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.”
“The Tribe? Yeah, they’re alright. Mostly performers who didn’t get cast at IA or IB.”
“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).
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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.