A Rising Tide Lifts All Improv Ships
There is a sea change, have you felt it?
Every improv theater reaches a tipping point in its lifespan; where the number of available slots for involvement — whether it be through performing, interning, teaching and coaching, even paid positions — is outpaced by the number of people ready and willing to fill those slots. With a finite amount of stage and a finite amount of hours, there will be a lot of people left feeling deeply unsatisfied with their improv theater experience.
Improv is a performance art form and it is a populist art form. It can, conceivably, be done anywhere. It requires no props, no scenery, no script. A couple of chairs are a nice accoutrement, but not even that is necessary. All you need is a few people to do it. But I believe that there is another ingredient, and it is the ingredient that makes performers proud to play under a banner that says “Second City” or “UCB” or whatever theater is near you.
You need a few people to watch.
And playing under a known marquee all but guarantees that someone will be there to watch. With no need for sets or costumes (or sometimes, paying the performers), overhead for any show is unconscionably low. Any show can expect some off-the-street traffic enticed by cheap ticket prices and cheaper drinks. However a recent development may soon come to affect all of us: UCB is raising its ticket prices. With a handful of exceptions, weekday shows have risen to $7 and prime weekend shows are now $12.
“The impact in the American theater has not been just about dollars and cents, or accessibility, or the makeup of the audience, as the playwright Arthur Miller once explained to [Jason Zinoman] in an interview. The reason high ticket prices are important, he argued, is that they change what is seen onstage, as artists inevitably create work with the older, wealthier audience in mind.”
Days cannot be made any longer. And, as someone who has been on stage with over 30 people at the same time, improv teams shouldn’t be made bigger. Past the tipping point, there will always be an inability of a theater to accommodate everyone. Faced with a shrinking chance of even being on the marquee stage, a dwindling populist audience, and in the wake of a theater closing… a sea change needs to happen.
We need to be creating our own opportunities. We, as performers, must captain our own ships. We must be part of the swell, ahead of the storm. We cannot, and should never have, relied on a house team or a theater institution to be our measure of success. Creating art our way, saying what we want to say, sending our message out to people… that is what defines us as successful artists.
This is the big change of improv, performance, and comedy this coming year. While there will always be a place for established training programs and brand name marquees, we will also watch everybody begin congregating in smaller, more intimate communities. There the performers can take the risks they never could before, as their voice was previously subsumed by the larger theater.
Already the tide shifts. These projects might not make any of these people rich, but they do get to own their own product, and they are artistically fulfilled. Teachers are setting up “pop-up shops” for their classes. Comedy groups play backyard shows in secret locations. A performer creates an improv collective. Weird shit happens in bar basements…
What are you doing?
