Urban Yeti Director's Corner
Debauchery is so damn cash...
Our last showing of Debauchery was very comfortable. A lot of appreciation goes out to the staff at Alaska Experience Theater. Bar, box office and tech ran flawlessly which gave us more time to interact with the audience beforehand to set up an energized environment. We had a diverse crowd of locals, tourists and even an improv guest from Boston College (raise a glass to Tabitha!). Some notes I took away as a host for improvement were transition back from intermission and how to keep a strong flow for the second act. Technical areas of improvement for our show. I know I know, shut up John, we want to hear about the improv.
We have all been putting a lot of work into Urban Yeti and I can personally say sometimes it gets stressful. But whenever someone asks me if I'm still having fun, I never have to pause and think about it. I have tremendous pride in what we are doing and those we are working with. We are getting the best out of people, and no matter how hard the work gets, it is rewarding. But the simple answer? Of course it's fun, because this shit is so damn cash.
The Bare Bones

I'm excited to say the troupe stepped up and performed well in this experiment. Although we still have things to work out in our long form sets, I was particularly impressed with the creativity of our performers in the show. From solid character interactions in Building Blocks to Evelyn and Janosz in the produce section, our performers came up with some very interesting objectives and were able to sustain great character dialogue in several of their scenes. It was also nice to see an infusion of energy in several places when needed. Although one could argue the breast feeding Wickedness scene was a lot of two characters yelling at each other, I would counter and say they stayed true to the situation, brought in some good detail (empty theater, 9:45 pm showing of the Notebook) and the energy was much needed. I was also particularly impressed with our short form, especially Slide Show. I will throw some props to Erik, who really made that game with a solid narration. The funniest thing I have seen in a long time is his constant reference to that 'ass hole' Bob who judges. Why is this funny? Because going through a Las Vegas slide show is one thing, but building out complex relationships with the characters in the pictures strengthens the improv immensely.
Enough of this positive crap Hanus, get to the juice! As a reminder to those new to the blog, we have been working in rehearsals on putting a structure to our longer form work. Build a strong base reality with good characters, environment work and detail, then throw in an oddity identified by the team and elevate that oddity by asking questions about how it changes the world around them. We didn't do a great job of finding this structure in our performance last night. It was not as easy for me to write down a series of oddities like our last shows and the strength of the performance last night was more found in interesting character interactions and objectives. Two examples of the challenge were our Promiscuity and Indecency sets. We continue to struggle through our Promiscuity set. It is not because three suggestions are hard to juggle, it is because at it's core it is the closest thing a lot of us have ever done to long form, it is our first true experiment of taking an empty palette and building a 15 minute scene with sustaining content. In both last night's show and previous performances we are finding situational quick sand. We have an unhealthy attachment to resolving situations instead of exploring the world created. There was way too much time spent on a basketball court in the set last night and way too much time spent on dwarf jabs. When in doubt, we need to fall back on the world we created to find something better. We created outs, but didn't use them. Some questions we could have asked to get to a better place:
- What is the link between Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the initial world created? It is kind of strange a back story to a seemingly normal environment included fairy tale characters, let's explore.
- What does basketball have to do with the initial offer which was really solid: Girls changing boys in relationships?
Overall, our Promiscuity set has yet again showed us we need a lot more play time in the long form arena. It is also important to talk about our indecency set. A solid story, some fun details (Russian occupation, torture, aging love), but if you step back you'll realize the scene fell into crazy town. The strong objective floated us for the amount of time needed in the set, but after the produce affair was over, we wouldn't have had many places to go. Why? No one challenged an oddity which was there waiting to be taken: All of this was over a simple recipe. The humor of the indecency set could have been elevated much more if we had a straight character challenging the element of Russian conspiracy over a simple home made recipe.
If you go back through my last couple of blog posts you'll see similar elements being discussed about our long form. It's time to start asking myself what I need to do as director to help get us through a transition to solid long form quicker. I'm going to focus on three areas in the future:
- Better play time. Summer can get intense in Alaska, especially when you layer individual schedules on administrative prep for our third season. We are going to bring more focus to the improv arena in the coming months. In addition, I'll be joining the troupe in playing some of these sets over the next couple of rehearsals to get fresh perspective on the challenges faced. Rather than focus on our sets, we are going to focus on 10 - 15 minute longer form scenes based on single words. More play will always equal a better product.
- Don't just make it about a challenge. Hey, if you are reading this, I'm rewarding you by giving you one of our big announcements now instead of making you wait! We will be starting an Urban Yeti After Dark short form show in October. The focus will be high energy, uncensored short form games. The performers in Urban Yeti are amazing and I have no doubt in my mind they are going to kill these sets. By allowing Urban Yeti to offer different formats and letting our team mix it up, it is going to strengthen all of our performance offerings.
- Play AND watch. It is no secret Urban Yeti shares performers with other troupes in town. As a result, they put in a lot of time performing. I would like to find more ways for our performers to watch improv as well so they can sit back and identify/assess just like this blog does. This could include getting the troupe together to watch our own shows or finding some good internet/video content to offer a fresh perspective.
This blog focused a lot on improvements and potential change in the future, but I don't want that to detract from the talents our troupe has and continually shows each performance. I am very proud of the product we are putting up and the evolution of our improv. A start-up company is allowed to find themselves over the first 12 months of their existence. Another incredible aspect of this experiment is I am having some really great conversations with audience members and supporters about improv. I really think we are elevating the understanding of the art form and starting to bring in folks who don't just want to drink and hurl dick references on stage, they want to explore with us. Thank you to the performers who are bringing it set after set and thank you to our fans who are continuing to come out and support. We are truly creating change folks, can you feel it?
Look to our social forums this week, we are about to make announcements which are going to change the game completely...
Elevating into the Unknown

Let's talk about the artistic aspects of our show last night, let's talk about the improv. It is again important to re-iterate the troupe is working on a structure consisting of setting up a strong base reality, introducing an oddity into this world and then elevating this oddity by asking 'If this is true, then what else is true about the world we just created?' This last month, with-in these efforts we focused on everyman characters and really challenging the oddity because it is in the challenge detail arises. It is in this detail where humor is often found. We also worked starting our scenes 'in the action'. Rather than the first positions and lines of dialogue of our scenes being character introductions or 'talking heads' heavy, we wanted to spice things up by starting in the middle of strong, physical situations.
We are doing a fantastic job of setting up oddities in both rehearsal and our shows. These oddities are strong, they are fun and most importantly, they have the ability to establish games to play off of throughout the scene. Let me provide a list of a couple from last night's show to demonstrate my point:
- Base Reality = Fast Food establishment, Oddity = Souls of the animals killed to make the nuggets drive customer's to avenge their death
- Base Reality = Manufacturing facility where animals are harvested for food, Oddity = New hire employee has WAY too much passion for her work and comes up with inventive ways to harvest animals
- Base Reality = Fast Food Drive-Through, Oddity = Massive employee communication and mistakes are backed by confidence the customer is the idiot
- Base Reality = Waitress training to be a bartender, Oddity = Waitress has a lifetime of using awful ingredients in anything she makes that is dangerous to the human body, yet this goes uncorrected
- Base Reality = Female character growing up and going to high school, Oddity = Entire society is misogynist to the point female learning has to go underground
Where we need to continue improving is getting every single performer to identify similar oddities and work together to elevate with-in the context of the scene. Last night we a hard time reaching high notes throughout our scene work, finding those moments of high audience engagement. This was because of confusion introduced that couldn't be overcome with strong listening. An example of this was old librarian grandma in the misogynist society. Although a fun character, some performers confused this for the oddity while others were trying to stick with fun scenarios in a misogynist world. The scene lingered far too long on the aspect of libraries and librarians when the real gold was portrayed in scenes that asked questions like 'If this society is clearly different from our own in views of females, then what would a first date be like?' of 'If this character is not encouraged to learn at home, then what lengths does she have to go through to become an intelligent female?'. Another example was in our promiscuity set. The further into the scene we got, the further away we got from the original theme of odd ingredients. We got so far away the scene become a mixture of performers trying to stay true to it and those trying to drive plot points to conclusion. We need to continue working the 'If, then' questions of the worlds we are creating throughout the rehearsal process.
I love what we are doing and I am proud we are coming together as a team to try different ways of playing improv, ways I can honestly say have never been seen in Alaska. Everyone in Urban Yeti Improv started out with short form and loves it. Short form is a high energy and fun art which really sucks an audience in. In fact, I would like to do more of it with Urban Yeti in the future. Scenes average 3 - 5 minutes and the games are structured. You are placed in a sandbox with a playground that has slides, monkey bars, swings, even a weird dome jungle gym thing people are constantly getting hurt on. Some of us have done this for over a decade. But those of us in Urban Yeti all stepped to the edge of the sand box, looked at each other and asked what is outside of this playground. When we all took that step together we took on a very challenging art form. What happens after the five minutes? What happens when plot, funny character traits and big movements can no longer sustain the scene? What happens with less structure and more unknown? I'm confident what is starting to emerge and will continue to emerge more often will be comedy where the players can look back and be proud they literally made a whole play out of a single suggestion and in the process created a world that could be viewed for hours with excitement. Why try this? Simple, we are no longer just going to play on this playground, we are going to build it from scratch in front of an audience.
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