More Butter

Hello, Tumbr world! Happy New Year, if January 9th isn’t too late to say so.

I write with some exciting news. My comedy partner Justin and I - collectively, as you might already know, we’re From Justin to Kelly - are opening a pop-up improv space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn very soon! It opens on February 1st and closes on April 1st. We love the idea of an ephemeral space for an ephemeral art form: truly, if you weren’t there, then you missed it. Our hope is to move this space around the city as we find available places. For now, we’re starting literally on the ground floor, in a basement, and we couldn’t be more excited.

We’re using this space both as a headquarters for our own creative work and as a space to teach classes and put up shows. Check out our website, and send us an email at countdowntheater at gmail dot com if you have questions, would like further information or would like to be involved! We are taking show pitches for experimental, fun, daring ideas. You should pitch us one! Send us that idea you’ve always wanted to try. Seriously.

I’d like to use this platform right now specifically to highlight a class we’re teaching called Love the One You’re With. We’ve expanded a workshop by the same name into a four-week class that allows us to really dig into heightened agreement and consciously positive choices in scenework. We’ve spent the last couple years touring around the country teaching and performing, so all of this stuff has been truly road-tested. (There are testimonials on our website, if you’d like to read them!) Not only that, it has been informed by our own performances and reflects our mutually-developed philosophy and values on improv and what it can be. 

The past couple years have driven home for me a firmly-held belief that improv has the power to be an end in and of itself. The places we’ve traveled and the people we’ve met along the way have truly rejuvenated and reinvigorated my love of this art form. Improv *can* be a stepping stone to other things, but it can also just be, and it can be beautiful. These classes are a reflection of that reinvention and rejuvenation, and I am honestly so excited to share them with improvisers in my home city of New York. 

If you’d like to take a class rooted in positivity taught my people that truly love what they do, then you should consider taking this class. If you’re new to/revisiting improv and want to give it a go in a positive, supportive, inclusive setting, then you should consider taking this class. If you’re going through or have gone through the levels at other places and you’re looking to branch out to something that can complement those experiences, you should consider taking this class. Join us and fall in love with improv all over again, just like we did.

What are you waiting for? Go to this link! Hope to see you at Countdown Theater very soon.

I came back on here to write this because I wanted to tell you about my show tonight. (I have a show tonight, it’s in NYC, it’s at the PIT at 7:30. We were listed in the New York Times and everything - I mean, what?!) But I also came back here because I wanted to give myself the chance to write something that was decidedly imperfect. I wanted to show myself that it was possible that the goal can be completion and not perfection. 

I wanted to tell you that this year in particular I have felt a lot of pressure and that it’s been a daily exercise to relieve that pressure. Why is this? I’m willing to chalk up some of it to external events making the present and future look considerably bleaker - the election for one, my grandmother’s passing in March (thus losing the third grandparent to whom I was very close in a span eight months) for two. I also think it’s a factor of my age: I turned 35 this year, and while that’s by no means old, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that this number hasn’t made me think some really negative things about myself and what I’ve accomplished and what I haven’t by this point in my life. American society has a way of making a 35-year old woman feel 90 sometimes (all the time). 

That all being said, I don’t want to blame the world for my problems. The truth of the matter is, I have put this pressure, this burden of expectations on myself. There’s undeniable value to the idea of holding yourself accountable to your work and pursuing what you want to be doing with your life in as dedicated and tireless a fashion as you can. No one else can do this for you! Hard work is the only answer, I believe this! But too often lately for me, this pressure has at times really tipped the balance and gone way beyond simple motivation and into an ever-sharpening instrument of my own self-sabotage and self-destruction. The voice in my head tells me that I’m not working hard enough, ever. It is relentlessly hard on me. I am never doing enough, according to me, and the things I am doing I am not doing nearly as well as I could and not nearly as well as everyone else is doing them. Some days it is so bad that I will berate myself for not making enough progress on - I kid you not! - reading a damn book. Reading a book is a leisure activity! The world is not made of mile markers and benchmarks! But this voice in the back of my head insists that it is. And that I am falling behind all of them. 

Then, I started reading this book. It’s called Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. Have you read it? I’ve picked up the hardcover a few times and put it back, convinced I didn’t need some sort of creative self-help guide, after all I should be able to do this on my own, dammit, said the voice in my head. (Also, um, in case you hadn’t heard, I’m basically the worst, I can’t even FINISH READING A BOOK, PEOPLE.) Then I saw it in paperback this weekend, and buoyed by a good friend’s recent recommendation and the fact that paperback is cheaper than hardcover, I was like, fuck this, I’m buying it. 

I am still reading it so don’t tell me how it ends. (I assume she lives?!?!)  I have to tell you, I have had to suspend my cynicism and sarcasm throughout, because it can get pretty cheerleader-y and even a little hokey at times, but I’m glad that I have put those needlessly critical voices aside to really take it in. Here’s the number one thing I have learned from this book so far (SPOILER ALERT!!): your work doesn’t have to be important. It can just be.

When I read this sentence, I could feel the idiot voice in my head shut up completely if only for a moment. This sounds so simple, and yet, it’s a total revelation. So much of my internal pressure comes from feeling like I have to have Something to Say at All Times. Now, sometimes I do - remember this? - but a lot of times I don’t. Once I did have Something to Say on this blog, I felt that all people wanted was for me to keep saying things that were Important and Significant and Relevant. When my improv shows were merely fun and not Emotionally Resonant, I felt that I had failed myself as a performer and missed an opportunity to Showcase Important Work and show the world how Powerful improv can be. (This capitalization makes me look sort of insane but I am doing it for effect so go with me here.) I now realize that this stupid voice in my head gives zero leeway for anything resembling the creative process: dead ends, fleeting inspiration, the ability to say something incomplete or inconsequential (gasp!). But these things are all necessary if I want to say anything ever! 

So I am telling myself this: my work doesn’t have to be perfect or speak to great unknowable truths, it just has to exist. Importance and Significance aren’t achievable goals, in fact, they can’t be goals at all. I don’t decide that what I say on paper or on stage resonates with you, reader or audience member, *you* do. (I learned that from this book, too.) And if nothing does, it is better that I say things rather than withhold them for fear of their (or my) not being good enough.

Glimpse of a rainbow from the passenger seat, Sarasota, Florida, July 16, 2016.

A year ago today, my grandmother, Roberta, passed away, peacefully, at the age of 90 following a (mercifully brief) period of ill health. The intervening time has passed extraordinarily quickly and painfully slowly all at once. The amount of grief I have felt (and still feel) at times has completely overwhelmed me, as I have struggled to make sense of and navigate the enormous space that her absence has created in my life, and in my heart. My grandmother was a constant in my life from day one; to say that we were close doesn’t do it justice, not really, it went deeper than that. Quite simply, we understood each other, without ever having to explain, reassure or state it any further.  They say the best improv scenes start in the middle, and need no exposition: it is as if this relationship has always existed at its fullest strength and its most realized. She and I were always there.

I attempted to write about her several times in the weeks and months following her passing. Nothing I wrote during that period ever felt like it did her justice, or could ever truly capture what she meant to me. What words could? I suppose you had to be there.  Eventually, I put my pen down, and instead of forcing writing, I slowly began to try to resume living, to reconnect with the world after a prolonged period of debilitating grief and profound numbness.

In that living, I unwittingly discovered the most fitting tribute of all, the kind that can only be found in motion and on the road. 

It is no accident that I have derived the greatest joy and the most creative fulfillment in my life from touring around the country with my improv duo over the past two years, nor is it a surprise that I feel most at peace when staring out a car window, or seeing what lies beyond an exit ramp. My grandmother loved to travel. She never got on a plane in her life - in spite of having proudly worked in a factory during WWII that manufactured airplane propellers (she told us all the time that she was Rosie the Riveter, and I believed she actually *was* for far longer than I probably should have). She preferred instead to set off on “her adventures” from the comfort of her van, or, later in life, crossing the country aboard Amtrak.

And they really were adventures, taking her to 49 states. In 1987, she drove from her home in Connecticut to Alaska, a nearly 5,000 mile drive. I remember her writing, in cursive, “Alaska or Bust!” on the spare tire holder on the back of her van.  Her traveling companion was her cousin Edna, who suffered a series of minor strokes somewhere around Rapid City, South Dakota. “I thought we were going to lose her at one point,” she told me a few years ago, adding nonchalantly, “But then, after a week, the doctors gave the OK. So, we got back in the car, and we just kept going.” Alaska or bust, indeed.

In the wake of this trip, I remember asking when I would get to go along with her. She promised she would take me on a cross-country trip when I was 10. I protested that didn’t want to wait that long, but she explained that she wanted me to be old enough to remember it. And go, we did, my grandmother, my aunt Eunice, me, and my childhood best friend Amanda, setting off northwards for three weeks that summer, to Niagara Falls, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Glacier National Park, and countless other beautiful places along the way. I am glad she waited. That trip now holds some of my most vivid memories.

That trip was the first of many that my grandmother took me on. In June 1994, we spent a week in Washington, DC, touring landmarks by day on a small, hot bus whose driver she referred to repeatedly and loudly as “Roly Poly Dave.” (To be fair, she wasn’t wrong.) I was 13, and, as the photos I have not destroyed will attest, I made a very questionable hat choice for the entirety of that trip. I’m pretty sure we both wore fanny packs. We stayed at a local KOA, and she brought a tiny camping TV with an antenna, on which, one night, we watched the OJ Bronco chase unfold live. If you thought that was surreal from your living room, imagine watching it while sharing a KOA cabin bed with your grandmother.

A few years later, it was she who taught me to drive, and our adventures continued with her in the passenger seat. I was just one of the many who had benefitted from her tutelage, and by far the least notable. That title belongs instead to our Aunt Lydia, my grandmother’s sister-in-law and lifelong friend, whom she surreptitiously taught to drive while her husband was away in the service in the 50s. Lydia felt trapped, and my grandmother took it upon herself to help solve that problem. When her husband returned, he was reportedly less than pleased. My grandmother relished this story for her entire life, laughing every time she recounted it. It’s clear to me now how much freedom she felt while driving, and how much she felt that others should feel that, too.

For my part, our lessons took place in her minivan, primarily in the local high school parking lot. The first time I pulled out onto a main road with a 45-mph speed limit, my grandmother encouraged me to keep the van in low gear if I felt nervous. I almost immediately found myself at the head of what most closely resembled a funeral procession. “Don’t worry about the people behind you, they’ll go around you if they need to!” she asserted. With each glance in the rear view, the cars behind me and their collective outrage seemed to increase tenfold. She remained steadfast in her conviction. I chose to believe her. I still think of her every time I get behind the wheel of a car.

At the start of all her travels, my grandmother would exclaim, happily, “We’re off like a flock of turtles!” I feel that same flurry of excitement at the onset of every new tour. She gradually began to scale back her travels in her later years, staying close to, and eventually mostly at, home. Whenever I would go home to visit, we would sit and talk for as long as we had time for, and when we left each other and I gave her a hug, I’d say, “See you next time!” to which she would always enthusiastically reply, “I’ll be here!” In the midst of what has been heart-wrenching, devastating year, in these moments on the road, in some small way, I feel as though she still is. And, I smile.

Tonight in NYC, my improv duo From Justin to Kelly has the last show of our monthly run at the PIT Loft (154 West 29th Street, b/w 6th and 7th) at 8:00 PM. If you’re in town, you should consider coming. It’s going to be really fun. 

On Thursday, we head to Florida for a few days of teaching and performing!

Thursday, July 14th, 7:00 PM: We’re teaching our workshop, The Most Important Moment of Your Life, at ArtsGarage in Delray Beach. Huge thanks to ImprovU for inviting us down to teach, and for setting up Friday’s performance, too!

Friday, July 15th, 8:00 PM: We’re performing at SOL Children’s Theatre in Boca Raton, sharing the bill with local improv troupe Business Casual. (As far as I know, this is not a children’s show, but one for adults.)

Saturday, July 16th, 3:00PM: We’re teaching our workshop Love the One You’re With at the Sarasota Improv Festival. 

** Above is a relatively new photo of us, taken by our friend Jesse in Eau Claire. I really like both the photo itself and what it implies - for me, that’s two collaborators looking together not toward the future, but toward the present. Embarking on this journey as an independent, touring improv enterprise has required me to reorient my thinking, away from milestones and goalposts and traditional indicators of success and the constant internal worry of “am-I-doing-this-right”, to instead root myself more firmly in the experience of the here and now. The here and now is all there really, truly is. I have to remind myself of that constantly, but I really believe it’s true. 

The title of the first workshop we’re teaching in Florida (and that we taught in a few different places over the course of 2015) - The Most Important Moment of Your Life - was pulled directly from a quote I dug up from RuPaul’s Reddit AMA a couple years back: “This is the important thing: it's important to stay in this moment right here, the now. This moment is the most important moment of your life.” (RuPaul has a *lot* of quotes that could apply to improv, and the entire AMA is worth reading.) This has become a major tenet of the improv philosophy that Justin and I have developed together over the course of our work and our teaching, this idea of being present in the moment, of having a first thing, and making that *first* thing you have between you really, truly matter. This moment you and your partner are having on stage, no matter how mundane, abstract, beautiful or just plain bizarre it is, has the power to be transformative, if you let it.

If this sounds simple, it is! And yet, improvisers of all levels struggle with the idea of truly staying in the present, preferring instead to stand outside the scene and judge it rather than existing fully within it. (I know this because I used to do this all the time.)  And you know what? That’s understandable. All around us, as improvisers on stage, are escape hatches for our own commitment. Opportunities to bail on the moment are ever-present. Distractions - often in the form of self-judgement and us doing what I like to call “improv math” in our heads - are a constant background hum. From my own personal experience, for what it’s worth: when you’re fighting against these things, when you feel like you want to bail, or that you feel like what you have isn’t enough, commit ten times harder to what you and your partner *are* doing on stage. Commit so hard that you make yourself uncomfortable with how committed you are to this scene, no matter how mundane or stupid or abstract it is. Because that’s what being in the present really is - it’s total commitment. 

I don’t know what tonight’s show will hold. There’s a certain low-level anxiety that comes with putting up your own show in New York, for me anyway, that never really goes away - that feeling that you’ve got to deliver here, when there’s about 20 improv shows going up around the city at the exact same time as yours. But I can tell you this - whatever it is, I know it will be committed. Because, basically, at the end of the day, all I ever want people to say about me after a show is this.

In the past, I purposely refrained from using this blog to promote my own shows, as I was afraid it would dilute my larger message and make me look blatantly, well, self-promotional.  But you know what? I take an enormous amount of pride in the work my improv duo From Justin to Kelly does. I think it’s compelling, unique, and ambitious, and honestly, I just think it’s really good! I think you should know about it and see it if you can. And besides, isn’t one of the best ways *to* spread a larger message/improv philosophy to get up on stage and embody it? I think so!

Oh, hello!

I think I am finally ready to resuscitate this improv blog. Several things kept me from it for the better part of the last year. Chief among those things was a mounting internal pressure that I had to do this “right.” That feeling built up until I felt so stuck I couldn’t write anything no matter how hard I tried (and oh, reader, I tried!), feeling that nothing I wrote could ever live up to what I had written before.

It’s taken me months to realize that all I really had to do in this space was to be myself. There is no perfect, there is no right, there is only doing.  

More to come. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite Sleater-Kinney pictures of all time because this is my blog again, so why the fuck not?

I’ve struggled over the past several days and weeks to find ways to encapsulate and recap this momentous year of my life in a way that I felt would do it justice. This was, by all accounts, the biggest year of my life, the year that I took big swings, and stepped far outside of my comfort zone in my work and in my life. Surely, I thought, there must be a way to wrap this all up in a nice year-end bow, and tell you what I’ve learned along the way.

And there are ways. I could tell you that From Justin to Kelly did 40 shows in 20 different states as part of four national tours, and that in my 12+ years of doing comedy, I’ve never believed in or been prouder of anything I’ve ever done more than this. I could tell you that 2015 was the year that I finally felt largely free of the deep-seeded anxiety and fear that had imprisoned me for so long. I could tell you that this very blog you’re reading and the process of writing it has been a transformative experience, and that crystallizing and clarifying my thoughts on improv, comedy, gender, and the theater system has given me complete conviction in what I believe this art form has the power to be and where I want to take it. I could tell you that I did all of this while awash in grief over losing my beloved grandparents this summer. Surely there are many connections to be drawn between all of these things. It’s my life, after all. Why couldn’t I draw them?

Then, I realized why: 2015 was a year that defies this level of neat summation. This was my most present-tense year. 

After years of questioning myself and second-guessing my choices, I gave myself permission to really *live* these last 12 months, to be totally and completely in it, to not worry about what came before or what was to come next. I lived moment to moment. That goes for the joy and exuberance that I felt in that moment on stage in Tampa in November, where Justin and I committed harder than we ever had on stage and subsequently delivered one of our strongest shows. It goes for the triumph I felt in the moment in New York in June, when I published a blog post that so clearly expressed what I believe to be true, and allowed myself to be unafraid of its potential consequences. It goes for overwhelming and overpowering sadness I felt in that moment in July in Connecticut when I held my grandmother’s hand and said goodbye, and then three weeks later, in August, in Florida, when I hugged my grandfather for the last time. 

 In 2015, in both improv and life, I stopped standing outside the scene and trying to control where it went. I jumped all the way in and committed to what was happening, and I gave every last thing I had to the scene and the situation I was in. When I felt fear telling me to bail or to make safe choices, I took the teaching advice that Justin and I have given over and over again: just be in it. When you feel the urge to bail, commit even harder than you think you’re capable of. The resulting work and life has been more beautiful than anything I have ever experienced. 

"Practice. Learn and then unlearn — that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process." - Carrie Brownstein

That quote is about music, but holds just as true for improv. For me, as readers of this blog know, the past year or so has been a constant, ever-evolving process of learning, unlearning, then learning anew. That process is still unfolding. I used to think there would be an end to it, a time when I and we would get it. Now I realize and embrace the fact that "getting it" is a total myth. Revelations and success will come, as will hardship and frustration, all in the name of creating your own path into the process. The work is the joy and the joy is the work. I really, truly believe that.

Twelve years ago, on October 4, 2003, I took my very first improv class. Ever since then, every October, I’ve stopped to commemorate what I’ve come to consider my improv anniversary. The decision to begin doing improv was a watershed moment for me, a moment when I dared myself to take a huge risk, and try something unknown and scary. There was a time before that first class, and a definitive time after, after which nothing has ever really been the same. It seems an occasion worth marking.

You probably know the feeling. Log into Facebook around this time of year, and you’ll find a lot of posts from improvisers marking their own improv anniversaries. These posts sound a lot alike: an outpouring of affection for improv, expressions of gratitude to those who taught you and for the friends that you’ve made, ending with, “here’s to another x years!” I don’t doubt their sincerity, for years, I posted updates exactly like these, all thanks and celebration. Cake for everyone!  And, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this. But I’ve recently started to think that these improv anniversaries also offer us a unique opportunity: to look around at where we’ve been and what we’ve done, and ask ourselves: “Why am I still doing this?”

Improvisers rarely take this opportunity for self-examination—on our improv anniversaries or at any other time. Sure, we’ll say, after a bad show or rehearsal, wearily and with frustration, “Why am I still doing this?!” While those feelings are valid, they’re purely circumstantial and reactive. The line of questioning I’m referring to is deeper and more active than that. It is a series of questions, all under the heading of “Why am I still doing this?” including, but not limited to: Why am I doing this show? Why am I on this team? Why am I performing/taking classes at this theater? Why am I doing improv? Is this the way I want to be improvising? Am I happy doing this? Do I still experience the sort of wonder that I did when I first discovered it? If not, what has changed?

I think we fail to ask ourselves these questions because we are afraid of what the answers will be, or that they might be “I don’t know.” (I was, which is why I didn’t ask myself. For years.) I think we also just assume that if something makes us reasonably happy, occupies our time, and provides us with a social circle, then that’s enough. For a moment, though, I would ask you to allow it not to be. Push beyond enough, and see what you find.

Take my advice: ask yourself these questions anyway, and ask them now, whether it’s your improv anniversary or not. Don’t delay, and don’t be afraid. This is the best thing you could do for yourself.

If Justin and I had asked ourselves and each other these questions back in August of last year, we could have spared ourselves a lot of pain. A bit of background. In February 2014, Justin’s house team, Chet Watkins, was cut, and, after five years on Megawatt (the Magnet’s house team system), he was not recast in the subsequent round of auditions, to the surprise of, well, pretty much everyone. He was an inventive, consistently strong player, and had an equally strong audition. Meanwhile, my house team, Horses, was spared. We would have one more truly great show after that, and promptly begin a slide into inconsistency that would spell the end for our nearly three-year run in August. During the intervening six months, Justin and I started working together as a duo again, and began to see real progress, both in relation to where we had been before as a duo, and in relation to the creeping stagnation we had both felt in our last year or so of being on house teams. We were building something unique and wonderful together, and it was a great feeling. Concurrently, Justin made it his mission to get back on Megawatt, and the theater gave assurances of his talent and steps he could, and did, take to do so. No guarantees, to be clear, but definite hope.

This was the point at which we should have asked ourselves: “Why are we still doing this?” If we had, we would have been easily able to answer why we were working together: because we loved it, and because our work was really good. If we had then challenged ourselves, and asked, “Then why are we auditioning for something that’s not this?” our answer would have been “Because this is what we’ve always done. This is what we do.” That answer, my friends, is not only not good enough, it’s not an answer at all.

It is mid-August 2014, and we’re on the phone, talking about the coming auditions. In the back of my mind, I knew what we both wanted was to work together exclusively, but instead of acknowledging that fact, we rationalized away our decision to re-audition. Justin had a point to prove: that he belonged at the Magnet. I had just had a meeting with the director of house teams where he told me that if I did get recast, it would most likely be on a veteran team, not one of newly graduated students. (Again, no guarantees, but hope.) That had swayed my decision, but I still had doubts about signing on for another team at all. I pushed these doubts down. We lied to ourselves and each other, saying that us both getting on new teams was “part of the plan,” that the visibility we would gain from being on that stage on a weekly basis would raise our profile and be a boon to our work together as a duo.

This, in retrospect, was total bullshit - I mean, since when has anything but one’s actual work been a boon to their work? - but it was bullshit we needed to tell ourselves in order to justify a decision that, deep down, I did not know why I was making, and that Justin was making because he had that point to prove. Ego and fear drove us forward, and, as it turned out, off a cliff.

It’s a week later. It’s about 1:00 pm, and my audition callback is at 1:30, and Justin is asking me, begging me, not to go. He has not gotten a callback - in spite of having another great audition - and I have never seen him more devastated and upset. Our “plan” had completely failed, as plans where the decision is wholly in someone else’s hands so often do. I was very angry on his behalf, but I told him I had to go to callbacks, saying something about “being a loyal person” as unconfidently as you could ever make such a statement. Walking down the stairs to the train, I chose loyalty to that system over the work I truly wanted to do and the person I wanted to do it with, too afraid of the consequences to my status at the theater not to go.

I got placed on a team. It wasn’t a veteran team, but a team mostly comprised of newbies. I knew in my heart I didn’t want to be there, and that that was unlikely to change, and I felt it was unfair to anyone who wanted to be there for me to take that slot. I did something that previously seemed unthinkable: I quit. Composing the email, I felt ungrateful and horrible, like some kind of traitor, even though I knew what I was doing was the right decision for me and my work. (You see, now, how deep the loyalty complex went.) I pressed send on the email and immediately felt a wave of nausea. Realizing there was no taking it back, I then felt something else: free.

The thing was, I’d been free the whole time. If I had just listened to those nagging doubts, if I had just asked myself from the get-go, “Why am I still doing this?” and answered truthfully, “Because being on a team is what I do and I’m too scared to try to do the thing that I really want to do because it feels so much harder.” I would never have signed up to audition.

My point in telling this story is this: simply doing something because you have always done it is a completely insufficient reason to continue to do it. Trouble is, at least in New York, being on house teams feels so important. You tell yourself that being on a house team or performing at a particular theater is part of who you are, that improvising here, within this system, beats the alternative of trying to do this on your own. I told myself that, too, even when my house team shows were shitty for months at a time. Can you imagine? This is part of my identity, and to be clear, it’s mediocre a disproportionate amount of the time. This is part of my identity, and yet I don’t control it. Why would you ever outsource something as powerful as that, with the knowledge that it could be taken away from you, without explanation and notice?

Some would argue, and I think they’d be right, that had Justin and I not gone through this experience, we wouldn’t be where we are now. Had we not had been coerced into prioritizing our own work, I like to think that we would have, but I can’t say for sure. It’s more likely that house team inertia and that time commitment, for either or both of us, would have taken top billing. The very thing we told ourselves would be beneficial to our work together, if it had worked out according to plan, would have, at best, stymied it, and at worst, destroyed it.

in our reluctance to examine our real motives, we nearly ruined our own chances for  collaboration and the greater success that we’ve subsequently found. We skirted doing so, because I think deep down we knew a cursory examination of those motives would have turned up the worst parts of ourselves: we were holding on for dear life to scraps of validation, something that felt familiar, and we were both too afraid to admit to each other that just working together didn’t feel like enough. What I later came to realize was that showing those parts of ourselves to each other could only make our partnership stronger, not weaker.

Dare yourself to challenge your own status quo. You might find deficiencies, but you might also find reserves of conviction that you didn’t know were there. The most powerful thing you can do, as an improviser and a person, is to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and to act accordingly. I can think of no better way to celebrate your improv anniversary than to move beyond online platitudes, to give yourself the true gift of a renewed sense of purpose and the chance to rediscover the magic you found in that very first improv class.

We give a lot of lip service to the concept of truth in comedy in improv. On the surface, this notion is relatively simple: all we need to bring to our scene work is ourselves, that to exist, listen and react honestly as a character in a scene is enough to find humor organically and elicit laughter from the audience. Funny doesn’t have to mean jokes, it can instead mean relatable moments. Looking at this concept from a teaching standpoint, as a curricular objective, the idea of truth in comedy, as it is taught, releases students from the pressure of saying something funny and discourages wild, frantic, painfully unfunny, invention.

This principle was something I was trained to introduce in both the free intro class and on the first day of Level One. I always struggled to convey it to my students, and I never quite felt like I encapsulated it into the valuable lesson I knew it could be in the ways that I successfully did with other concepts. At the time, I chalked it up to a function of my relative inexperience as a teacher.  Leave it to the woman to blame herself, but I digress.

I realize now that the reason I felt I did an inadequate job of explaining truth in comedy in this way is because I believe that this explanation is not only inadequate but also severely limiting. Too often, we interpret truth in comedy to simply mean just this: act in this classroom and on this stage as you would in the real world. What this ultimately leads to, however unintentionally, is an improv setting whose tone *does* mirror the real world, in that it is dominated by the experiences - the truth, if you will - of the majority of those in the room: straight privileged white males.

But what if we taught it differently? What if we could heighten the curricular objective of this principle to empower everyone in the room, not just the majority? What if we were able to use the concept of truth in comedy within a reimagined improv curriculum as an opportunity to acknowledge and address the fact that our truths, our experiences in the real world, are undeniably vastly different from one another as a direct result of our gender, race, age, and sexuality? What if the improv classroom were a place that could promote greater understanding and awareness of one another, thus allowing us to create much more authentic, complex and meaningful characters and relationships in our scenes, not to mention making improv exponentially better in the process? Put another way: what if truth in comedy meant speaking your own truth, while also not assuming that not everyone shares it?

Speaking for myself, simply by virtue of the fact that I am a woman, I am going to make scenic choices and bring a perspective and set of experiences to bear upon an improv scene that a man never would, regardless of the character I'm playing.  This perspective is invaluable in and of itself, and yet I think it is something that we are largely too afraid to face head on for the sake of misplaced loyalty to an outdated sense of political correctness. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we not only faced it, but owned it. And by owning it, I mean owning the tough parts, too. For instance, one of the realities of the female experience is the fact that it is so largely defined by white male oppression, physical dominance, and aggression. And yet, many straight white males, particularly those in the improv community, seem wholly unaware of this. Charmingly unaware, mostly, but unaware all the same.

We can be lulled into thinking this lack of awareness of the female experience doesn’t exist, until we are unsubtly reminded that it does. This usually takes the form of an incident in an improv scene that is so egregious it simply has to be called out and discussed. In the case of women, I’ve seen this happen most often with regard to physical boundaries being unknowingly crossed by men. By and large, though, the lesson is left here, after the line has already been crossed, and the mistake has already been made, by which point, in my estimation, it is too late. Speaking from personal experience, no matter how much of a teachable moment you try and make this, the end result is that the person who made the mistake feels publicly shamed and the victim feels tremendously awkward, while everyone else in the room sits there and thinks, “Well, at least it wasn’t me.” No one truly learns anything from these episodes. Until we make empathetic awareness an integral part of the baseline improv curriculum, we can expect to see these sort of incidents happen again and again.  We have to treat the illness, not the symptoms.  It doesn’t mean there won’t be mistakes, but rather that when they do happen, we will have as a baseline a greater understanding of where we’re all coming from.

**

That lack of awareness on the part of straight white dudes in improv, combined with the absence of direct acknowledgement on anyone’s part of the disparity in our experiences and their active role in the shaping of my own, had consequences for my own play as I came up in improv. I have spoken before in here about the burden of representation for female improvisers, and how we sometimes feel on stage that we must represent for our entire gender in our choices, and prove that we belong there. As Justin put it so well to me the other day, “You know what men don’t have to contend with? ‘Hey, you know who’s not funny? Men.’”

In the process of proving myself in a male-dominated room, I became the type of female improviser who many would label as strong. Confident, assertive and quick-witted in my scene work, I set myself apart as a woman who could hold her own amongst the men on stage. Looking back, my improv persona was not untruthful, but it consistently showed only one side of who I was. On stage, I was myself on my very best day. Eliminated from my scenic choices were the sorts of things that defined my experiences, both as a woman and more personally, that seemed like undesirable qualities or indicators of weakness to me. Emotional and physical vulnerability of any kind. Insecurity over my diminutive physical stature, and the resulting fear for my physical safety that comes with the knowledge that any man who wanted to could hurt me. My lifelong inability to confidently sustain direct eye contact, due to the dragged retina in my right eye that has left it so noticeably off-center. (Yeah, I went there.)

It wasn’t until recently, in my work with my duo, when I began to dismantle the performative armor I had worked so hard to build for myself, that I realized that the qualities I described above had the ability to be powerful in their own way. They weren’t weaknesses, they were strengths, and moreover, they had a place in my artistic work, because they are part of what has made the person I am. I worked hard over the past year to shed the brassy, overstated confidence I thought I needed to survive up on stage as a woman. This has been very difficult, and often really, really uncomfortable, but the fact that this was a goal for both Justin and myself made it a lot less scary. I didn’t have to do it alone. The results have been transformative for me so far, and it is still very much a work in progress, as it should be, I think. I want every improviser to have the opportunity to feel this way.  

**

So, what place does this sort of thinking ultimately have in the improv classroom? After all, aren’t we all just trying to learn how to be funny here, or at the very least, fill the hours after our day jobs end? I mean, lighten up lady, am I right?

This has come to define the philosophy behind the way that Justin and I perform and teach. Take a workshop from us, and you’ll hear us repeat this often: you have the opportunity to make a different choice. You have the opportunity to make a positive choice, to care about your scene partner, to listen and react. And it’s never too late to so.

Over the past year, this turn of phrase has come to define my own work as an improviser, both scenically and in the larger, professional sense. And I think it could come to define yours, too.

Success is a difficult thing to measure in improv. All at once, we’re taught to follow laughs from the audience as our cue for where to go next in a scene, while seemingly at the very same time being told to ignore them completely. It can be a very disorienting and confusing thing, to pay for comedy classes and then be told not to try to be funny. On paper, it sounds like a total scam, and, well, it actually sort of is.

Then, a peculiar thing happens: we begin to surprise ourselves. You, like me, probably remember the first time you got a completely unexpected laugh in a class by saying something that wasn’t even remotely funny. I couldn’t tell you the context of the scene itself in my case, but I can tell you the feeling: complete exhilaration. That first feeling of, “oh *that’s* what this is” is the best thing there is. I can’t say for sure, but I bet that your first unexpected laugh came because of the way you said something, not what you said, from an emotional or physical choice you made in a scene, rather than a witty aside while standing outside of it. It almost certainly came from something you created together with your scene partner.

That first unexpected laugh we get, that fleeting feeling of exhilaration and surprise, over time, becomes something that we chase, instead of something that we allow to happen on its own. And unfortunately, sometimes the chase pays off, which, to my mind, is the worst thing that can happen to an improviser: to figure out what “works” for us as individual players.  As veteran improvisers, without realizing it, we become severely limited by our own “good” scenic choices, and we start making them all the time. It’s at this point that improv stops being improv, and turns into a party trick. Before making these moves on stage, you may as well turn to the audience and say, “Hey, look what I can do!” while also turning to your scene partner and saying, “Hey, no matter what you say, I’m still going to do this!”

As experienced improvisers, we often confuse playing confidently with playing comfortably.  Confidence has a place on an improv stage. Our own personal comfort does not, and it is at the heart of all of our go-tos and why we keep going to them. I know, because I played comfortably for years during my time on house teams. Justin and I both did. I found my comfort zone, and the choices that existed within it that “worked” for me. Playing dumb. Playing assholes. Making smart references. (Ugh.) Playing some version of myself, most of all. (I got *so* much mileage out of my witty, smart, always-knows-what-to-say  Kelly Buttermore character, you guys. That gal is a real firecracker!) Over time, my identity as an improviser because completely defined by my own “successful” choices. I, like you, said to myself proudly on more than one occasion, “this is how I play.”  No, I didn’t plan exactly what I was going to say or do ahead of time, but deep down, I always knew how I was going to react to what my scene partner gave me: with one of a few, very specific, Kelly Buttermore choices. I became the master of my own particular brand of party tricks, and somehow managed to still convince myself I was doing improv confidently, rather than comfortably.

But even the funniest go-tos in the world will only work for so long. Have you ever complained, or heard others complain, about being in your head? Of course you have, it’s one of the most commonly-used expressions in improv. You know what “being in your head” really means? It means, “I don’t understand why the choices I always make aren’t working right now.” By the same token, have you ever walked off stage, and thought to yourself or, worse, said aloud, “I had no idea to do with my partner’s initiation?” What that essentially translates into, “I couldn’t figure out how to make my own shit work with what the other person was saying or doing.” Often, these feelings of being in one’s head, of being lost up there, of not knowing what to say stem directly from our own internal limitations, the ways that we have told ourselves that we play. Once we get into these so-called slumps, when our shit stops working, what follows next is either we either start making no choices at all on stage, completely frozen in fear, or wild, unpredictable ones that we think maybe will garner a reaction of some sort. These things, predictably, don’t work either, because they also aren’t improv.

You have an opportunity to make a different choice. You’ve always had this opportunity, but you’ve convinced yourself it’s not yours to make, or worse, that it doesn’t exist. What do you do now?

The first thing you have to do, and I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you have to drop your shit. You have to let go of your go-tos and step out of your comfort zone, and you can only move forward as an improviser if you do. Kill your darlings, as they say, and perhaps more violently, take that improviser you told yourself you were, and throw that person off a cliff. It will be hard at first, I know, because I just spent a year doing it, and it was the hardest fucking thing I have ever done. I still have to check my impulses from time to time not to say something smart and witty or play myself in a scene. In order for us to become the duo and the collaborative unit we always suspected we could be, Justin and I had to literally throw away years’ worth of everything that had ever worked. Every zany character, every overused physical stance, every urge to make a reference and show everyone how we smart we were, every impulse to sit down in chairs. Every single thing. It was only when we did this that we first got a glimpse of all the wonderful choices we had in front of us that we never knew were there. *This* is how you play.

Once you’ve started to do this, the next thing you need to do is to recognize that your only job in a scene is to listen and react to your scene partner. That’s it! Yes, it’s deceptively simple, but it’s the truth. Many improvisers, especially advanced ones, confuse reacting with responding. They’re not the same thing. Let me reframe it: react, *then* respond. And really, really react. Listen to what your partner just said, literally the last thing they just said, take a breath, see how it makes you feel, and then respond from *that* place. Having a big emotional reaction to a piece of information, no matter if it’s big or small, is a choice that is always yours to make, and the beautiful thing about it is that if you do it, and you commit to it, the words that follow will begin to feel more natural. You will inevitably start to feel those feelings of surprising yourself again. I know because I have watched it happen time and time again in all of the workshops Justin and I have taught together. I have also experienced it firsthand in my own play.

Finally, you always have the opportunity to make a positive choice, to care deeply about your scene partner.  I could write an entire blog post (and I probably will!) about conflict in improv scenes, and how and why it becomes the dominant choice of players over time. Suffice to say, at the heart of scenic conflict is fear and lack of trust in one’s scene partner. It’s sort of impressive how often improvisers can turn “yes, and” into “fuck you, you idiot” and I almost want to commend them for it, if it didn’t piss me off so much. You can always, always, turn this around. You can choose to love the person you’re with, and love the place that you are. Our default settings as humans in the real world is dissatisfaction and displeasure, and that often finds its way on stage, too. We play out scenic relationships the way we’ve seen them portrayed most often. (When was the last time you saw two people depict a blissfully happy married couple on stage? I rest my case.) We play out locations the way that they feel in real life: on stage, we hate being at work, our coworkers are idiots and so on. We don’t have to do this! The beautiful, magical thing about improv is that we can choose to react positively to something or someone that in real life would make us angry or upset. We have the rest of our lives to be annoyed at the DMV. On stage, we can choose to view the DMV as the best place we’ve ever been.

This philosophy gets at the heart of the workshop that Justin and I teach most often, called Love the One You’re With. The principles behind it are simple, as described here. Take the choices you’ve always made, and put them down for two hours. Instead, choose to listen, react, and care about the other person. This worked for us, and it can work for you, too. You have the opportunity to make a different choice. Let us show you how.

For ten years, I was fiercely loyal to an improv theater system that, by design, was never going to be loyal to me.

I invested my entire self-interest and emotional well-being in doing right by the theater, and in finding success on their terms. I believed that I was part of a community. What was good for the Magnet would ultimately be good for me, if I would only just be patient.

I gave the best years of my life to a theater, instead of giving them to myself.

Here’s why.

When you first fall in love with improv, it’s a truly beautiful thing. Those first feelings of true discovery, of completely surprising yourself with your actions and your words coming out before you have the chance to consider them, of putting your complete trust in your scene partner, my gosh, there’s absolutely nothing in this world like it. It’s like accessing a part of your brain you didn’t know existed. You know this feeling, too, it’s something akin to, “I want to do nothing but this for the rest of my life.” It is why we’re all here. Improv is magic.

Improv is unique as an art form, because, honestly, you only need to be alive in order to do it.  And that’s how it’s sold, too. In free drop-in classes, that’s the sales pitch: “Anyone can do this!” You believe it, because it’s absolutely true. You sign up for a Level One, you take it, and you’re hooked. You sign up for another class, then another, then another. Somewhere around your third or fourth class, the message changes from “Anyone can do this” to “Anyone can do this, but not you.” And you believe that, too. They’ve been right so far. They’re probably right about me.

The longer you stay in the system, the more limited you feel. You start off in Level One feeling like you can do anything, and you wind up in higher level classes feeling like you can’t do anything right.  But you’ve already given this so much time, and so much money, you’re in too deep, and the non-improv part of your brain that craves the ladder of success starts to kick in. You keep trying, surely if you just keep working at this, if you just want it badly enough, they will want you. Maybe you apply to higher level classes and you don’t get in. Maybe you ascend to the final level and you don’t make a team. Maybe you do make a team, but once it’s gone, you never get back on, no matter how hard you try or how much you want it. Maybe you get to be on a bunch of teams, but when you bring them the project you’re really excited about, they don’t want it. “But not you” can also look like “You, but we decide how.”

By the time this happens, whenever it comes, you have given so much of yourself to this place that you don’t know where the theater ends and you begin anymore. That’s because, at some point, a switch happened without you realizing it. At some point, you stopped declaring your love for improv, and started declaring your love for the place you were doing it.

This switch is a curious thing. In a way, I suppose it makes sense: improv is ephemeral, humans have an inherent discomfort with ephemera and the undefined, they need to draw lines, to put things in a box, to transform the abstract into the concrete. People also have an inherent need to belong to something greater than themselves. The types of people who fall so deeply in love with improv are also, not coincidentally, generally the sorts of people who have struggled with belonging at various points in their lives. I know because I was one of them. These theater allegiances become a point of pride for people, a badge of honor that one can wear as a mark of self-definition. It is no longer, “I’m Kelly Buttermore, and I’m an improviser.” It is instead, “I’m Kelly Buttermore. I do improv at the Magnet.”

And that’s what I said, for a very long time. Listen, I moved to New York when I was 22 because I wanted to write for Saturday Night Live, that’s why I started taking improv classes at the UCB. Yes, I *did* fall in love with improv, and it did change my life and alter its course, inarguably for the better. I came to the Magnet from the UCB because it felt like a place where I might belong, where I might fit. And for a while, it surely was that place. What I didn’t realize at the time was that by putting my deep-seeded need for acceptance and belonging above my own personal ambitions, I was essentially putting down a security deposit on a life and a career that I would rent but could never hope to own.  

And that’s the bait, and the hook. That’s how they got me, and that’s how they kept me. By believing that I was a member of a community, by feeling like I belonged, I believed that I had a stake in the theater’s success. I felt proud that I had been there since the beginning, as if I had gotten in on the ground floor, as if that meant something greater. Surely, as one of the theater’s initial stakeholders, when this place broke through, went public, if you will, I would be one of the first to reap the benefit. I felt assured that, although there were moves and decisions made that I strongly disagreed with, that if I simply waited it out, if I was patient and loyal, that patience and loyalty would eventually be rewarded. Meanwhile, the goals that had brought me here receded farther and farther into the background. I never put together that sketch packet, for example. What was the point? What I had at the theater sure felt a lot like success. But what had I really done, for all those years? I’d sacrificed my own ambitions - ambitions that were strong enough to make me move to New York - to carry out someone else’s vision. I told myself that the place had made an investment in me, and I owed it to the theater to stay. I went to work (literally) for the Magnet, when, the entire time, I had a million dollar idea in my very own pocket.

That million-dollar idea was From Justin to Kelly. And you know what’s crazy? I begged the theater to take it away from me, to put their stamp of approval on it. We both did. And it was only when they didn’t, when they let us get to a certain point but no further, that I realized what I really had and why they didn’t want it: I had something that was inarguably, undeniably mine. They wanted something that was theirs, that could sell classes.

We spent months trying to get them to realize that what we were building was beautiful, different and special, that it had rekindled a love for the art form that had brought us here in the first place. That what we were creating was not only the best improv, but actual theater. “Why doesn’t this improv theater seem to care that we’re doing really good improv?” we said to ourselves. It’s because they didn’t create it. And, because they had said to Justin, “Anyone can do this, but not you.” And they had said to me, “You can do this, but we decide how.”

Gratitude, patience and loyalty. All fine qualities for a person to have. In this particular context, they were qualities that gave all the power to someone else, not to myself; to a system that, by design, needs to make you think you’re not good enough. If you inherently believe that you’re not good enough, you will keep spending money to take classes. And you will be patient. And you will perform for free. And you will feel grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Loyalty to a system can only take you so far when that system is never truly yours, and never was to begin with. I say all of this without bitterness, and without apology. I had to give myself over to this system to realize that I didn’t need it, to realize that I could be strong outside of it. I also have people in my life that are the reason I came to this realization. Without them, I would still be there. I probably would have stayed another ten years. I would say that I am lucky to have somewhere to go, and I am, but more than that, I created my own opportunities. From Justin to Kelly doesn’t need to belong to any theater, because it belongs to us.  

I also do not want to lie to you. I really wish I were 28 right now and not 34.  In prioritizing my own comfort, I lost a lot of time that I cannot get back. All I can do now is make every moment matter.  Since I started doing that, it changed everything for me. You know what it feels a lot like? Improv.

Why do so many advanced-level improvisers long for the halcyon days of Level One? Because that’s where we learned everything we ever needed to know. Listen. React. Agree. That’s all that ever mattered. Improv is inherently, deeply beautiful and powerful. Being part of a system can make you feel like that isn’t enough in and of itself. It is enough. Trust me. If you don't believe me now, keep reading this blog, and maybe you will.

What a great question! Thanks for asking it. Like the nerd that I am, I actually ran the numbers on the house teams at the three major theaters before writing that piece, and those Lloyd Night figures stuck out to me, too - in a good way, of course. I will clarify my own post and say at that the theater I’m referring to, the Magnet, which is obviously the one with which I have the most firsthand experience, the ratio of 2-3 women per team has held steady since they first created teams in 2006. Looking at the current UCB Harold Team roster, I’m seeing 5/3 for the most part. The PIT is a little more difficult to nail down, because some of their teams are fewer than 8 people, but I see a lot of women on the roster, too.

Returning to the open questions raised in last week’s post on my own personal experiences of success and rejection as part of the improv theater system, I’d like to talk more in depth about the culture of competition that is such a large part of these systems. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the specific brand of competition that occurs among the female members of improv theaters.  

A friend made a very interesting point in her comments on my post, which is that this sense that women are in direct competition with one another *isn’t* inherent, it’s *learned*, and becomes ingrained the more time you spend in the system. I completely agree with that statement. As you’ll recall from my last post, that was my own experience, too. As my years as a member of the Magnet’s improv house team system went on and my status at the theater began to rise, I increasingly gauged the measure or level of my own success relative to the other female members of the theater community. The culture of the place trained me to do that, whether I fully realized it or not at the time. How do I know that? Because, as my friend also pointed out, I didn’t feel that way when I was 22 and just starting out, fresh out of college. I’m going to go ahead and say that I especially didn’t feel that way, because I had just spent four years at a women’s college, for God’s sake - a place that completely removed a significant element of competition from my life for those four years. (It was the best.)

But back to improv. So, where does this sense of learned competition among women come from? In some ways, the answer is simple: from within the system itself. The representation of women on house teams being what it is, two or three per team, sends an abundantly clear message to women: there are a limited number of slots available for you. I believe this has historically always been the case, in spite of the maddening fact that, honestly, if more women did improv and advanced to higher levels, that balance would start to shift, because it would *have* to, in order to accommodate the overall gender balance of people in the room. That hasn’t happened. Yes, there are more women doing improv, but that’s also because are also just more *people* doing improv, at least in New York. I’m going to take this further: as long as there are house teams, a significant gender shift will *never* happen. That’s because house teams, as they are defined under the improv training center model, are a direct extension of and an advertisement for the theater’s improv classes. Women aren’t seeing a lot of themselves in that product, so they are much less incentivized to buy into it, and so the cycle never truly breaks.  

Let’s talk about the women that do want to make it onto house teams, because the message sent to them isn’t just that there are a limited number of slots for women, it’s this: there are a limited number of slots available for women, so you'd better be really good, but, hey, even if you're not really good, we need to put two or three women on each team regardless. These women then will feel, at best, conflicted. At least at certain points, they will feel that they have to prove why they are there, and prove which of those two camps they fall into. In other words, the eternal question: am I truly good, or am I “the girl?” And this is where competition among women does enter the picture, I believe, because in an environment that is already competitive for everyone, given the fact that they are a minority within it, women will start to compare their status and skills to other women on their team, and other women in the team system. I know this, because I did it. It’s gross, but I did it. It’s not black and white, either, I don’t want to imply that I was a total cutthroat bitch who needed to be top dog all the time. It was more subtle than that. It could come in the form of taking pleasure in the fact that my other female teammate had called in sick to the show, meaning that that show could be all about me. (Yes, guys have to prove themselves, too, particularly because the training center model means that teams are consistently turning over to make room for those graduating through the classes system. I know many guys who have been cut from teams, and I don’t want to diminish their feelings by implying that this is solely a women’s issue. It’s not.)

One more thing about house teams before I move on. House teams created out of a training center system, by and large, aren’t really about putting up the best work. If they *do* create good, consistent work, as some do, that is, of course, a welcome and happy byproduct. They are, above all else, a status symbol for those who are cast, a clear marker of external validation, and, as I mentioned earlier, essentially an additional level of the training center and an advertisement for classes. It means, quite simply, that being on an improv house team is about learning on your feet and giving certain types of players a chance: the sorts of players that will represent the theater well. I would love to say that I felt this meant they cast, in this case, only the most dynamic, interesting female performers to represent the full breadth and range of how amazing strong women can be at this art form. Unfortunately, I feel that it increasingly means that the theater will also cast women who are non-threatening and inoffensive, under the argument that a woman who makes an audience comfortable is much more likely to sell classes than one who is, say, an overtly physical or unpredictable player. This is true of men, too. I’ve watched it happen.  But it was also true of myself! Yes, I was a dynamic, talented, extremely skilled improviser on all the house teams I was on. I see no reason to pretend otherwise at this point in my life. But I was *also* a safe choice. You know why? Because 95% of the scenes I played were sitting and talking scenes. Because I played clever, witty, smart characters who always knew the right thing to say. Because I learned how to play to that particular audience and could make them laugh. I stuck around as a veteran in that system because I was very, very good in the specific, particular way they needed me to be.  

That leads me to my next point. What has happened for women at the Magnet is even more interesting and potentially problematic for the women that wish to perform there over the longterm and rise within its ranks, beyond the level of a house team. The theater is an extension of the training center, and as such, the shows programmed there are an artery to the classes system, as anyone who has ever given the house team outro “If this looks like fun to you, think about taking a class…” knows. Operating under this model, with the primary objective so clearly being class enrollment, the theater as a system (and a business) has chosen to emphasize the importance of its classes over the advancement of the professional careers of its performers. (The UCB has been able to do both, but it also has more significantly more resources at its disposal to do so.) Without a defined pathway toward career advancement beyond the theater’s walls, no one leaves, the personalities on stage remain the same, and those personalities become the theater’s voice by default. This is especially true for women: case in point, the women that could be classified as the elite, veteran performers at the theater are the same ones that have held those positions for years. To take this a step further, this means that not only are there fewer slots for younger female improvisers to advance to, it also means that the theater’s dominant female voice becomes defined by the voices of a few specific people.  Are these women extremely talented? Absolutely they are, no question! That is not up for debate. But the simple fact that these are literally the same individuals night after night and year after year means that these people become the gold standard by which all female improvisers will inevitably measure themselves and to which they will aspire and perhaps even tailor their own play in order to succeed and move up.