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.