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DC improviser and actor Darnell Eaton talks with Puss and Kooch about who he wants to meet when he dies, playing like your heroes, and how to have better auditions.
Darnell Eaton on Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear everything Darnell has to say, listen to his podcast episode.
The indoor kid lifestyle
I’m very introverted but with extrovert tendencies. Mostly, I’m an introvert, though. I stayed in the house when I was a kid. I used to watch Nick at Night all the time. My mom would have to kick me outside, and I couldn’t wait until night came so I could watch Nick at Night.
What were your favorites shows?
There were too many! Bewitched was my favorite. I had this aspiration that I was going to meet Elizabeth Montgomery, but she died in the 1990s. I think everyone who was on that show is dead now.
But moving on, I Dream of Jeannie was another favorite. Barbara Eden is still alive, so I may meet her one day. Larry Hagman, who played the husband, died in 2012, so he’s out. I can’t meet him unless I die. I felt like the people on these shows were my friends.
I also loved The Patty Duke Show, Dobie Gillis, Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke is still living, so I could still meet him. I loved him. He was very physical and witty and charming and attractive. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was amazing.
I Love Lucy was the shit. I loved it so much. I loved that kind of wacky physicality. But my favorite show was The Martin Lawrence Show. That will always be my favorite show. I aspire to play the different types of characters Martin Lawrence can play.
He’s using a lot of his own experiences, things that have happened in his life and his culture and bringing them to light. With his ability to snap into those specific characters, it’s so much fun to see them all live. I loved Sheneneh, when he played his mom, and a few of his other characters.
I often try to play Jerome on stage. Sometimes I fail, but sometimes it’s a success. It depends on who you’re playing with and if they actually get it or not. But he’s so much fun. If you don’t know who Jerome is, he’s this greasy old-school player. I see these people on my streets—I live in Southeast—and they just have so much character and flavor. I want to be more of that.
Playing characters in improv
If it’s a looser format, I usually just go out and do whatever my impulse tells me to do. If it’s a more restrictive format, I have to think about options that makes sense. It’s a good thing, but sometimes it can be a little constraining if there are people I want to eventually play.
In teaching students, I’ll tell them to think of their heroes on TV and try to play how they’re playing. But almost everyone thinks they can’t. I feel that there’s this intrinsic fear of trying to play our heroes.
I agree with that a hundred percent. I think a lot of it is because of a style of improv, the encouragement to be grounded. That word is still very confusing to me in a sense of the degree of grounded that you have to be. That’s not how my brain is naturally wired. I want to be a little bit more zany and creative. I want to be more of that sometimes when I play.
You want to try to be that hero, but sometimes you wonder if the opportunity lends itself to that at any given time. Time is of the essence when you’re on stage. If you’re co-authoring a scene and don’t have good synergy with your scene partner, it’s hard to go out there and not fret over the fact that you’re being a crazy character.
Do you feel like you’re not getting supported sometimes?
No, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think there can sometimes be differences in how I was brought up and how other people were brought up. There are certain things I don’t get because I wasn’t part of a certain culture. Maybe they’re things I should know, but that’s just not how I grew up.
I remember hearing the word “torta” in a scene one time, and I had no idea what it was. Turns out it’s a type of Mexican sandwich, and I’d even had one before. I just didn’t know the word. A lot of times, I worry about cultural references and not getting them. But I don’t let that get in my way. I’ve gotten to a point now where I’ll go up to a scene partner and say, “What does this word mean?” especially if an audience member drops something I don’t know. And if my scene partner doesn’t know, I’ll work with whatever I have.
Doing things that bring you joy
When I was a little boy, like five or so, my uncle used to take me to the horse stable because he owned a few horses. I used to ride these little ponies. Then he passed away a couple years later, which was sad, and I never got to do it again.
So this is me going back to doing things I enjoy and have fun doing. I got to the horse stable and smelled manure for the first time in a long time, and it felt great. I wasn’t disgusted, it was very nostalgic. I was just like, “This is home. This feels like home.”
I feel like everybody in the theater or art space has a therapist. I think people need therapy because I think behavioral health is something people need to learn how to maintain. I wanted to try a life coach, so I tried one who was very helpful. She told me I needed to play more and embrace myself. I needed to go back many, many years and understand the things I used to like to do when I was younger and then be in that space more.
She had me do some exercises. I went and skipped in a park. She also told me to go get ice cream. She said, “Put it in an ice cream cone. Don’t put it in a cup. Lick it and enjoy it.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had an ice cream cone. So I took her advice. She had me jump up and down on a bed and all these other little fun things just to bring my youth back.
Once after finishing a run, I saw I needed to mow my lawn. The sprinklers were on, so I decided to turn them up and run through them. I’m in the hood, right? Everyone thought I was crazy. It was so weird and random, and the water was cold as shit. And then I got sick the next day. But it was a lot of fun. I want to do more of that, without the sick part.
Is there anything else you want to do?
Here’s my full list of things I want to do:
- Watch Martin Lawrence
- Watch Bewitched
- Plan a trip to somewhere peaceful
- Visit close friends
- Be the center of attention
- Observe nature
- Karaoke
- Learn dance choreography
- Make pizza
- Travel to foreign countries
- Horseback riding
- Learn how to bowl
- Spa treatments
- Speak French.
Now that I’m not working full-time for the government, I plan to go to a Francophone country and just stay there for a month. That would be cool. I’ve been looking at maybe going back to France, but I think Canada never gets any love. I’d like to go to Montreal and spend some time there. Or maybe I’ll go somewhere more exotic, like Algeria. I’m keeping my options open.
If you have any recommendations, let me know.
Acting and improv
I got into acting at age five. I was in The Night Before Christmas. I had to be a reindeer or something like that. When I was in Syracuse, New York, I got the chance to play the lead in Pecos Bill and play a cowboy. It was so much fun.
Then I got to sing for the first time in the chorus for a Christmas play. I sang “Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire.” The pianist must have changed keys several times while I was singing. I vaguely remember the audience standing up to clap except for my mom and my stepdad, who were dying laughing. That’s when I knew maybe singing wasn’t the right thing for me.
I waited until much later in my life to go back to theater. I had always wanted to do it because I used to watch Nick at Night and Turner Classic Movies. I took a class at school, which I thought was “Intro to Acting,” but it was actually “Improv for Acting.” I didn’t realize that until three weeks after the fact. I went up to the professor and asked where the scripts were.
So I got into that and did improv first. It was the only class I got an A in during undergrad. I made plenty of A’s in my master’s program, so I just want to put that out there on record. It was tough. I went to engineering school, and life was tough. I guess that’s why I’m not an engineer now.
What is your first creative move when you got to DC? Was it improv or acting?
I didn’t go back to improv until later. I was working and was just out of a relationship and felt like I needed to keep myself busy. I was in a club and got into a fight with my friend’s ex-boyfriend, and we got kicked out of a club. I used to go out religiously every single night and realized I couldn’t do that anymore. I knew I needed to find something to get into.
My professor told me I should look into doing improv as an adult, and I went to a Seasonal Disorder show and thought it was awesome. After every show, they mention that you can take classes. so I signed up for WIT classes as a New Year’s resolution. I took my first class in the winter of 2009.
I went through the curriculum and realized there was a lack in my ability to play relatable and real characters. Then I got plugged into Studio Theater and started with their conservatory. I really liked what I was learning, playing more emotionally grounded characters with realism. Greek tragedy was a great class to take. It was an eye-opener on how to play from a clean palette and play heavy and bigger than life with less energy and more efficiency.
Big deal achievements
There have been a couple moments that I felt like have been “big things” for me. Very early after I finished my second class at WIT, I formed a team called Subsidized Corn with several people from classes. We ambitiously, within that year, put on a show at Adelaide Fringe festival, like our own show.
We flew out to Australia and had five productions. We were headlining for an hour of our own production. That’s when I was like, “We’re big shit.” Because we did that. And this was within a year, and we hadn’t completed the curriculum or anything. We just wanted to do it.
I’m impressed when I hear about a level two team getting together to do a show at a bar, but you went to Australia? Do we need to tell indie teams to step it up?
The funny thing about it was, I was like, “We can’t do this. We need to finish the curriculum. You guys are crazy. We’re just going to go out there and have our own show and submit to a festival and get accepted and headline? Do you know what it takes?”
Then we all just did our part in getting stuff together, planning the flights, planning for places to stay. I was in charge of PR, so I got us a radio interview to publicize our show. It was a lot of fun. We spent five days in Sydney and in five days in Adelaide, and it was just amazing.
We didn’t get to see too much of the Australian improv scene because we were at the Fringe shows. We passed out so many flyers. We would go to grab something to eat and look in the trash, and a lot of our flyers were in there. But we did our thing out there. We had a few shows that were packed.
Another moment that was a big deal was getting cast in a Fringe show, 22 Boom, with Nu Sass Productions. I was with so many talented people in that show. Our play was based off of a show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind from the Neofuturists. They do 22 plays in two hours, and the audience chooses which order they go in. IWe’d do 22 scenes in 75 minutes, and as those scenes were going on, the twenty-second scene was being written on the spot. Then we would perform it.
Also, when I made Love Onion, I remember running around the table in my house at least 16 times because I had always wanted to be on a WIT house ensemble. That was just amazing. It allowed me to see that a lot of the work I’d been doing to prepare for this had paid off.
Was Love Onion the first WIT team you made?
Yeah, because I didn’t do Harold. I did Love Onion and then iMusical. I tried out for iMusical two times without making it. I made callbacks the first time and was super excited. The second time, I did not make the callbacks, which was fine.
The cool thing was that, during this whole process, I started learning how to perfect auditioning and understanding how to audition properly.
Darnell Eaton’s advice for auditions
You shouldn’t see an audition as a job interview. It’s an opportunity to share what you can offer and provide, almost as if it’s a collaboration. It’s like, “Hey, this is what I’m offering to you to show you my skill set,” versus putting it into the perspective of, “I hope they like this.”
I think when you change that perspective, it gives you more power in an audition. That’s something I had to learn in an audition class, which I took at Studio Theater.
That really resonates with me. I think when you’re trying out for Harold, it feels more like a job interview. They’re looking for someone who has a minimum set of skills. But when you’re trying out for an ensemble, it’s different. It’s more like, “Hey, I’m here. I’m like this. Do you like it?” And if not, it’s not that you haven’t met the bare minimum.
If you think about it, they want you to be the person that they want there. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have allowed you to come into the audition. The auditors want you to be that person.
If you are more confident or play more confidently and allow yourself to just show yourself and then say, “Hey, this is what I have to offer. Is this a fit?” and then not take it personally when it’s not, you’ll get more success. You can just walk away saying, “Okay, I did something fun. I hope I get a call.”
Thanks for getting wet with Puss and Kooch
Tune in next week for an interview with improviser Kristina Martinez!
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