Saturday night was Mothers last show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. The 9 year run of the group at the theater is the longest a house team has performed at UCB. It was a great show to boot.
During the show, I thought about what made Mother such an amazing experience to watch in all the years they have played. A group of performers that had grown together, like a vine wrapping around itself, to become one seamless entity. A group of performers who were taught in the earlier incarnations of the UCB training center. What about this group can we, as improvisers, learn from? What can we steal?
Commitment
Anyone who has ever seen Mother knows that they committed to realities and characters unabashedly. Never were initiations judged and never did anyone on the group bail on an idea. Everything was embraced and everything nurtured in their scenes. I always felt that Mother’s scenes were like seeds planted in the ground and everyone watered each idea until they grew.
Emotion
What I always loved about Mother was their embrace of emotion in scenes. Love, hate, lust, happiness, sadness; Mother ran the gambit committing to these emotions truthfully and realizing their extraordinary power in scenes. These organic choices led to scenes with decidedly more intimate content which the cast never shied away from.
Physicality
Mother would often would start scenes touching, holding, or embracing one another. This is one of those decidedly Mother traits in that they were not shy about using their bodies with each other. They were as comfortable making out on stage as they were brawling into the audience or pirouetting around the stage. This is one thing that I have been thinking much more about in my performances, and something I definitely need to steal.
Love & Trust
Here is where Mother really stood apart. Sure groups love their parts, but Mother’s time together really cemented their incredible trust with one another. You could see the intense love and trust pouring out of their playing. All scenes were pushed that much farther because each cast member knew that behind them were a group of performers that would do anything for them. With that support, your risks in scenes can be limitless and they were.
And so ends almost a decade of performance, it has been fun watching. What’s next? Something amazing I’m sure. But for now, Bye Mother.
Hey how about that Del Close Marathon, right? Anyone? Crap.
So it’s been entirely too long and I haven’t updated improvoker. This is due to one unfortunate problem, those damn Del Close Marathon notes. See the thing is, I took notes in a dark theater in a little notebook and when I looked again at my notes, well, nothing made any sense. it was all scribbly “numer 4.5 — don’t wear slutty cloths on stag.”
Luckily I recorded the whole press conference on my iPhone, but I haven’t been able to copy the audio files over to listen to the pieces I need to finally post those notes. I feel terrible about this and I apologize profusely and hope we can still go to the sock-hop together.
Come on baby, where you going?
The good news I have not given up and will try, to make sense of what the UCB 3 said on that stage in the dark. Thanks for bearing with me while I flake a little — I’ll try to be better in future.
So as commenter The Gooch rightly noted, I have not written about Bobby Moynihan, of UCBs Stepfathers, being picked up by SNL. This is of course amazing news. Bobby had auditioned for SNL last year and was not added to the cast, but I think all of us expected if he auditioned again he would get the spot.
One of the many words of wisdom I got from Bobby was back in my UCB 401 improv class, Bobby was subbing for Billy Merritt, and he spoke about this face he does which always gets a laugh. He did the face, which is a magical shrug, and we all laughed. I then decided to create my own face which I could do and always get a laugh. Unfortunately Bobby was unavailable to coach me on the face and had to cobble together my own face from various sources, but at the end of a year — I had a face. It’s not Bobby’s face, by any stretch, but it’s good enough for government work.
All that is totally true.
Bobby is one of the nicest, most supportive, super talented people I have ever met. He’s been a staple at UCB since I started and I’m really sad to see him go, but at least it will give America a chance to see that lovely man’s face. (Oh, and America, I just danced with Bobby the other night and let me tell you, Bobby can dance too.)
This year started off to an exciting start as the DCM Press Conference was reserves to talking completely about the UCB concepts about improvisation. It was a unique look into UCBs brand of improvisation and what they feel makes good comedic improvisation.
Roberts, Walsh, and Besser laid out the UCBs “theses” on improvisation. Who h ranged from the expected “Game is fundamental” to more subtle “having your own opening isn’t important.” I will be sure to post my full notes once I’m near an accrual keyboard.
The UCB3 then played a few of Del’s earlier, less known recordings.
Shows
MySpace was as usual incredible, with some hilarious scenes about what sounded like the most bizzare workout system spx90, of something in that vain. Bassprov was as wonderful as I remember it and Horatio Sans, who has lost a considerable amount of weight, approached the stage with a poise I have not seen. The Stepfathers was by far the most stressful improv set with Shannon O’Neil and Chris Gethard getting into a slapping brawl on stage. For anyone at the theater, it was like watching your mom and dad start to fight — although very funny once everyone decided not to kill each other.
The highlight of the night, however, was Directors commentary live. The film was Universal Soldier and the commentary was by far the most inventive and hilarious I have seen to date. “I call ziss a Van Damn”, “no sleeves means you don’t have to pay for sleeves” and “That’s me, that’s not me” had people litterally rolling in the isles.
The next few updates about the DCM are going to be coming from my iPhone. Please excuse any bizarre spelling mistakes while I sort out what I’m doing with this thing. I will try to give frequent updates to the site complete with photographs… if that’s possible.
I’ll be updating throughout the DCM10, so that I’m not overwhelming your browsers and RSS readers, I’ll try to keep updates as concise as possible.
I’m headed into the city now after taking off Friday to prep. And by prep I mean sleep. I’ve got a shopping list of trail mix, water, energy bars, and perhaps a few tissues. It gets rough down in the trenches.
Photograph courtesy Ari Scott