Interviews | John-Henry Doucette

Jason Kypros and Rob Wilson of Plan B sketch comedy and improv.

NORFOLK, Va. — I recently sat down with Jason Kypros and Rob Wilson of the Hampton Roads sketch comedy and improv group Plan B to talk about writing, handling sensitive topics with humor, and the group’s forays into videos. Here’s the second part of that talk. The first part is at this link.

This conversation was recorded at Kerouac Cafe before Plan B’s recent The Big Show at the Naro Expanded Cinema, and it has been edited for length and clarity. There is some adult language below.

Q: How much standup do you do?

Wilson: I do a little bit. Jason, he got me started. Yeah, he started me down that path years ago.

Kypros: What I ultimately would like to see for Plan B is, well it is already – a cool creative entity, a thing that is itself. It’s not me. It’s not Rob. It’s not Brendan. It’s not anyone. It’s everyone. … I’d like to see it where somebody could actually come to us and say, “We need a creative concept.” Because that’s what we do.

Wilson: We’ve done stuff for a lot of different people around the area, like “Plan B Cares.” We’ve got the YWCA we’ve done work for. … On top of that, when Jason says we’re a creative team, we can go anywhere and if you need two hours of entertainment, we can give it to you.

Kypros: Like last night I did standup, Rob did standup, Beatty (Barnes) did standup and then we did an improv show afterwards.

Wilson: There’s so much talent in this group and we’re trying to – I’m not going to say exploit – but we’re trying to bring all that to –

Kypros: We want to utilize it all.

Q: Let me go to “Light Rail” now. Obviously, I think it’s a great sketch. I think it is very funny, especially here.

Kypros: It is a little local.

Q: But it’s not like a local gag and then you show the “Plan B” (video credits). It’s a full thing. So this starts with you guys in the car –

Kypros: Wherever we were, we’re talking about the light rail and this was the time we were just starting the group and we knew – I was really pushing the video. … We were brainstorming, we had this idea, and looked at each other and said, “Let’s just write this one.” So we went back to the apartment, and Rob and I pretty much sat there and wrote the script.

Wilson: What was really funny is we needed a platform for these guys to really talk about this (in a) conversation. So we wrote the conversation first, the dialogue.

Kypros: Well, we had the jokes. We were laughing – you know, “It’s $100,000, you could go to the moon this number times.” So we had the jokes so that’s how we structured it. We knew where we wanted our beats to be. We knew where the open was, and we had our character point of view.

Wilson: That’s exactly it. It went jokes, and then we had the jokes essentially and we went to the characters. Okay, this is the point of view and how we can get to it, and then we came back to the jokes and really formed them to the characters. The part when the high math came in, like, we said that almost simultaneously.

Kypros: We had an idea – One of the things you think about for sketch, too, but definitely for video, you’re thinking, “What’s my stage picture? What’s it going to look like?” And we both were kind of brainstorming and we thought it would just be funny for Rob to be totally like in some crazy, like doing some high math. When we talked to Keith Jackson – and that’s when we got the location. My dad let us get into St. Patrick’s (school) and they had this white board. I said, ‘Keith … I need math on the board. I don’t care what it is. I need math.’ So he showed up with like the equation for hydrogen. So that’s what that is. But this is how that stuff happens. So you’re constantly writing the whole time, and you show up on set – We have our script, we have our beats and our characters, and we get on set and now we have Keith getting in it, too. Keith’s like, “We should go all the way around the board.” We start thinking A Beautiful Mind. So we get these crazy dolly shots that go all the way around the board. And then we had an idea it would be funny if Rob wrote something completely ridiculous on the board, so at the top, what is it? Like, “Ham over eggs times two equals omelet.”

Q: I’ve tried it. That hasn’t worked out for me.

Kypros: (Laughs.) It’s an inexact science.

Wilson: I was working it out.

Q: Let me take you back to the writing. So you’ve got your jokes. You work the dialogue. You know who the characters are going to be. So one of the things I like is a lot of the comedy comes from the acting. It’s your (Kypros) earnestness and it’s the way (Wilson) deflates everything that (Kypros) says with – and I love light rail – but with common sense.

Wilson: That’s the thing.

Q: But do you know that structurally, that that’s what you’re going to do?

Wilson: The thing was. Were knew Jason’s character is the voice of the city. He’s the city’s boy.

Kypros: The city personified. I’m the people making just blind decisions.

Wilson: Yeah. Like, “It’s gotta work out.”

Kypros: We were opposite ends of the spectrum. Republican-Democrat. We’re talking about the same thing but we have different points of view.

Wilson: In my mind, I felt like everyone that I knew. You know what I mean? All of the people I had talked to about light rail, these were the things that they were saying but their voice hadn’t been heard. They were saying it but they weren’t saying it at City Council meetings. They were saying it in bars. They were saying it, you know, wherever. So of course nobody was going to hear it because they were talking to other people in bars.

Kypros: That was the idea. And the choice for Rob to play that character and me to play the other character –

Wilson: We went back and forth.

Kypros: We didn’t really know who was going to play who at first.

Wilson: The “house citizen” line.

Q: That’s a badass line.

Kypros: It’s a good line, right? It’s got some layers.

Q: It’s a really loaded line.

Wilson: Once we had kind of figured out who was going to play what, that line came about then, because it would have been weird to go the other way, I think.

Q: How did you think about that line?

Kypros: We had some jokes, but the jokes do develop as you write the script. You don’t want to have too many jokes and you want it to seem dialogue-y and not jokey. … The house citizen line. We had jokes, and other jokes came out. One of the hardest things about writing a good sketch is the end.

Wilson: Yeah.

Kypros: Getting out of a sketch is so hard sometimes.

Wilson: All the time.

Kypros: Not all the time. Sometimes you get a gift and you know what your out is and you’re like, “This is great.” You know? But finding the out is just really difficult sometimes. That was toward the end and we added it. We knew what the voices of the characters were. We thought it would be cool to be able to say something that had that connotation, but apply it to a different – It’s still a mentality, you know what I’m saying? You can apply the mentality to anything you want.

Q: I worry that people who live outside the area don’t get how good it is. You lay out the logic – how isolated it is, how you stop at 7-Eleven – then you get to the capper, which I think is the Beach, where (Wilson) goes, whatever the line is –

Wilson: “Sure it is, Jason.”

Q: What is it, two minutes long? And you get all the logic against light rail – not that I agree.

Kypros: Well, yeah. I think when we were writing it we knew that we had something that was good. When we were done I felt this is a good sketch.

Q: Have you ever done that one live?

Kypros: No.

Q: A lot of it’s in the acting and the camera.

Kypros: It is. That was Keith. The whole bit at the end, you know, that’s Keith like, “I’m just going to let it run. You guys do what you do.” That’s him saying … let it happen. No, we haven’t done it live. Some of the timing happens in the post production, too.

Wilson: You find out how much of an editor’s medium it really is.

Kypros: You look at the footage for “Light Rail” and you see different takes on lines, different deliveries and intentions.

Wilson: It changes the whole thing. You could have cut really any of the sketches we’ve done a hundred different ways and it changes the meaning. We try it a number of different ways, really.

Kypros: To a degree. You can’t cut them too divergently. Every part of the sketch matters though. That’s a successful sketch to me because, you talk about timing, every part of it to me works together. Like the feet shot, me walking through. That was a last-minute thing.

Wilson: It built momentum for the scene.

Kypros: They’re not all home runs, but that one definitely had a better chance than others.

Q: How much of the finished video is in the script and how much is improv?

Wilson: Well the whole end is improv.

Kypros: The tag is all an improvisation. … Really the ending and the beginning is all improvised. With him working the problem and me coming in …

Q: Sniffing the marker?

Kypros: That was improvised.

Wilson: (Laughs.) I don’t know where that came from.

Kypros: I think Keith caught on to it.

Wilson: “Keep it.”

Kypros: ‘”You’ve got to sniff that marker, man. Sniff it.”

Q: Tell me about “Forest Fires.”

Kypros: We had the “Racism” PSA because we did it as a live performance for the YWCA. The feedback that we got was everybody really liked it. And again, part of the charge for doing more video work. I wanted to shoot stuff. Shoot stuff, shoot stuff, shoot stuff. And so I had a golden opportunity to have some hands on deck that particular day that I normally wouldn’t have. Chip Johnson and Keith Jackson and the racism PSA didn’t involve me, so I didn’t really have to worry about performing in it. We could really make more of a production out of it. So Brendan Hoyle, like all the early stuff with the exception of the (restaurant) interview … that’s all Brendan. He’s really good at turning a script out quick. That forest fires one was a PSA he had written, as well. So we decided it would be cool to try to shoot both. Since we shot the ‘Racism’ PSA, part of the production process was we shot it to look like a real PSA. So we thought it would be funny to sell this other PSA idea as if we just broke from a PSA. So that whole intro to that, the ‘Forest Fires,’ that was all improvised. We made that up on the spot.

Q: That racism one would have been very interesting with shirts off.

Kypros: (Laughs.) It would have been great. And the only reason we called it “Forest Fires” was we were trying to think of ways for it to get hits. We were just playing around. Forest fires were happening at the time.

Q: That one, other than the intro, was that scripted?

Kypros: That one was scripted. But like the donut was an afterthought.

Wilson: I wanted that donut.

Kypros: I ate it.

Wilson: We had like, what, four donuts?

Kypros: Just two. But the donut was a thought. We’ll go into a production and one of the things I like to do is think of the ways to make it more funny visually.You know, we do this and cut to this and I have a donut.

Q: There’s a lot of reversal of expectations in that one, too, which makes it funny. So you just work out the beats in the writing or is it in the rehearsal?

Kypros: Well Brendan had written it – He had written that sketch before Plan B. It was sitting around. So I had a chance to look at it, and just as an actor … You talk about the “Light Rail” and the acting and, well, we have done it for a while and we work well together. I knew – again, I had my point of view. I knew what was happening there. Brendan was going to try to derail, hijack the PSA, and I just wanted to keep it on track. “No, no. We’re not here to talk about childhood obesity.” And then some of the direction comes out of that.

Wilson: You figure it out. What’s really cool is attacking it from all these different angles, as an actor, as a writer. I guess Jason more than most and also Brendan, who is a great theater director, your mind starts working on like three or four planes when you first get a script. My thing is really live shows. I can grasp how a live show is going to work. … It almost happens organically. We’ve been doing it together six months now, and we’re starting to really know each other. … Now it’s one of those things to where when you get there you’ve got a feeling of how it’s going to go down. There are happy things that come out of the process –

Kypros: To interject, it goes back to that intent of the group having an improv base, so you know, here’s the script, you’re off book, I’m off book, here’s who is going to work the camera. Everybody’s got their role. But when you get down to doing it, you can allow that improv to happen.

Wilson: A big improv concept is that of one mind.

Kypros: We want to be like a cool-ass, jamming jazz band.

Wilson: You get the sheet music, you know the song, but you know, like, Lauren might riff off and do some cool stuff.

Kypros: And people have some characters that they can do. When you’re writing a sketch you can write to someone’s strengths. ‘I can just see this guy saying it.’

Q: Can we talk about the silent film? There are a lot of different kind of gags in there. Can you talk about how you came up with the idea?

Kypros: My dad’s been playing (piano) for the silent films forever. Before I was around. Thom Vourlas (of the one and only Naro Expanded Cinema) had mentioned to me years ago, “You know what you should do, you should do a silent film.” … As a part of a way to try and get the group out, and I’ve just reached this point in my life where I want to create, so we mentioned the idea to Thom, would it be a cool idea and he said sure. So we were like, “The Naro, we’ll be able to put a video up.” It was a great way to get some exposure.

Wilson: It was really cool being on the big screen.

Kypros: The concept basically was I thought about whether I wanted to make it look like a silent film, you know, do after effects so it would look all jerky. I tried to film it to see if I could make it look like that and I couldn’t find any easy answers. So my decision was to shoot it like a silent film. What I mean was to use all wide shots and then just dive in for coverage. I wasn’t worried about over the shoulders, medium (shots) …

Q: A lot of the coverage is for gags, like the locket.

Kypros: Exactly.

Q: You see the acting and then you cut to see the joke.

Kypros: Right. That was one of the jokes – Brendan and I opened it up to everybody. We always do. … But that was one of the jokes Brendan and I had from the beginning. We were laughing hard that is would be so funny to reveal this locket and we were both in it. … Because of that, because we couldn’t use dialogue, we knew it was really character-dependant. It was really dependent upon sight gags.

Wilson: The Phineus T. Snellsworth character (the heavy played by Wilson) actually came out – we didn’t know what to do with him.

Kypros: Rob came up with this idea. It was after we put the ‘Light Rail’ video up, and it was getting a lot of play. So we were talking about it and Rob came up with this character.

Wilson: It was going to be this guy and it was the same character but he went into City Council and went, “Yes, I’ve got this fantastic idea. I’m just going to need a hundred thousand million more dollars.” (Evil laugh.) And then the City Council’s just going for it. (Laughs.)

Kypros: And we used that character for a cold open we did at a Belmont show. That was his debut. Then we did this project, we decided to use that character as the lead, pretty much. The villain.

Wilson: We’re always finding new stuff.

Kypros: We had that long title card and there’s no way to read it. We knew we wanted that gag in there. … And we shot that in a day. We started at the Naro, and we thought we were going to this other location and there was going to be a whole chase scene around the house, and we were like, “No, can’t do it.” So we shot it at the Naro. … I wanted it to be like a silent film, but a 2011 silent film. Like it didn’t have to be something that Buster Keaton would (be in). It had to be like that. … We knew we wanted to be clever with (the form of the video) and break convention.

Q: And mess with light rail again.

Kypros: Yeah.

Q: Well, let’s talk about the ending. There are a lot of little gags, like the ropes just being piled on her.

Kypros: That happened there. We didn’t have time to get that shot. And in the editing room that happened. We’re just sitting there watching it like, “Aw, shit. We just pulled the roped off her.” And then we said, “Let’s let it roll.”

Q: And then you go into 7-Eleven.

Kypros: We had established that. (Laughs.)

Q: That was in the plan.

Kypros: That was in the plan. That was part of one of the shots. We knew we needed to get to a railroad track. We knew we needed a rope.

Q: So was that a light rail track?

Wilson: No.

Kypros: That was a piece of track that wasn’t even part of the track. We just lucked into this not-on-the-track track.

Wilson: Location scouting, man. That’s so important.

Q: I wasn’t at the show, but the whole part where you’re waiting for light rail, did that get a big laugh?

Kypros: Oh, yeah. “Where is that light rail” got a big, big laugh.

Wilson: It was just crazy.

Q: For that one, it’s almost like you don’t need the card. Because the joke is in the acting and then you get the card.

Kypros: Yeah, you get the acting and then you get the card and the card just punches it. That was in the timing too. We knew we had to time the joke but also we had an opportunity to get a laugh from the placement of the card. … Really, the title cards came after. Like “Where is that light rail” might have been one of them we knew was going to be in there.

Wilson: I think the whole thing we do that is exciting to me is the layering. It starts with the original person to the group, and you get some additional layering there. And then you get on set, and … there’s the improv that happens there, and then you get into the editing room.

Kypros: In post we can add sounds and play with the timing even more.

Wilson: They say too many chefs spoil the stew, but if you have just the right amount of chefs, you know what I mean? It’s just one of those things.

Kypros: We’re a creative collective. That’s what we’re trying to be. We’re trying to be an improv jam band.

And that’s that. Thanks, guys.

Speaking of jamming …

If you’ve stuck around this long, you deserve a treat. Here’s the amazing Dennis Chambers, playing us out. This song near and dear to my heart because my older daughter, now five, used to dance around to it when she was a toddler. Aptly named, too — “Plan B.”

Tagged brendan hoyle, comedy, comedy writing, improv, jason kypros, keith jackson, lauren rogers, naro expanded cinema, norfolk, norfolk va, plan b, plan b improv, rob wilson, sketch comedy

Oct 18 2011

2 Comments

Interviews, Uncategorized, Writing

Writing Craft, Vol. VIII: Rob Wilson and Jason Kypros of Plan B (Part One)

Jason Kypros and Rob Wilson of Plan B sketch comedy and improv.

NORFOLK, Va. — I recently sat down with Jason Kypros and Rob Wilson of the Hampton Roads sketch comedy and improv group Plan B to talk about writing, handling sensitive topics with humor, and the group’s forays into videos — most recently a 10-minute homage to silent film.

Kypros, 33, is a Norfolk native and Wilson, 29, was raised in Chesapeake and Norfolk after his family moved here from Queens, N.Y. Both are writers and actors with Plan B, and both also perform standup comedy.

This conversation was recorded at Kerouac Cafe before Plan B’s recent The Big Show at the Naro Expanded Cinema. It has been edited for length and clarity. There is some adult language below.

Q: Had you wanted to perform when you were kids? How did that develop?

Kypros: I can remember being really little and I just liked to dance all the time. Whenever anything came on, I would just dance. Which is funny because when I was older, you’re an adolescent and you know, I would never dance, but inside I was like, ‘Fuck, I want to dance.’ (Laughs.) But I did a play in first grade, because my dad was teaching where I went to school. Ever since I did that play, I always was kind of doing that stuff.

Q: And at some point, comedy hit you.

Kypros: Yeah. I always loved comedy. … I went to Thoroughgood Inn (Comedy Club in Virginia Beach) before it shut down. I remember going to see a show and being like, ‘I can totally do that.’ But I just didn’t have the nerve to do it. So I moved to L.A. because I got a role in a film. … After a year and a half in L.A., I finally did stand up. I was probably around 23.

Q: What was the film?

Kypros: Mickey. … It was a John Grisham film. I was eligible for my SAG card after the film, and I met a producer and I started working for him. I moved to L.A. and found out intern meant work for free. … I started doing comedy and then started taking courses at The Groundlings.

Q: How about you, Rob?

Wilson: My first play, I can’t remember the name of the play, but I was probably in the first grade. I remember that I played an exclamation point. (Laughter.)

Kypros: I bet you were so good at that.

Wilson: I was. (Laughter.) Like, the play’s almost over and I come busting in. And I say, I’m like, ‘Bam!’ And then after I say my line the (Bel Biv Devoe) song ‘Poison’ comes on. And we all did the dance. (Singing.) ‘It’s driving me out of my mind.’ We all did that dance and I remember I was always do plays in church, and if there was time to speak, I would be doing it. It probably wasn’t until I was 13 or 14 years old, there was this girl, —– ——, and she was like, ‘I love poetry and plays.’ And I was like, ‘Shit, I do too.’ (Laughs.)

Kypros: —– ——, if you’re out there …

Wilson: Thank you. … I eventually started hating her guts. (Laughter.) But like the acting and the poems, that kept up. I decided in high school, that’s what I was going to do. I thought that was all that I was good at, and I’d been doing it since I was 14.

Q: You applied to Old Dominion University?

Wilson: Yeah. I went to (Tidewater Community College) for a minute, and I did some plays over there. I got into ODU. It was like being new all over again. I realized how much I sucked. (Laughs.) When you’re in high school you think you’re great. Then you get to college and you think you suck, and then you get kind of better at it. And then you think you’re great again, and you get back out into the real world, and you think you suck again. It’s kind of this perpetual thing of thinking you suck. I didn’t start doing comedy until I auditioned for The Pushers. And that was six, seven years ago. … (Following a pilot show for The Pushers) I did the very first real show. I was doing a play at the time, Hole In the Sky.

Q: The 9/11 play.

Wilson: Yeah. And – too soon, first. It was like 2003, maybe 2003, 2004. It felt too soon. … I was doing that, so I couldn’t do (The Pushers). So Brad (McMurran of The Pushers) and another dude came to the play and I was giving a heart-wrenching speech to the audience, and they found a way to sit right directly in my eye line, and Brad’s making faces. People were like crying in the audience, and I’ve got to try not to break character. That’s when I decided comedy might be fun to do.

Q: Did you go to school locally?

Kypros: I went to Norfolk Academy for 12 years. My dad taught there at the time, and then I went to college at Virginia Tech. It was pretty much right after college that I got that movie. That’s when I went out to Los Angeles. I lived in Los Angeles for about six years.

Q: What did you study at Tech?

Kypros: I was an interdisciplinary studies major.

Q: What does that mean?

Kypros: It’s almost like a choose your own adventure major. You take your minors and you turn them into an interdisciplinary studies major. My minors were theater, communications and the humanities. I didn’t get accepted for the engineering curriculum but I took engineering for the first year and half … and I was like I don’t want to do this anymore. … The theater minor happened because I was doing so much production. I was in a lot of plays, and you kept getting like a credit every time you did a play. I was like, ‘Shoot, I might as well take a couple classes and get the minor, you know?’

Q: What kind of plays? Was it comedy?

Kypros: No. Actually, I love musical theater. We did some cool stuff, man. We did some experimental stuff based upon a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Comedy always ended up coming up. You’ve got to know when to hit those beats. When you’re performing live, it becomes something you can feel. It’s not always the same thing. You know it from seeing things that make you laugh. It’s like, if that would have been a second sooner, I wouldn’t have laughed that hard. Timing is –

Wilson: Is everything.

Kypros: Is everything. Timing and life are both a bitch. (Laughter.) Timing is a bitch.

Q: So how did you do with standup?

Kypros: The first time I got up, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do the edgiest stuff I have.’ I got up there, and it was some pretty decent stuff. I have joke about my mom being adopted. Some of the jokes I still tell today.

Q: What’s the joke about your mom being adopted?

Kypros: It’s just like people , when they get on stage, they want to say, ‘Well, I can say this because my mom was this or I can say that because my mom was that.’ You know, but my mom was adopted so I don’t know what she brings to the table. You know, the only way I’m going to find out is if I run for office or something. So I’ve had to look at my life and see if there’s any clues to show me what it is that she brings to the table. I realized that ever since I was 13 I’ve always had a job, so maybe I’m white. But at every job I’ve ever had they’ve always complimented me on my fantastic work ethic so I could be Mexican. I get my check and I don’t want to spend it so I might be Jewish. And I love white women so I must be black. And that was the joke. … The first time I got up and told these jokes, people laughed and this guy asked me if I wanted to do this show at this place that was down on West Pico Boulevard, the Comedy Union next to the Roscoe’s House of Chicken ‘n Waffles in L.A. It was like a bringer show. (The comic has to bring friends to fill the audience, and there’s often a drink minimum.) But it was cool. It was one of those moments where you got up, you did it, it was great, and then the guys says, ‘Hey, I run the show. You want to do this thing?’ You know, so that was neat. That worked out pretty good.

Q: How hard is it to fill the bringer shows? Did you have willing victims?

Kypros: Yeah. You have some friends. It’s always something like bring five friends or eight friends. But the thing was always, it’s a $10 cover and a two drink minimum. So it was hard to constantly hit your friends up, and they hear you telling the same jokes a lot. … After a while, you realize I can’t keep doing bringer shows. As a hungry comic, you want to do all the work you can do, but then you get to be a little wiser in your craft and you start to see what it is. You start to see the benefit of the open mics and then you say, ‘Well, maybe I only need to do one bringer show every three months and really bring ‘em out.’ … You almost inadvertently get a schooling in self promotion.

Q: You’re writing your own stuff.

Kypros: Yeah. Absolutely. My brothers and I have a great relationship and so every now and then they’ll call me up and have a funny idea, you know what I mean? There’s some jokes that I have that are certainly thanks to my brothers and there are jokes in there that are thanks to my friends too. You know, as comics you’ll sit around and go, ‘Oh, here’s a tag. In that joke what if you said this?’

Wilson: We were just having a conversation last night on the way to the show and somebody said pee-pee.

Kypros: I said pee-pee.

Wilson: And I said please don’t – there’s nothing sexy about referring to my penis as pee-pee, and we just spit-balled for like, what, twenty minutes on the way to this show. When we got to show, it killed.

Kypros: Yeah, I got up and started doing this bit and it worked. That’s how you write, I think. That’s how I write. The way I write the best. Riding in my car, thinking about something. You know, riding in my car by myself, it’s almost like I’m working. My head’s running, I’m thinking about stuff, and I’m putting stuff together. There’s nothing better than having a buddy there you can bounce stuff off of.

Wilson: Yeah. That’s a good thing. That’s actually the best stuff ever.

Kypros: Road tripping is good times.

Q: When did you start writing?

Wilson: I started in poetry and spoken word. … I started writing probably my senior year of high school for real. My buddy and I thought we were filmmakers and (laughs) we would do just horrible stop-motion effects and stuff like that … I was 22 before I wrote anything good. Everything was terrible up until that point – writing this hugely emotional, what we thought was avant-garde crap for years. But when I started writing comedy, started writing sketches all the time, that gets you to train that muscle to start thinking in that way.

Q: And for comedy to work, it’s got to have a shape.

Wilson: Right.

Q: You got to have the assumption, you’ve got to deflate the assumption and build toward the final turn. I know I’m not using the terminology.

Kypros: I don’t know what the terminology is.

Wilson: My favorite thing is incongruity. I learned this back in high school. One of these things doesn’t belong here. One of these things doesn’t work. You know what I mean? And then under that same kind of notion, what if something is completely out of place and no one acknowledges it?

Kypros: You put normal people in a strange situation or –

Wilson: Or you put strange people in a normal situation.

Kypros: You play with levels and all sorts of stuff.

Wilson: Truth’s the best thing, though – stuff that really tells the truth. That’s what I liked about the “Light Rail.” I didn’t even thing it was so funny. It was funny because it was so true.

Kypros: To me, that’s the whole reason I wanted to do comedy anyway. I grew up listening to Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams and George Carlin, but George Carlin was the one I really liked the most, I think, because I thought he was hilarious and he dealt with issues. He dealt with the way people thought about things. Everybody’s dealing with the way people think about things because it’s comedy, it’s the juxtaposition, but I just thought it was so cool. It was like, ‘Many a truth is told in jest.’ How many times has someone been, ‘Hey, you’re an asshole. Ha ha. Just kidding, man.’ Man, you mean it. (Laughter.) I like to say that standup comedy is the last bastion of free speech, or it should be. Which is why I tell that joke about my mom, because to me it’s ridiculous. We’re sitting here laughing and it’s like so what, I get to say this thing or that thing or this word or that word or I can say this scenario just because I have this card to say it? You know, if you’re going to say it, say it. The thing about it too is it’s what makes you laugh. You’ve got to hit that thing. Again, with the light rail, they’re thinking that. They’re already thinking it. And you’re saying it.

Wilson: We gave them a voice.

Q: How did this group start?

Kypros: I had done The Groundlings and I was back in Norfolk and I had always wanted to do – I felt like when I came back I wanted to do some sketch comedy. … I got to meet Rob and Brad (McMurran) and all those guys (through The Pushers), and Sean (Devereux) and everybody … Well, we kind of were buddies before I saw (Wilson) perform. I thought it was really awesome what they were doing everything and we all became friends and were hanging out and all that kind of stuff. … I had always kind of wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what it was. I ended up going back to L.A. after I came back (to Norfolk) to finish the class at The Groundlings, finish this last whatever. Now I’m a level four Groundling. It’s like a role-playing game or something. That was the one where they really taught me how to write. That was the one where the whole idea was look at all this improv training you’ve done – use it to write the sketch. Use it to fill in the blanks in the sketch. Which is really like we were doing already, where we’re riding in the car, BS-ing in the car, and suddenly I’m up on stage telling a joke, only it’s written, you know?

Wilson: Right.

Q: But if you want to go long form, and I think it’s the same as a story, there’s a shape. It’s got to go somewhere. We’ll (discuss) that with “Light Rail,” but how do you get to that place? The inspiration seems to be the improv, but at some point if you want it to be –

Wilson: With that sketch specifically, there was an idea. We were thinking, ‘Well, what’s on people’s minds?’ I think that’s where it started. And then we were –

Kypros: We were bullshitting about the light rail, is what it was. We were just talking about how stupid it was, and we started laughing, and … we just kind of looked at each other.

Wilson: Aha. That’s it.

Kypros: We had just started the group. I had come back and I’d done a couple plays at Little Theatre of Norfolk and Brendan Hoyle was the director there. He and I together were like, ‘Let’s start this thing. What do you want to call it?’ (Hoyle and Kypros then started Plan B.) Rob and I had talked about doing stuff together and it was the sort of thing where we were all talking about stuff but there was never the opportunity for us all to work together.

Q: So why did you leave The Pushers?

Wilson: I wanted to be a part of this group because Jason and I work together and we have a really great time. We have great chemistry. It’s fun. It’s like a little bromance. (Laughs.) And he’s like well we’re doing this thing, and we’re going to be shooting a lot of stuff, and it was always something I was really interested in. I thought a lot of subject matter was going to be different from what I was doing then. So I was like I want to do this thing, and (The Pushers) thought it would be a conflict of interest. (Though Wilson wanted to do both, he realized there was no way he could have split his time.)

Kypros: When we started Plan B, we had like eleven or twelve people. We had an audition. Thirty people came out. We didn’t expect that many and we had to choose 12 of them, and now … we’re down to nine. That’s how it goes. Cause it’s hard, man. No one’s making money.

Wilson: We’re doing it for the love.

Kypros: We knew that everybody had different levels of experience as far as what they’d done with improv. One of the things we talked about from the very beginning … we wanted improv to be the foundation of the whole group. The sketches would come out of that. It’s fun. You’re constantly creating. We’ve done a good job with it and we’ve tried to help each other along. Our rehearsals are like a class.

Wilson: Almost, yeah. Definitely.

Kypros: We have an agenda. Rob’s been making sure we stay on task with that.

Wilson: We all are on different levels. Jason’s gone all the way through The Groundlings. Lauren’s completely Second City trained. I’ve been doing it a while. I haven’t –

Kypros: You’ve had influences from all these different things.

Wilson: I’m like a ronin. I’ve learned a little bit from here, a little bit from there. All of us will tell you, every single rehearsal we go to, we learn something new.

Q: (Wilson and I) have talked personally about content. In my own writing this is something I’ve struggled with (in short fiction stories). One of the things we’ve had conversations about, is when you’re creating art or a sketch – and I think what you guys do is art – how do you deal with that issue of how you’re representing people in sketches?

Wilson: We did a racism sketch. Sometimes I think it’s what’s not said but how the characters themselves are portrayed. So in the racism sketch, I’m a black dude who has his own hang-ups and ideas and Brendan’s a white dude who has his own hang-ups and ideas. Both of the characters are coming from an intelligent place with an intelligent argument, even if their foundations are completely off base. What I’m saying is we’re not playing any one character in a way that –

Kypros: We characterize a specific point of view and the point of view points out the ridiculousness of the situation.

Wilson: Right, but I’m saying in the portrayal of the characters. Not just in the content. I think a lot of it has to do with the portrayal of the character.

Q: Both characters – and they say completely off-base things – but they both have power.

Wilson: Right.

Kypros: They believe what they’re saying.

Q: It’s a dialogue, it’s not –

Wilson: Right. It’s not, ‘You’re telling me how it is.’ And I’m just sitting here taking it or vice versa. It was honorable.

Kypros: It was an honorable dialogue.

Q: Until you got to Asians, but we’ll come back to that.

Wilson: Right.

Kypros: Right, but come on.

Wilson: (Kidding.) We don’t have any in the group, so they couldn’t speak up.

Kypros: Nah – Again, the point was to add to the ridiculousness of stereotypes and that sort of stuff.

Wilson: Right.

Kypros: That was the idea. Like for all those things, you’re talking about content and what we want to get across, I know for me – I have a production company. That’s how we started doing all these video things. I have a small production company, JLK Productions — there it is. That’s all the plug I’ll do. … But so basically, here I am, I know how to do this sketch stuff. The cool thing to me about the sketch stuff was, you know, this is what I was writing. I was coming out of The Groundlings writing all these sketches for stage and thinking, ‘Some of these would be good video sketches.’ To me, SNL and the stage and that whole concept – I really got a taste of that when I was doing that class. I mean, three months of that. So this was what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do Plan B and I knew we were going to have video influence from the beginning. … Keith Jackson started helping us out. He helped direct “Light Rail.” He and I directed it together, and he directed the racism PSA. … With the racism PSA, as far as content is concerned, we knew that – I knew that I wanted to keep it at a certain level. As a standup, I hate it when you go to work a room and they say, ‘You’ve got to keep it PG.’ I don’t know why. I feel we all live rated-R lives, and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise. You might stub your toe and say ‘shit.’ That’s the world we live in. So I’d rather be honest, but I don’t want to push it. But with the racism PSA, there definitely were some moments where we all as a group were like, ‘Well, how should we play that line?’

Wilson: I feel that when you’re talking about, especially, racial stuff or anything that’s kind of touchy, I go back to truth, man. Like, if it’s true, let’s play it from an honest place. That’s coming from an actor and a writer’s place, but, I guess, more as an actor because you want to play the honesty. We were cautious of certain things because you don’t want people to get the wrong idea. Because when you do something that’s touchy, when you do something that can go either way, there becomes a concern. (Comedian Dave) Chapelle was talking about it. He was talking about when he was doing his show … he did (a sketch about a family whose last name was a racial epithet) … He did the sketch and it was hilarious to him, but he would go to some backwater place and people would come up to him and be like, ‘Ha ha ha, (repeating the epithet) yeah!’ And it was like, ‘Why are you laughing?’

Q: That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Could someone watch that sketch (“The Folly of Racism”) and enjoy the fetishization of Asian women at the end of it?

Wilson: I think the point that it’s placed, it’s tongue-in-cheek enough – If they did, it’s a far reach.

Q: Right, but you think the sketch reads that, obviously, it’s satirizing both stereotypes and sometimes the ways we talk about stereotypes.

Kypros: Right. What Rob’s saying about truth and what we said about putting ridiculous people in real situations or vice versa is what you have there is you have two people who are characterized, and they themselves are playing stereotypes and they believe it’s their truth and it looks like a PSA. That’s how you get the funny in that sketch. It’s like (singing the NBC public service announcement theme) ‘The more you know … ’ So we have this real situation and we’re putting ridiculous people in it. So that’s why I don’t have a problem with the Asian joke because we’ve established that these two people are ridiculous. You know what I mean? So they say that joke and it’s like some place for them to – so the subtle way is it’s like bringing them together. You know what I mean?

Wilson: It’s like this common ground. And the thing I’ve realized is somebody dumb is gonna take whatever you say and feel whatever way they want to about it. But you know what you’re intention is. As long as you’re clear on your intention as an artist or as a group of artists –

Kypros: There you go.

Wilson: – then, I mean, you give it to them and it’s all subjective.

Kypros: You can’t make everyone happy, right? … Not everybody’s going to laugh at a comedy show the same way.

Wilson: The thing that gets weird is when you’re dealing with a group of artists and you don’t know the group’s intentions. You know what yours is. If you don’t know the group’s intentions, that’s where you get into a muddy place.

Kypros: We make sure, I make sure, Brendan makes sure that once we had everybody after the auditions we told everybody what our intention was.

Q: What is your intention?

Kypros: Our intention is just to be a really good sketch comedy group. Plain and simple.

Wilson: From top to bottom.

Kypros: We want to have solid stuff and we want to be able to appeal to a wide range of people. We’re not trying to go for one particular group. With my standup, it’s different. I go to do my standup and I want to say whatever I’m going to say and I want to do it however I want to do it. But with this stuff, I am more inclined to go, ‘Well, will the kids laugh at it?’ Like the silent film. (‘Follow That Fiend!’)

Wilson: We did the silent film at the Naro, and children were enjoying that. You know, it’s nice. Oh God, it’s so nice to be able to have something you can have your mother and children enjoy. You know I don’t have any kids yet – that I know of – but when I do I want them to be able to enjoy the things that I do. With my standup, my standup my kids are not going to enjoy. Until they’re 20. (Laughs.)

Kypros: You might not want them to hear it.

The next part of this talk is on the way.

Playing us out … a terrible song about an L.A. institution to which Kypros gave a shout out above. Enjoy the insincere dancing.

P.S. Plan B did not do this video.

Tagged brendan hoyle, comedy writing, improv, jason kypros, keith jackson, lauren rogers, naro expanded cinema, norfolk, norfolk va, plan b, plan b improv, rob wilson, sketch comedy

Oct 16 2011

9 Comments

Community, Interviews, Writing

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XV: Commentator and opinion writer Brian Kirwin

Sometimes a cutline is just a cutline. Sometimes it sets up a really obscure callback. Put the glasses on, Brian Kirwin! Put 'em on! Courtesy photo.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Beach-based opinion writer Brian Kirwin contributes to Bearing Drift and The Daily Press newspaper. He’s worked extensively as a political consultant. He often comments on public affairs matters through various forms of media. He works in public relations. He serves on the Beach’s Arts and Humanities Commission, too. And the man acts.

So he’s a sextuple threat — at least, he is if you only count things listed in the preceding sentences. There may be more, but that’s okay. As you will see, sometimes in America we make our own math.

By the way, Kirwin is a conservative. Who knows? Maybe that will come up.

Any more of an introduction to this Belligerent Q&A will only delay the pleasure.

Q: Just who do you think you are? Please use three examples in your response.

I used to be that kid in the classroom who never got in trouble, but instigated everything. I’d talk to my ‘neighbor’ in class, then as soon as the teacher looked my way, I’d have this studious look on my face and another kid was talking back to me or laughing. Being that the teacher was usually a nun, the kid got his lights knocked out.

Today, I try my very best to be the same instigator I was when I was six. I’ll be on a conference call with several vaunted Republican leaders, and say the one thing that they usually don’t want to admit. I’ll meet with my Democrat friends, who invariably tell me how every time they say they know me, their friends get either sickened or angry.

I also do a fair amount of acting, and my agent usually books roles for me where I, with a fair amount of snark, tick off the whole audience. Life imitates art, ya know.

Q: You suggested that former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine run for the U.S. Senate on the slogan “A Do-nothing Governor for the Do-nothing Senate.” This recommendation seems insincere. Discuss.

Anytime I say something nice about a Democrat, it’s insincere. Democrats have ruined the country. They can’t have a decent talk radio show. Their newspapers are so ineffectual I think birds will start boycotting them soon, which could get messy. Democrats are the party of failure. They assume nothing good can happen in America unless dictated by government. Kaine failed at all his attempts to do stupid things as Governor, and the Senate has accomplished a big fat zero, so they do seem to have a lot in common. I do think the EPA may issue a mandate to Kaine to trim his eyebrows, though. The courts might just uphold that.

Q: Of the various kinds of opinion you write, I most enjoy the “round up” style “Kirwin’s Commentaries,” which give you a chance to riff on everything from the lack of conservative voices on public affairs programming (back when we had such things) to the flawed restaurant math of a half-pound containing 15 shrimp and a pound containing 25. Could you talk about that form and how it’s a different writing process that with longer opinion columns, if so?

Admit it – you love everything I write. It’s OK. My stuff is legendary and fun. Longer opinion columns are a like writing a symphony. You have to have several movements which build along the way to the finale. I write columns that way, usually in sections. Then tie some thematic threads through it and punch it up with a healthy dose of sarcasm.

Commentaries are like writing a song. All I need is a catchy hook, like a healthy dose of sarcasm. I look at something – a story, an experience, another column – and zing. The commentaries are a collection of ironic zings – a hat tip to Andy Rooney, if you will.

Q: When you’ve had 15 shrimp, are you really sitting there going, “You know what would hit the spot — maybe, 15 more shrimp?” Wouldn’t 10 cover it?

I think it’s pretty ironic to have a large number of something called a ‘shrimp.’ Besides, I’m a Republican. A Democrat would sit there and decide what a ‘fair share’ of shrimp I should have. How dare I have 15 shrimp when they think 10 should be all I’d really need. There are some homeless people in Chicago who don’t have any shrimp at all, probably because that deep dish pizza is all the rage. Anyway, I don’t need Obama’s socialist dictates about how many shrimp I should eat, or anyone else’s for that matter. This is America. If I want to eat 100 shrimp and go to bed smelling like Old Bay, I dare someone to tell me I shouldn’t. They’d probably accuse me of clinging to my shrimp.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about the apparent deep political polarity in America? Are we turning into the last two sections of The Stand?

Figures you’d look to liberal Stephen King for political theory and analysis. I think there are much better Stephen King books to look to for politics. Like The Shining – The ‘Overlook’ Hotel as a metaphor for the federal government, whose boiler explodes because we hired an incompetent caretaker – Hi, Barack! Or Carrie – the liberal’s fantasy about what religious people are really like and that they’re one bad prom from taking out an entire town. The Stand is pretty much junk, although it’s somewhat amusing seeing liberal fantasies play out. Liberals like stories of massive self-imposed destruction. Like Obamacare.

Q: If it comes down to it, where should we head? Boulder, Colo., or Las Vegas? I mean, that Randall Flagg fellow is awfully charismatic.

You lefties fall for charisma too easily. Instead of being a follower, try being a leader for once. You’ll be surprised how much fun it is forging your own future than trying to find the right idiot to tell you what to do.

Q: You are a contributor to Bearing Drift, which recently announced its merger with Virginia Line Media. When I spoke with Jim Hoeft, he suggested some exciting possibilities for expansion and new ventures. What are some things you would like to see Bearing Drift do that it isn’t already doing? And when you guys inevitably do a sitcom, starring you of course, what’s the premise you’ll pitch?

There already are some good political sitcoms now that they stream the Democratic Virginia Senate online. I actually think sitcoms are pretty lackluster lately. It’s a half hour of dramatic standup. If we could do some throwback sitcoms that actually had some storytelling, in the tradition of All in the Family or Good Times, then we’d have something.

Actually, I think Bearing Drift needs a conservative version of Saturday Night Live. Skit comedy is the way to go. Maybe the liberals will pass the fairness doctrine and NBC would have to program us.

Q: Can I play the weird relative who drops in a lot but isn’t allowed to handle sharp things, use the stove, or control the TV remote?

I always pegged you as the guy who needed to include his middle name to make up for some deep-seeded insecurity. You can have the tv remote anyway, since all these networks are showing pretty useless stuff that don’t have much creativity anyway. I’ll pop in a DVD and watch you hopelessly try to change the channel for a few hours. Remember, relatives aren’t weird. Just in-laws.

Q: What do you think it says that we live in a country in which many people who have just eaten 15 shrimp can pretty much go ahead and eat 15 more shrimp? Or at least 10, depending upon the accuracy of the scales/mathematical acumen employed within a given shrimp-dispensing restaurant?

I fear for a world when the person calculating the bill can’t do simple math. I wish we lived in a country that didn’t bother to count your shrimp in the first place. We regulate way too much. We tell fishermen how much to catch. We tell Detroit what a car should weigh, and now we have cars that get totaled if you lean on them with the wrong kind of boots on. We tell toilet makers how much water a flush should be. We have so many regulations that it takes 18 years to build a four-mile road. One-hundred fifty years ago, it only took six years to build a nationwide railroad. Liberals hyper-regulate everything, and I’m pretty sick of it being so much of a pain in the neck to accomplish anything. My dream is to have a country that couldn’t care less how many shrimp I have.

Q: A concern I have from both my brief time as newspaper columnist and in reading some of the opinion voiced via local media is that compromise and the art of finding common ground do not seem to be valued. When you write for Bearing Drift or The Daily Press, do you feel you are preaching to the choir, meaning appealing primarily to conservatives, or do you hope to reach a wider range of people and influence them? Is that why you agreed to do The Daily Press gig?

Now that you mention it, your newspaper column career was pretty brief. I accepted The Daily Press gig because they asked. I love writing. I love entertaining. I couldn’t care less if I influence anyone, although if people are influenced by me, kudos to them. They’ve shown remarkable intellect. As far as preaching to the choir, every choir has its fair share of sinners. I’d write for The Washington Post if it meant I’d have legions of lefties ticked off at my spotlight on their silliness. If The Daily Press was really smart, they’d syndicate me. But some of their own scribes have dreams of being like me, so I doubt they’ll make the good business decision to do that and instead stay up late at night trying to be like me. And they’ll fail again.

Q: This past summer you criticized a fairly low-key editorial by The Virginian-Pilot noting the amount of energy consumed by the boxes people use to record television programs, even when said boxes are supposedly turned off. How do you get from that to “that’s the trouble with these liberal ninnies” and “I’m tired of these effete snobs telling free people what they should and shouldn’t do” and “I’m going to stick my carbon footprint up their tree-hugging butts”? It seems that you’re criticizing an editorial that ultimately suggests not regulation but moderation.

All The Pilot’s editorials are low-key, low-intellect and have low-readership. Criticizing them is like hunting in a private reserve. Easy! To your point, the first step to regulation is whining about moderation. First liberals tell you what they think you should do. Then when you don’t do it, they move to force you to do it anyway. Newspaper folk never criticize people who use tons of paper resulting in the loss of so many trees, do they? But they whine about electricity that powers their media competition. There are so many inconsistencies in the liberal’s management of everyone else’s lives that I think the clearest response is ‘mind your own freakin’ business.’ If I want to eat a cheeseburger while watching three TVs and surfing my laptop, go curl up in a corner with your tofu, bottled water and a book. I won’t bother you. Don’t bother me.

Q: In August you lauded the The Virginian-Pilot editorial page for being three “right three times in a row.” In retrospect, do you feel you should have put a little more backhand into that compliment?

Actually, I graded them on a curve. They were more ‘not wrong’ than they were ‘right,’ but it was so much better than their usual level of ‘so wrong that it’s silly to even address’ that I felt they needed some positive feedback. I am a uniter, ya know.

Q: A bit more seriously, could you talk a little about your day job and your passion for acting? People don’t usually just take up these activities/vocations or enter the political arena accidentally. There’s meaning to it for them. What is it you like about these forms of communication and self-expression? How do they inform your writing?

I love provoking emotional responses. Watch some old promos from Rowdy Roddy Piper and you’ll learn a great deal about me. I was a wrestling geek as a kid, and it amazed me to no end how a person could infuriate thousands of people so well that they’d buy tickets to see them get the tar beat out of them. Acting provides that in a big way, and so does political talk and writing. The real secret is not to act. Just be an amplified version of your reality. People who fake it won’t succeed. This is the real me at a high volume. That’s why it works.

Q: If Kaine continues to avoid your fine slogan, may I incorporate it into my “replacing U.S. Sen. Jim Webb” fan fiction? Still working out the plot, but it will be like a Gogol short story with anthropomorphic disembodied eyebrows battling a walking football metaphor. Working title — The Fourth & Long Follicle.

Just cite your source. But please publish it before my daughter has grandchildren.

Q: A number of interest groups have taken to asking candidates to sign pledges vowing that they will or won’t do this or that should they be elected to office. Is there any value to this? Though you are not running for anything, will you sign my pledge that affirms good government is a practice that is situational and may involve compromise?

Why don’t you say ‘all campaign promises are lies, and once I’m in office, I’ll do whatever the hell I want, and you’ll like it.’ Same thing as calling everything situational and compromising. Your way, we wouldn’t have any need for campaigns at all. Why bother if whatever they say is subject to change based on the situation? Your path would result in the downfall of the nation. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if politicians just told the truth and voters could actually believe them?

Q: How about the pledge to make the laws of math apply to shrimp per pound?

Just don’t tip idiots. Problem solved.

Q: We’ve covered so much ground here. Is there anything else you would like to say?

Just a few Piper quotes:

‘Don’t throw rocks at a guy whose got a machine gun.’

‘When you were young did your mommy and daddy place the swing too close to the wall?’

‘Just when they think they got all the answers, I change the questions.’

Playing us out is Rowdy Roddy Piper, in two parts.

First: A heart to heart with Andre the Giant:

And now, from John Carpenter’s awesome They Live, the greatest cinematic fight ever (with Keith David!). Was Ralph Waldo Emerson predicting this fight scene when he wrote “there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning” in 1841?

Most assuredly.

Also, most assuredly, this is not safe for work due to rough language and just a wee bit of pummeling:

Put ’em on!

Tagged bearing drift, belligerent q&a, brian kirwin, column writing, commentary, conservative, politics, rowdy roady piper, the daily press, the virginian-pilot, they live

Oct 13 2011

1 Comment

Interviews, Theater, Writing

Writing Craft, Vol. VII: CORE Theatre Ensemble’s 40 Whacks

CORE Theatre Ensemble's 40 Whacks team: Edwin Castillo, Cayley Waldo, Steffani Dambruch, Paul Costen, Nancy Dickerson and Emel Ertugrul on the Little Theatre of Norfolk stage. Photos here and below by John Doucette.

NORFOLK, Va. — I caught up with members of CORE Theatre Ensemble this past week at Little Theatre of Norfolk while they readied their new play 40 Whacks, opening Friday.

Based on the Lizzie Borden murders, it runs for only three performances.

This talk discusses the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and Viewpoints training, CORE’s founding, and some of CORE’s past shows, including an adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper and the original piece You Vs.

The members of CORE are Emel Ertugrul, managing director, artistic associate and actor; Edwin Castillo, Suzuki/Viewpoints training instructor, artistic associate and actor; Laura Agudelo, Suzuki/Viewpoints training assistant, artistic associate and actor; and Nancy Dickerson, artistic associate and actor.

The primary subjects are Ertugrul and Castillo, both of Virginia Beach and — full disclosure — longtime friends of mine. Sitting in were Dickerson of Chesapeake, as well as 40 Whacks actors Cayley Waldo of Norfolk and Paul Costen and Steffani Dambruch of the Beach. All were nice enough to humor my attempts at photography.

Showtimes are at 8 p.m., Friday, Oct. 14, through Sunday, Oct. 16, at Little Theatre of Norfolk, 801 Claremont Ave., Norfolk. Tickets are $15 for general admission; $12 for senior citizens, students, and active duty or retired military; and $8 17 and under. The play contains unsettling images and some sexual content. Reservations are via (757) 627-8551 or at the Little Theatre site.

My thanks to CORE for the time — and for keeping it pretty clean. It had been getting a little salty lately in these Q&As. I’ll try to do better from here on out, Imaginary Mom Who Can Work A Computer. And of course call more. Love you lots.

This has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Can you tell me how CORE started?

Castillo: I guess this started because … we wanted to do it, really. (Laughter.)

Ertugrul: Well, we wanted to do a show that we wanted to make our own rules for. We didn’t want to do someone else’s piece. That’s usually what starts you with your own art, is deciding “I don’t want to do your art, I want to do my art.” So we did our art, and started involving people that – It’s not about finding people who agree with your art, but are willing to go along this way with you. It’s good to have people that agree with you just enough to feel comfortable to disagree and to make something beautiful. So that’s sort of how it started. It started with a conversation. And we’re still –

Castillo: Still at it.

Ertugrul: We’re still at it. I mean, five years later, six years later, we’re still doing it. It’s not like we started like, “You know what we’re going to do? In six years we’re going to be over there.” We did have a goal but it was much more immediate. It was about answering that first question, or answering that first desire of wanting to make our own stuff.

Castillo: And I guess our desire to create our own art, it’s not a slight against the theater scene around her at all.

Ertugrul: No.

Castillo: It’s just that we wanted to see something different out there.

Ertugrul: We wanted to do something different.

Q: From the start, there was a real emphasis on the physical Suzuki method. Could you talk about your influences? I don’t know if it goes back to (1990s performances at Old Dominion University performances of) MacBeth or (Eugene O’Neill’s) The Hairy Ape.

Castillo: Actually, it started with Hairy Ape. I met a guest artist Leon Ingulsrud (an actor and director from SITI Company in New York) back in Fall 1997.

Ertugrul: Had you worked with “Bondo” at that point?

Castillo: I’d met him at ODU.

Ertugrul: Before (Ingulsrud), (SITI actor) Will Bond used to come down and work as a guest artist at ODU. One year, Will wasn’t able to do it and Leon came down to fill in, and then Leon kept coming back. Not every year, but for a good number of years.

Castillo: And the two of them belonged to the company in New York called the SITI Company, which was founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki, who developed the actor method of Suzuki training.

Ertugrul: And they got together because Anne had been working on Viewpoints, which is a way of breaking down physical performance, any physical performance. It does stem from dance, but then they decided not only does it apply to dance it applies to theater, any kind of physical performance. She teamed up with Tadashi. (His) own company in Toga, Japan, does Suzuki, so they wanted to make a company that was utilizing both of these thing. That’s what SITI is now, and still is doing amazing shows. … Most of it is just about “Are you physically capable to do these amazing feats onstage?” Well, you can’t just walk on stage and do amazing things if you haven’t appropriately conditioned your body to do so.

Castillo: And the training itself, I mean, for practicality’s sake, the actor – the Western actor – does not have the type of training skills like other artists do. That’s why we believe in the training and also the SITI company. A dancer can always do their position one, two and three, and jete and all of that. … Musicians can do scales, singers, people who play instruments. But an actor really didn’t have any of that, except for memorizing a monologue and looking in a mirror. But there’s nothing physical to it. So the Suzuki method of actor training actually gives you something physical to work with that is really breaking down basic movements and seeing how exact you can be.

Ertugrul: What this training brings up for discussion is how do you know how to carry this character across the stage if you don’t know how your body walks? … If you don’t know yourself, then how do you put a character on top of that?

Castillo: In a physical sense.

Steffani Dambruch, center frame, during a rehearsal this past Sunday for 40 Whacks, opening Friday at the Little Theatre of Norfolk.

Ertugrul: This isn’t how to act. This is literally how do you carry your body as this character you’ve decided to play.

Costen: It’s like a precognitive way of deconstruction. I mean, there’s nothing intellectual about it whatsoever, but it’s something like deconstruction in that you break down the pieces and parts of what’s going on within your body and the space as it relates to your body and everything, but it gives you a greater understanding.

Q: Let me ask you about The Yellow Wallpaper, which, as (Castillo and Ertugrul) know, I loved. … I thought that really married words that could have led to a melodramatic play into something really physical and visceral and interesting. How did that project come about? And I wanted to ask you specifically about the adaptation process (from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story).

Ertugrul: We sat down and said, “We want to do a show and we want to do it on our own and we … don’t want to buy the rights to do something.” The show that we had done just before that was something we had bought the rights to do and that’s fun, but we really wanted to make something that was completely our own.

Q: Was that Duranged? (Two Christopher Durang one-acts “The Nature and Purpose of the Universe” and “Titanic.”)

Ertugrul: Yeah. … After we had done (Duranged) we decided we wanted to adapt something. We sat down as a group and said what do you remember? What is the one story you really remember? And we came up with this list, and then we went back and we read them all. Just to see, “Well, is it really just my ninth-grade memory of it being such an awesome story. Or was it really a good story?” The one that won was “The Yellow Wallpaper.” And it really was the way that story was written — how it is done in journal entries — it lent itself so well to staging. From there we just started taking the actual words that she does as journal entries and started cutting it and making it into (the same) number of segments (as there are entries in the story).

Castillo: The fun part of adapting that was figuring out who were the characters. Really the story is just her, from her point of view.

Ertugrul: But the name of the story is “The Yellow Wallpaper,” not “Woman in Room.” So we decided that the main character in that story was the yellow wallpaper. The main character was it living and breathing and being comprised of more than one person. It looks different. It can sound different. It needs to be people doing this.

Emel Ertugrul, center, with Steffani Dambruch and Paul Costen in a rehearsal of CORE Theatre Ensemble's 40 Whacks.

Q: Can you describe how you took something to illustrate and used the multiple bodies of the actors to tell that story?

Ertugrul: One of the first things that happened with this training was we taught them how to move together. That’s the first thing, and that’s what the physical training does.

Castillo: The company for the show, for those who aren’t familiar, is a woman, the main character, and a husband, the other main character, but then we had a chorus of other people, was it six or seven?

Dickerson: It started as seven and then became five (when the play was restaged as a traveling production).

Castillo: So we had the chorus of people as the wallpaper and the binder between the chorus was this 80-foot piece of cloth, which we learned very quickly how to manipulate around the stage using the physical space of the theater.

Ertugrul: And the people.

Castillo: It really was just playing with how many ways can we utilize this cloth? As the story progresses, she becomes sucked into to wallpaper, and it becomes her psychosis of sorts because she sees people and talks to people in the wallpaper. So as the story progressed, we had the wallpaper on the outskirts of the space and it started intertwining.

Ertugrul: Into her world.

Castillo: At one point we’re actually holding her up.

Q: Can you talk about how you make decisions like that? Do you find that in rehearsal or do you know that going in?

Castillo: I say almost 90 percent of that is finding it in the rehearsal process.

Ertugrul: I think with that one we did have a completed script going in.

Castillo: But as far as manipulating the cloth and seeing how it works in different scenes, it was really trial and error.

Ertugrul: I do think we knew when she was finally gone, when she was really part of it, and we worked from there. … Deciding which emotion would go there.

Q: What’s it like to play a role like that? Do you feel like you have a say in the process of writing it?

Waldo: I think they came in with the adaptation pretty much taken care of. We played around with who would say what when and when our voices would overlap. Creating the show physically, it had to be a group process because there was no director who could stand there and say, “Okay, now move the wallpaper downstage.” We had to figure out this labyrinth of cloth together. We were playing one character together.

Dickerson: I had kind of a unique experience because (when Dickerson joined the cast) they had already done the show and they were changing it because it was based upon who was available and could drop everything and go to Canada for a week. I was like, “Hey, I can do that.” (Laughter.) So I would up taking on parts other people already had done because we took (the chorus) from seven people down to five people. The patterns of the wallpaper had already been established and it was, “Well, we have to take this down to five people instead of seven, but we need you to be here.”

Ertugrul: There was a lot of modifications where it wasn’t you just filling another person’s shoes. It was combining two roles. It was a completely different configuration.

Q: Did you cut apart the text or move things?

Castillo: I don’t think we moved anything, but we definitely cut.

Ertugrul: We put a scene in there where it was full-on dialogue between the husband and the woman, which doesn’t happen (in the short story.) It’s actually told all from her perspective. We made that scene. I’m going to be frank: I have not read that story since we did our adaptation, and I don’t remember what we changed. (Laughter.)

Castillo: On the adaptation side, it really did start with: “Here’s this entry; let’s read it out loud.”

Ertugrul: And go: “Boring. No. Cut it.” Or: “That sounds good.”

Castillo: Or: “Who says that? Oh, she would say that.” It really was that process at the very beginning. Just read it aloud.

Ertugrul: We had much more of an issue with Poe, when we did (The Poe [n. proj-ekt]), because there’s a lot of things that sound great in your head when you’re reading but when you try to do it (aloud) it wreaks havoc on your mouth.

Castillo: And there a point of adaptation where it’s “well, should this be said or is it an image?”

Q: Do you give the text a couple of passes and then start to figure out the movement?

Castillo: Yeah.

Ertugrul: The short story’s job is to put those images into your brain. Watching something theatrically, we’re supposed to show you that image with our actors. So one of the key moments of adapting is going, “Okay, what are we showing and what are we talking about?”

Castillo: Normally the adaptation is not a pretty process.

Q: I don’t know that gothic is the right word, but there’s a kind of aesthetic to the stories you seem drawn to. Also, I had kind of assumed that this stuff is in the public domain so in adapting it you don’t have to pay somebody.

Ertugrul: That was another pull.

Castillo: Definitely.

Q: Is there a consensus about the kind of stories you do? You guys do a lot of dark material.

Castillo: Well, we definitely —

Ertugrul: Well, you can say that, but You Vs. was not dark.

Castillo: There are exceptions.

Ertugrul: And Three Penny Opera can be seen as dark because it’s Brecht, but it itself is hilarious. It’s a very funny show.

Q: You’re sometimes taking source material and you’re kind of assembling. Do you look at it as a group authorship or do people take the lead?

Ertugrul: It really depends upon the show.

Castillo: I feel like with every show we want to get the group involved in the writing. I know with this show, I asked the group to bring in text that’s related. We have text from the actual trial of Lizzie Borden. We also have text from —

Ertugrul: A 1960s novel that was about the women’s movement of getting out of the kitchen and into the workplace.

Castillo: We have text from a Mike Tyson interview. … And Antigone.

Dambruch: I brought in a lot of Richard III. We didn’t end up using it.

Q: Why did you bring that in?

Dambruch: Richard III is one of my favorite all time plays. It’s very dark. There’s something about him as a villain … that I thought would be interesting to put into the mind of a woman.

Castillo: The theme I wanted (the cast) to go off of was crime, and one of the central themes of the show is getting away with a crime and guilt.

Nancy Dickerson during a recent rehearsal for 40 Whacks.

Q: What was it about Borden? Was it just that this is gruesome and it might get people in?

Ertugrul: I had read about it once before and I thought about the brutality of what it takes to whack someone 19 times in the head. What that sounds like. Think about how long it would take if you had to sit her and listen to me whack something, hit something 19 times. Really at eight or nine, you’re going to go, “How many times are you going to do this, lady?” You know? And Abby got 19 — that’s the stepmother — and the father got 11. That’s originally what started it. It was me, Nancy and Edwin, and we were over at Doumar’s one day, and I was like “think about that” over our milkshake and fries. (Laughter.)

Dickerson: Eating ice cream.

Castillo: So where we really wanted to go with this was, she got away with it. She was acquitted of it. Now how do you live with it?

Ertugrul: If there’s any question of where we’re going with this, of: “Did she do it?” We’re going with: “Yeah.” (Laughter.) We’ve done a lot of digging. Don’t read the first Wikipedia entry that you come to.

Waldo: Even the transcripts of the trial, there’s a lot of discrepancies there, too. Either it’s people’s stories changing or people not documenting things correctly. It’s very hard to get a true handle on this story because of how poorly it was recorded at the time.

Castillo: How does Lizzie live with the guilt?

Ertugrul: If you don’t get punished, you may punish yourself. … And the way that we’re staging the show is as a recurring nightmare. This is the nightmare she has almost every night.

Q: Do you tie it into the act of punishing the people she’s killed?

Ertugrul: No. It’s all about punishing herself.

Q: Let’s talk about You Vs. There was a really unique way you found content for that play. Could you just talk about that process?

Ertugrul: It started with True Office Confessions. (Laughter.) Yeah. There is this website called True Office Confessions and it is a venting board where anonymous people can go on and complain about where they work and the people they work with. It is actually extremely funny and every now and then you get one that is heartbreaking. … It started with this notion of, it’s always you versus. The way you start out your entire life is you against something else, and then you against you. So that became the outline of the show.

Castillo: Then we branched off. The beginning lines and the end lines of dialogue, we started with what do you hear kids say? Why is the sky blue?

Ertugrul: And we came up with all this stuff that wasn’t on the internet. And then the end of it we decided, “Well, what are the actual answers?” And between that, what happens between you being a kid and being a parent? … What happened was we did this (the beginning and end) and we were still hashing out the middle portion of it, and went what are we trying to say to them? That was the question. And we all had to sit down and go what are we trying to say to them?

Dickerson: It was a whole rehearsal.

Ertugrul: It was a whole rehearsal talking about what are we trying to say? Why did I ask you to come in and sit down and watch what we just did?

Q: Were you concerned about tying it up in a big bow too much?

Ertugrul: Yes. … And then what we decided was: “Go for it.” And if you honestly believe what you’re saying it can’t be too sappy. If we were acting at the end of that and didn’t actually mean it, yes. But we meant it. And finding that poem.

Q: Can we spoil the poem (at the end of the play)?

Castillo: “Oh Me! O Life!” by Walt Whitman.

Ertugrul: Using that reinforces what we showed about life being cyclical. … Using something older (than other “found” materials in the play) reinforces that.

Q: My favorite sequence is the balloons. I knew there was going to be some killer movement stuff because it’s you guys but it was like a play within a play. There was like a story. Can I ask you to describe that scene for people who haven’t seen the play?

Castillo: That actually came from something created by Laura (Agudelo).

Ertugrul: We had created short pieces for something that was done over at ODU … and we were taking Wallpaper to Canada. Brant (Powell) and Laura were still local and we were able to work with them where they were able to build two pieces. One of them was the balloon piece.

Castillo: We had taken personal ads from Craigslist and Portfolio Weekly, like, years ago, and The Village Voice … and reading these personal ads we were struck by the amount of hot air. … So we just turned that into a physical thing. We created a balloon factory, where a balloon started at one end, was handed over to another person, which was blown up (with) a little helium tank, handed to another person, tied with a string, and handed to another person to hang up. That was the sequence.

Q: And what happened along that assembly line at certain points, and these were little stories, was reflected in how well the balloon is made, whether it pops or lasts.

Ertugrul: And each one was placed in such a way that: “Okay, this one sounds very perfect. This one’s not so perfect. This one is too honest.” And then the color of the balloon would change. … It went on the scale of perfect to whoa.

Q: It’s not just the stories. It’s the actions, and there’s a range of motions that the stories have and the people handling — in a way handling the story as they pass it along — and there’s all these ranges of emotions as they pass it along.

Ertugrul: It’s funny to see someone reacting to a popping balloon.

Q: You have to do all this stage business and there’s so much movement. I think what I haven’t conveyed in describing this is it’s a very intricate process.

Dickerson: There was a lot of making sure I did or did not do things to certain balloons that I was working very hard to keep straight. … We talked about it as we went through it: “Wait, are we the people speaking? Or are we third parties putting the words into the balloons? Do we look at each other? We want to look at each other. Let’s not look at each other. Okay, we are not the people speaking. We’re the little magic men in the ATM who make the money pop out. So we’re the people in the factory who make these balloons. What are the balloons?” We ended up being objective third parties working in this personal ad factory …

Ertugrul: It would probably astonish people how much we talk about really specific moments. … That’s the precision. This show alone, that opening is very precise about where everyone is and where they’re looking and what’s going on.

Waldo: The precision you were just talking about, whether it is the minuteness of how do we blow up this balloon or the elaborateness of some big dance that’s happening, I think that’s what the training really helps you to prepare for. I think there’s a misconception with Suzuki training that … you’re going to get on stage and stomp all around the place.

Ertugrul: What does someone call it? “Stomping and shouting.” Do you guys stomp and shout on the stage?

Costen: Only in my mind. (Laughter.)

Emel Ertugrul and Edwin Castillo of CORE Theatre Ensemble at the Little Theatre of Norfolk.

Tagged 40 whacks, 40whacks, core theatre ensemble, edwin castillo, Emel Ertugrul, Laura Agudelo, little theatre of norfolk, nancy dickerson, old dominion university, paul costen, steffani dambruch, suzuki method of actor training, suzuki viewpoints, theatre, viewpoints, you vs

Oct 08 2011

Leave a comment

Interviews, Theater, Writing

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XIV: CORE Theatre Ensemble

NORFOLK, Va. — CORE Theatre Ensemble, founded by alumni of Old Dominion University’s theater department, has a new show, 40 Whacks, opening this coming week at the Little Theatre of Norfolk.

It is, you might say, a family drama.

With axe murdering.

40 Whacks is based on the murders allegedly committed by Lizzie Borden of her stepmother and father in Fall River, Mass. Though she was acquitted, the case continues to remain a part of American folklore. There have been a series of adaptations (including a musical), a museum in Salem, Mass., and a bed and breakfast bearing the Borden family name at the site of the murders.

The B&B gift shop even sells a Lizzie Borden bobble head. So, you know, break out those credit cards.

40Whacks runs for only three performances. Showtimes are at 8 p.m., running from Friday, Oct. 14, to Sunday, Oct. 16, at Little Theatre of Norfolk, 801 Claremont Ave., Norfolk. Tickets are $15 for general admission; $12 for senior citizens, students, and active duty or retired military; and $8 for kids 17 and under. The play contains unsettling images and some sexual content. Reservations are via (757) 627-8551 or at the Little Theatre site.

In an email, CORE offered:

It’s a lot darker than The Yellow Wallpaper and definitely not as light as our last production You Vs.

The company practices the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and the Viewpoints improvisation system. They’ve been involved in traveling shows, workshops and collaboration with college and non-college theater students around the world.

Past shows include The Poe (n. proj-ekt), Duranged (Christopher Durang one-acts), and their excellent adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper. Other productions include Frankenstein, The Threepenny Opera, and You Vs.

The Yellow Wallpaper is one of the best plays I’ve seen around here, and I greatly enjoyed You Vs. earlier this year. We recently traded email for this Belligerent Q&A.

Q: Just who do you think you are? Please use three examples in your response.

We are:

Students. In every production we create, we learn from each other as well as our casts as to what makes good theatre. Theatre that doesn’t bore us or make us wish we were somewhere else. We don’t pretend to know all the answers when we collaborate on new projects. We use our casts to help us understand how each production works. There is always so much to learn from another human being. It’s artistic conversation.

Teachers. What we’ve learned over the years with our actor training and experiencing theatre outside of the U.S. Is that we strive to instill a sense of discipline and commitment in everyone involved with our shows, both onstage and backstage. Sometimes it’s easy to think that acting and theatre is ‘fun.’ Which it is and can be a lot of times — but it’s also hard work. It’s a craft. It’s something that needs to be developed and questioned.

Harsh critics. Of our own works and others’.

Q: Is the Suzuki method the one in which you slap around some smart guy right out of the gate so the rest of the mugs in your crew lay off their damned shenanigans and focus on the one last job you got to do so the Big Man will let you out of the life once and for all and you can finally go straight with your best gal, Sheila, maybe somewhere warm like Costa Rica? Or is that the other Suzuki method with the violins?

Yes it is … the first one. In a weird way, yes, that’s exactly what it is.

The second one is also true, but we don’t know anything about violins.

Q: Castillo, you’re a love struck shoe salesman enamored with a walk-in customer seeking pumps. Agudelo, you’ve seen worse looking men, but you’re really just there for the pumps. Ertugrul, you’re the shoelace supervisor carrying a torch for Castillo, but he hardly seems to notice you – even when you try to lace up Agudelo’s non-lacing pumps. Action, CORE Theatre Ensemble. Action.

Black stage.

A blowtorch is lit by Ertugrul. Its light reveals Agudelo who is holding a broken bicycle pump. Castillo is revealed, holding a sock and gently weeping.

Ensemble (whispered): This is not a shoe store.

Blackout.

Q: A life in the theater – why? To very loosely paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, aren’t you really just trying to hurt your parents?

It’s easy to be boring and a lot of other things in life are just that.

Mom and dad didn’t raise boring.

Q: Your new production, 40 Whacks, is based upon the case of Lizzie Borden. After your research, writing and rehearsal, where did you come down on the hot-button issue of axe-murdering?

Two pro, two con — so you’ve really got a 50/50 chance of knowing what we’re thinking about whilst in conversation.

Q: Often a new work is made by a key line that captures the essence of the greater work, and drives it, oh so fiercely, into the audience’s collective ribcage. Presumably someone in the play has a line such as, “It’s cleavin’ time!” or “I’m gonna axe murder you so fast you won’t know what hit you; at this point you should understand that it will be an axe that hit you.” or “Heeeeeeeere’s Lizzie!” Were there any other lines that didn’t make the cut?

‘You can’t ax in here! This is the sitting room!’

‘Can’t get the candles today, Brendonna.’

‘Poor girl looks as if she’s been raised on promises’

‘That’s gotta hurt.’

‘Are you there god? It’s me Lizzie.’

Q: We’ve covered so much ground here. What else would you like to say?

There’s always more. No matter what, there’s always more.

In honor of Fall River, the New England setting of the Borden murders, I am proud to present the following video.

There are many things to say about this video.

Due to a very unfortunate editing decision early in the video, it is not safe for work.
It does actually exist.
Somewhere in New England, a place I like to think of as the Greater Rhode Island Metropolitan Environment (GRIME), the people who made this video are probably planning sequels.
The decision to mix social commentary, quasi-sexual patter, and warmed-over Chamber of Commerce messages was somehow brave.

Remember: The city, they’ve been fixing all the cracks in the pavement.

Tagged 40 whacks, 40whacks, belligerent q&a, core theatre ensemble, edwin castillo, Emel Ertugrul, fall river rap, Laura Agudelo, little theatre of norfolk, old dominion university, theater, theatre

Oct 05 2011

Leave a comment

Interviews, Pop Culture, Theater, Writing

Writing Craft Q&A, Vol. VI: Sean Devereux of The Pushers (Part Two)

Sean Devereux of the comedy and improv group The Pushers during a rehearsal at his condo in Norfolk, Va. Photo by John Doucette.

NORFOLK, Va. – This is the second part of my talk with Sean Devereux of comedy and improv group The Pushers.

Devereux serves as the group’s co-producer, manager and co-head writer. Additionally, he and fellow founding Pusher Brad McMurran teach classes on improvisation and comedy writing at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, and also are involved in Improvageddon, a long form improv competition between local teams. Additionally, he recently was featured here in a Belligerent Q&A.

This discussion includes some adult language and frank discussion of jokes you may find offensive. It is toward an end. Additionally, one of the video clips contains adult language and probably is not safe for work. This Q&A had been edited for clarity and length.

It helps to have read the first part for context. You can find it here at this link.

Q: How did you get into the group?

My wife and I broke up and once that happened there was about a six month period of time where I was moping on the couch, and then I picked up Portfolio and saw auditions for a play over at The Little Theatre of Norfolk, and I said, ‘You know, I might as well.’ I did theater in high school. I was always more on the tech side but I did some acting in high school, but at least going out and auditioning beats sitting on the couch. So I went out and auditioned and got the role. … I think I had two lines …

I was really immersed. Afterwards the cast would go out drinking and meet whatever cast was rehearsing at the Generic. I just really fell into that community theater world. … I was actually kind of surprised I did fall into it. The cast I was in was kind of an all-star cast as community theater goes for the early 2000s in Hampton Roads.

Q: That, by the way, is the most specific Wikipedia page.

(Laughs.) It is. Not even Hampton Roads — early 2000s Norfolk community theater.

Q: It’s just a list with no links.

Exactly. Through that I just met a whole bunch of people. … I was having a good time with that. I started dating a girl who was involved in theater. I started a run of like four shows in a row, which is probably like a year and a half, and had just gotten burnout. The second to last play I was in was where I met Ed and Lauren Rogers, who is now in (another Hampton Roads area improv and sketch comedy group) Plan B. We struck up a friendship. Through them I met Brad and Jeremiah (Albers) and a couple other people who would actually go on to form The Pushers.

Q: Rob Wilson (now of Plan B)?

He came in pretty close to the beginning. In fact, I wrote ‘Justice Crusaders’ with Rob in mind. For his audition, we knew he was going to be in but made him audition anyway. I’m pretty sure he read the Captain Pirate role at the audition. I’d also written another role with him in mind. …

At some length, we then discussed a sketch from an early show. Devereux wrote a sketch featuring two new characters. The following week he wrote a new sketch featuring the same characters, thinking both the original sketch and the new sketch would make it into the show. When the original sketch was cut, however, there was no context for the recurring characters. The Pushers went ahead with the new sketch, which bombed.

Q: There was no context?

It was eight or nine minutes of crickets.

Q: What did you learn from that?

Number one, we weren’t as big as we thought we were. We didn’t have a loyal crowd who would come to every single show. We learned that when you’re writing a sketch that has a recurring character, which I think is something definitely SNL has learned, you have to write the sketch almost as (if) it’s the first time people are being introduced to these characters. Which is why it’s so easy to take the game of the scene and apply it to a different setting.

Here’s ‘Justice Crusaders,’ a sketch we will discuss in some depth. This is a repeat of the link from the first post, for context. Again, NSFW:

Q: I think the writing is good. How do you build that scene?

I started that with Captain Pirate. Brad and I, we always have a couple of notebooks to jot down ideas. (He pulls one out of a bag.)

Q: Your brand is Mead.

Actually, one brand I have Mead. (Pulls another one out, reads the cover.) Downtown Norfolk Council – I’m not sure how … that was actually a work meeting. Moleskines, I actually have a couple in there. Something I can just kind of stick in my back pocket. It started with Captain Pirate. I just thought that was kind of an absurd name for a superhero. …

From there it just kind of grew. I think we came up – We don’t do it as much today, but back then we would meet and just toss out ideas. I think somebody else actually came up with Low Self Esteem Girl. Another actor was going to play Aquaman. I did notice there are some cheap jokes, like making Aquaman gay. That only happened because Jeremiah was in it. Well, Jeremiah’s playing him so obviously you’re going to have to make gay jokes. You know, never has a gay man played a character where there weren’t gay jokes.

Q: Well, stop there a minute. There are couple things there. There’s kind of a throwaway moment where Jeremiah leaves where he says something to Low Self Esteem Girl, he says “bitch” and walks out the door. How do you feel about those jokes a few years later?

Some of them are, I would have to go back to cheap. There’s another one in there with Low Self Esteem Girl, and the reason I say we need Captain Pirate is because he’s a minority and we need a minority in the group. And Low Self Esteem Girl, Sandra (Hernandez), who is Hispanic, says well I’m a minority, and I go, ‘What do you want? A medal and a taco?’ And nowadays I don’t think I would write (that). You get a cheap joke. It doesn’t really do anything to progress the story of the sketch.

Q: Did you talk about it at the time, or was the idea just to push push push?

At the time it was just push push push. Rarely did we ever – The only sketch we ever thought maybe this is too far was a sketch I wrote called the Terri Schiavo diet where it was kind of an infomercial. There’s a new diet plan and the way it works is, you know, get into an accident so you’re in a coma and then have your husband remove the feeding tube and watch the pounds just melt away. Yeah. That was the only time we were, ‘Maybe that’s a little too far.’ But we put it up.

Q: Wait so you –

Oh yeah. We did.

Q: See, for me, that would just be too much for me. (Schiavo’s brain damage and the resulting vegetative state may have resulted from an eating disorder; she lost 65 pounds in her late teens, then struggled to keep weight off, subsisting on liquids, apparently.)

Exactly. We debated that almost until the night of the show. That sketch came from my uncle’s kind of dark sense of humor.

Q: I guess I wonder when you’re writing a sketch are you thinking this is satire? What are you satirizing?

Back then I wasn’t. I was just kind of writing whatever popped into my head. Nowadays it’s definitely more of satirizing I wouldn’t even say social conventions. Now it’s finding everyday situations that kind of bug people and just kind of take it to the absurd. Like I’m a big offender of always being on my phone. It drives Brad up the wall. So right now I’m working on a sketch where it’s two couples out on a date and three out of the four people are carrying on conversations with each other that are strictly on the phone. …

Q: Sometimes when I’m writing and trying to write toward something, if I’m commenting on a social thing or something about a (racial or ethnic) identity, it just kind of reinforces the notions some people have about those groups.

I think it is a fine line. I think back in the day, I don’t think we cared. I don’t think we ever really thought about it. We did a lot of racial humor, which we would always run it by Rob or Saeed (Wilkins), who was the other black guy. That would be our litmus test. You know, if we turned in a sketch and they didn’t punch us in the face then you know we were good to go.

Q: But that’s not much of a bar.

It’s not. Again, I think we – We had no bar. It definitely got us a reputation that we’re trying to shake now — of doing things for almost like shock value. The ‘God is dead line,’ that character, I like the idea of a priest losing his cool in the middle of a sermon. We haven’t done that sketch in two, two and half years. If we were to do it again I don’t think we would go to the ‘God is dead’ line. There’s no point to it. There might be one atheist out there who thinks it’s funny, but the rest …

Q: I mean, what do you want to do? Do you want to make people laugh or – What do you want to do with your writing?

I would say, first and foremost, laugh. I would like to say that we’ve done some satire as of late. Our Ghent hipster characters. I did one video for AltDaily where I play a politician. I do like that. Every time I write something like that I have a fear of, you know, becoming pretentious.

Q: I’m not saying it has to have a message. … One of the things I think writing of all kinds doesn’t do well is address differences, and I’m very conscious about writing in a way that reinforces differences that have been inflicted on people, not developed within that community. So I guess what I wonder is when you’re writing, not just in that context, is there something you want to accomplish with what you’re writing? Do you want to just make people laugh or do you want to keep turning back expectation? One of the things about the ‘Justice Crusaders’ is I think it does take the expectation the audience has and turns it back and it builds. There’s another sketch I was going to ask you about where you play the dad and Brad’s your son and he’s got to be gay (because his dad wants him to be). I think that sketch is about expectations turned around and it kind of builds.

It is. That sketch started out as an improv scene I did with a girl when I was taking classes in New York at Upright Citizens Brigade, and I do like looking at political correctness. I think that is a scene of like taking I wouldn’t even say political correctness, but taking it too far. Now the hip thing is to have somebody gay in your family. You know, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and all that. … When Queer Eye For The Straight Guy came out there was like, you know, people I knew who would watch it who would be fag this, fag that, but thought it was a great show. It was that way, and by saying they watched that it was like ‘Oh, no. I’m cool with gay people because I watch Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.’ Again, it’s taking political correctness to the – I wrote another one for Rob where a woman takes home her boyfriend to meet him for the first time and they’re shocked not because he’s black, but not black enough. They start quizzing him on Malcolm X and you know the black power movement and black authors. …

Rob a lot of times would get upset that he would always have to play the black roles. Like he couldn’t just ever play a doctor or a lawyer. It was the black lawyer or the black doctor. I was guilty of it in ‘Justice Crusaders.’ He couldn’t be just a pirate; he had to be a black pirate. And this was a sketch where he’s just supposed to be a boyfriend bracing for the fact that because he’s black a white family might be upset that their daughter is not going to be dating a white man. But they’re like no, if he’s black we want super black. …

It’s weird for a white person, you know, giving my perception of something black people have to deal with, but it almost seems that if you’re black you have to know the history of rap and hiphop because that’s your culture.

Q: In the mind of white people.

Exactly. In the mind of white people. It was kind of an exaggeration of what white people expect black people to be.

Q: Let me ask about Upright Citizens Brigade.

I think the most training I got that has helped my writing has been at Upright Citizens Brigade. They’re whole main focus — and this is applied to improv though it could be applied to all comedy — is finding the game of the scene. Stripping away everything, all the characters and things like that, what is this scene really about. That’s not that you can’t have a really funny scene that’s nothing but a bunch of crazy characters, but it seems the ones that are most successful are the ones you can break down into a simple sentence – what is this really about?

I think that’s something that has helped me the most with my writing, you know, stripping away all of the fluff. Which is hard. Nowadays when we write a scene there will be a lot of great lines and jokes and whatnot but sometimes they end up getting cut because they really have nothing to do with the game of the scene.

What does this character want? … Do they get it? Even if they don’t get it, what are they doing to get it. This other character, is he there to help him out? Is he there to be the voice of opposition? …

My process is so I’m wearing so many hats now, I have very little free time to do actual writing. I have my notebooks. I would say normally 99 percent of my sketch is written in my head. … I write almost like the nuts and bolts. I do find that because I’ve been thinking about it so long a lot of the funny bits of dialogue come out while I’m writing. I try to get out at least the nuts and bolts of the scene and go back and write in jokes later. …

Usually my premises are more relationship based ideas and usually autobiographical. One of the last scenes I wrote was right around Valentine’s Day, the day before my girlfriend apropos of nothing said, ‘You know what I really want? I want you to write me a love letter.’ I had written her a love letter, but now I’m screwed. Now when I give you the love letter on Valentine’s Day, yeah you’re going to be happy that yu got it but you’re going to think the only reason I gave you this love letter is because you told me you wanted a love letter. So I wrote a scene were a guy takes his girlfriend to a really fancy dinner and right as he’s getting ready to get down on one knee to propose she says, ‘You know the only way this could get any better is if you proposed to me.’ And then it just becomes absurd. … That actually got a pretty good response.

Q: So how did Valentine’s Day go?

It actually went well. She’s very understanding. Luckily I had other stuff to go with the love letter. …

Q: What are you plans long term?

We would love to open our own performance space, possibly a 60-seat theater. During the day we could have classes, then at night sell PBRs for $2 a bottle and put up shows. We’d like to own a theater and teach classes. And this is the pretentious part – maybe legacy. We haven’t given up the whole some day we could have our own show, but it’s not something we’re actively pursuing. We’re pretty good being a big fish in a small pond. But teaching comedy and improv, it’s kind of like making my name go on. Even if the theater is something that doesn’t make it, it’s something people will remember. …

We’re teaching. … I got pretty lucky. Hopefully we’re going to be helping people who have a similar type of dream and point them in the right direction. And it’s just fun.

Tagged aquaman, comedy, comedy writing, hampton roads, improv, norfolk va, sean devereux, sketch comedy, the pushers, the tide, upright citizens brigade

Sep 29 2011

Leave a comment

Interviews, Theater, Writing

Writing Craft Q&A, Vol. VI: Sean Devereux of The Pushers (Part One)

Sean Devereux of The Pushers during a recent rehearsal at his Norfolk, Va., condo. Photo by John Doucette.

NORFOLK, Va. – I caught up again with Sean Devereux of comedy and improv group The Pushers at Colley Cantina for a beer and a talk about writing comedy, improvising and how far a joke can push.

And Devereux recently was featured here in a Belligerent Q&A.

This is a long talk, broken into two parts, but those interested in comedy writing and other forms of writing — particularly finding the core structure of a work — should stick around.

This discussion includes some adult language and frank discussion of jokes you may find offensive. That mostly in the next part of the talk, which I’ll post in a couple days, but there is some adult language below.

For those who may be coming to this blog for the first time, I write it to learn from other writers and artists. I appreciate their time and honesty, and I have respect for the direct discussions they agree to be a part of. So thanks to Devereux. And thank you for reading.

Without further ado, part one of the conversation …

Q: How did you start writing?

I’ve always been a comic book nerd and my mom has comics that I wrote when I was five or six years old. I’m not a very good drawer but I could trace my hand. I would then turn (it) into a character. She has just pamphlets and pamphlets of these pages that I would draw one drawing per page and then write a caption and staple them together.

I always was very interested in comedy. … (W)hen I was in junior high and even high school, I would write scripts for The Monkees TV show. … Say what you will about their music and whether or not they played their own instruments, but their TV show still holds up as pretty funny. It’s a lot of absurd humor. It’s breaking the fourth wall type of stuff. I’ve always been fascinated with how they were kind of playing exaggerated versions of themselves, and then there were times they would break that character and go back to their real selves. I was always a big fan of that. I was a fan of Saturday Night Live.

Q: Do you remember the first time you saw SNL?

No. I do remember always liking the Coneheads. I always liked Bill Murray, but I’m not sure if that was from Ghostbusters and Caddyshack first and then Saturday Night Live after. I guess by the time I really was kind of aware of him, he must have already been off Saturday Night Live … so I must have seen repeats.

They did a big interview with (the SNL cast) in Rolling Stone and I got that issue and I must have read it a million times. It was kind of around then I decided I really would like to write for SNL, which I had forgotten about until my high school reunion a year or two ago. A lot of people were bringing it up. ‘That’s so cool – you were always talking about writing for SNL and now you’ve got your own comedy group.’

Q: What was it about the show that you liked?

I have a very short attention span so I like the sketch format better than sometimes even a half hour sitcom. Again, I always gravitated more toward comedies than dramas or even action movies. There’s just something about laughing I really enjoy.

Q: Did your folks have a good sense of humor?

My mom has a very weird sense of humor and my dad was kind of a life-of-the-party, lampshade-on-the-head type of guy.

Q: What’s a weird sense of humor for a mom?

She was a very strict mom growing up, but then there would be other times when we would be eating dinner and she’d be like, ‘Wow, these mashed potatoes smell kind of weird.’ And when we’d go in to sniff them she would push our head into them, which if my sister or I ever did it to one another we’d get in big trouble. That was our biggest joke. She always liked doing that.

She’s not like a joke teller or anything like that, but she’s really good at telling stories. She’s from New York and worked for ABC Radio in the early to mid 1960s, and her office was two doors down from Howard Cosell’s office. So she has a bunch of great stories about going out with Howard Cosell. Not dating, but just everybody from the office going out. She saw, when the Beatles came to New York, she got to go to the concert at Shea Stadium. When they gave their first press conference, she was actually in the room. She was the assistant program director at one point in time. She has a horrible taste in music. I always wonder how many really good bands never really got their shot because my mom would just toss their stuff before it ever got to the program director. She just has a way of telling a story and making it funny.

Q: You got that from her?

I think I kind of did. I’m not a joke person. When people find out I’m in The Pushers they go, ‘Oh, tell me a joke.’ I don’t know any jokes. I know maybe one knock knock joke.

Q: The one with the interrupting cow?

Well, there’s the cow one and there’s the other one where you start it. Start the joke.

Q: Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Q: (Uncomfortable silence, then laughter.)

For some reason, that’s my favorite knock knock joke. … It’s more to get back at people asking me to tell them a joke.

Q: You don’t see yourself as a joke teller, but you have to write comedy.

My comedy is very situational, or it’s more about taking something in everyday life and just exaggerating it. With the exception of the super hero sketches I do, most everything I do is more relationship based. A lot of it’s usually based on something that happened to me, and then just retelling that in sketch form and exaggerating the hell out of it.

Q: So how do you get from wanting to write for SNL to forgetting all about that dream and then (to The Pushers)?

A failed marriage.

Q: A failed marriage?

Yeah. That’ll do it. One of the reasons is I had the desire but had no idea how to act upon it. I went to George Mason University and my first semester I was actually a theater major. I did theater in high school. I had no desire to be on stage, but it was about being around the kind of people I had a kinship with. Mason at the time had a pretty competitive theater program and I couldn’t get into any of the theater courses, not even intro to theater. The only one I could take was actually taught by the Religion Department. It was themes and motifs in contemporary theater. So after my first semester I switched to English composition with an emphasis on fiction writing.

Q: What did you want to do with that?

I had no idea. At one point I thought about teaching. I still harbored thoughts of eventually writing for TV in some form.

Q: You didn’t want to write short stories or the Great American Novel?

No. I love reading those things but for some reason the actual mechanical act of writing I’m not a big fan of. Which is why I think I love sketch writing. It’s only four or five pages. … I did do a lot of short stories. I would still kind of dabble in script writing. I also ended up getting a minor in film and media studies, but it was in their Communication Department.

During my junior year, myself and some friends decided we were going to do our own TV show, kind of interview program, like a very localized The Larry Sanders Show, mocking the late night TV format. I wrote five scripts for that. We actually started filming pieces for it. The problem was, instead of going with other communication majors to help me do this, I had my friends who had no idea what they were doing and as soon as exams rolled around they abandoned the project to go study.

Q: So what was an early sketch?

Early sketches were a lot of mocking Mason campus life. They had just unveiled a new bus system that students could use, but it had weird stops. It wouldn’t stop at the Metro station, so if you needed to get to D.C., you’d stop like a half mile away and you’d walk. … Essentially they spent all this money for this new bus line that nobody ever bothered using. So we’d do live reports – it had some kind of name, like the Tide – so we’d always have a roving reporter trying to interview people on this bus. There would never be anybody on it. …

The summer between my junior and senior year, I got an internship at Channel 13. I started in the news department, because I gave a brief thought at trying to be in journalism. Two weeks in the news department, I realized that journalism really wasn’t the thing for me. You had to stick with facts. I do like exaggerating. My version of the story was always much better, or I thought was much better than what actually happened.

Q: And they frown on that.

Yeah, they do frown on embellishing. So after two weeks I moved to the production department. … So a lot of it was going out to Harborfest or Bay Days and handing out t-shirts. I went back to school and graduated and had planned to move to New York with two really good friends. My girlfriend at the time who was a year behind me had visions of the three of us going roughshod all over New York City, so if I moved up to New York she would break up with me. So I picked her over New York and moved back home to Virginia Beach.

Q: Do you know how many women they have there?

I know.

Q: Just putting that out there.

Yeah, it was not one of the smarter moves I’ve ever made.

Q: Well, I’m sure at the time it was very noble.

I don’t think so. It was sheer stupidity on my part, and then I had to go and marry her. So once I moved back here, I had no idea what I was going to do. I went to Regent for about two semesters. They actually really have a good program.

Q: Masters of communications?

Yeah. It was going to be with an emphasis in screenwriting, but I quickly found I had to start editing some of the work I turned in. Nothing against their form of Christianity, but it is very strict. I thought I could fake it for the sake of getting a degree and using their equipment and stuff like that. I only lasted probably a semester and a half before I decided to drop out. …

For me, I didn’t mind it so much at first. I come from a pretty strong Catholic family. I had an uncle who was a priest. So the fact that you had to pray before every class, I was okay with that. Not really my thing, but I was okay with that. I had a script analysis class, which was actually pretty good and then one day the professor never showed, and then the next day, the next class, she was very apologetic, but (a family member had been injured; and this incident became a distraction for the class). … We had to spend the rest of the class praying for her (relative) and by that point in time I was pretty tight on money so I started calculating how much money I was wasting by praying …

Then I was taking a television scriptwriting class, and I loved the class. The guy actually had credits to his name. … He was really cool. There was probably 40 people in the class, and the first week or two we had to pitch him ideas. We had to take an existing TV show and then pitch him ideas for possible scripts, kind of like you would do pitching –

Q: In a writers room.

Exactly. On the first day he shot down every single idea that anybody came up with. He was very harsh and mean about it. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really weird for Regent.’ So the next class, like half the people dropped and we had to go through the same process, pitching him ideas. This time a couple people would be close to him saying, ‘Okay, that’s a good idea.’ Then something would happen and he’d say, ‘No, that sucks. Give me your next idea. No. Horrible. Move on.’ Finally, at the end of the class he said, ‘A lot of you had really great ideas, you know – things a producer might actually pick up, but when you go into a meeting with a producer it could be right before lunchtime. He could have just been chewed out by his boss. You know, you could have the best idea in the world, but if this guy’s having a rotten day, there’s a good chance your idea is going to fall on deaf ears. … I’m going to get you ready for the real world.’

Devereux later dropped out. He had written for class, among other things, a script for Mad About You, but lost much of his Regent writing when a computer virus software apparently ate the disk.

Q: Are you sure it was the virus software?

It could have been God.

Q: He’s gotten pretty tech-savvy in the past few years.

He has. I have an uncle who was a priest who died a while back, so I’m assuming that he’s up there looking out for me. Although he had a pretty weird sense of humor, too. … I remember a Christmas, and, again all my family was in New York, and his parish was in Brooklyn. We’re all at my grandmother’s house, and my mom is one of six kids who all had pretty large families. Every Christmas was just a mass of people at my grandmother’s house. We’re all starving but we’re all sitting around the dinner table waiting because we can’t start eating until Uncle Marty came. He ended up showing three hours late. My grandmother made no bones about it that Marty was her favorite because he was a priest, so we were all kind of annoyed when he finally showed up. My mom was like, ‘Where the hell were you?’ And it’s like, ‘I’m really sorry, but a family in my parish, you know, the husband died this morning so I had to be with the family.’ And my mom was like, ‘Oh my God that’s horrible, what do you say to a family who has a loved one die on Christmas Eve?’ And without blinking his eyes, straight-laced, he’s like, ‘I hope you saved the receipts.’

So my uncle the priest had a very morbid dark sense of humor, which I’m a big fan of as well.

Q: Were you an altar boy and the whole bit?

Yeah, I was an altar boy, in Sunday School, I taught the youth group.

Q: I still have my cassock. I put it on every now and then.

Really.

Q: No.

When we first started, Jeremiah (Albers) would play all the priest roles. Back then we were always going for the cheap (jokes), so the fact that he was gay, you know, naturally he would be the one to play the priest. Now that he’s out of the group, I’m regulated to all the priest roles.

Q: Have those jokes died down?

They have. The priest character I have is an angry priest … We have a recurring series of sketches where Brad plays a kid with Tourette’s. With sketches that have recurring characters, the game of the sketch is always the same. It’s just the situation that would be different, kind of like John Belushi with the samurai character. … So Brad does this character, this kid who has Tourette’s, and either it’s at a wedding or at a funeral or just a church service where I’m giving my homily and he keeps on interrupting with more and more profane outbursts, and my character is trying to keep his cool until he finally loses it and berates the kid in front of the whole church.

Q: So what happens?

It always ends with Brad having one last outburst … so I repeat it, and my out line is always ‘God is dead.’ … and then I toss the Bible at him, and it always hits the actress behind him.

Q: Wow. A little hardcore.

Yeah.

Q: How did it play?

It’s, ah, there’s always a shock when I say it, but then when I toss the Bible it always hits the girl smack in the face and she’s a pretty good physical comedian and falls over the back of her chair, that cuts whatever – because people like watching other people fall down. … Whatever moral indignation they had at me saying God is dead is quickly forgotten by a girl getting hit in the face and falling over the back of a chair.

We discussed how Devereux came to work at a local news station after working in retail and doing freelance production assistance, which led to a full-time job. The interview picks back up with how he returned to writing.

I was writing for work. Occasionally I would come up with an idea of like, ‘Oh, this would be a good movie or a good sitcom.’ And I would jot it down, but I was really not writing other than for work for a long, long time.

Q: What would you do when you had an idea?

I would put it in a notebook. A lot of times I would start working on something. At the time I had a work ethic when it came to writing. I would write and if I would get to a sticking place instead of plowing through and keep on writing I would stop and then go back to the beginning and reread what I wrote … and I immediately would start editing myself. I can’t write directly onto a computer. I have to write longhand first. I would just start rewriting. So I have an amazing first 15 minutes of a movie because, you know, I’ve edited the hell out of them, but nothing past that. Nowadays, even if I getting to a sticking point and it’s crap I just keep on writing and then go back and start rewriting.

Q: Did you ever want to try to write a comic book?

Yes, I thought about it. I actually met an editor back in the late 1990s. … We went to the San Diego Comic-Con, and this was right before it blew up to what it is now. … There was one point in time where I had a drunken conversation with an editor from DC Comics and I don’t know how we got into it, but I actually pitched him a couple of ideas, which he was receptive to. He was actually pumping me for information. But it was almost like – not work, but it made me look at comic books with a more critical eye, which I really don’t want to do. It’s a guilty pleasure, and I kind of want to keep it a guilty pleasure.

Q: One of my short stories is about a guy who gets out of the Navy and opens up a comics shop in Norfolk.

During the period when I was kind of directionless in my writing, the one idea I kept going back to was, and I probably had close to 90 pages written, was a screenplay that is kind of a cross between High Fidelity and Clerks set in a comic book shop. A lot of it is kind of autobiographical, which is I guess is the same as the idea you had, which is the guy has a lot of great ideas for comics but he’s afraid of failing. So it’s one of those things, if you don’t try, you know. …

Today, because of the interview, I pulled up the ‘Justice Crusaders’ sketch. I don’t think I’ve seen that in a couple years. … I don’t know if it would ever make it in The Pushers these days.

Q: Why not?

It’s long. It’s like eight minutes long. Right now we’re down to if you had something five minutes long, maybe that would make it in.

Here’s ‘Justice Crusaders,’ a NSFW sketch we will discuss in some depth in the Part Two of this talk, especially some of the jokes about race and sexuality:

Q: Well, let’s talk about that sketch. I think you were here when I was talking to (McMurran and Albers) about it.

Well, let me ask you what is it about the sketch that you like?

Q: It’s got all kinds of little crises, which I like in comedy. It’s interesting and it’s absurd. Number one that all these people would answer an ad and show up. It’s got these layers of absurdity, and then I don’t want to say that it’s obvious but it’s, the setup is … Aquaman shows up, there’s a reveal that it’s Aquaman, and they don’t want him to be in the group. Which is funny.

It is. It’s Aquaman and no one wants Aquaman in the group. All he does is talk to fish. That’s not a new joke.

Q: But it’s also funny that he’s the only person who is an actual superhero.

Right. Exactly. I’ve always had a love-hate with that sketch. I think I told you this before, but when I joined a group it was strictly as a writer and then I got thrown into the performing aspect as a necessity. The entire first summer of the group I was always playing little bit parts. That scene, I wrote it, but it was the first time I essentially had the lead and was the one driving the sketch. I was scared shitless walking out on that stage. …

I think I noticed in the video today that I started out with a really kind of geeky voice and halfway through the sketch I ended up losing the voice I created for the character. Going back to what I said about comic books, where I said I never wanted to look at comic books with a critical eye, I’ve gotten to the point now where I do look at the sketch and sketch comedy. I can still enjoy it, but when I watch Saturday Night Live now, it’s never I can kick back and relax. It’s always, ‘Oh, I see what they did there. Oh yeah, that didn’t hit as much as it should have.’

Q: I always remember liking the late sketches.

Me too.

Q: They take a risk. It’s like when you go to a jazz show and the polite people stay for the first hour and leave, and the musicians open up.

I always loved the last sketch. The first sketch is always some recurring character they know is going to hit. I was really disappointed with the Betty White episode. Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and all the girls came back and it turned out to be – the Dana Carvey episode turned out to be the same thing. It was nothing but recurring character after recurring character. There was nothing new. You know, I have a stable of characters that I play, but I’m more about writing something new or trying to take a character out of a standard format. …

I’m trying to find out where can we put this character and make it work.

Part two is on the way …

Tagged aquaman, comedy, comedy writing, craft q&a, hampton roads, improv, justice crusaders, norfolk va, sean devereux, sketch comedy, the pushers, the tide, writing craft

Sep 26 2011

Leave a comment

Community, Interviews, Uncategorized

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XIII: Plan B sketch comedy and improv

NORFOLK, Va. — Over the past couple of months, I’ve spent a good bit of time speaking about writing and creating comedy with people who are a lot funnier than me. I have found this process to be both invigorating and humbling — like sex, but with a greater percentage of intentional laughs.

Today a few members of Plan B, a Hampton Roads sketch comedy and improv group, will be represented here in a Belligerent Q&A. I’m not going to lie to you — there is some adult language below, so be warned. Also, whatever they say, I still dig light rail.

Plan B this weekend presents The Big Show, an improv, sketch and multimedia comedy performance. The event is scheduled for 9 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 1, at Naro Expanded Cinema, 1507 Colley Ave., Norfolk.

You can find information at this Facebook link or call (757) 625-6276. Tickets are $10, or $15 for tickets and a shirt. There is surface lot parking behind the Naro between Spotswood and Shirley avenues and some nearby street parking.

Two Plan B members, Jason Kypros and Rob Wilson, also sat down with me recently for a long craft talk, which will run at a later date I totally will figure out like really soon and stuff. It’s quite the well oiled machine around here, let me tell you.

In addition to an upcoming show, the members of Plan B have names, such as Beatty Barnes, Brendan Hoyle, Nikki Hudgins, Garney Johnson, Kypros, Lauren Rodgers, Keven Schreiber, Jim Seward and Wilson.

I hope you’ll check them out.

And remember to take care of your feet. Also, the lower legs and ankles. What do I mean with the random foot care references? I’m setting up what the funny folk call a “call back.” Do you have to ruin everything, Imaginary Mom?

The following answers, unless otherwise noted, came from Kypros.

Q: Just who do you think you are? Please use three examples in your response.

The White Buffalo

The fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse

Big Debbie (Little Debbie’s sister – the one that taught her all the recipes)

Q: What was Plan A? (Please don’t all of you say podiatry.)

Sorry to disappoint … Podiatry.

Q: Presumably, you let Hampton Roads Transit take a pass on the scripts for your light rail videos. What were some of their notes?

Rob here.

Of course we talked to HRT and they had some very insightful and funny notes on that script. In fact they actually wrote all of Jason’s dialogue. That’s why in that sketch my character sounds like a sensible human being and Jason’s sounds like a behind-schedule, over-budget murder machine that will never be allowed in Virginia Beach as long as white people with money have anything to say about it.

Q: For the future comedy writers in the readership, will you please enumerate a few of the catch phrases and setups to avoid?

Jim Seward here.

What are you kidding? Never avoid catchphrases and common setups! Look, the average audience member doesn’t understand intelligent humor. And they don’t know George Carlin from Carrot Top. Be as uncreative as possible so you can relate to as many people as possible. Never try to have an original thought; it’s doomed to fail. People love dick jokes. You can never go wrong with dick jokes. If you’re writing for a black comedian, make sure you talk about how uptight white people are; that always works. If you’re writing for a white comedian, mention how they have good credit, and then make a Hispanic slur and say ‘It doesn’t matter, they can’t hear me, they’re in the kitchen.’ If you’re writing for any other nationality/ethnicity, just have a story about how it was tough for their family to adjust to the United States and then have them talk in a funny accent as they mimic their parents. Gold, I tell you – sure fire gold! Oh, and puppets. Always have them use puppets. Preferably puppets who can play a musical instrument. Then you can go for minutes and minutes without writing any comedy!

Q: Plan B – there can only be one. How and when will you fight the so-called Plan B Improv of Des Moines, Iowa?

This is Keven.

When? End of the corn harvest season. (Just to be courteous.) How? To the pain. I have a sweet black bandanna I can wear. And a broadsword. And I can speak with either a Scottish or English accent.

Q: Can we do a double bill? I will gladly fight character actor John Doucette, once considered the fastest draw in Hollywood. We’ll see if his reputation holds up, given his 1994 death.

No, we cannot. Although you are a wonderful journalist, I fear that even the cold dead hand of the late great John Doucette may prove to be too swift. (Actually we would love to do the double bill but Legal prevents us from it … we have a non compete clause with the NRA.)

Q: Why aren’t more comedies set at NASA?

Jim Seward here again.

Great question. There should be more comedies set at NASA. You could have the nerdy engineer, the sexy tour guide, the ne’er do well ex-astronaut who hits on all the ladies, the server in the cafeteria who’sa smartass to all the customers. Yep. And then there could be special guests who rotate in and out like the Love Boat – you know, each episode is a different shuttle crew or something. Then when ratings start getting lower, there could be a ‘very special episode’ where the shuttle crew is beloved by everyone and then at the end of the episode they launch and it blows up, and we pan across the faces of all our regular stars as we see the look of shock and horror on each of their faces. Except the smartass waitress. She just exclaims, ‘Eh, they weren’t very good tippers anyway.’ Remember, no tragedy is so bad that you can’t milk it for commercial purposes.

Q: So there’s Plan B and The Pushers and apparently some groups coming out of the classes over at The Muse Writers Center and then other day a guy at the bus station asked me for a topic and gave me two minutes on “directions to the can.” At what point does Hampton Roads reach its improv and sketch comedy saturation point? Should we make a rule – such as saturation is when we have a greater number of improv troupes than we do miles of light rail track?

I know that guy. He kills at The Funny Bone.

Q: When you say this show at the Naro is The Big Show, what are you getting at? How do you think it makes all the other shows feel?

The size of the show.

Skinny and cute.

Q: You comedy style is marked by a give and take between characters in conflict, sometimes portraying a battle between the earnest and the savvy, interlocking sides suddenly joined by circumstance in the congress of verbal and physical structures, mated in a deliriously dirty dance until reversals pile against reversals, recasting perspectives, erupting in a moment of truth, a single comedic beacon illuminating the dim bay of human understanding. What does that mean, what I just typed?

This is Keven.

It means we regularly rock faces off. It also means we should probably take a shower after doing dirty mating dances. Especially me. For obvious reasons.

Q: You are known, in part, for the marketing campaign behind Kypros Ouzo. I often enjoy ouzo in the privacy of a darkened bathroom, drinking it neat until the voices leave me alone with my shame. Do you have any other serving suggestions?

Yes. Once, on the summit of Everest, after an arduous yet liberating climb. I enjoyed a refreshing glass of Kypros Ouzo with Vladimir Putin, his mistress, and three of my favorite Sherpas. As we toasted to the success of the Internet, I thought back to my childhood in Cyprus. The look on my face made Vladimir weep.

Q: A bit more seriously – why do this? Why create something when there are so many other ways to spend one’s time? Where do you see the group going down the line?

Be passionate about something. Always strive to create. Give and expect nothing in return.

We are going to 7-Eleven to get a Big Bite and a Slurpee. Wanna join us?

Q: I hope you enjoyed that softball because here we go. Hoyle, you’re a maverick astronaut with daddy issues, a secret past as a Spaniard, and a love of the slow bolero. Wilson, you’re Hoyle’s much older copilot, but you haven’t cut a rug since that tragic night your old running buddy, Skinny Pete, bought it in a Wichita dance hall. Rodgers is the NASA administrator whose job is on the line unless this mission goes off. Kypros is the engineer who realizes that there’s only one way to get the Lazy Arabesque Rocket Program off the ground – and it doesn’t involve the traditional kind of exothermic chemical reactions he learned about in aerospace engineering school, but ballet d’action. Beatty Barnes Jr. is the skeptical congressman and Kypros’ former Harvard roommate who invented the Internet, thus inspiring Love Story. Everybody else is a space pirate. Let’s do this:

Rob Wilson will take this one. Yes, I am speaking in the third person. Yes, that IS a little pretentious. Okay here we go…

We open on a shot of Brendan doing the Macarena by himself in a dance studio with moody black and white, film noir style lighting a la Robert Alton (look him up). He begins to do a Patrick Swayze (God rest his soul), slowly winding his hips as we do an extreme close up of his crotch.

FLASH and we are in a pool hall. Rob ‘mother[appreciating]’ Wilson (that’s me) rides through the double doors on a badass motorcycle and skids to a stop inches away from three hot ladies. They faint. He (I mean me) revives them and they are ‘appreciative’( they want to do it) ( sex I mean) ( at the same time) (somehow involving the motorcycle). They ask him (me) to dance. He breaks down crying (it’s really cool crying though).

FLASH Lauren is in a kitchen making eggs we pull out to reveal the starship Enterprise through her window. It blows up.

FLASH She wakes up. Rob Wilson is in bed beside her (still crying, but it’s sexy crying this time).

FLASH Jason is doing some smart shit (I only really understood like three words in his description).

FLASH Beatty is … Man I’m tired of this shit. I’m gonna go get a drink.

FLASH We all do a Bollywood dance number … even Rob Wilson but he (me) is crying (this time it’s heartfelt and humble ). Oh and the Space Pirates all have to walk the Space Plank. Rob Wilson doesn’t cry (well, okay, there is one tear like the Indian (feather) in that one recycling commercial).

Q: We’ve covered so much ground. Is there anything else you would like to mention?

Flip-Flop!!!!!!!

Seward now holds this blog’s record for exclamation point deployment, with Kypros a close second on the strength of his last answer alone. Wilson was voted Miss Parenthetical. Schreiber, for using The Princess Bride as a referent, wins one free resuscitation from Billy Crystal and Carol Kane.

They already are working out their wordplay about how he spells his first name.

Thanks to all.

Again, Plan B is at the Naro Expanded Cinema this weekend.

A video for the road. The music will win you over:

Bonus fun fact: More than 4.1 million people “like” Slurpee’s Facebook page; in comparison, roughly 8,800 people “like” the National Endowment for the Arts. Sleep tight, my babies.

Tagged belligerent q&a, hampton roads, improv, jason kypros, jim seward, keven schreiber, naro, naro expanded cinema, norfolk, norfolk va, plan b, plan b improv, rob wilson, sketch comedy, the big show

Sep 07 2011

Leave a comment

Interviews, Theater, Writing

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XII: Comedy writer and actor Sean Devereux of The Pushers

At left is Sean Devereux, producer and co-head writer of the Hampton Roads improv and sketch comedy group The Pushers. In the foreground at right is a custom Ed Carden-shaped Chia pencil holder. Photo by John Doucette.

NORFOLK, Va. – During a recent rehearsal for The Pushers’ upcoming show at The NorVa, members of the improv and sketch comedy group ran lines and worked out blocking in Sean Devereux’s Colonial Place condo.

A duo worked on a musical number on the patio. Several other cast members practiced a sketch in the living room. One ducked into the kitchen to seek out a prop magic wand for her role as (spoiler omitted) in a sketch about (spoiler omitted) in which a (subject noun) thoroughly (verbs) an (object).

I can’t reveal the details of these sketches in progress before the show, because (a) that would involve translating the strange marks on a notepad into real words and (b) The Pushers might retaliate by coming to my kids’ school and working blue. My family gets enough of that at home.

Through the rehearsal, Devereux worked on sketches, handled scripts and coordinated with colleagues. Numerous sketches were in play for the show of all new material. The group is meeting throughout the week to get ready. Several guests and some surprises are promised.

The Pushers has a rep for pushing the envelope, as the name suggests, but in a recent talk here at the blog founding member Brad McMurran discussed the work the group has done to hone its craft as an improv group and a collective of comedic actors.

Devereux, also a founding member, wears a number of hats, including as the group’s co-producer, manager and co-head writer. He happens to have written one of my favorite sketches, which I’ll discuss in another post soon, if my planned schedule of posts holds up for once. And he’s even bylined an interview with himself.

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XI: Writer and editor Tom Robotham

Writer and editor Tom Robotham did not realize he would be part of a blog post that would unsuccessfully link 1870s British light opera and 1980s American light rap when he agree to be photographed at the Taphouse yesterday in Norfolk, Va. As it turns out, parents just don't understand that I am the captain of the Pinafore. Photo by John Doucette.

NORFOLK, Va. – That gentleman, the one always over in the corner writing away at The Taphouse Grill on West 21st Street, well it’s his turn for a Belligerent Q&A.

Tom Robotham began his journalism career as an education reporter and music writer for The Staten Island Advance in New York City and has freelanced for a variety of publications, most recently as a columnist for Veer Magazine and Hampton Roads Magazine.

Most people in Hampton Roads know him as the longtime editor of PortFolio Weekly, the alternative weekly that folded a few years back. He’s also written books and taught at Old Dominion University and The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk.

Furthermore, he is never known to quail at the fury a gale, and he’s never, never sick at sea.

What never? you ask.

No never.

What never?

Hardly ever.

My point is that may come in handy this weekend.

Because, as the cutline above suggests, I bring the Gilbert & Sullivan deep cuts harder than DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s He’s the Librettist, I’m the Composer.

Regular readers (love you, Pretend Mom Who Knows How To Use A Computer) realize I often have conflicts with folks featured here, and Robotham is no exception. He’s been my editor more times than he cares to remember, and yet we’re still friends.

This Belligerent Q&A is some partial get back for all that red pen.

Q: Just who do you think you are? Please use three examples in your response.

Well, clearly, I’m a beer drinker. The Taphouse almost went out of business when I left town for two weeks this summer. Seriously, though, that pub is one of the best places I’ve ever been to – anywhere – for music and conversation, not to mention beer.

I’m also a professional arsonist. Before anyone calls the cops on me, let me explain. I figure it’s my job as a teacher (at ODU) and a writer of essays and articles, to try to set minds on fire – to get people thinking, imagining and questioning everything they’ve ever read or been told – including everything I say.

I try to convince my students in particular to question the whole mainstream American fantasy (as opposed to dream), which to my mind is based on a combination of material affluence and flatulence. I’m sure I pissed off at least one set of parents who wanted their daughter to major in something she hated; after she studied Thoreau with me, she decided to march to the beat of her own drummer and become an actress.

Third, I’m a musician – not a very good one, I must say, but my heart and soul are in it. I played a gig earlier this summer, and people didn’t throw empty PBR bottles at me, which was encouraging.

Q: You are know for thoughtful explorations of music, writing, culture, and society in your editorial and essay writing, both in your former role as editor of PortFolio Weekly and presently in work for Veer Magazine and Hampton Roads Magazine. I’d suggest that two themes I’ve seen in your writing are (1) deflation of hypocritical assertions and naysaying by certain political forces and (2) the exposure of shortcomings in our individual and (by extrapolation, perhaps) communal support for arts and culture, as well as civic involvement, namely the core aspects of public life such as government. What does that stuff I just typed mean?

I have no idea what it means. It sounds like a passage from a PhD dissertation. That said, I agree with what I think it means. I’ve written a lot about hypocrisy – including my own – as well as the marginalization of arts and culture, which to me are as important as food. And as you point out, I’ve written about civic apathy. It’s all of a piece, really. Seems to me that our country was founded on a sublime Jeffersonian dream of simplicity, beauty, education, hard work and civic engagement. Therein lies the hypocrisy. We hear a lot of blather about the ‘founding fathers.’ But for decades at least, our schools have virtually ignored arts and culture in favor of curricula that train children to be cogs in a machine. As a result, there’s little public support for the arts and a massive deficit in our capacity for critical thinking. Seems to me that most people have bought into the suburban dream of having a house on a cul de sac with a huge garage, a Ford Gargantuan, and a large backyard with an 8-foot stockade fence where they can hide from their neighbors – that is, when they’re not inside taking perverse pleasure in watching people make fools of themselves on American Idol. Meanwhile there’s a whole world of cultural beauty out there – live music and art, theater and dance – and architecture. If more people cared about beauty and artistic excellence, we wouldn’t live in these hideously ugly suburbanscapes of stripmalls and clogged boulevards. Finally, there’s the disconnect from nature. I heard recently that the average American teenager can identify 1,000 corporate logos but fewer than 10 plants. I suspect it’s not much better with adults. That’s why we have so many environmental problems.

Wow – I covered a lot of ground there and probably sound like a rambling elitist. I’ve been accused of that. So be it.

Q: You’ve written forcefully against those who oppose subsidization of public broadcasting. When did you stop loving God?

There is no doubt in my mind that God listens to NPR – especially On Point and The Jefferson Hour – and that he’s a member of the WHRO Leadership Circle.

Q: You have said that readers don’t need to be pandered to. I want to agree with you, but that sentiment neither exploits my weaknesses nor appeals to my base instincts. Discuss.

You don’t have any weaknesses that I know of. As for your base instincts, I thought we weren’t going to discuss that night of debauchery at the Thirsty Camel. I do think that our community and country would be a lot better off if we got over our anti-elitist tendencies and let experts do their thing – that includes journalists who are professional observers; they need to tell us what they think is important, and we need to listen. The great ones – from Murrow to Nat Hentoff to Bill Moyers – have always done that, and we’re better off for it.

Q: Why did they name our new light rail line after a laundry detergent instead of calling it Hampton Roads: America’s First Region’s First Light Rail System That Goes to Newtown Road In Norfolk For Now?

Because that wouldn’t have fit on the train. But it does have a nice ring to it.

Q: Do you pledge to support my campaign to reunite Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies in Norfolk to play their 1994 modern rock hit “Ride the Tide” aboard a light rail train repeatedly for a half hour or 7.4 miles (whichever comes last)?

I do, indeed. Although I also like the idea of getting Ozzy Osbourne on board to sing ‘Crazy Train’ for 24 hours straight.

Q: Sometimes I think back to the New York days. Like the night in 1979 when Cyrus from the Gramercy Riffs called all us city gangs together at Van Cortland Park and Luther whacked Cyrus and put the whole dirty deed on us and all that heat came down from the airwaves while we headed back to our turf and I never thought we’d make it back to Coney Island in one piece especially after me and my boys ran into the Lizzies and what with what happened to Fox in the subway but at least Luther got what was coming when the Riffs learned it wasn’t us that took out Cyrus at the summit. I take it you and your crew had a better time getting back to Staten Island, yes? What was the name of your gang and what route did you take?

We came up with a name one night but promptly forgot it after smoking a lot of marijuana and eating 17 boxes of Twinkies. Come to think of it, though, there was another night I recall when some friends and I went to a party in the North Bronx, sang Beatles songs all night with two fugitive IRA members (true story), then rode a Manhattan-bound subway through the South Bronx at 3 a.m. (Not something I’d recommend.) We eventually got to the Staten Island Ferry, then caught Staten Island’s lightrail, which actually goes somewhere.

Q: Funnily enough, when we had our local scrape with those local punks in the Downtown Norfolk Crusher OGs the other day, we were only able to flee on The Tide to Newtown Road before we had to rent a car at that Avis on Virginia Beach Boulevard. Maybe light rail could be a little longer, if only to enable the Technicolor flight of nonexistant gangs. What’s the likelihood we go all the way on light rail in Hampton Roads? By “all the way” I mean to Portsmouth.

Ah, fun times.

Right now the only way it can serve local gangs is to take them all to a sit-down at that great sushi restaurant on Newtown Road. Kind of like those old meetings of the heads of the five mafia families in New York, but with California rolls.

That said, I think it’s unlikely that I will see a truly serviceable mass-transit system here in my lifetime. Right now, I figure I’m better off hopping a Norfolk Southern coal car out of West Ghent if I want to commute somewhere without a car.

Q: If the Beach continues to go slow on light rail, will HRT forces take the needed permissions, funding, and land by sword skirmish?

No. I think we’ll continue to talk about it, just as we talk about ‘regionalism’ and attracting the ‘creative class.’ Reminds me of the characters in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Just a bunch of people sitting around with their pipe dreams. Or Waiting for Godot. But I do kind of like the idea of taking Mount Trashmore, swords in hand, as we recite ‘Charge of the Lightrail Brigade,’ with apologies to Tennyson.

Q: In recent years you’ve taken up martial arts and songwriting. Where exactly are you going with this?

I’m not a very good musician, as I’ve already noted, but I kind of like my own stuff. I figure I’d better be able to defend myself at gigs because some people do tend to get pissed off when I refuse to play Jimmy Buffet songs.

Q: I understand that you’re heading back to school this fall. Will Sally Kellerman play your love interest? Who will play Lou, your chauffeur?

Lou will be played by my old friend Louie Pisigoni from Staten Island. As for my love interest, I’m holding out for Rachel McAdams. I’ve had a crush on her ever since Wedding Crashers.

As for going back to school, I’m going to give ODU a try while I continue teaching there, but I may transfer to my son’s college, room with him in a customized dorm suite complete with hot tub and hire Kurt Vonnegut to write our papers. Oh wait – he’s dead. Maybe Dave Eggers, then.

Q: We’ve covered so much ground here. Is there anything else you would like to say?

I’d like to say hi to my friends at the Taphouse. It will be at least three hours between the time they read this and the time they see me.

You can learn more about Robotham (and see a photo of him on a horse) at this link to his site.

And thanks to the magic of YouTube, former Screamin Cheetah Wheelies frontman Mike Farris will play us out:

Tagged belligerent q&a, hampton roads, hampton roads magazine, hrt, norfolk va, old dominion university, portfolio weekly, taphouse grill, the tide, tom robotham, veer magazine

John-Henry Doucette

Writing, and humble photography.

Category Archives: Interviews

Writing Craft, Vol. VIII: Rob Wilson and Jason Kypros of Plan B (Part Two)

Writing Craft, Vol. VIII: Rob Wilson and Jason Kypros of Plan B (Part One)

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XV: Commentator and opinion writer Brian Kirwin

Writing Craft, Vol. VII: CORE Theatre Ensemble’s 40 Whacks

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XIV: CORE Theatre Ensemble

Writing Craft Q&A, Vol. VI: Sean Devereux of The Pushers (Part Two)

Writing Craft Q&A, Vol. VI: Sean Devereux of The Pushers (Part One)

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XIII: Plan B sketch comedy and improv

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XII: Comedy writer and actor Sean Devereux of The Pushers

Belligerent Q&A, Vol. XI: Writer and editor Tom Robotham