Meow House Theatre

I am back from my week in New York City, where I took an intensive workshop in longform improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. And even though I really don’t like this word, there is no other one to describe it but AWESOME!

Monday, July 30

My flight was supposed to leave at 7:50 AM, which would get me to JFK at about 8:30, from where I would then take a cab directly to the UCB school on W. 30th and 7th. However, the weather did not care that I had to be there at 11:00 AM, and decided to fuck things over for me by having a thunderstorm after I got to Logan. Therefore, we didn’t even leave Boston until almost 9:00 and then sat on the tarmac for quite a while in a stack, and so I didn’t get out of the terminal at JFK until 10:30. Obviously I was not going to make it to my class by 11:00. They’re pretty strict there about being late and not allowing people in past a 15-minute grace period, so I knew I was screwed. I had to wait forever in the cab line too, and didn’t get to Manhattan until about 12:15, and the UCB receptionist said that perhaps when they had their bathroom break at 12:30 I could go in. Which I did and it was fine, although I felt kind of out of it having missed the first part of the class where I’m sure people introduced themselves. On a happy note, my comedy writer/performer/producer friend Sharilyn from Canada was also taking a class at the same time–a class identical to the one I was in, but taught by someone else–and she came in during the break and said hi and we made plans for lunch. That area of NYC (Chelsea) has tons of little restaurants, at non-tourist prices, so it was pretty easy to find something different every day for our hour lunch break.

Betsy Stover was the instructor for this session. (It turned out that the instructors often split up a workshop; we also had Ari Voukydis, who happens to be Betsy’s husband, teach us for about half the time too.) If you have a chance to see either of them perform at UCB, or even just to watch some of their television appearances, please do–both of them were super nice and of course hilarious.

Not to get too much into the mechanics of the class, which I’m sure nobody who isn’t already in improv would care about, but at UCB they teach the Harold form of longform, created by Del Close and Charna Halpern and most commonly identified with The Second City Theatre in Chicago. Lots of improv groups do the Harold but Second City is the grand-daddy of them all. This was an intensive class, 6 hours a day, and man that is a LOT of improv all at once. Most of the stuff I learned is stuff I already knew (not that I’m an expert at it, but rather that I’d learned it before) but it’s always nice to see different teachers’ perspectives on it (and this was doubly interesting given that our two instructors have not only been performing improv at UCB for years, but are married to each other).

Monday night I was pretty tired after getting up at 2:30 in the morning the previous day so I just got done with my class and went back to my hotel with Sharilyn and hung out and then we went to dinner, where the waiter thought she was a CNN anchor and a customer came over to tell me how beautiful my hair was. **blush** Then it was off to bed.

I have pictures for future posts; it’s not all just boring text!

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