Get Up , Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Shannon McCormick and Shana Merlin are two of the most accomplished and experienced improvisers in Austin. Shana teaches improv classes on a weekly basis, and Shannon helps run The Out of Bounds Improv Festival, now in its 6th year. Together, they form Get Up, an improv group that focuses exclusively on longform narrative... aka stories. We talked with Shannon about Get Up, narrative improv, and the past and future of improv in Austin.DB: Get Up is one of the few troupes in Austin that focus exclusively on narrative longform (the only other being Shana's other troupe, Girls Girls Girls). What is that you find so compelling about narrative-based improv?
Shannon: As I suspect is true for a lot of people doing longform improv, it’s partly just a question of what I got into first. My first real compulsion to do longform came after seeing We Could Be Heroes’ Six Degrees format. And even before that, all of the longform shows I had seen, or at least the ones that I can remember making an impression on me, were narratives. I lived in Atlanta for a while in the late 90s and saw a few episodes of the first season of Dad’s Garage’s improvised soap opera Scandal. Those shows were pretty great. I even saw a show back in maybe ’93 or ’94 at the Annoyance in Chicago called Brainwaves: The Baby-Eater, which, looking back, I suspect was largely an improvised narrative, although at the time I just thought it was one of the craziest, silliest plays I had ever seen.
I think, too, though, that it’s a question of temperament. I’ve been doing theater in some capacity steadily since 1992, and even earlier if you count high school stuff, except for two years that I spent in graduate school in New Mexico, where I basically spent my time discovering that I didn’t have the discipline to become a professional fiction writer. In some ways I think my frustration with my own writing was I didn’t understand story structure very well and couldn’t find how to make events engaging on the page. Most of my characters were kind of stuck in their own heads. So when I started taking classes at the Hideout with Shana and Sean and the people from BATS who would come out, I found this vast wealth of knowledge of story structure, and the kinds of things that hold the audience’s attention that I had been butting my head up against elsewhere in my life. The hooks got in pretty deep and I haven’t stopped being interested in understanding story and narrative structure since.
But I still haven’t quite answered your question, have I? I guess for me, Get Up does what it does because I find narrative to be deeply and profoundly human. All cultures have narrative and storytelling traditions. We’re just wired for it. Humans are narrative beasties. It’s how we relate to one another. Even something as simple as asking someone how their day was, you’re going to get a story. Hell, it’s how we relate to ourselves. Think about your own past or make projections about the future, and you’re engaged in story-making. And because we’re wired this way, even if you’re doing something onstage that doesn’t seem like a story, the audience is going to be projecting that narrative instinct and craving onto the actions onstage. I think a lot of times scenes live or die depending on this narrative projection the audience does, and rather than ignore that, I’d like to get good at it and use it to my advantage onstage. Which is not to say Get Up wants to tell stories that the audience already knows or that are formulaic. We’re just trying to be cognizant of what the audience is going to be doing regardless of our intentions. Finally, I consider myself an improvising actor before I think of myself as a comedian. Doing narratives is the best way, for me, to keep the audience engaged without being too worried if you’re slaying them with the funny. I like the sensation of an audience silently waiting on the edge of their seats to find out what comes next almost as much as I like getting a big laugh, and I’ve found that often the former makes the latter more likely.
DB: After doing improv in Austin for so long with various groups, how does it feel to have a consistent 2 person troupe? Do you approach it differently than your other projects?
Shannon: That’s interesting. There’s something almost weirdly snotty about being in a duo, even more than doing a solo show. It’s like “Hey everybody, we have this great connection and we don’t need anybody else.” Which from the outside could be kind of icky, I guess, like watching some newly coined couple grope each other in public. But yeah, I love doing scenes with Shana. We’ve worked with each other in some capacity for a long time now, and for me, at least, she’s the person I ‘get’ most consistently. We understand where our scenes are going a lot of times even before we initiate them.
What I really like about doing a two person show is you’ve got no time to hang back and stew over whether the show is going well. You’re just on all the time and you just have to keep pushing the thing forward without pre-calculating too much. With no one else to back you up but your partner, it forces you to listen really hard. If you drop something, there’s not much hiding you can do. We’ve had some shows recently where we’ve been able to playfully incorporate some miffed offers into the show, but we don’t want to make a habit of it.The other aspect of being in a duo that’s different and really helpful for me is at the practical and logistical level. With only one other’s person’s schedule to worry about, we can rehearse and do shows without too much difficulty. We’re pretty portable, which, as a dad and dude busy with other projects, I’m really appreciative of. If I were in a larger ensemble, I’d have a much harder time being able to juggle my schedule. It’s one of the reasons I don’t play Maestro and shows like as much as I’d like to.
DB: Where would you like to see the future of Austin Improv develop in the next five years or so?
Shannon: I’d love to see us continue with the awesome upwards trajectory we’ve had for the past couple of years. New people coming here to learn or to do their own thing, a multiplicity of styles and voices, and the same open, inviting spirit that we have. That’s one of the hallmarks of our scene and one that I hope doesn’t go away. I think we’re starting to gain a reputation as a cool place to do improv, and I’d like to see that develop and get to the point where some folks at least, can make a decent living just being dedicated to improv. I actually think that time isn’t that far off.
The other thing that I’ve always loved about Austin improv, and a lot of credit here should go to Jeremy Lamb, is a desire to find our own way forward without wanting to just copy what’s been successful elsewhere. The Jury and later the Cupholders have always been a model for me of how to push forward and make your own kind of show, and I think that leadership has rubbed off on a lot of people, like with all the new show formats PGraph has been doing or McNichol and May’s Guided by Videos. I’d love to see that tradition continue.
And of course, I’d love to see Out of Bounds keep getting better and better and more known in the improv world.
DB: Tell us about the origin of Get Up, and your history together as performers.
Shannon: We’ve got kind of an Obi-Wan and Anakin thing going on, in that Shana was my first improv teacher, and now we’re doing shows together. And yes, in most ways I’m definitely the Anakin in the relationship. But yeah, we’ve been doing stuff with each other for a long time. My first two and half years doing improv, I was constantly doing shows, a lot like the Pgraph or ColdTowne guys are right now, with We Could Be Heroes—still a much better name than Heroes of Comedy—as the Heroes were sort of the only game in town. Shana and I did tons of stuff together within that context. Then my son Emmett was born in 2003 and for about a year I took a big step back from doing improv. That time also coincided with a general malaise in the Austin improv scene and I wasn’t really all that compelled to get out and do shows that much. But that time laid the seeds for all kinds of developments with Andy Crouch starting to book shows and make room for people to do their own thing at the Hideout. In the fall of 2004 he asked Shana and I to do a three-person mainstage show at the Hideout for a month or so. We called ourselves, or the show, Hat Trick. It was sort of intended to be a show in the spirit of 3 For All, narrative-based improv. The chemistry wasn’t quite right with that group, most likely because, to my discredit, I’ve not always been the fairest person in the way I’ve treated Andy. But in the aftermath of those shows, I asked Shana to move ahead as a duo and see what that would be like. Our first show was in early 2005 at FronteraFest, where we made it to Best of the Week with our 24 Minutes format. And we’ve been doing a couple shows a month ever since.
DB: Get Up in particular seems to like to tell stories with lots of characters. Obviously this is a challenge with only 2 cast members. What techniques do you use to create distinct characters and to keep all of these characters' traits separate in your head?
Shannon: We’re not always successful with this, but we try to make the various characters we each play within the shows have energies different enough, both from one another and from our own natural tendencies as players. When we remember to do that, the shows usually turn out pretty well. It’s when the characters get samey that we run into problems, especially when we’ve packed a scene with 5 or 6 characters. We both like to play really physically, so grounding the characters in some kind of physical location or with a physical trait helps keep everything straight. Some of the voice-over narrative techniques we use in the show help too, although we use that as much to expand the visual picture in the audience’s minds as we do to sort our who’s onstage.
Also, doing a narrative really helps, and when I do shows with Shana and we edit to a new scene, it’s rare that I don’t know who I’m supposed to be in the upcoming scene. It’s not that we have specific scenes we need to cut to, but when the story’s really clicking along, we can both just sort of feel what needs to come next. In that sense it’s not that hard to remember which character you’re playing.Recently we’ve rehearsed some more specialized stuff that we’ve noticed ourselves having trouble with, like how to do crowd scenes or group combat scenes without them getting muddy. It’s taken us a while to master little stuff like that, but once we put our brains to it in rehearsal the math of those techniques was pretty easy to piece out. It’s kind of like mapping out a football play, with lots of “to make that scene work, you swap sides of the stage so we can fight each other, and then we’ll spin the scene around so we can change characters and see what’s going on over there.”
As a side note, I’m really excited to see Cathcart and Olson at Out of Bounds this year, plus they are coming down next month to play at ColdTowne. They’re also a male-female duo who play tons of characters over the course of their shows, but rather than the foolhardy eight-person shoot-out climaxes that Shana and I seem to end up doing a lot, their shows consist of a series of interlocked two-person scenes that unspool over the course of the show. It’s a pretty cool approach.
DB: What improv groups or performers, past or present, influence or inspire you?
Shannon: Man, so many people. I mentioned Jeremy earlier, but there are so many leaders and inspiring figures on the scene in Austin right now it’s awesome. Obviously, Keith Johnstone’s philosophies have had a big personal impact, and from elsewhere the 3 For All and BATS guys and Dad’s Garage guys have been pretty influential. Speaking of BATS, I’ve been lucky enough to have become pals with a couple of guys from Kasper Hauser. Best sketch comics in the game right now, in my opinion. Dasariski really blew me away last year. I could watch those dudes eat soup onstage for a half hour and I would be very happy. I’m really lucky as the producer of Out of Bounds that I get to help bring people down here who are inspiring to me and hopefully will be inspiring to the rest of the community.
I think it’s important, obviously, not to limit one’s improv influences to fellow improvisers. I’m really inspired by the kind of serial narrative TV shows that HBO does, films, fiction and non-fiction, especially history. Some of the best comedic writers in America right now I think are doing comics, like Chris Onstad at Achewood or David Rees’s My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, and I love trying to bring those sensibilities to the stage as well.
DB: Ask yourself a question and answer it here.
Shannon:
Q. Seriously, I get to ask my own question? Okay, how awesome is Sara Farr?
A. She’s totally awesome. I think it took Shana and I a while to hit our groove with the kind of format we wanted to do. We both really like trying to, as Rafe Chase says, “blow out the stage,” meaning that since everything else we’re doing is made up, why be limited in our settings by the physical limitations of the playing space. Those possibilities didn’t fully click for us until last year at Out of Bounds when Sara added her cinematic sound design to our bag of tricks. I’m really crappy at improv tech, and Sara’s really awesome at it. And she did it all because she likes what we do and because she’s a real sweetheart. Just showed up one day with a library of cinematic scores and said “Hey, would you be interested in adding this to your shows?” It’s really allowed Shana and I to find our voice on stage. It’s to the point where I don’t really think of Get Up as a duo anymore, I think of us as two performers and a sound improviser. We should probably update our cast page to reflect that.
Get Up is performing in the Double Barrel on May 18, 2007.
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