Todd’s interview with Improv Interviews is only viewable via the Wayback Machine, which is exactly why I started this archive! Also, this is looong, so grab a beverage and a biscuit.

Where were you born?
Chicago, Illinois.

What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
The earliest earliest I can probably think of are two things: the Donny and Marie Show and the Muppet Show. I think the Muppet Show was like the kid primer for Saturday Night Live. In High School, obviously SNL, Monty Python. Bill Murray was a big influence. I love watching those guys.

Do you see their effects on you in your comedy now?
Absolutely. Bill Murray is really a huge influence on me. There was a lovely understatement to what he did. He had the capability of being silly, serious, and he could also just rise an eyebrow and destroy something. There’s something really understated about his work. As he gets older that’s something he’s able to do more. But he could always get the girl without doing a pushup. [laughs]

When did you know that you wanted to be a performer?
Since I was 9 years old. We were driving to Ohio and I had my little cassette tapes in the back seat. I remember listening to a tape of Elvis, and having an epiphany of ‘wow, I’m listening to Elvis and that’s his job.’ That’s when it all makes sense, that my Dad gets up and goes to work and does his job, and Elvis gets up and sings and entertains people.

And I did plays in Junior High School and High School. I think somewhere around Junior or Senior year of High School it occured to me that I was either going to be a graphic designer, like drawing and cartooning, or an actor. And being an actor was louder. I also couldn’t handle somebody critiquing my drawings, but I never had a problem taking direction. I saw performance as an easy collaboration, but for me drawing was like that’s the inside of your head and I couldn’t get notes on that, you know what I mean? Now, drawing and graphic design is something I do on my own, and performance is what I do for a living.

How did you get involved with improv?
I think it goes back to Bill Murray being an influence. It was one of those things where I connected the dots and went ‘oh, he went to Second City before he was on Saturday Night Line and became a Ghost Buster and in Stripes and all of that.’ I find year book entries that people had written saying ‘we’ll see you at Second City.’ This is when I was 17 years old. I knew that I would be at Second City back then. Then I got my degree in Theater, then right out of college I went back to Chicago.

I remember talking to talking to Holly Wortell, who was in the Touring Company of Second City and performed at Loyola when I was going there at the time, and I asked her how I could get a job at Second City. She said the best way was to get a job tearing tickets, or washing dishes or bartending or something like that and watching the shows and getting to know the process. So, right out of college I got a job at job at Second City Northwest, because I was in the suburbs. I was tearing tickets when Steve Carrell was on the Second City Northwest stage. I remember sitting in the back of the house, watching his work, taking secret notes.

Then when it came time to audition for the Touring Company, because I went through the program, and also studied at Improv Olympic with Del Close and Charna, when it came time to audition for the Touring Company, I knew what the job was, because I had seen hundreds of shows by that point. That was pretty early on. I got hired into Second City when I was 23.

How long had you been doing improv at that time?
I got hired in the Touring Company in late 91, 92, so I had been improvising for 3 or 4 years in Chicago of intensive improv study. My life was [improv.] I would be taking classes at Second City, taking classes at Improv Olympic, waiting tables during the day at the Hamburger Hamlet, sleeping in the bar across the street from Second City, going over to Second City, tearing tickets there, hosting, as they called it, at Downtown Second City until 1 in the morning, then I was performing at Improv Olympic on Friday night. I was pretty much submerged in the improv community from 90 to pretty much 96, the improv community in Chicago.

Do you have any idea why it was so important to you?
Well, I knew what I wanted. Like I said, I wanted to be Bill Murray or go that route. I wanted to be a professional actor on television and film, so I saw the well-tread route of Second City. It’s kind of like High School when you join a band to meet girls, then along the way you fall in love with rock music. So, that’s what I saw it as, a spring board to Second City to Saturday Night Live, then to movies, then somewhere in there, probably more in New York, I fell in love with improvising. I don’t feel like I learned how to improvise until I left Chicago, even though I had studied with Del and Charna and Martin DeMaat and Mick Napier and Dave Razowski. All these great teachers. Don Depollo. It didn’t all click or come together really until I got to New York.

Do you think that’s because you were on your own more, in a sense, in New York, and that helped you develop your own voice?
Well, I think it’s cumulative. I was doing Second City and their thrust wasn’t improvisation. It was sketch comedy. Improvisation was used as a tool to get to scene work. Also, there was a bottom line at Second City. They’re a business. When we would tour or do shows, when we would improvise, we would do improvised games and they have a hook and a pattern. So, you go on a well-tread path, get the funny out, because you’re on the road and you’re selling a product. You find you’re repeating yourself a lot.

There was also a slight edge of competition within the Chicago improv community. When you’re not in Second City, you’re competing to get into Second City. When you’re in Second City, you’re competing to get into a Touring Company. When you’re in Touring Company, you’re competing to get into a resident company. When you’re in a resident company, you’re competing to get through the ranks to the Mainstage Company.

As Spolin states in her book, competition [doesn’t] work. It’s Darwinian, and it needs to be a business to survive. And I cast no dispersions on Second City. But as far as my education as an improviser, just getting on stage with nothing, starting with zero, and going and trusting the ensemble, and trusting the work, to do it for its sake with no ulterior motive of ascension, I didn’t learn how to do that until New York. I learned a lot of things at Second City and I’m grateful for the experience. I learned about fast. I learned about funny. I learned how to be quick on my feet, quote, unquote. I also toured with the funniest people in the country, so with exposure to really talented minds, you’re going to learn a lot. You’re sort of humbled by the level of funny that you’re surrounded by, but it wasn’t until Burn Manhattan with Kevin, Matt, Jay and John and Shira, our director, that I really learned to love improvisation.

How did your acting training effect your improv? Did you find it to be helpful to you or a hinderance?
They’re one in the same. Improvisation is a form of acting. All acting is improvising, except some things have to be said with the writing around it. My friend said that. That’s brilliant and that’s the truth. They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s not like now I’m improvising and now I’m acting, because when you’re improvising you’re playing characters. You’re heightening relationships. You’re listening. You’re playing make-believe. You’re giving over to the circumstances, fictional circumstances, believing them and having to convince an audience of the truth of the moment. I mean, there’s no difference.

As far as my studies in college, I had a lot of voice training, and movement training, and character training, and understanding dramatic structure training. I think when I brought that to my improvised work, it brought a more theatrical level to my improvised work. Because I understood plays and scene structure and characters and how to move in space from having done lots and lots of plays. Performing wasn’t a new experience to me. Performing without a script was a new experience. But I think they’re the same creature, just different ways of doing it, like oil painting or acrylic painting or water color painting, they’re all painting.

Who were some of the people in your Touring Company?
I toured with Nancy Walls, Adam McKay, Neil Flynn, Brian Stack, Pat Finn, Teresa Mulligan, Jay Johnston, [inaudible], Miriam Tolan, Matt Dwyer, sometimes.

Burn Manhattan was known for being very physical. Were the seeds of that for you planted in Chicago?
Oddly no. I found Chicago improv to be very cerebral. I can’t speak for it now. I found it to be very fast-minded or quick-witted, and not very physical as in terms of what I know to be physical. Like Europe has a long tradition of physical comedy, clowning and what not. The seeds of Burn Manhattan that got planted in me were when I had gone with Second City to Scotland for the Fringe Festival and saw this group that was based out of Liverpool called ‘Rejects Revenge.’ They had done this show called Pee Super. There were 3 people who created all of their environments, all of their props, all of their special effects just using physical devices, how they would shape their bodies. They would make you see things that just weren’t there. It was just a firecracker in my head. It made me think that all the work I had been doing up until that point was just standing still.

I think Second City’s strength are their characters and their relationships, and deriving the humor from those moments, but they’re not a terribly physical show, not in the way that I knew was possible until I went to Europe and saw this tradition expressed in front of me. So, I watched this group and just bullied my way into getting to know the theater company, Rejects Revenge, and picked their brains, and stole so much. I said to myself ‘how can I make a show look like what they’re doing, only improvised?’ They were a very rehearsed group. They devised all their physical bits in rehearsal, then did a play with them. I wanted to figure out how to improvise with that sensibility.

What were some of the ideas that you took from Rejects Revenge and how did you adjust them to improv?
They would create their environment. They would embody fog, or they would be candles or they would be hieroglyphics. There were 2 guys and a girl, and in one scene she fell down a well. They picked her up and showed her falling down the well. She would be on a swing in a garden. There was no swing, but she would create it. She would move through space as if she were on a swing. There was an entire train chase at the end and all they had was 2 boxes on stage that they stood on. And they would create a chug, chug movement with their bodies while they maintained the scene. There was a lot of comedy and music and whatnot. It was unbelievable, and I thought ‘wow, we really don’t understand this whole idea of ‘environment.” We don’t understand shaping space the way these people did. It really transformed the way I looked at what improvisers could do. Everyone else was doing scenes in kitchens and restaurants and bookstores, very linear. These people were exploding the environment palate.

So how long did you work with those guys?
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.

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

And it winds up being more physical typically?
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.

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?
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.

Were there things that you tried to work on and you were like ‘I don’t know how to represent this physically. It’s just too difficult?’
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.’

Could you describe the typical Burn Manhattan show?
Scott would make a 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.

Interesting. A closing image?
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 squatting over there. You find out what a show means by going through the whole show.

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

How would you guys edit scenes?
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.

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?
Oh absolutely. We never took suggestions.

So the movement was like your opening?
Absolutely.

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

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

Were the same 3 people there?
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.

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?
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 exercises and foci, 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.

What are maybe some specific exercises that you guys do to kind of distinguish what you guys do from what other people might do?
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.

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.
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.

Can I call what you guys do ‘organic’ improv?
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.

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?
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.

Really?
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.

I imagine it’d be pretty easy to make somebody fly with 20 people.
[laughs] Oh absolutely.

So, why did you move to Los Angeles?
Because I had aspirations of being in television and film, and this is the place to be. This is where the work is.

What year did you do that?
2000.

How did you find Los Angeles when you moved out there? The art scene in general and the improv scene?
The nice part about the artistic culture in L.A. is that the people who are doing it are really doing it. If you open a theater in L.A., you mean it. If you’re going to go through the trouble to open and maintain a space and start a school, that isn’t about learning to act on camera or learning how to do commercials, you mean it. It’s not like you’re doing it to try and advance yourself. You’re doing it for the love of the game.

As far as the improv community, it didn’t really feel like there was as much as of a community as I felt in Chicago or New York. I think that’s changing thanks to Improv Olympic and UCB. I think it’s much more of a shared, group thing now. I mean, we’re a little island in the Valley, so I don’t necessarily feel part of the improv community. There’s no judgement there. It’s just we’re disconnected from the rest of Hollywood, so we have a little mom and pop organization in the valley and teach our little weird improv stuff, and we’re doing fine.

When I moved here I started teaching at Bang [Theater], and did that show the Doubtful Guests, which really opened up new ideas for me, got me some people who are interested in learning an alternative view of the work, and from there the Hothouse started. You know, the Hothouse itself is its own improv community. We have alumni and new students, and the friends that we have from Burn Manhattan and from teaching in festivals across the country.

So, what are your own personal goals with improv right now and what are your goals for the Hothouse?
My goals for the Hothouse are just keep growing, and keep that non-competitive space. Let people keep learning the work. My own personal goals, always just experimenting. I’ve done so much that I’ve wanted to do. Now it truly is love of the game. It’s just thinking up different ways to use this medium to put up good theater. It’s just thinking up new ways to use this medium to put up good theater. I’d like to find a way to translate what we do into television.

In your opinion, how important is performing in front of an audience to improving as an improviser?
It’s imperative. The phrase that we learn at the Hothouse is the lessons of the work are forged in the fire of performance. You’re really not going to know what works until you’re performing without a net in front of an audience. That’s when you really get better, that’s when you really get what it is we’re talking about.

In your opinon, what makes a good initiation? And how do you initiate typically?
Anything is a good initiation. Initiating physically just means doing. There’s no bad initiation. I think the best initiations are ones that the players don’t even realize they’re making.

To you, what is the ‘game of the scene?’ And does it play a role in your improv?
Yeah, absolutely, game of the scene, as I define it or as I learned it, is, this is my textbook definition, the discovered, agreed upon, pattern or logic to which the scene is played.

And that plays a big role in your improv?
Absolutely, it’s how scenes are shaped. It’s how the relationship is deepened. If the premise is the who, what, where: angry patrons and an absent-minded waiter in a restaurant, that’s the premise of the scene. How you express that relationship is done through the game. Basically, when we’re improvising we want to create a situation where we don’t have to think, raw discovery into re-discovery. So you go out and you do something, the more you do that thing and heighten it, and mirror that which is heightened, the game of the scene presents itself, just by doing it. So, it’s the discovered, agreed upon pattern or logic to which the scene is played.

Do you find yourself creating physical games a lot and reincorporating physical patterns?
All the time.

That’s something that I don’t see very often.
[laughs] We do it all the time, because your mind can wander, but your body is always in the scene, so if you ground things physically, you’re never going to get off scene. The characters exist in the place. Your mind might be thinking about what you need to pick up a Cosco. But if you keep yourself grounded in the character and in the environment, you’re going to be in the space. You find out what the character is doing. By creating that doing, that can only be heightened and rediscovered, and heightened and rediscovered.

What if someone were to say what I’m doing is sitting in a chair. Is that sufficient for you guys?
Oh yeah, there’s no ‘don’t do’ anything. If sitting in a chair is what that character’s doing, it’s about who is sitting in a chair, how are they sitting in a chair, why are they sitting in a chair, where is that chair, then how can all those things deepen the characters and the relationship. So, if you’re going to sit in a chair, really sit. What time of day are you sitting in the chair? Right now I’m sitting in a chair and talking on the phone, but I’m doing something. My body is telling a story of what it’s like to sit in a chair at 1 o’clock in the afternoon in Los Angeles on the phone talking about improv. And what kind of a chair is it? Is it a swivel chair? Is it a wheel chair? Is it a stool?

How do you encourage people to be that present and to incorporate that much detail into their work?
Exercises and rehearsal.

How do you get into character?
Physically. You do a physical hold. Character is predictable behavior, so you start behaving and you have 30 seconds to do it, or fractions of a second to do it. Once you start, you just say yes to the discovery, deepening that discovery, then you’re improvising, so of course you treat everything that you’ve done like it’s always been there. The character has a history. The character has a relationship. The character does things that they’ve always been doing. Then you channel that physical behavior which creates the change of the scene or that which can be mirrored or be complimented.

Do you ever find yourself doing a character and later you’re like ‘oh, I met that person in a store, or on the street,’ or something like that?
I think it all goes in the old lock box in your head, whether you know it or not. I don’t ever intentionally say ‘oh! I just did the person from ‘Whole Foods!’ I don’t think there’s time to make those distinctions. You’re just kind of out there doing it.

In your opinion, what makes a good improv coach or teacher?
Somebody who gives the students room to fail. Someone who keeps the atmosphere positive, keeps the work fun, and keeps things encouraged. Someone who knows when it’s time to stay in this exercise because they haven’t gotten it, and when it’s time to move on and challenge them further.

Did you take to coaching or teaching immediately?
Yeah, I knew when I started at Second City and went through the classes. I had already talked to Martin De Maat about wanting to be a teacher.

What in your opinion makes a great team?
Listening. Agreement. Allowing themselves to be individuals, and allowing the individuality of each person to share in the greater goal.

Do you have any pet peeves that you see on stage?
As John Theis said ‘the lists of negatives are infinite.’ You try to focus on the positive. Always there’s frustration when you’ve been working with a group for a year, and they still may be doing the same bad habits. That can be frustrating. But for the most part, everybody has to be comfortable working at their own speed.

But there’s nothing like maybe somebody playing a newspaper reporter from the 20’s and you’re like ‘oh god, I hate that’?
No, because if it’s grounded and good and organically discovered, it doesn’t matter. I’m not so much concerned with content. I concern myself more with context. Were they listening? Were they heightened? Did it grow out of the moment? Did they play the game? Did they use their environment? Are they grounded in their relationship? So, I don’t care what’s going on in the scene. It’s how they’re going about doing it that’s important to me.

What would you like the future of improv to be, both artistically and commercially?
Um, I don’t know. That’s a tough question. I guess there could be a wider base of improv. It’s true of anything, of pop music, of rock music, of movies, you want a greater variety. You want a greater variety artistically and commercially.

Do you have anything that you would like to say to the improv that we didn’t get out?
What do I want to say? I don’t know… I don’t know. [laughs] I have nothing to say to the improv community. I mean the work speaks for itself, and to say the improv community, it’s so big. It’s so vast and so many people are doing it now. I guess, to keep ripping it apart, smashing it down and reinventing it. Be a part of where it’s going. I guess I’m grateful that it exists and that people are still doing it, but for the most part just rip it apart. Burn it down, then see what’s left. Then play with that for another 30 years.