*From the Chicago Sun-Times April 12, 2009
by Darel Jevens djevens@suntimes.com
People doing improv in Chicago are supposed to learn from their directors, but Marz Timms remembers the night he was the one who did the educating.
Improvising away on stage, he came to a scene where “I was like, ‘bling bling.’ And after the show the director was like, ‘What is this “bling bling” thing that you kept saying?’ ”
It might have been a common term everywhere else, but less so in the world of 1990s Chicago improv, where a black face was about as hard to find as a dude at Lilith Fair. For all that improvisers were accomplishing during that decade– honing the wits of future stars Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris, and showing the world that improv could be art in its own right and not just a parlor trick — they still were overwhelmingly, embarrassingly Caucasian.
“It was pretty much a North Side of Chicago white fraternity,” Timms says.
But thanks to some deliberate, targeted efforts to acknowledge the imbalance and fix it, Chicago improv is becoming a more colorful world. “It’s a million times better than it was back in the day,” says Shaun Landry, who created the mostly black Oui Be Negroes team here in 1994.
This week’s Chicago Improv Festival reflects that with the most culturally diverse lineup in its history, and a special emphasis on teams and players of color. Landry’s group gets a main-stage slot at the Lakeshore Theatre, as do the African-American ensembles Pimprov, Velvet Gunn and Frangela, and acts starring black comics Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael-Key (see sidebar).
It’s a range of backgrounds that would have been unthinkable when Landry, a Dunbar Academy grad, got started in the late ’80s. For a time, she recalls, she knew of just two other prominent black players in Chicago, and joked that the three of them each staked out part of town: One had the South Side, one had Second City in Old Town, and Landry had the rest of the North Side.
She would play with white teams and find that her color affected the way the improv scenes would develop. No matter what the premise, “it seemed like it had to mentioned that I was black.”
And it wasn’t just her. The two women in Frangela, Frances Callier and Angela Shelton, had the same experience while performing in Chicago in the late ’90s. A line Callier heard a lot: “What do you think, as THE BLACK PERSON?’
Adds Shelton, “They’re not subtle at all.”
Timms, a 35-year-old from Austin, illustrates with a sample scene set in a business meeting. He announces he’d drawn up some sales charts.
“‘But you’re BLACK!’ Or somebody would say, ‘Who let the janitor in here?’”
To be fair, these usually would be the moves of novices, still in training. More experienced improvisers would tend to have more open minds.
Tempting as it may be to chalk up these awkward moments to racism, Landry has another explanation.”It’s done out of fear, fear of not getting a laugh,” she says. “In some people’s minds, it’s funny to be called out that you’re African-American, or that you’re Hindu, or that you’re gay.”
And it doesn’t necessarily ruin the moment — far from it. “This is the biggest improv gift,” she says, ” ’cause now we can really play. Now we can have a good scene” — one that isn’t about sales charts but about something bigger, like racial sensitivities.
So what explains why improv stayed so white for so long? It’s not like any race is better than another at saying funny things off the tops of their heads. As Callier points out, “Black people have been improvising around their kitchen tables since birth.”
They might not know, though, all the ways to put that wit to work. Dionna Griffin-Irons saw that firsthand. She had performed with the diverse casts of Second City Detroit and, on moving to Chicago in 1999, was surprised to find black actors so scarce in the improv theaters.
But the town had talent. “I was going to the South Side and seeing artists — whether they be poets, actors, musicians, singers — who were improvising and flowing, doing their own thing. Maybe calling it a different name, but a form of improv.”
As she saw it, a geographic divide in Chicago was deterring South Siders from making their way to the North Side improv theaters — not just Second City, but also iO, the Annoyance, ComedySportz. Says Landry, “You just couldn’t get on the 6 [bus] at Jeffery and drive two hours all the way downtown, where it ends, and then get on the Red Line to get all the way up to Second City.”
Another thing about improv that Callier notes: “It takes a bit of, I’m gonna say … money?”
Yes, taking improv classes means paying tuition. You might get a scholarship, but even if you excel you’re unlikely to get paid for performing, not unless you get hired by Second City, a fairly lofty achievement.
Other outlets promised a more immediate return. “When stand-up was really hot,” Landry says, “African-Americans were going, ‘Why do I wanna go to iO or Second City when I can come over to the Punchline across the street and they’ll pay my ass for 15 minutes to an hour? Is improv payin’ my bills? No!’ ”
Stand-up comedy is familiar to almost everyone — unlike this other theatrical avenue with its rules and its miming and its debates over short-form vs. long-form. “For black people, doing improvisation is an exotic experience,” Callier says. “It’s kind of a kooky crazy artistic experience, vs. something they begin to understand they can make a living out of.”
Second City got serious about diversifying after owner Andrew Alexander watched an all-white cast struggle to address the Los Angeles riots of 1991. Callier, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side, was put in charge and spent the mid-’90s wooing minority actors and teaching them improv.
That’s about when Landry started Oui Be Negroes. “The big thing was: Be who you are,” she says. “Don’t hold back on anything.”
In part she hoped to provide an alternative to white-majority teams where black actors would avoid roles that might come off as stereotypical: big mamas, pimps, dice-rolling hustlers and the like.
“I prefer that you went that route so you can [act as] a mirror of what we stereotypically are seen as and reflect that back on the stage,” she says. “That’s good theater. That’s making a point.”
When Timms joined Oui Be Negroes, he experienced “culture shock,” so different was it from his work with white ensembles. “It was really, really good,” he says. “You got to express a little bit more of yourself and the things you were thinking.”
The Frangela women, after they’d moved to L.A., started an African-American group of their own, Funny Black People, and it was “the best improvisation I’ve ever seen or experienced because everybody was really on the same level,” Callier says. “It wasn’t about being black, it was just black people improvising together.”
Griffin-Irons now directs Callier’s old Second City outreach programs, putting on workshops there and in schools to introduce young people to improv. One of her main tasks is producing an ever-changing minority ensemble informally known as “Brownco.” She seen walls come down when performers share an ethnicity.
“You put a black woman and a black guy improvising together, and sometimes there’s a colloquial that some people will just get because there’s that shared experience,” she says.
Vallea E. Woodbury is finding that out for herself. At 26, she’s fairly new to improv, having spent most of her fledgling acting career in musical theater. But since passing an Outreach and Diversity audition at Second City, she’s been taking classes there and rehearsing for the Brownco show “No Money, Mo’ Problems,” which opened this weekend at Donny’s Skybox.
“There’s a certain comfort level [on an all-minority team] that I think is there whether subconsciously or consciously,” she says. “I know 99.9 percent that if I make this reference, these people are going to get it.”
She’s heard about white ensembles making too much of a teammate’s race and is pretty sure doesn’t happen as much as it used to. But it still does happen.
One time, as she performed with white players, “the two people before me knew I was about to walk into the scene, and one of them said, ‘Man, I just really hope this person who walks in isn’t a black woman. I can’t stand them. They’re high maintenance.’ And I was like ‘OK, I guess I’d better walk in and make this work!’ ”
Mostly, though, she gets encouragement, from the teachers who show her how to handle moments like that, and from the actors of color who set an example on the Second City stages. “I definitely lucked out with my timing,” Woodbury says. “Had I shown up even five or six years earlier, it might not have been the same ballgame.”
Besides Timms’ Pimprov, Chicago has the African-American teams KevINda and Blackout, as well as groups concentrating on Latinos (Salsation), Asians (Stir-Friday Night) and GLBT life (GayCo).
Landry, 43, sees progress when she lines up new actors for Oui Be Negroes, now based in L.A. after several years in the Bay Area. “I put on an audition and hundreds of people come,” she says. “Back in the day, I was begging people. I was walking up to black people and saying, ‘You wanna be in Negroes?’ ”
But there’s more to accomplish, she says: getting improvisers paid (as hers are), getting improv houses into black neighborhoods, getting more talent involved by reaching out through black radio stations, newspapers and theater companies.
After all, Landry says, “it’s not like we’re some rare breed of people!”
This 12th Annual Chicago Improv Festival is not just a black thing. This year’s multiculturally themed fest also boasts shows performed (at least partly) in German (Foxy Freestyle, Saturday at the Playground), Hebrew (Altermania, Tuesday at ComedySportz), Japanese (Impro Japan, Friday at the Playground) and even sign language (Iceworm, Wednesday at the Gorilla Tango Theatre).
Lifetime achievement awards will be presented to two veterans of the television sketch classic “SCTV”: executive producer Andrew Alexander and actor-writer Joe Flaherty, who played Guy Caballero, Count Floyd and numerous other roles. The presentation starts at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Second City e.t.c., 1608 N. Wells ($75). Flaherty also will perform with Toronto’s Impromptu Splendor (Saturday, Donny’s Skybox) and the Chicago duo Bassprov (Sunday, Lakeshore Theater).
More shows happen at a dozen or so other venues sprawled around Chicago, plus one in Schaumburg. For details, go to www.chicagoimprov festival.org.
Direct link: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/1522550,SHO-Sunday-improv12.article
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