If our audience is to be believed—and I do find them occasionally trustworthy—opening night of The Wasteland Comedy Hour was a solid success.
The first shock was a completely full house. We filled ImprovBoston up to the bleachers, and latecomers found themselves cramming into nooks and holes. From my vantage in center stage, it was an even mix of faces familiar and unfamiliar. They were a very warm, excited audience. Even our pre-recorded curtain speech got some giggles.
My biggest fear—Eliot’s opening monologue—went mercifully well. I took a risk by reading an excerpt from “The Imperfect Enjoyment” as the inspiration for my bit. I am, I admit, a bit power-hungry when I’m on stage (especially when I’m on stage alone). If I feel like I have control over the audience and their expectations, I am having a ball. If I feel like there’s a disconnect between the audience and myself, or what I’m saying, my head-voices start chirping and my performance suffers. I rolled the dice on Friday by kicking off the evening with one of the crudest, angriest, and sexist poems I’m aware of, nearly guaranteed to alienate our very first audience. All the more satisfying, then, to win them over in the next few moments.
I can’t speak to the experiences of the cast, but from the good post-show vibes, I think everybody enjoyed some success on stage, or watched one of their videos rock a full audience. As with every show, there were ups and downs. One particular “down” for me was completely forgetting to write a joke to cover Ryan’s costume change, and having improvise some bullshit about invisible-ink tattoos in the moment. Thank goodness for a forgiving and receptive audience. I was pretty angry at myself for forgetting to prepare that moment, but the cast convinced me it read better than it felt. Typical!
Hopefully the success of “Our Bodies, Our Shells” bodes well for the next six shows. I’m very much looking forward to this Friday’s show, “Oh Mirror, You Always Know What to Say!” which I believe is the most sincere, raw show of our run.
Tonight is the premiere, and we kick it off with “Our Bodies, Our Shells.” Remember two posts ago, when I was mulling over the justification for wedging T.S. Eliot into a comedy show? I glossed over the idea of Eliot as an “advertising mechanism” because, as of that writing, we hadn’t had even a nibble of interest from any media, which of course undermined my point.
But in the last two days I’ve given two interviews about the show, and as predicted, most of the questions were about Eliot. I’m starting to figure out how publicity in Boston works—reporters love hooks. It’s so obvious, but we rarely get to exploit it in the improv world. It’s super-important for these limited run shows to get press hits right off the bat, because by the time word of mouth buzz builds, the show is usually halfway (or entirely) finished. Writers in Boston don’t really touch improv, because they can’t provide a reliable review (the show they see will never be replicated). The rare improv shows that are profiled usually have big hooks (Code Duello, Ennis Cotter, The Robert Cycle). Sketch comedy fares better in print but there just isn’t a lot of sketch in Boston, so it tends to fly under the radar. Anyway, we’re lucky to get some press right off the bat.
In writing up the latest adverts for the show, I took a loose tally of how many sketches we have. Prior to now I’ve been keeping it vague to avoid liability, citing “seven hours” of scripted material. The seven hours is still accurate, if a bit modest, and I was downright shocked to count 176 sketches in various stages of completion. This total encompasses stage sketches, film sketches, songs, monologues, dance numbers, audio bits, and several hybrid experiments. The number of bits will grow by the end of the run. We started writing in June and producing in September—not bad, I say!
Time to get your tickets! If you think you’ll want to attend multiple shows, we’re offering a $50 pass to all seven of ‘em. Just inquire at the box office or wait a few days for the special link on the ImprovBoston site to go live.
I’m having trouble remembering why I thought it would be a good idea to have T.S. Eliot host “The Wasteland Comedy Hour.” Originally I tagged “...with T.S. Eliot!” onto the title as a joke, and to skew the perception of the show towards a weird late-night program. As a title, and an advertising mechanism, it totally works. As an idea I now have to follow through on, it’s presenting some challenges.
There was a time when the producers discussed the idea of abandoning the Eliot-as-host idea altogether. I resisted dropping him from the show, because I felt our material—mostly 2-3 minute sketches, films, and songs—is too diverse in tone to bind into a cohesive hour. This is still true, and for that I’m glad we have Eliot facilitating the evening. His role is pretty well-defined now: he’s Kermit the Frog. Kermit hosted The Muppet Show, but the character was never imposed on bits that didn’t have anything to do with him—and once the program got rolling you never really missed poor Kermit. He popped in here and there to tell a joke, move things along, and buffer other pieces.
So, Eliot is our Kermit, and of course I wanted to tackle the challenge of playing Eliot, because it sounded fun, and hosting in character definitely falls outside of my performance comfort-zone. Here are a few of the hurdles I’m stumbling over.
Several sketches which take place in the meta-world of Eliot’s variety show have lines written for Eliot himself—naturally. Unfortunately, they were written long before I stepped into Eliot’s shoes, and so his dialog in these bits feels functional at best, forced at worst. I need to rewrite his lines to fit his voice, or improvise around the scripted beats. This is not the fault or responsibility of the original writers, just a hiccup in how we’ve developed the show and material.
T.S. Eliot is notorious amongst anybody who’s studied lit (and many who haven’t). This is part of why I chose “him” to be our host—his dry cadence, his stuffy reputation, his canonical criticism and dense poetry—he’s already a character, and that he would never host a comedy show is all the more reason to force the role. Plus, I strongly dislike his scholarly writing, even though “The New Criticism” paved the path to some of my favorite practices in Critical Theory. I am also divided on his poetry—I empathize with and pity Prufrock down to the muscle of my heart, but “The Waste Land” leaves me cold. I’ve read all his other work but confess that none of it really sticks unless I’m deeply committed to taking the time to read and re-read. So, what does this mean for me, playing the character? Just that my WICKED HILARIOUS New Criticism jokes have to be cut.
Eliot’s voice and cadence are distinctive, but not conducive to high-energy late-night antics. Here are some recordings of the man himself:
I mean, I would love to talk like that for the whole night, but I’d end up doubling our show’s running time.
In walking the line between faux-pretension and lit-nerd-masturbation, the only real metric is how many laughs a joke/bit gets. But because I’m only doing each joke/monologue/bit once, I’ll never have the opportunity to revise, tweak, perfect—I’m flying in the dark. I suspect the monologues for the first three shows will be a bit strained as I figure out (along with the audience, in real time), just what’s so damn funny about T.S. Eliot. I’m writing the monologues out fully, but I won’t have the mental bandwidth to memorize their exact phrasing, so there’ll be some improv and some dropped jokes and some gibberish as I stumble to get comfortable in a new character, in a new show, in front of a new audience, for a window of ~7 minutes. If I fuck it up or the stuff I wrote just isn’t funny, the opportunity to make that beat work will be gone forever. Much like improv, but with the added sting of having conceived and prepared for that moment of failure for several weeks.
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