I took a few hours tonight and threw together what I remembered of the recent history of improv at CMU. There's probably stuff that's missing, and wrong, and hideously slanted to my point of view.

But I thought you all might get a kick out of seeing it anyway.

Max

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Around New Year's, I was talking to Adam about my near-mania for telling Old Stories of the Good Old Days when Everything Was Much Better Than It Is Now, and You Kids Don't Know Nothing About Nothing, and Turn Down That Darn Rap Music Before I Turn The Hose On You.

So he suggested that I actually write some of it down, because the website doesn't really have a History of NPP. So I am, because it makes me feel important.

This is just the way I see the last eight years or so of improv at CMU; I did my best to be objective, but other people might tell you something different. So here's how this all started, as best as I can remember:

My freshman year was 1994-1995, and Scotch 'n' Soda only did four shows a year. Actually, four shows represented a big increase; only a few years before, they had only done one or two. Skibo (the old student center) had just been torn down, so we were performing in the Drill Deck in the basement of the Navel Building. (I know that's misspelled, but I find it funny.)

There were, believe it or not, more people interested in being involved in Scotch 'n' Soda than there were opportunities to perform. So the board and the General Meeting Coordinator did a regular series of workshops called Playworks. I attended these only sporadically, so I could be wrong bout this part, but they typically consisted of an hour or so of theatre games and an hour or so of a workshop, where someone who knew something about something taught all the youngins how to do stuff.

There were an awful lot of freshman at the time. Anyway, that's how Playworks went the fall semester. In the spring, the general meeting coordinator (Lysander Abadia, a sophomore) asked around if anybody would be interested in getting together and doing some improv informally, in the lounge outside of his room at Morewood. I said that I'd be interested in getting involved, and even though I didn't know a whole lot about improv, I'd be happy to help him run things.

So he went to the board with the idea, and they asked if anyone was interested in helping get this project started. Brian Fredrickson (another freshman) and I both volunteered.

For the rest of the semester, improv consisted of people who all would have been hanging out together anyway sitting around in a lounge and amusing themselves. Me, Lysander, Erik Gaghan, Lisa Kouvolo, Brian, Taylor Wray, Sameer Karim, Matt McKeon, and I'm sure there were more people, but I don't remember who. I think I remember Ken Legum, Robyn Nace (now Robyn Chittister, thank you very much), Kellie Walsh, Wendy Jones (now Wendy Tucker), and Lou Bojarski being there fairly often as wel, but that might have been during the following year.

Over the summer, Wendy (the incoming president) wrote a show called Snapshots, which consisted of starting positions for a number of actors (between two and eight, and there might have been one that only had one), and a title. The concept was that actors would be given the number of a sketch and a starting position, and they would assume that position in blackout. when they were in position, the director would read the title of the scene, and the actors would do a scene. When the actors found an end to the scene (which they couldn't do by leaving the stage), the director would say "Smile!" and a strobe would go off, simulating a camera flash. Hence the name.

She came to me and Brian and asked if we'd be interested in doing the show in September of 1995, with a very short rehearsal period. Brian agreed to direct, and I agreed to stage manage.

Long story short, we did the show with a two-week rehearsal period, and it was a modest success. It actually made money, because we spent about $175 on some stock costumes and props, and a plywood "frame" around the stage, to make it look like a page in a scrapbook. The cast (if I recall correctly) was Samir, Tyler Gregg, Paul Tabachneck, Dave Hirscfield, Hannah Rohlfs, Shana Reade, Fiona Bedford, Kim Sims, and Renee... Renee... dammit, I can't believe I can't remember Renee's last name. And you just know she'll be the only one who reads this all the way through. And she'll beat me up. She could do it too.

Aside: It took Taylor at least two years before he forgave me and Brian for not casting him.

At the same time as this show was going on, there were two other improv-related activities going on. 1995 was the first year that Scotch 'n' Soda did a Homecoming show, as such. It was a scrawny little slapped-together revue (thus starting a trend, unwittingly and unfortunately), and the directors wanted to have a short improv show. Because Brian was already directing Snapshots, the board wanted either Samir or me to direct it. I didn't want to do it, because I thought people might not see that it was a different show than Snapshots, so Samir took the job.

If memory serves, the improv show in the Homecoming Show included me, Taylor, Fiona, Matt, and Hannah, for the record.

I just tried to look Renee's name up on the website, but somebody took down the archives. Man, I thought you had my back, guys. Though the random pictures are pretty fly.

My memory is fuzzy here, but Samir became the nominal head of the regular improv meetings due to much the same reasoning. I don't remember if that was so much a conscious decision, or just how things worked out. Lysander had become VP, and I was one of two general meeting coordinators, byt improv was separate from general meetings, and the "teach the youngins about theatre" aspect of Playworks disappeared as SnS realized that it could handle more than four shows a year. I don't think we even used the name Playworks that year.

(A few more attempts were made over the years to resurrect Playworks, but they almost all went over like the proverbial lead balloon, though Alex Lewin ran a decent set of writing workshops in the spring of '97.)

Improv remained a sporadic, just-for-fun type thing for most of the rest of the year. We got a bit more rigorous about taking attendance and trying to introduce new games. That fall was when Paul introduced us to Friday Night Improvs, in the old Pit Theatre in Oakland. We learned a whole bunch of new games there. Lisa started dating one of the Susquehana Hat Co. members, and the Hat Co. helped out a bit with some teaching. Slowly but surely, we started to focus a little bit more on learning some new skills.

That fall was when we came up with the name "No Parking Players". The name itself came from a fellow named Lou Bojarski. He's probably still living at the corner of Beeler and Wilkins, in that house with the big wooden fence, and the porch off the back door with a grill made out of car parts. If you stop by, ask if he still has my dining room table in the basement. Bit I digress. Lou came up with the name because of a project we were working on in the summer of '95. Wendy wanted to direct a show called "Geniuses" (with a cast of Lou, Robyn, Ken, Jeremy Kriegel, Matt, and me, in the role of a lifetime: Winston, the Filipino boydguard), but we needed a space. We looked into that small gray building at the back of the Navel Building, near where the police station is (or was at the time). It was designed to test submarine parts or something, because it was watertight and intended to be flooded. I don't know how, but SnS and Wendy convinced Dean Murphy to allocate some money to determining if it would be feasible to turn that building into a black box theatre.

It turned out that it wasn't, but Lou had dubbed our summer troupe the No Parking Players, because the gray not-a-theatre has "No Parking" written on it in red approximately every six inches. (And we couldn't call ourselves Scotch 'n' Soda, because we were doing the show over the summer.)

"Geniuses" never happened (that's a whole OTHER set of long boring stories; ask Lou when you go see him), but the name kinda hung around. When Brian decided he wanted to name the improv troupe, ther were two finalists: the No Parking Players, and the Peanut Gallery. The Peanut Gallery was because whenever there was the slightest opening for a wise-ass comment, either Lisa, Taylor, or I would be right there with the wise-ass comment. The other two of us would respond, "Hey, no comments form the peanut gallery."

No Parking Players won by one vote. I was pissed; I thought No Parking Players was a dumb name. I eventually changed my mind, though. Woodscotch had also made its first appearance in '94-'95, and there was almost always improv there, because it was entertaining, which put it one up on pretty much everything else there. But other than those, NPP didn't do any performances as a troupe until the very end of the spring '96 semester. I never knew if SDC asked Samir to get the troupe to perform, or if Samir volunteered the troupe, but NPP performed at some kind of SDC event.

I'm fuzzy on this because I wasn't there. The event was on the same night as Woodscotch, and as one of the GMC's, I was going to be there. And I was PISSED at Brian and Samir for taking the troupe to that show instead of Woodscotch, and I really hated the idea of a performing troupe instead of a fun learning troupe.

Come to think of it, I might have been misspelling Samir's name this entire time. I'll go back and fix it, maybe, if somebody ever puts the archives back on-line.

Fall 1996 was the freshman year of Donovan Chase, Ayne Terceira, and Kat Torrey, and the return of Jason Specland. Jason had spent a year at CMU on 1993-94, then left. He went back to Florida, where he worked and learned all about improv.

Now we're getting to people you might have heard of, which means we're coming to the end of the stuff that only I remember and care about, so count your blessings.

Samir and Brian were both on the board at this point, and I was trying to be less involved in SnS, due to personal reasons that have nothing to do with improv and everything to do with my now-legendary reputation for bitterness. Samir stopped going to improv, and I wasn't interested in running anything, so the three-headed monster died and Brian became the full director. (Taylor had also drifted away from SnS and improv at that point.) Brian's vision was one of NPP as a performing troupe. The thing is, he didn't do a very good job of communicating that to anyone; we were all expecting things to be as they had been before.

I think it was the second or third meeting of the year, Brian went quasi-postal, infoming everyone that they weren't there to fool around, and he wanted them to treat improv meetings the same as they would treat rehearsals for a show. I left the troupe after that, because I didn't want to be in on that atmosphere.

Kat, Don, Jason, or Ayne could tell you more about the rest of this semester. All I know is that Brian showed less and less interest in improv, and he pretty much appointed Ira Fey as the assistant director. Since Ira wouldn't take his rollerblades off during rehearsals, the bar wasn't exactly being set high, if you take my meaning.

If I hadn't been cheap and skipped out on buying a yearbook, I'd remember Renee's name. Robyn probably knows, but I want to find it myself.

At the beginning of the Spring '97 semester, Brian quit improv and the board made Jason the director of the troupe. I volunteered my services to him, in case there was anything I could do to help him run things. Subtext: Max knows all about improv, and he'd be happy to help you do this, if you can't handle it. In all of the things I've been wrong about in the history of NPP (and there have been many), that's the one I was wrongest about.

Littleton! Renee Littleton! And I have been misspelling Sameer's name, but that's much less important than remembering Renee's last name. Thank God you can still get to the archives by typing in http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sns/archives/

This part is actually where my memory gets fuzziest, because I wasn't as involved in the troupe as others. I was being the PL for Godspell, and then finally being on the board in '97-'98. The funny thing is, this is the part where most people would say the "real" history of NPP begins.

But if I remember correctly, in the spring of '97, the membership was pretty much down to me, Taylor, Jason, Ayne, Don, and Kat. I can't remember if Mike Strauss was around then, or if he didn't come around until the fall. Either way, he wasn't as serious about improv as the six of us were, and so doesn't really factor into this story.

Jason did a wonderful job of teaching us about actual, honest-to-God improv, with his experience to back him up, instead of the vauge things that Brian, Sameer, and I had learned out of texts. But we didn't really do any performing, because Jason didn't think we were ready. We started performing in Skibo Coffeehouse late in the semester, and into the fall of '97. At first, the organization was good about supporting the shows and coming to watch, but that dwindled pretty quickly, and that's when the schism between the memberships of SnS and NPP began.

Fall '97 was the first appearance of Adam, Ron Laufer, Maurice Parent, Nathan Clark, Susan Dernyar, Kang Wu, and other people I'm probably insulting by forgetting them. Will Uther had worked on Godspell in spring '97, and he started showing up to improv when time allowed. He spent more time at FNI than the rest of us did, and kept a tentative like between the two groups. Krista Contino started coming around in spring '98, if I recall correctly.

Jason left the university for personal reasons after the fall '97 season. There was much weeping. I am NOT being sarcastic. Directorship passed to Kat, with Don, Ayne, and Taylor supporting.

The guy you should ask about this time period is Taylor. He'd be better at it than me. In fact, I'm going to stop trying to remember what was going on in the troupe at this time, because there are many other who could do it better than I. I'm going to skip ahead to Improv '98.

Ten years before, there had been a Carnival show called Improv '88. That's all anybody knew about it. That might have been the first appearance of Chumley and Chest, actually. (Mick and Mike, to those who aren't as cool as me.) We were hurting for Carnival show ideas in '98, so I made a vauge proposal of a full-bore improv show, in the name of seeing what we could do in terms of an improvised show with the full weight of the organization behind us.

The proposal got squashed pretty quick, as two directors stepped up with proposals for musicals that were worth putting on a Carnival stage. But I re-proposed for a March performance slot, and it passed.

My original plan was to run a few weeks of rehearsals, and videotape what we did. Then, cull the best stuff from the tapes and do a show of it. Basically, the model that Second City uses to put their sketch shows together, only with less time spent in rehearsals.

I pitched that pretty quick, because I was afraid the actors would just play to the camera.

So without any real vision, I opened up the show to anyone and everyone who was interested in coming. I had Don as an assistent director, and Ron Laufer as a stage manager. Exactly six people showed up to the first day of rehearsals: Taylor, Ayne, Kat, Maurice, dave Hirschfield, and Brian Magerko (who had been into and out of improv a few times in the last couple of years).

So unfortunately, the first real attempt at opening up improv to the main SnS population, and they were all too intimidated to try it.

Right about the time of the first rehearsal, I asked Steve Werber (the director of the Hat Co.) for some help, and he steered me toward "Truth in Comedy". Literally; Steve worked at Barnes and Noble, and he steered me right to it. That's where I discovered long form improv, and the Harold.

I'm assuming everyone reading this is at least slightly versed in the Harold.

This was NPP's first attempt at carrying any kind of character over from one scene to the next; Jason was never a big proponent of recurring characters, so we'd never done much with them. I was always sad about that; I saw nothign wrong with recurring characters, as long as you keep putting them in interesting situations.

The going was slow; people were having trouble picking up on the intricacies of the form. Also, we were starting the Harolds with three-line scenes to generate ideas; I'd never heard of the Invocation, and the only other idea-generating game I knew was Limelight, and I didn't want to add music. Ayne did that a year later.

Plus, we had some of the issues that I'd feared during the Snapshots/Homecoming thing a few years (and pages) ago. Kat and I had some trouble remembering who was directing who, because I didn't quit performing while I was directing I'98. The fact that I was a raving lunatic who did a barely competant job of hiding how much I was flying by the seat of my pants didn't help.

To this day, I've never performed in long form improv. I talk a good game, but I couldn't act in a Harold to save my life.

The full weight of the organization never got behind the show. Everyone was tied up in Much Ado the month before, and Assassins the month after (included Dave and I, who were in the cast of AssAss, and Ron and Don, who were in Muchado). I asked Lou to design a set with a few different levels, and some areas where people could play. I was hoping that something other than a black box would emerge.

I always liked the set he did. Basically, it was the alley from West Side Story. There was a floor level, a platform behind a distressed fence (ask Taylor and Adam about distressing the fence), a fire escape going up the side of a brick building, and a car. No shit, a real car. It was held together with duct tape and prayers, and you weren't allowed to touch it, but there was a car.

The cast hated the set. They were convinced it was going to collapse at any second. We tried to throw in some improvised lights and sound effects, but the entire staff was so burned out, it never really happened. I was always sorry about that; I always thought some creative lighting would have made a big difference.

Anyway, I'98 was a success in that everyone who worked on it had a good time, and it sewed the seeds for further serious work in long form improv.

For the organization, it was a disaster. Jared Bendt (the co-TD) left a table saw and a bunch of tools unlocked in the basement of Margaret Morrison, and they were stolen right before build on AssAss started. Plus, the producer and/or publicity head lost the cash box, so our ticket profits were exactly $6. I think that's all I have to say about the origins of the latest incarnation of improv at CMU. I know there are holes here. If you want them filled, ask the people I talked about at the beginning. Robyn was the historian of SnS for two years; she might know more about past efforts. Ask Jason about what he was teaching, and what his goals were. Heck, ask all of the directors that. Ask Taylor about the different directors he worked with, and ask Kat and Ayne and Will and Lisa about evolving long form. Ask Don about starting the voting procedures and the Hall of Fame. Ask Kat about how we started playing Game accidentally when we were playing Film and Theatre Styles, and she forgot to change the style. The only goal we started out with back in the day was to have fun and to get people involved when they couldn't do shows. No way did anybody expect it to last as long as it has and grow the way that it has. Keep trying new stuff, and keep adding onto and filling out this history. And have fun. And don't turn your back to the audience, for Christ's sake.