Countdown Theater

A pop-up improv theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Learn more at countdowntheater.com.

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Halfway there

This week, we reached the halfway point of our monthlong run in the Countdown Theater space. Here’s a midpoint assessment of how things are going so far.

Most broadly, this has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and has been absolutely worth doing. The shows people pitched and have performed so far have not only been great, they’ve affirmed that when you give people the opportunity to put up their own work, they’ll rise to the occasion. We’ve been continually impressed with the talent coming through our doors, and we’ve done our best to give them a supportive environment in which to succeed. (Also, not for nothing, our performers have handled the unpredictable loud noise from the recording studio next door amazingly well.)

When we first rented the space, we worried that it might be too small to accommodate performances. Now we know: starting small is definitely the way to go. There are 15 seats in our theater, so an audience of 5 makes the place feel practically full. Also, the small space decreases the distance between the players and the audience, and the audience members from one another, and that level of intimacy has resulted in the creation of a warm, inviting creative space. You can feel it when you walk in the door.

We’ve also learned that getting people to come out to shows doesn’t have to feel like you’re groveling and calling in every last favor of every friend you’ve ever had. It turns out you just have to put up interesting work, and people will come! That has been incredibly heartening.

Justin and I put ourselves on the schedule at least twice a week, and have subsequently learned that performing multiple times per week is pretty much the best thing for our partnership. We knew this from our extensive touring, but shows back home have always been much trickier. Prior to this, performing here in NYC typically amounted to a monthly show. The long layoffs between shows left us feeling rusty when we finally took the stage again, and the monthly shows were never great as a result.  If we did have a good show, we had to cool our heels for a month until the next one, and lost considerable momentum. If we had a bad show, the pressure and dread mounted for the next month. Eliminating those layoffs has meant that, good show or bad, we have no choice but to get right back on the horse. It’s boosted our confidence considerably. It’s also a damn relief to finally be doing really good shows in New York.

When we signed the sublease on this space, we told each other that we had to comfortable with the idea that we wouldn’t recoup any of the money we put down on it. Intellectually, we were comfortable with it, but the reality of it has taken a bit of adjustment. Our main revenue stream for this space was to be teaching workshops. Let me be straight with you: we’ve tried every way we know how to get the word out, and people aren’t biting. We’ve got some theories on why that might be, which perhaps we’ll write about in a future blog post. Sure, this is disappointing — we really like teaching, and we would have loved to have taught these, for one — but it’s been an exercise in putting our money where our mouths are. We’re gonna lose all the money we put into this venture, and that sucks. The next time we do this, we’re going to have to recoup most of our costs, so we need to devise some new methods for minimizing expenses and maximizing revenue. And we’ll do that. We’ll find that balance. For now, what we’ve gotten out of the first edition of Countdown Theater has been extraordinarily valuable and entirely worth it.

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Failing together

If you’ve seen Kelly and I perform at any point over the past two years, then you know that the show we do is unique. We spend a lot of time in silence, making eye contact, not worrying about where the show is going, not trying to force anything. We like to think of it as improv without ideas. When the format works, it’s amazing, and these days it works more often than not. When it doesn’t work, though, the show can be really rough.

We had one of those rough shows the other night. The suggestion was “baseball memorabilia store,” and we lost control of the show within the first few minutes. (We tend to have trouble with transactional locations, but that’s a topic for another post.) We abandoned the activity we began with — buttoning a baseball jersey — for no real reason, and moved on to this weird half-abstract plane where it was very difficult to tell what we were doing and why we were doing it. This was one of those shows where our emphasis on silence and simplicity worked against us. We weren’t connecting, and we couldn’t easily salvage the show. It was embarrassing, and we walked off stage feeling really bad about ourselves.

Something like this has probably happened to you at one point or another in your improv career: You can tell that the show is going wrong while you’re in the middle of it. When this happens, you usually end up either wanting to bail on the scene/show, or wanting to take charge of it; wanting to take it upon yourself to fix what’s going wrong.

But Kelly and I did neither of these things the other night, even though both of us at various times during the show wanted to 1) bail, and 2) take charge and fix it. Instead, we just committed harder to what we were doing, even though it wasn’t working, even though we didn’t want to be doing it. This choice might not have been the right one in terms of this particular show, but I think it was absolutely the right move in terms of the long-term health of our partnership and our format. We have to fail together in order to succeed together.

We’ve mentioned this before, I think, but one of our main performance goals is to have the audience walk away saying “They had a good show.” Not “He was funny” or “she was great.” They had a good show. We want to create something that is so mutual and organic that the audience cannot distinguish between our individual contributions; that they leave the theater impressed by the piece rather than the individual performers.

The counterpoint to this is that when a show goes wrong, we have to fail together, too. One player cannot take it upon himself or herself to save a bad show. One player cannot start judging the show as it’s happening. This undermines the format, it undermines the trust relationship between Kelly and I, and it undermines our mutual ability to, after the show, diagnose what went wrong and devise a strategy to fix it.

We are confident in our format and in our ability to succeed with it. But the format only works if we don’t panic. We’ve worked very hard to banish the panic impulse; to learn to project and manifest confidence in our choices even when we might not love those choices. When you force yourself to stick with your initial choice — when you deny yourself an easy exit — you force yourself to find ways to make those choices matter. You put yourself in the hands of your partner and the world you’ve created together. And I would rather let a bad show remain bad while sticking to these principles than salvage a bad show by abandoning them.

In the context of our format — a format that we’ve developed together, that we really love and believe in — individual invention is always the wrong choice, and intense mutual commitment is always the right choice. If we want people to say “They had a good show,” then we also have to be willing to let them say “They had a bad show.” After our bad show we went out for drinks. The next day we went back to our space, talked about what went wrong, and fixed it together.

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How we sold out iO West on our first national tour

Two years ago, Justin and I packed a show at iO West in Los Angeles on Valentine’s Day – a place 3,000 miles away from our home base of New York; a place where we knew almost no one. So, how did we do it?

This particular show was to be the second stop on our first solo tour together, which spanned ten days and five cities, and the simple act of booking it was the most ambitious thing we’d ever done as a unit. To that end, we worked the press angle, pitching ourselves the only improv duo that tours the country. It worked. We got our LA show listed in LAist (LA’s version of Gothamist), and an interview published in Los Angeles magazine.

I’ll never forget that interview. For one, it was held in the courtyard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a beautiful sunny day in February, where we’d ordinarily be battling cold and snow back in New York. But more than the weather, we were professional and articulate, and we seized the opportunity to present ourselves and our work as the real fucking deal. To be clear, we were total unknowns at the time, but ultimately that didn’t matter. The world may not have known how great we were at that point, but we did, and we sold ourselves as such. The simple fact of appearing in the press correspondingly assigned an external legitimacy to our work. It made us want to deliver on that promise.

The press coverage raised our profile and boosted our confidence. Beyond that, our second measure of potential success with the iO West show was the fact that we were under contract with them. We were on the hook for hundreds of dollars if we didn’t deliver on audience members, and that made us really work at it. You know what made us work even harder? Beyond that audience minimum, for the first time ever, we stood a chance of actually making money to perform. And guess what? It happened. We got paid. A check arrived in my mailbox for $68. It felt like a lot more.

This all comes back to what has since become a recurring theme for our duo: the notion of expectations. We have learned many times over since then what we learned in LA for the first time: when there are raised expectations for us to succeed, we rise to the occasion, and we typically excel. Our duo was borne out of an environment in NYC where the stakes were perpetually low and the expectations practically nonexistent. In LA, that could have easily been equally true: again, no one knew who we were, and we could have easily used that fact as an excuse as to why we couldn’t bring in people. We didn’t.

Instead, we took the expectations placed on us by that media and the prospect of losing money as an opportunity to view this show as significant. We weren’t just doing any show, we were doing our show, a show we had honed and developed together over the preceding six months, that would become our signature form. This tour was our chance to introduce ourselves to the West Coast improv scene, and the Valentine’s Day show was our chance to show that we were something worth seeing. It was our chance to seize a moment for ourselves. And seize we did.

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Opening night

(cross-posted from countdowntheater.com)

It’s here! We open Countdown Theater to the public tonight, Wednesday, February 1st. We couldn’t be more excited to invite the world — or rather, as much of the world as a 13×18 room can handle — into our pop-up improv theater space. The past month leading up to this opening has been a whirlwind of planning, scheduling, and promoting, and an ongoing lesson on how to work with the time and the space that you’ve got.

We’ve taught this workshop all over the country called Do More With Less, which teaches you how to make what exists between you and your scene partner at the top of your scene matter, no matter how small it may be or insignificant it may seem at the outset. (Its previous title was also apt: Be Not Afraid.) Little did we know when we named that workshop how fitting it would be to our current venture. Our space is very small. It’s in a basement, on a side street in Brooklyn. There’s a recording studio next door, and it’s pretty loud through the wall sometimes. To the outside, it might not seem like much, but to us, it has been a space of pure artistic and creative inspiration and potential. Committing to this space has been one of the most fulfilling things we’ve ever done, and signing this lease was one of the smartest investments we’ve ever made — and we’re not even open yet! We really love it here. We hope you do, too.

One of the things that makes Countdown Theater so special to us is that it is a journey, not a destination. Part of that is by design: as a pop-up space, it is transient and ephemeral by its very nature. More than that, it’s also a part of our journey together as an improv duo. Its roots can be traced all the way back to December 2014, when Justin and I said yes to the offer to tour Wisconsin and Minnesota with the Eau Claire-based trio Glassworks. Not only had we never toured before, but we never even knew that touring was something that an improv group could do. The first show of that tour took place in this guy Scott’s living room in Madison. We did the show in our socks, in front of an enthusiastic audience made up of 20 or so freshmen from the University of Wisconsin. After years of performing at a black box improv theater in Manhattan, we had grown accustomed to a way of doing things, to the way we thought things had to be in order for improv and the space it took place in to be legitimate.

That Madison show turned that notion on its ear, as has our connection, collaboration and growing friendship with Glassworks over the past three years. It is not hyperbole to say that Mack, Elliot, and Alex have completely changed the way we approach improv and what it has the power to be. Starting in high school, they saw there was no all-ages venue in their city for emerging independent music and artists, so they created one themselves, in their own home, and they improvised there alongside musicians and performance artists. They didn’t wait for permission, they just did it themselves (and they still do, to great acclaim, in their basement in Eau Claire). They fell in love with improv in high school, and instead of moving to a major city and enrolling in a major theater’s training program, they bought a used minivan and toured the country independently, seven times. They trusted what they had, and they trusted that it was enough— and that they were enough — to make it work. And work it has.

With this venture, we hope to follow their example. We’ve spent a lot of years in this city waiting for permission to do our work. With Countdown Theater, we’re taking the reins firmly into our own hands, and inviting anyone else who wants to join us to come along, too.

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Talk about it tomorrow

(re-posted from countdowntheater.com)

It’s September of 2016, and Justin and I have just walked offstage after a show that started well, but ultimately got away from us. We stood apart from the audience and proceeded to mutually skulk and brood about what had just gone wrong on stage. Rather than looking to each other for comfort, we used the spark of disappointment we immediately saw in one another’s eyes to ignite a cycle of frustration, recrimination and blame. As often happens with improvisers, the brooding after the show lasted about seven times as long as the show itself. As also often happens, this brooding ultimately—and needlessly—tainted the rest of an otherwise wholly joyful evening.

Allowing your shows to affect you is one thing. It would be unrealistic to expect performers who have invested so much time and effort into putting up their best work to be impervious to negative feelings when that work doesn’t deliver. We are allowed to be disappointed in our own performances, and to wish things had gone better. It is when we allow those feelings to poison us and infect the people and space around us that we violate the very nature of what it means to be a performer in the first place.

Your own feelings about your show are highly subjective. (If you’re like me, they’re tied into deeply-held insecurities that, frankly, have little to do with what actually happened on stage. Fun!) Just because you thought you sucked up there doesn’t mean that your audience thought you sucked up there. This has probably happened to you: Someone has approached you after a show and said “Good show,” and you’ve responded by saying something like “It wasn’t very good, but thanks anyway.” Stop doing this! Stop greeting an audience member’s positive feedback with sheepishness, apology, and self-recrimination. If someone tells you that you did a good job, that is <i>not</i> your opportunity to try and convince them that you sucked: In doing so, you invalidate that person’s experience, and you rob them of the joy that they felt during the performance. (I have long said that I wanted to teach an entire workshop to New York City improvisers on how to appropriately and graciously accept compliments.)

Listen, I’m not saying it isn’t hard to look an audience in the eyes after a show that you were embarrassed by; it really sucks sometimes. It is easier to hide, and sequester yourself away with your group in the corner of a bar, and tell yourselves that brooding together is a form of support, that it cultivates your group mind. If we could go back in time and tell our younger improvising selves one thing, it is this: collective complaining is not the same as doing the work. It is also, frankly, really unprofessional. Going further, the converse is also true: I would argue that it’s just as unprofessional and unproductive to go to the same back corner of a bar and pat one another on the back for hours. Mutual exultation and the accompanying bits it inspires isn’t doing the work, either. Sure, it feels better than shitting on yourselves after a bad show, but what, ultimately does it accomplish other than serving to further support the notion that improv communities are closed off and insular?

It took us years to learn this. September’s incident certainly was not an isolated one for us, but in response to it, we decided to change up our post-show routine. Regardless of how the show went, we don’t talk about it —at all— in the immediate aftermath, even if it was one of the best shows we’ve ever done. We resolve to talk about it tomorrow. And instead of looking down at the floor and shuffling into a side room, we push ourselves, facing fully forward, back into the audience. We look people in the eyes if they talk to us about our show. If they say good job, we say, sincerely, thank you. If they don’t say anything, we engage them on another topic. We turn the private into the public, and give ourselves zero time to give in to the temptation to sulk or cheer. We can always work it out in practice. We can always talk tomorrow.

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The way out is through

(reposted from countdowntheater.com)

One of the cool things about Countdown Theater is that it travels. The theater isn’t tied down to any one specific place; rather, it can pop up for a month at a time literally anywhere — anywhere with cheap rent, that is — and each edition of the theater can and will end up being influenced by its temporary location. That locational influence has certainly been true of this first edition of Countdown Theater. We’ve started to refer to it as Countdown Theater: Deep Bass Edition.

Let me explain. There’s a recording studio next door to our space. It specializes in bass-heavy hip-hop. Recording sessions can go all night long and into the morning, and from our space we can hear every bit of those sessions, because the noise bleeds through the walls. As far as we can tell the studio doesn’t have any soundproofing whatsoever. At times, the bass has been so loud that our chairs start shaking.

It’s very annoying, and distracting, and there have been times when Kelly and I have been sitting in the space, unable to concentrate because of the noise, and wondered how in the world we will actually host shows here. The noise isn’t constant, but it’s frequent enough to be problematic. We bought a bunch of moving blankets, heavy ones, to hang on the wall between our two spaces, in hopes that they will help muffle the sound, but this is sort of like cutting two circles out of notebook paper and calling them earplugs. There’s no good way to stop the noise. There’s no good way to ignore it. So, in the end, we’ve decided that we just have to own it.

“The way out is through,” we like to tell ourselves, meaning that the best way to overcome adversity is to fight through it. We say this a lot in reference to improv. Improvisers often want to bail on choices that don’t immediately pan out; they will choose to drop a character, or prematurely edit a scene, or ignore what has already been established in a scene in order to present new and unnecessary information. These moves are a product of insecurity; of not believing that what you have is enough, that you are inventive and resilient enough to make anything work.

Kelly and I do this sometimes. When we practice, we’ll sometimes end up cutting short scenes that don’t feel like they’re going anywhere. The result is that our practices often end up being, like, an hour’s worth of 90-second scenes interspersed with another hour’s worth of self-doubt and recrimination. The weird thing is that we know that bailing on ourselves is the wrong move. Our best shows are invariably those in which we’ve shown total commitment to our choices; when we’ve deliberately chosen to ignore that little voice that kicks in, saying “I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what we’re doing, I don’t think this can work.”

Deciding to listen to that voice is what makes choices not work. The choice is almost never the problem; the problem is invariably the attitude with which you play it. We have found that when we commit to what we’ve started to do at the top of a show, regardless of how uncertain we feel about it, we always find a way to make it work. By denying yourself the option to bail, you will find within yourself creative powers that you never knew were there.

Let me take this a step further. Improvisers like to bail on internal scene choices that aren’t working, but they also really like to blame their lackluster or bad shows on environmental factors. The audience wasn’t responsive, or was small. The show time was too late and we were tired. The room was too hot. The group we were paired with sucked and took the air out of the room. We ate some bad Mexican food before the show and had searing gas pains throughout. And so on and so forth.

Kelly and I used to do this all the time. (The “searing gas pains” thing actually happened to us, and, honestly, that’s probably a good excuse for why that particular show sucked.) Over the years, though, we’ve realized that this was just our way of disclaiming our own responsibility for our bad shows. Because we’ve had plenty of great shows where the crowds have been small, or the show has been late, or the room has been weird. It’s not the room’s fault when our show sucks. It’s our fault when our show sucks.

There’s a direct correlation between the “blame externalities” mindset and the temptation to elevate our current noise problem from solvable to unworkable, so that if Countdown Theater doesn’t work, we can point to the noise and not to ourselves. But that’s the wrong approach. We need to be able to do a good show anywhere, regardless of the circumstances. In doing this, we are owning our work and fully accepting – embracing, even – the space it occurs in.

And thus the Deep Bass Edition of Countdown Theater. The noise is really something. We’re trying our best to abate it. But it’s always going to be there, and we’re just going to have to make it work; to make it an asset rather than a liability. Maybe it’s sort of cool to have a theater next to an active recording studio. Maybe performers will end up working the noise into their shows. Either way, we’re going to make it work. Because it’d be the wrong decision to bail on hosting shows because of atmospheric conditions. It’s noisy in our theater. But we’re going to own it. Because the way out is through.