Gettin’ to Know Ryan Gowland
Posted by Brary | Filed under Interviews, The Brary
Ryan is a longtime improviser at iO here in LA and back in Chicago. That’s where I first saw him. I’ve been a fan ever since. Every Tuesday USS Rock N Roll has the pleasure of sharing the 9 o’clock hour with Local 132, Ryan’s smart and funny ensemble. I recently asked Ryan some questions about his background and his thoughts on improv. His answers are well worth a look.
How did you get started in improv?
I think my interest started probably like a lot of people – doing improv games in high school drama class. At that point, my experience with improv was pretty much limited to the British version of *Who’s Line is it Anyway?* Growing up in San Diego, there wasn’t much improv around, and if there was any I certainly didn’t know of it. I started a sketch group in high school, and I guess we basically improvised as we wrote.
I didn’t get involved in improv again until after college when I was in a theater group in the Bay Area. I loved doing theater but I was growing tired of being, you know, *dramatic* all the time. I always held out hope that we’d throw a comedy in there amongst the Chekhov and Shakespeare, so I started another sketch group, the award-winning Old Man McGinty, (we only won one award, but I love saying “award-winning”). I ran our rehearsals using improv games I took from various books and somehow no one stopped me and asked me what the fuck I was doing.
My theater company gave us a space for our first show and and then finally produced an original comedy play that I was in, but at that point I had decided to move to Chicago and study improv because I had heard of Second City. I knew about nothing else there besides Steppenwolf and knew nobody in town, but I moved anyway. A director friend in San Francisco told me to study with Del Close, but neglected to mention iO or the fact that Del had already died. Instead, I learned about iO from a fellow temp worker on one of my first jobs there.
I’d been in Chicago for a couple months and was taking the one class I ever took at Second City, and had no clue what iO was at all. When my co-worker told me about iO, I went to see my first iO show, which I remember was a Cagematch because I was broke and it only cost 3 bucks to get in. I pretty much fell in love right then and there. It was everything I was looking for: it was like real theater, but created instantly and, on top of it all, it was funny. I started going to shows pretty much every night they were open for my first summer in Chicago.
Can you tell us about your improv journey and where you are currently?
I think I was always pretty confident in my ability to improvise, to an absolute fault. I moved to Chicago having been surrounded by theater actors that weren’t too keen on improv, giving me the mistaken impression that I, the “funny guy” in a theater group, would kill there. I thought I would be in Chicago for a year, two years tops, and work for Second City. I had no idea that so many people, far more talented than I, had the exact same idea.
In one of my first classes at iO, I got ripped by Liz Allen, my teacher, because I was doing some of the worst bits on earth and finding myself incredibly clever for it. I was glad she did. It stopped me in my tracks. I pretty much realized that no one was going to mistake me for a master of improv and I ought to take the time to listen and figure out how to do this instead of blindly believing that I could. When I was in doubt, I just tried to remind myself that it was just like acting in theater, we just didn’t have the benefit of weeks and weeks of rehearsal.
I don’t know what it says about me, but I think I’m still in the same place. I just love being able to create theater from nothing, with the added benefit of it being funny. I would like to be less controlled by bits and more controlled by character and emotion, and I’d like to think that, on a good night, I do that. I just want to be more consistent. Craig Cackowski said, and I’m totally paraphrasing here, that a good improviser does maybe 6 good scenes out of 10, and that the work is to try and bring your average up, even though no one is 10 out of 10. It just doesn’t happen. But we all keep trying anyway.
I had Miles Stroth as a teacher really early on, and he said – and again, I’m paraphrasing – that you should learn how you can be funny and get your laughs and once you do that, then the real work begins. He said he got to a point where he was confident he could get laughs and stopped worrying about them. I was in the gestational phase of my improv education and hearing that blew my mind. I couldn’t believe someone so funny didn’t care about laughs. But I think that’s the goal. For me, its perfecting that kind of focus and adapting and adjusting that personal goal to a group context.
I know you spent time in Amsterdam with Boom Chicago. What’s improv and comedy in general like in the Netherlands?
Boom Chicago was an amazing experience, and I’m forever grateful to those guys that they brought me over. To prepare for it, I asked a Boom alumni in Chicago what to expect and he told me, “when in doubt, fall down.” I think that was solid advice, though its not just because the Dutch love slapstick (though they do) but because if you were stumped on how to win over the crowd it was good to remember that someone falling down was always funny. Extremes did very well there.
The other bit of advice I got was written on the wall backstage and it said, “subtlety plays…with my balls.” That was the truest advice I got there. Boom is like a big rock concert but with improv games. Subtlety doesn’t really jibe with a rock concert. It’s big, it’s loud, you know, we often got to run backstage and put on a ridiculous costume. One time I was given the suggestion of “Iraq” for a character, so I went backstage and put on a full desert camo outfit with a beard and a toy machine gun. I ran back onstage and was asked, “What do you do?” And I said, “I’m a teacher.” That’s about as subtle as you can go there.
They tell you to leave your pop culture references at the door, despite how well everyone speaks English. And mostly, they are right. However, my cast mate Dan referenced *Back to the Future* if not every show, then every other, so it wasn’t a hard and fast rule. A lot of the humor there was political, and audiences loved that we Americans could laugh at ourselves. George Bush the Second was President, so, because of my gray hair, I played Bush more than Dan mentioned *Back to the Future*. It wasn’t a hard impression. I fell down a lot.
There is a *Who’s Line is it*-type show on Dutch TV, but I felt like Holland was still learning what improv was all about, not unlike, oh, every country. I think Boom has had a huge impact over there and more improv troupes have begun by students after taking classes at Boom, so I think the theater has had a lasting impact on the comedy scene there. Improv is more short form out there, though. We did a free long-form show when I was there, but I don’t know how much that has taken off with the Dutch folk. You know what they say about subtlety.
On that note, what are the differences for you in doing improv in Chicago and here in LA?
I honestly think that there is less differences than most would think. Again it was Miles who said that we will always be ambassadors for long form, but, in Chicago, its been around longer and isn’t (always) seen as this weird, alien thing. In LA its much newer art form, though iO and UCB are making some real strides to make up the difference quickly.
That said, I think audiences are slightly more prepared for long form in Chicago, and are also far more willing to attend it despite freezing temperatures. Coming from California, I really thought we would completely lose crowds during the winter after hustling audiences to come see plays in the Bay Area in the middle of summer, but people show up. Chicago is more of a theater town, and, I hope I’m not insulting anyone here, but LA isn’t. Otherwise I think the work is the same here as there with the exception of having UCB as well.
Having two long form theaters in town with each having its own particular philosophy on the Harold is a really healthy exchange and pretty damn exciting. I guess it’s sort of like having both the Annoyance Theater and iO in Chicago. I wish the two theaters here would do more to work together, as there’s sort of this weird “you’re a UCB person *or* an iO person but not both” (with exceptions, of course) but I like that at least there’s the competition.
What most excites you about improv?
Performance-wise, I don’t think I’ve lost my excitement for what will happen on stage before a show. The unexpected is still the drug.
As for when I watch improv, it’s exciting for me to see it when it becomes theater. Some of the best theater I’ve ever seen has been watching improv shows. I saw The Subject in Chicago and one show had Christina Gausas as a woman who had lost her husband, T.J. Jagodowski, who appeared to her often as a ghost. While we see that “ghost” move a lot, they treated it in such an emotional way, that the scenes were as heartbreaking as they were hilarious.
I also saw Miles improvise a show by himself, and it was one of the best pieces of theater I’ve ever seen. I also watched a lot of T.J. and Dave shows in Chicago and they were always incredible pieces of theater.
What are your hopes for improv and its impact on the world?
I guess I hope improv keeps getting better and keeps evolving. I don’t see it slowing down, that’s for sure. It’d be nice if people didn’t hear “improv” and instantly think you were a stand-up comedian, but frankly, a lot of improvisers *are* stand-ups, so it’s not that outrageous an idea.
As for it evolving, I think there are new forms out there to be created and more ways for people to push long form improv. The Harold is a great structure, but what’s beyond it? I’m not too precious about form, and I think we aren’t thinking beyond it often enough. I think the JTS Brown form is perceived like this indecipherable “triangle offense” of improv, but I think more people should learn that or the Deconstruction and then figure out what we can do next. In a way, form is the improv version of a written play, and it feels like we’ve stopped “writing” our improv plays. There are many more ways to explore ideas hatched from a group context, so I think we should be able to come up with different ways to improvise a story.
Where do you see the future of improv going?
I heard John C. Reilly on NPR talking about *Cyrus* and the fact that it was completely improvised. He said it was what drew him to the project. Mike Leigh has been doing the same process for years. While I’m not advocating the obliteration of screenwriters, I love seeing improv being used as a storytelling tool and not just as “ad-libbing” to make a comedy movie funnier. I think that improv has its place in movie making and not just in a mockumentary. I think that there’s still a divide in respect to people’s opinion of improv. I think it still has the stink of being “cheap,” as if saying “well, we just made it up” means it can’t be very good or as good as something that was written or rehearsed.
Being in a theater company, the stories that always circulated were the ones where “things went wrong.” When something happened that wasn’t rehearsed. That’s when everyone snapped out of their rehearsed performance and were forced to be in the moment in a living theater piece, and it was so exhilarating that everyone kept talking about it for years after. It was moments like those that pushed me to want to do improv. There’s just so much more to improv than just bits, though, don’t get me wrong, I fucking love bits.
Tags: Local 132, Ryan Gowland
