Monday, January 21, 2008

A Tale of Four Theaters

The floor of the Cantab Lounge, New Year’s Eve 2008.

The Tribe was my first improv gig out of college.  In early 2005 I was finishing up the workshop program at Improv Asylum, watching shows at ImprovBoston, and getting sad that there was no obvious ladder to climb once I completed my last class.  There were no performance opportunities for inexperienced performers at IA or IB; they rarely even auditioned.  Then my instructors at IA began mentioning The Tribe, in a series of increasingly contemptuous asides:

“Yeah, they’re a bunch of new performers.  Neraj [the Tribe’s founder] is an IA program grad.”

“Apparently The Tribe has like fifty performers.”

And finally, a piece of encouragement that seemed backhanded given the prior context:

“They’re holding auditions?  Oh, you should definitely go.  I’m sure you’d get into The Tribe.”

I ended up auditioning, not getting in, then auditioning again and starting my career as an improviser.  But that’s a boring story for a different boring entry.

As of 2005 The Tribe was, true enough, a loosely organized band of budding improvisers and comedians who couldn’t get stage time in Boston or Cambridge—but not for lack of drive or talent.  They were simply young and green.  The Tribe had shows every Thursday in the basement of a dive bar in Central Square, Cambridge: The Cantab Lounge.  Ah, The Cantab.  A claustrophobic little space perpetually overpowered by funky-smooth bass.  The last two groups to perform in a given night had to shout over “ChickenSlacks,” the band upstairs.  It was a mediocre place to do comedy, a fucking awful place to do theater.

But The Tribe blossomed.  Suddenly the army of performers were inviting their friends to the shows, and the basement of the Cantab was filling.  The audiences were growing too big for the space (even if the audience was 50% performers).  The Tribe reinvented its internal structure three times in a single year, moving from “loosely organized” to “highly compartmentalized,” always with the goal of pushing its members to try new things.  Guest performers and traveling ensembles played alongside Tribe teams.  A typical evening in the basement of the Cantab lasted from 7-10:30, showcasing four or five ensembles.  All were fed by a torrent of new graduates and young performers who flocked to auditions every six months.

It was clear the Tribe was outgrowing the Cantab.  So, Neraj found another space: the third floor of Buzz Boston, a gay club by any other date, time, or floor.  Now The Tribe performed two nights per week—Thursday and Friday—in both Cambridge and the theater district of downtown Boston.  It housed around one hundred performers in various improv troupes and showcase shows.  It spawned a scripted theater unit, a music unit, and a film unit.  ImprovBoston and Improv Asylum looked dead by comparison, and suddenly IB and IA performers were doing their own small projects in The Tribe’s spaces.  With a better reputation came yet more growth.  Finally The Tribe packed up and moved into Buzz Boston for both its Thursday and Friday shows, and The Tribe Theater was born in fall 2005.  A comedy theater right in the theater district of downtown Boston—see ya, Cantab!  We were finally legit!

The Tribe Theater, late 2005

About six months later—June 2006—The Tribe lost its space in the theater district.  Turns out we were inhabiting Buzz Boston by the grace of its owner, and when the whole joint changed property managers, we got the boot.  Pretty much all our eggs were in that basket.  The Tribe collapsed almost immediately.

It was the end of a great organization, but we were all too busy scrambling for a new home to give The Tribe a proper burial.  When I auditioned for ImprovBoston in June, my fellow hopefuls were 75% Tribe alumni.  Boston’s Neutrino team, who had formed under the auspices of The Tribe, went independent for a time (and were eventually incorporated into ImprovBoston).  A faction of my teammates from The Tribe’s mainstage moved back into the Cantab Lounge under the name Bastards Inc.  Some of the more theatrically inclined performers created the Bad Habit Players.  By the end of the summer, all that was left of the Tribe were mixed emotions, some marketing collateral, and the Tribe Theater’s awning (which is still rotting on Stuart Street).

View Larger Map Carcass of The Tribe Theater, present

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to account for the entirety of The Tribe’s impact on Boston’s comedy scene.  It lit up and burned out too fast.  In the last two years, ImprovBoston and Improv Asylum have incorporated some of The Tribe’s more successful philosophies, and now there are many, many more performance opportunities for Boston young’uns (and veterans).  My fellow Tribe alumni, my closest artistic collaborators, are movers and shakers in our community—you’ll see them in both IB’s and IA’s mainstages, mounting their own projects, and infiltrating local and national stages.

I had the odd experience of spending new year’s eve in the basement of the Cantab, now home to Bastards Inc.  It was a party completely unrelated to improv, but thinking about The Tribe in that space is inescapable.  And then somebody found old Tribe coupons in a back room, and we tossed them around like confetti.  I think we’ve moved on.

A few months ago I wrote about ImprovBoston’s big move to Central Square.  It’s happening right now.  Hundreds of IB members and volunteers are scraping and scuffing, painting and polishing, heaving and hammering in the big dusty cavern that will soon be ImprovBoston’s new home.  We’ll open on February 15th. 

Construction on 40 Prospect St. January 2008

ImprovBoston is stable and cautious (often overcautious), and it has a rich 25 year history, so I don’t fear we’ll experience anything like the Tribe’s autumnal crises.  However, we’re raising the stakes with this new space—the rent is higher, our regulars have been going to Inman Square for ten+ years, we’ll be on the red line and therefore accessible to many more people, and now we’re responsible for the content on two stages.  I don’t think we’ll realize how comfortable we’ve been in our Inman Square nest until later this year.  2008 promises to be a roller-coaster year of artistic growth for our theater, a period of change and challenge I haven’t experienced since The Tribe closed its doors.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Amusement Park

This afternoon I sent a handful of people my first public draft of Amusement Park, the screenplay I began developing as part of Boston University’s Summer screenwriting course.  The class only workshopped the first 30 pages, and I’ve been tinkering and hammering on my own time since the end of The Wasteland Comedy Hour.  It’s thrilling to be able to share my work, and solicit honest feedback from people I trust.  One of the few things I really miss about college are creative writing workshops.  Even at their most pretentious and pointless, there’s something safe about being able to discuss and critique the craft of writing with your aspiring peers.  From what I’ve seen, equivalent experiences in the real world are rare.

This is my first real attempt at writing a feature, and I’d like to get the story tight enough that I’d feel comfortable adding it to my portfolio, or sending it to a grad school admissions department.  We’ll see what happens as feedback starts trickling in.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Citizen Soldier

By now everybody’s seen the magnificent, sweeping piece of propaganda by the US Army, Army Strong, which has been playing in theatrical previews for the better part of a year.  No matter your feelings on the message of Army Strong, you can’t deny the film’s power.

Conversely, the National Guard’s sister offering, Citizen Soldier, is a laughably shallow mashup of bad ideas and pathetic pandering to (an adult’s perception of) youth.  Its crimes are many.  I could list them all here, but that would ruin the fun—watch the film right now.

I can hear the PR firm storyboarding out this multi-million dollar venture:

“We need to make this thing epic.  Epic.”

(long pause)

“Muskets.”

And later:

“How can we humanize the invasion of Normandy?”

(long pause)

“Marriage.”

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Putting Baby to Bed

The Wasteland Comedy Hour is over.  Indulge me, if you will, as I fumble for a suitable postmortem.

The last show, “In Calvin We Trust,” was a good blend of silly and sentimental.  We mixed with some comedy staples—god, religion, death—from new angles, and peppered in some darker material—our fears, the future, the cosmos—and steeped everything in a rich time-travel broth.  Of our shows that require context to understand, I’d say “In Calvin We Trust” is up there with “Hitting Our Marx,” and I don’t know if there’s any one bit or sketch that I could extract, hold over my head, and scream “Look! This is how awesome our show was!”  As we got deeper into our seven show run, we found ourselves intertwining sketches more and more.  I’m looking forward to the day when we edit the footage from our live shows together, and host the whole experience in cyberspace—we definitely made a “live happening” that’s difficult to grok from our standalone video selections.

That said, here’s a thing:

Weird, right?  It’s my send-off to the T.S. Eliot character I’ve been playing for the last three months.  I figured he’s already dead, so there’s no harm in turning his pseudofuneral into an artsy-fartsy meditation on performers’ postpartum.  Also, I love “The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and had to get Eliot’s real voice in the show.  This seemed like an elegant solution, a kind of video elegy.  The funny stuff in our last show was strong enough to buoy this downbeat, and I am eternally thankful that we have a team willing to take these kinds of risks.

Speaking of the team!  Holy shit, do I love these cats.  I wish I could throw them a parade.  I wish I could remember every compliment that people have given me in the last five days so that I could replay it for the cast and crew, word for word, as I clap them on the backs and then maybe give them handjobs.  The Wasteland Comedy Hour was a massive machine, an extremely demanding ensemble production that relied on our team’s ability to not just pull their weight, but to stretch well beyond their comfort zones, to be open to peer collaboration, critique, and construction, to set the bar high and then jump like crazy.  They built a ship, drew a map, and steered everybody there and back again.

The time to bask in our success is quickly drawing to an end, as everybody switches gears, prioritizes new and old projects, and contemplates what to do now that they’ve blown six months on one big beast of a variety show.  Myself, I’ll be continuing to improvise with my friends and colleagues in the cast, although I’ve put a moratorium on any new improv projects that involve significant rehearsal time.  I’m reclaiming my weeknights and charting my own course for the immediate future—finding full-time employment for my days, and (screen)writing at night.  It’s going to be rocky, moving from the comfort of a supportive, talented ensemble to spending nights alone with the inventions and failings of my own imagination. 

But The Wasteland was a shot of liquid courage.  We’re all moving onward; upward.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

WGAe Strike Rally Tomorrow

I suppose one good thing about full-time job hunting is that it allows me to attend daytime events I’d otherwise have to miss.  Tomorrow morning/afternoon I’ll be in Harvard Square at this WGAe/Fans4Writers rally, supporting the WGA strike and hopefully snapping some photos.  I don’t have any expectations for tomorrow, so it should be a stress-free day in the cold.

Tomorrow night, though, I’ll be at my stressful last Wasteland show—hopefully you will be too?

Friday update:  I had to leave before the big march to the Harvard Lampoon building, but I was able to snap some photos and absorb some thought.  Here’s a glimpse of the action.