San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cover story
Ad-lib comedy form matures in the Bay Area with careful planning
Our look at the Bay Area improv scene. Pictured: ACT drama instructor Katie Rubin leading a workshop.
Improv doesn’t need to convince you of its legitimacy anymore.
Sure, you could hold onto tired stereotypes about how the art form isn’t professional: “It’s all amateurs!” “All they do is play games!” Or as Ken Robertson, artistic director of BATS Improv, jokes, quoting an improv buddy of his, “Improv is one of the few mediums that has spent a lot of time and energy to earn a mediocre reputation.”
In fact, the form is thriving. San Francisco Improv Fest will celebrate its 14th year Wednesday-Sunday, Sept. 19-23, with classes at FeelGood Enterprises and Un-Scripted Theater Cisco employees participate in a two-day storytelling workshop, led by ACT drama instructors Fontana Butterfield (bottom left) and Katie Rubin (bottom, second from left), at the Strand Theater in San Francisco in August. Company and performances at PianoFight. Companies come from the Bay Area and beyond, all the way to the United Kingdom. BATS Improv, a pioneer of long-form improv, has been going strong for 32 years. Pass by Valencia Street’s Stage Werx Theatre at night, and you’re likely to see a horde of young people — that coveted, elusive audience demographic — clamoring to get into an Endgames Improv show, especially if it’s Friday, when the company’s long-running “Your F—ed Up Relationship” is playing. Endgames just bought a $2 million, 3,750-squarefoot space for classes and performances in the Mission District — a couple of doors down from more classroom and performance space it also owns.
Corporate improv training is a booming business at both large theater companies like American Conservatory Theater and much smaller improv companies like Leela, where co-founder Jill Eickmann says demand is such that she’s “never had to make a cold call” to get corporate clients.
At a recent multiday corporate improv training that ACT held for Cisco
at its Strand Theater, Des Murray, a senior Cisco director, described the class’ storytelling and delivery skills as vital to his team. When an engineer tells you about his or her work, the default approach is “to make sure all the information in my head gets into your head,” he says. But “that’s not what we want.” His employees might do “very complex” work, but they have to “remove” or “mask” that complexity when they structure and deliver their insights. Otherwise, Cisco “can’t take action based on those insights” — i.e., it can’t make investment decisions.
Trainings on Aug. 29, taught by Fontana Butterfield and Katie Rubin, focused on skills that engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians don’t often get to practice at the office: loosening up the body and being aware of its impulses and feelings, breathing deeply and deliberately, acting or speaking from the truth of the moment instead of from some notion of what giving a presentation is supposed to look like.
Yet Bay Area improv doesn’t owe its popularity only to tech companies looking to make their employees just as fluent in public speaking, networking and brainstorming collaboratively as they are in writing code. Nor are its classes full of aspiring comedians looking to follow the paths of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, both of whom cut their teeth at Chicago’s Second City (while Poehler also went on to co-found New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade).
At a recent Leela improv class taught by Diana Brown, participants said improv helped them access parts of themselves that had long lain dormant or never got a chance to blossom. John McCoy, 36, studies improv to “be more playful”; since he’s been taking classes, he says, his loved ones have noticed he’s “more relaxed at home.” Bruce Reif, 30, appreciates how the skills improv inculcates “overlap with the skills it takes to be in a good relationship” or “to be a good friend.” Jiale Zhi, 29, says his “whole life is about how to prepare for things” — music performance, school, work. He never learned “how to react when you’re suddenly in the middle of something.”