of course, they’re both very very funny.

I saw “Waiting for Batman” two or three times, and I wish it were more. But I’m going to use this entry to tell you about their performance at the 2015 Improvised Play Festival, one of the Hideout’s long-running contributions to the gospel of narrative longform.

My favorite compliment to receive as an improviser is open skepticism that the show was actually improvised. When a group is fully in flow state, when a show is exceptionally well-prepared, then the skepticism is warranted. I’m not a hippie-dippie person, but it feels in those moments like it really was pre-planned; feels like the show was waiting, like a sculpture in marble, for us to chip away until we revealed it.

“Process,” the recurring Hideout mainstage show directed by Jeremy Sweetlamb, was one of those. Partway through one of the shows I saw, an improviser friend next to me whispered: “But they planned this, right?” Only a few minutes later, she whispered again, more insistently: “But they planned THIS, right?”

(I’ve written before about why I love Maestro, which is a good primer if you’re not familiar with it.)

This is it. Much like the Hideout Theatre itself, when I think of the Maestro improv format, I think of my improv career. Maestro is for me what the Harold is for so many improvisers.⁶ In the early days of the Hideout, I did a lot of different shows—Gorilla Theater, More or Less, Start Trekkin’—but Maestro was the mainstay, week in and week out, giving me valuable reps toward my 10,000 hours. 

Since this whole project is a trip down memory lane, I should say more about those early days. Sean Hill had built his “coffee shop/improv theater” vision to perfection, but back in the early aughts, actually getting an audience to the Saturday 10pm show could be a challenge. Sometimes we’d bark our own shows, standing on the street and encouraging people to come in and see live comedy. More than once, we’d cancel because nobody bought a ticket. (One time our total ticket sales were two: a couple on a date. We decided to perform the show anyway, the cast greatly outnumbering the audience, who had complete control of the scores for each scene.⁷)

As far back as college, which is not that long before our story begins, I remember thinking that I didn’t have a “thing.” My housemates had a variety of hobbies: acting, guitar, death-defying sports, hell even Native American dancing. I was into… poking on the pre-Facebook Internet and watching the Simpsons. I remember telling my best friend that I needed something.

That was my situation in mid-2001, soon after graduating, when my college pal Andy Crouch fatefully invited me to his improv graduation showcase at the Hideout Theatre, where he’d been taking classes from my other college pal Shana Merlin. 

Sidebar: I always need to remind myself that this wasn’t the first improv show I’d ever seen. During college I attended a ComedySportz show on the UT campus; an exceptionally lewd set at a conference in Oklahoma; and most vividly, a show in College Station where I was an audience volunteer onstage.⁸ 

But anyway, all that was prehistory. Andy’s show was the first time I’d ever bought an improv ticket with enthusiasm. And given my lack of a “thing,” I was improv-curious as I walked into the Hideout for the first time. But I thought to myself what everybody probably thinks: I can be funny, but I don’t know if I can just… walk out onstage and be funny.⁹ 

Here’s the important part of the story: the show wasn’t that good.