DAY 14 - UNDERGROUND LOUNGE

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE SHOW TONIGHT?

GRIFF: It was a blast. By far the most fun I’ve had playing in and watching shows at the Underground Lounge. Large crowd and not all of them were improvisers. Before the show James and I warmed up in the least formal warm up I’ve done. We just started talking and making jokes, like friends do, and found this game I’ll call “The Plan” where we kept saying our plan was to do a lot of really dramatic and ridiculous things but every repetition ends with a suicide pact in the desert somewhere. I don’t know if you can repeat that one and get adequately warmed up, but I had a lot of fun. The show was high energy and, while teetering on the brink of nonsense sometimes, was remarkably well tied together.

JAMES: If you’ve ever been to the Underground Lounge, you know it can be a pretty tough crowd. I haven’t performed or seen a show there in probably 2 years. So, I was shocked and amazed at how many people filed in and filled up the tables right in front of the stage. It was as much, if not more, of an audience than you would hope for anywhere else. So, either this was an unusually crowded night (which I doubt seeing as it was a Monday late show), or this place has really picked up a following lately (which I completely believe). We had a fun show, with plenty of silly to spread around. It was a multi-scene, multi-character show, which is something that we’ve been avoiding as of late. My favorite thing about the show was how we never strayed from the narrative. Every scene or character that we played had a direct and clear connection to the first scene. It’s something that we hadn’t done yet, and I really enjoyed it.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT GRIFF/JAMES?

GRIFF: We are a lot alike. I know I’m a spazz and a screwball and barely coherent at times, but the thing that inspires that, the way in which I desire to be funny, is in James as well. He wants to find a shiny fun thing and play with it as much as I do. We just have different ways of doing that. He comes from a much more controlled, conceptually based or word game based kind of place that I can’t do because I’d get too excited and my brain would stop. He is the rock to my...stupider rock?

JAMES: If there’s a game to be found, Griff is gonna play it. At one point tonight, he played a guy that kept falling asleep at a presentation I was giving. The first time he fell asleep, I slapped him. The second time he fell asleep, I slapped him harder. He knew exactly what he was getting into by falling asleep a third time, but was unwilling to give up on the game.

HOW DO YOU FEEL/WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT IMPROV?

GRIFF: We said at the top, after the suicide pacts, that we weren’t going to do anything other than play for ourselves. It feels great to have no goal other than making each other laugh. However, afterwards I was frustrated by not knowing exactly what we could have done better. The show was fun and everything, but there were plenty of moments where something was dropped or I just plain had no idea what to do or say. It felt like I was struggling to keep my head above water at those points. Tonight highlighted for me just how important a coach is, or rather, how frustrating it is to not have a coach. It’s nice to have an educated outside perspective.

JAMES: This one was for us. We didn’t try to impress anyone, we just played good and fun. And it turned into one of my favorite shows that we’ve done this month. Usually when you do a “scenic montage”, it consists of unrelated scenes or characters that exist only for the one scene. I think it shows our growth that we created a single world, and we just visited different characters and locations within that world. It was pretty effortless also, all we had to do was establish the connection at the top, and then play the scene as normal. Bill Arnett (I know I’ve been name dropping a lot lately. Get over it, Sean Price) called it “punching out”. You do your part to connect the scene to the piece as a whole, even if it’s just tangentially, and then punch out and just play honestly. The work has been done, now just play. That keeps things from relying too heavily on plot and leaves you open to whatever might happen organically in the scene.

WHAT DO YOU THINK THE FINAL QUESTION SHOULD BE TODAY?

GRIFF: Do you want to live forever or die tonight on the football field like a goddamned hero? I’d just like to get freaky under the bleachers.

JAMES: I wanted to go with a “Marry, Bang, Kill” scenario, but I only got as far as marrying Viola Spolin and banging Del Close.