Oh my God. Not only did the North Korean hackers force Sony to cancel The Interview, they just made them recut their remake of Annie. This is just getting out of control, you guys.
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I'm doing it again. I'm playing a woman. Don't ask me why. It's just what I love to do.
A show that I wrote, Lady Balls, is previewing tonight at The Annoyance Theatre. I play Deb Champion, a narcissistic anger monster who coaches the most successful women's college basketball program in the nation. The cast is phenomenal and far, far better that I could ever deserve: Shantira Jackson, Becca Levine, Wolfgang Stein, Carley Moseley, Kimberly Vaughn, Susie Gutowski, Sayjal Joshi, Eric Schinzer, Julie Marchiano, Tiffani Swalley and Lindy Voeltner. Each of them deserves their own show. Many, many shows and many, many lucrative acting and comedy opportunities because they are all comic geniuses. That's not an exaggeration. It's the goddamn truth. And yes, I'm fully aware that being a big, athletic man who mostly plays absurd and broken women, both in improv and in scripted stuff, makes me about as unmarketable as a three-legged tapir that sings O-Town songs. I can't take that skill into a talent agent, because there are no roles for what I do. I don't easily fit into a certain "type," because I overlap several. I also don't consider it traditional drag, either. I'm not nearly talented enough to do what a drag queen does. And, you know, maybe my pure acting abilities aren't the best either. I fully admit and understand I'm rough around the edges. Ultimately, there are gay roles, a few drag roles, but never any roles for 6-foot-3-inch, comi-tragic, muscular, 60-year-old women. I can and do play men. I like playing dudes. Straight dudes, macho dudes, dude-bros. I can do that too. I just have way more fun playing women named Gail who constantly sob in various mall food courts. I also love playing gay roles, but I've discovered I'm also not the most marketable kind of gay. I'm not a non-threatening gay, since my sexuality is a big part of who I am as a performer, and it manifests in atypical ways. When I was in third grade, I wrote a play with my friend Joe called The Twee Little Pigs. I played all the pigs, and he played the wolf. I decided to make the third pig, the smartest one, a girl named Larryetta. In middle school and high school, I starred in videos where I was Barbara Walters, Romeo's Juliet, and Princess Leia. I got into my first improv team largely because of a chain-smoking old lady character I busted out in auditions. Since I've been in Chicago, I've played Goldie Hawn, a woman obsessed with Wicked named Barbara Jo Blazer, a chatty office kathy named Meredith, a high school art teacher named Mrs. McElroy, Whoopi Goldberg, and a sad, childless Christmas doll maker named Sheila Cankleton in another Annoyance production called A Woman's Path. Yes, I realize I don't make a pretty woman. I also realize I'm not a very good drag queen, because my characters are usually far too sad. I'm more interested in that elusive line between wildly absurd and quietly tragic. I also fully realize that what I do may elicit snickers behind my back, or confused gawking, or empathetic embarrassment from others who see me. But, to be honest, I don't really fucking care. This is what I do. And it took a long time to realize that it's something I should embrace as opposed to temper. If you like pant suits and talented, amazing women, come see Lady Balls. It's been a fuck-ton of fun to create. And really, for Chicago comedians, having fun and creating with incredibly lovely people is, and always will be, our Shangri-la. If you've been entrenched in the Chicago comedy scene long enough, it's hard not to look at our little, endearing biodome as a haphazard collection of mini-cliques, many unintentional and some very, very intentional. We have our Breakfast Clubs, our Heathers, our Alpha Betas, our Goonies and our Garden States. Thus, it's very easy to focus an inordinate amount of your energy on the groups you're not a part of, as opposed to the ones you are. After all, we're all here essentially playing a complex RPG, doing whatever shows and taking whatever classes we can to level up and grow stronger and cast bigger and badder comedy spells (you guys, I'm a fucking BOSS at metaphors). I suppose this isn't very different from most corners of civilization. However, in a system dependent on the eagerness for advancement held by the underlings, the feeling of not belonging can be crushing. It can also be easily conflated for rejection. Even for someone like myself, who has been here for eight years and has had many amazing opportunities and been a part of some incredible shows, it's easy to slip into a schoolyard mindset and cast myself as a loner, a rogue, a square peg. It's easy to see cool hipster cliques everywhere, and feel sorry for myself for not being a part of them. It's easy to see something great like The Jangleheart Circus and think "Well, that's another uber-insider thing I'll never be a part of" instead of "How cool, good for them!" I try to counteract the more self-defeating viewpoint by looking for ways I DO belong, the groups I am a part of, the friends I've made along the way. Because, just as I once looked at people who made Harold teams or got callbacks for Playground incubator auditions as basically God, I know there is someone newer and greener than me who would look at where I am and I want to go to there. Personally, I think my feelings of isolation come from my extreme introversion. Every online test I take, I am 100% introverted. I like being alone, on my couch, playing video games. This has made the necessary social aspect of being a Chicago improv comedian difficult. I also have pretty advanced social anxiety, the fun special flavor that allows me to deliver a glowing, earnest compliment to a colleague and then walk away convinced I just mortally wounded them with a heinous insult and that they hate me and that I am horrible. This basically makes doing insult-bits, the social backbone of many improvisers, virtually impossible. So, even when I am social, sometimes I am not the right kind of social. Huzzah! Anyway, years and years ago, I clearly remember a well-intentioned friend tell me, after I didn't make a Harold team for the third time, that I needed to be more social. I needed to show my face at the iO and play the game. I hated this notion. Either the comedy Gods wanted me, or they didn't. I wanted to be thought of as a good improviser, not a good sit-at-the-bar-and-do-bits-and-hope-people-notice-iser. So many years later, I understand this is simply a truth of the world we inhabit. If you want to be a part of those "cliques" you see, you have to be out, be visible, have an answer to the question "what are you working on?" and make yourself known. You have to build a buzz. Build a brand. It doesn't always feel great, but it's necessary for a lot of the leveling up we seek. You can't join the Kiwanis Club or Carol's monthly book club without showing up. It's simply part of the bargain. I don't get asked to do a lot of shows, and that's okay. I write my own. I don't sing very well, let alone musically improvise, so that world remains foreign to me. My Facebook will always be littered with comedy-scene in-jokes I'm not a privy to, experiences I won't get to have, but the simple fact is, none of them are preventing me from making my own. And if I'm a perpetual outlier, or an insider who just doesn't realize it, it doesn't matter. I have my friends, my allies and my creative collaborators, and with them I am invincible. Don't have a clique? Build your own. And then make it a force for good. I'm awful at auditions. I always have been, and even though I'm planning to take some workshops to alleviate this, I imagine it will never be my strong suit. I find it very difficult to translate my strengths into a 60 second monologue, or a couple 30 second improv scenes.
Like any actor who has been around long enough, I've failed far, far more than I've succeeded. A lot of my auditions, however, have been improv auditions. For groups and teams and touring opportunities. And, I've eaten shit at about 95 percent of them. It's nerve-wracking. The first audition I blew was for an acapella group my freshman year of college. My singing voice was once called "one of the worst sounds in the world" by some high school classmates, so needless to say I didn't succeed. Fortunately, this failure led me to audition for an improv group, and I succeeded because they liked my chain-smoking sexy grandma character, and I never looked back. When I lived in Southern California, I auditioned multiple times for Harold teams at the iO West. I failed. I failed at four improv auditions for the Playground theater, many for writing and directing shows, touring opportunities, Boom Chicago, Mission Improvable. And I've bombed regular auditions for commercials, agents, Columbia College films, and so many other random, independent things that I've lost count. I'm not that bad at improv, or acting, I just audition like I am. It's funny, in improv auditions, the auditors often say things like "We're not looking for you to be funny, we're looking for strong improv skills, support and teammwork." So you make leafy ruffly sounds in someone else's scene about an orchard and dive in as the footstool in a scene about a grandmother and you think "I'm scene painting! I'm a supportive player!" And then some innocent-looking 4-foot 11-inch girl steps out and initiates a scene by saying something like "I got shit in my cunt during my last abortion" and the auditors laugh hysterically and everyone fingerbangs themselves and she gets called back and you're like "But I was a footstool." You were also clearly not having any fun, which auditors notice as well. In theater and commercial auditions, I'm even worse. Because I look like Thor, but really only play manically unhappy fiftysomething women from the year 1993, my monologues always come off hilariously stunted. I have to at least act like a normal dude if I want to get the normal dude part, right? And then I'm given a side that was clearly written by a four year old, read aloud by a Scottish octogenarian with a stoma in a wind tunnel, and then translated into text by voice recognition software. And I when I look at the nonsensical side, I suddenly can't read anymore, and after I eat shit on my first try, out of pity the auditor gives me a vague instruction for a second read ("Be yourself, but more cautiously unconcerned") and then has me read it again, and I eat shit again, and then they smile grimly and say "Great, thanks for coming in, we'll be in touch," which means "We'll send you a polite thanks-but-no-thanks email in two days." No one is their best self in an audition. Years of work, of proving yourself otherwise, mean nothing if you can't get the tone right reading three sentences about a fake body wash. Or be Stephen Colbert levels of brilliant in a 30-second improv scene with a person you've never met. I get it. If you can't succeed in the contained pressure of an audition, how can you be expected to succeed when the cameras roll, or the stage lights go up? And, truthfully, looking back, I wasn't ready for a large number of the opportunities I auditioned for. My task, then, has been to find ways to show the unique abilities I feel I do have in alternative mediums. And to be patient. And to take each failure and recast it (pun intended) as a learning experience. And so, these days, I like to look at each audition as practice for the next one. And if I succeed, all the better, but no matter what, I'm getting something positive out of it besides the brutal feeling of eating shit in front of important people and hating myself for days. Though, that's fun too. There are these things in the Chicago comedy community called "showcases." They're usually held at an odd hour during the day, at a major theater in town, with an assortment of improvisers and sketch comedians, and for someone super important. Like Lorne Michaels or some other bigwig producers. And, usually, people completely lose their shit over them.
Also, unless you're in one, they seem to pop up suddenly, with no forewarning. They're a great tool to get our amazing pool of talent in front of decision-makers and influential minds in the entertainment business. They also lay bare our aspirations and performers. After the fantastically funny pair of Vanessa Bayer and Paul Brittain got hired for SNL, showcases in Chicago became a fucking THING, y'all. A gold rush ensued. "Tight five minutes" became the most important three words in our lexicon. Everyone, it seemed, was working on Christopher-Walken-at-Baskin-Robbins bits and refining their solo material at open mic nights. One theater even created a sweepstakes of sorts, inviting countless performers to show their "tight five minutes" over the course of a bajillion weeks, with the vague promise some might get to audition for Lorne. For a few years thereafter, it seemed like our improv community, built on the ultimate collaborative art form, exploded into a frenzy of every man and woman for him/herself. I myself wrote and performed a solo sketch show and started frequenting open mic sketch nights to throw up solo material. Nothing much came of it, though I was able to mark solo show off my creative bucket list. And I'm plus one really snazzy denim patchwork mom coat. The gold rush has calmed down, I think, mostly because it's been a few years since any Chicago folks have been plucked into stardom (Allison Tolman notwithstanding, though she earned her success completely outside the comedy system). I think we tell ourselves a lot of stories. We say we're here for the community, the art of improv, the love of the game. And, for a number of us, I think that's genuinely true, especially among those who know their peak ripeness in the eyes of bigwig SNL producers has passed (as unfair as it may feel. I mean, the fuckers just hired a 20 year old to the cast, so we should probably all just slap on adult diapers and begin to forget faces and mumble about the Korean War and shit ourselves all day long because seriously.) One of the fundamental experiences of pursuing comedy in this city, after all, is learning to subtly adjust expectations and aspirations. Yes. We're all seduced by the power of this city, whether we admit it to others or even to ourselves. The famous faces that line the walls of the places we perform impact us in many ways. They may not be a primary driver, but at the very least they've been an inspiration at some point, or perhaps the catalyst for packing up that U-Haul and driving cross country to the Windy City. There's a reason we're all doing improv and not playing sitars or making stained glass art. I think showcases force us to be honest with ourselves. I think we show our true colors, in a mostly positive way. After all, it's hard not to get crazy excited about auditioning for someone who has the power to change your life, and make you one of those photos on the wall. It understandably makes people crazy nervous, and makes them put all their time and energy into perfecting their John Kerry impression. I've never been asked to do a showcase, which I know colors my opinion of them. It's always nice to be asked. But I haven't really put the time and effort required to get on that particular radar, both socially and in continuing to foster a solo sketch persona. And, perhaps my peak ripeness has passed. And perhaps people know that I'll just play devastated lady characters and that that's far less marketable than a scruffy-cute young bro who's, like, really sarcastic and does a great Jon Hamm On a Roller Coaster. And perhaps, even at my peak, my skills in that area may have been far less than what is required for such an opportunity. I try hard, but then again I try hard at basketball and still can't shoot or dribble. Again, when showcases come around, even when you're not in them (or, perhaps, especially if you're not in them), an adjustment of expectations and aspirations occurs. Maybe this CAN happen. Or maybe it can't. Maybe I'm meant for something different. And you know what? That's fucking A-OK. |
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