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We’re back. Did you forget about us? You shouldn’t have. We were hot and heavy in March. Then we ghosted you for a bit. But now, it’s summertime, and we’re back, easy, breezy, and beautiful. We have sun hats and sundresses and wedges—or, at least, Kara does.
But we didn’t decide to come back just to talk about Kara. We’ve got a really exciting preview of our new podcast series, Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch, which will start in August. But before that, we thought you needed to know about a show called Want and Need by Kristin OBrien and Zach Mason It’s at DCAC, and it opens on Friday, July 19. We’ll be there on opening night, so you can sit with us.
The show features performers Analía Gómez Vidal, Caroline Chen, Erin Murray, Sam Schifrin. So go! You can purchase your tickets on Zach and Kristin’s website.
In the meantime, you can listen to the podcast on repeat until the show starts and enjoy this wonderful conversation we had with Kristin. She’s an awesome person who has some really awesome stuff inside her brain, and we loved digging into it.
A conversation with Kristin OBrien
We talked with Kristin about the idea and effort behind constantly creating. We also talked with her about Barbara Bush—Puss and Kooch loves talkin’ some bush—and her partnership with Zach Mason, with whom she created, directed, and produced Want and Need.
Some of the following questions and responses have been edited for clarity. To hear the full conversation with Kristin, listen to her podcast episode.
Do you teach at all?
I have no desire to teach, which feels really shitty to say. I feel ashamed of it, but I’ve never wanted to be a teacher in my life, of anything. I hosted a couple Harold Night jams, and I hated it. I never want to do that again.
I think because I do stuff with kids now—that’s not teaching, thank god—I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything in terms of doing some sort of social good.
What do you do with kids?
I just came from Alateen. Al-Anon is for friends and family members of alcoholics, and Alateen is a group that’s just for kids. This is the only one that’s in Montgomery County, and there are only three in this part of the state. There’s one in DC, one and Prince George County that’s closing, and the one we just started two years ago in Montgomery.
I love doing that. It feels good to give kids a place to talk about that stuff and not feel shame. And that’s what improv does for me, in a way. If you don’t know, Zach and I do really dark, gloomy, and introspective comedy all the time. I love doing that, and it’s cathartic for me. I think that’s what I get through doing Alateen, giving kids a place to just talk and be themselves.
I recently relistened to Zach’s podcast episode, and he talked a lot about you guys being “that person” for each other through Harold auditions.
Yeah, that was really nice, to have someone who has anxiety like I do—we’re both high-key anxiety people—with me.
Suggesting to each other, “How about we just not do this?” as an escape is a thing Zach and I do all the time. Our first Zach and Kristin show went off the rails because the tech didn’t work. The plugs on the stage didn’t have any electricity going to them. I don’t know what’s up with DCAC’s infrastructure—sorry to call you out, DCAC—but the plugs along the stage weren’t functional. So everything we’d planned didn’t work.
We decided to do the show anyway—it was a sold out show. But Zach was having a bit of a panic attack backstage and said, “We could just leave. We could get new names and never come back. We could skip town and never do this, and no one would know.”
But we’re both big Dolly Parton fans, so I just said, “What would Dolly do, Zach? The show must go on, my friend”
It was traumatic, but it was so nice having someone there who said all the things I was thinking.
You two connect on your anxiety. How does that make you feel?
It makes me feel so seen, in a way, having someone voice all of my concerns out loud. We’re basically best friends. Beyond improv, we have each other’s backs in every part of life. Zach is a real push for what I do and being comfortable. He doesn’t shame me about anything or make me feel like I have to do more things.
I felt that way when I first started doing improv, like I had to do everything. I had to audition for Harold or I wasn’t going to be successful. I had to want to be on an ensemble. And I didn’t really want any of those things, and it felt strange to say that to people who were so driven. It felt isolating.
Zach and I were on the same Harold team, Diviglio. I left the Harold program before Zach because I was very unhappy. And that’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, honestly. But it feels indulgent and guilty to say, “Quitting Harold was great.”
I love making those decisions as an adult where you can say, “Actually, this isn’t working for me.” I felt the same way on Harold. I loved the people, but I didn’t like the program. But I felt like I needed to stay and that had to be a part of my journey.
Right, or you’re not going to get on an ensemble or have these opportunities or people aren’t going to take you seriously because you didn’t do the track that everybody else does. I didn’t do that, and now I do all the shit I want to do without having to compromise my happiness.
Did that coincide with anything else? For me, whenever I get the impetus to be like, “Fuck you! I do what I want!” there’s a ripple effect. Did you a similar experience?
Not really. I’ve had the same job for five years. I’m pretty much a person who sticks with things. I know I’m a part of a group called The Quitters, but I’m very much not a quitter in every other facet of my life.
I think I was just so unhappy in Harold. I loved the team, Diviglio. They’re great people, but I was just so unhappy. I was sitting in rehearsals wondering why I was there. Doing that for a while, I just got fed up. I got to the point where I asked myself, “Why am I doing this if I’m so unhappy?”
I felt like the Kristin outside of that room was so much stronger and so much more self-possessed about what she wanted. I had done all that work outside of comedy, but I think because I had so much insecurity about my position in the comedy community and about me as a performer, I compromised my own happiness to be there.
Feeling like I couldn’t access that other Kristin was not acceptable to me. I became disappointed in myself for letting myself get so unhappy in this situation because I’ve been through so much more in my life. I just realized I didn’t deserve that. I could be happy outside of Harold and could do things that made me happy.
So I think that gave me the strength, knowing that I’ve been through worse than quitting Harold. But at the time, it felt like such a big choice. It felt unbelievable to quit. Even my teammates said, “But what if you don’t get on an ensemble? What if you never get cast again?”
What did you do after leaving Harold?
I started focusing on my indie team, The Quitters, a lot more because I get so much joy out of seeing them. I love those women so much. I love performing with them, but I love them as people.
Finding people that I love as people outside of improv and being able to play with them every week is a miracle in my life. We have a GroupMe where we talk every day, and I am so thankful because I never would have met those people outside of getting into improv. They make me so, so happy.
So I dove into that. I made us a bunch of rules and regulations after that point to maintain the integrity of the group. So we have bylaws.
Has it been the same core team for a while?
It was me, Molly Graham, and Tonya Jordan at first because we all did classes together (with Zach). Then we quit Zach’s team, so that’s where the name came from.
From there, we formed our own team. We wanted it to be not a bunch of white ladies, so we made an effort to go out to different activities outside of the core theaters. We have women over 40, as well, which is interesting in our community because that’s rare. Without going into the community to find people who were truly good that may not have wanted to get into classes because of the price barrier has given us such a blessing. I don’t think we would have found some of our performers if we hadn’t gone outside of the kind of the core theaters.
Where did you find them?
We found Sanaa Abrar at Bagelz and Jam. Tracee Jordan was on the indie group, The High-Fivers. We saw Andrea Quach at a LIT performance.
So that was a conscious effort. In recruiting, we knew we wanted the group to be more representative of DC, and that meant putting in the work. At the very beginning, part of our recruiting process was requiring current members to go to two different indie shows each month. Then we’d put people’s names in a hat and discuss them. We should just do open call auditions. But sometimes those don’t get out to enough people, either.
I love the idea of going to all these different events because there are tons of people who have left classes or didn’t make Harold and are doing their own things. And people have kind of forgotten about them, but they’re strong performers.
Sanaa does nothing else in the community, and I love that. She didn’t take any more classes, but she’s one of my favorite performers. That doesn’t have to prevent you from being a good performer. You don’t have to take classes to do improv. She’s been playing with us for five years because we found her right at the beginning. So she’s had coaches like Caroline Pettit, Kate Symes, and Donna Steele. She’s had that training, just in a different way. I think that’s a perfectly valid way to go through improv.
How many different iterations of Zach and Kristin have there been?
There’s been Zach and Kristin Will Make You Cry, Zach and Kristin Will Make You Slumber Party, Zach and Kristen Will Make You One of Our Sweet Baby Angel Children. That was my favorite. It was a house show that we opened for The Lodge. We dressed up as Marilyn and Daniel. I had an Annie wig from a Halloween store. We were a married couple, and everybody in the audience was our children, who were home for Thanksgiving because the show was around Thanksgiving.
We’ve done other things. We did Will Make You Cry and Slumber Party a few times. And now we’re doing our play, Want and Need, and neither of us are in it. We wrote and are directing and producing it, so it is our baby.
How did you come up with the idea and cast for Want and Need?
It was at the end of In Lieu of Flowers, which I did tech for. I never want to tech again, but doing tech for that show was so much fun because I got to call their edits. I got to pick the music with Sam Schifrin. I got to do the lighting design myself. Adding elements to that and working on the set design with Zach and Lura was so cool.
That show was so meaningful, and I got to meet people in the community that I hadn’t worked with before. And some of them are in Want and Need.
Right after In Lieu, Zach and I were sitting at Black Cat drinking and commiserating, and Zach asked me what I wanted to do as our next project. And I said I would want to do an improvised Noises Off, which is a 1980s movie. It’s a play within a play. It’s very physical, slapstick comedy. It has a comedic onstage that’s affected by all the drama that’s going on backstage. There’s a pregnancy announcement that ends up being heard onstage, and that affects how they act with each other. And there are people running on- and offstage. It’s a bit like a Benny Hill sketch.
But that whole dynamic of the backstage screwing up the play is really fun, and that’s what I wanted to see. So Zach said, “Let’s do it.” And we put our own spin on it and made it gloomy.
Our onstage is a very serious play, and our offstage is a cast of all women who live and work together in a small town and all of the drama that comes with it. We’re doing it like a soap opera, so there are going to be title cards that say, “Last week on…,” with intro music.
Could you go through the episodes and dates?
It’ll be two episodes per night with an intermission, and each episode will be about 30 minutes each. We start the first run with episodes one and two on July 19 at 7:30pm. Episodes three and four will run on July 20, and episodes five and six will run on July 26.
Then we’ll run through it all again in August. But it’ll be totally different choices from the actors. If they want to do a different spin on anything, they can. I’m very excited about that. We’re just doing whatever we want.
I feel like a lot of the improv I see onstage is different versions of similar things. But this is the most different thing I’ve heard. How do you come up with these ideas for shows that are so unique and different?
Zach and I meet every Tuesday, and we’ve met every Tuesday for three years with rare breaks. We don’t just do improv. We do other things, too. So we now get each other’s references and know where we’re coming from. In that time, I’ve watched the movies he likes. He’s watched the movies I like. So we share that, talk about what we like, and then we craft something from what we like together through talking about it.
We came up with Zach and Kristin Will Make You Cry by talking about sketches that we’d like to see or sketches that we’d liked before. Through that, we twisted it a little bit and took pieces of things that we liked to create a show.
I think that really feeds what we do. We have so many interests outside of comedy. Zach loves art, and I love mental health stuff and twelve-step program life and therapy. I work for NOAA, so I have weird fish details. And I work with scientists, who are always characters. Those pieces feed into how we get really wild and creative.
So your creativity is drawn from the richness of a full life.
That sounds so pretentious, but yes. I get stuck mentally when I’m doing too much comedy. My scenes aren’t good. I don’t feel as good about my life.
I like the idea of living a full life and bringing all of those parts of your life into your art. I think that’s where a lot of people stop. We’re doing other things, but we’re not bringing them all together.
For us, it’s a form of vulnerability to let people see that we have different aspects of our personality than just what you see onstage. I’ve hidden so much of myself from other people in my life for so many years that I don’t want to do that anymore. Being able to bring in my references, my love of drag performance, just being able to be my whole self onstage and show people the weirdest things that come to my brain and having people identify with that makes me feel so much more a part of our community.
Zach and I love screwing up on stage, just being terrible people, having “gross” emotions. Being that level of intimate and vulnerable with the audience is one of my favorite things.
You also seem to have an incredible level of awareness yourself and other people or the things around you.
I think I’ve gained more awareness through doing improv of seeing something and thinking about it and how to bring it into my show.
I guess maybe in a stand-up sense, you become more aware of the comedy of your life. And I take those to Zach every Tuesday.
Do you have bylaws for you and Zach or is that just for The Quitters?
Zach I don’t need bylaws. I hope he considers it the same way, but we’re both on top of our shit. We are not slackers in any way. If anything, we both worry that we’re not doing enough to support the other one. We’re constantly checking in to make sure we’ve covered all of our bases in terms of showing up, where we’re going be on Tuesdays, what we’re going to eat—very important—and what we’re going to work on. We come with an agenda every Tuesday.
That might be our bylaw: We come with something to work on.
That’s incredible consistency, three years every Tuesday working on art.
I love having the support of The Quitters and Zach, knowing that, if anything we’re doing too much in terms of getting what we want done. We’re always on time.
I think that’s also one thing for Zach and I: we’re never late anywhere, and I appreciate that in him so much because it shows respect for our time, generally. We get places on time, we work to a certain point, and then, if I’m at Zach’s house, we’ll watch 10 minutes of Real Housewives with his wife before I go home.
You mentioned stand-up earlier. Do you do stand-up?
Technically, I’ve only done it twice. I did an improvised monologue in An Evening With Zach and Kristin where Zach and I were competing late-night hosts. I did kind of a stand-up set, and it didn’t feel that hard.
I did stand-up again when I was asked to do Schtick. That was my first official time doing stand-up at a stand-up show. It was a lot of fun. I got to talk about naming my couch, whose name is Barbara, after Barbara Bush.
Zach and I decided—we’re a little too co-dependent—but we decided we want to do more stand-up after we finish the play because that’s going to take up our whole lives for right now. But I’d love to pursue stand-up a little bit more going forward.
I don’t actually like performing, though. Performing, for me, is being onstage. I like writing more than I like performing, probably because of the anxiety and self-consciousness that comes with it. And being onstage—and going to therapy—gives me some of that back. But I think I’ve found I don’t want to do that as much. I’d rather just write more stuff and do behind-the-scenes work.
My dream is to be Paula Pell and be known by comedians as a good comedy writer, instead of being known as a performer. She wrote for SNL for so long. Zach and I watch SNL every week, so that might also impact how we work together, as well. We talk about the writers we like who aren’t on stage. We give them a lot of support, and I think that’s what I want to be, not really an SNL writer, but a comedy writer, in general.
What is a Kristen OBrien sketch, or what do you want your sketches to feel like?
I want my aesthetic to be a gasp and a laugh. First, you gasp because it’s horribly sad or inappropriate, but as it goes on and the tension builds, you start laughing. That’s one of my favorite types of comedy.
For example, the premise of having a comedic funeral is a gasp and a laugh. That’s why I love working for In Lieu of Flowers so much because that’s such a taboo. Funerals are not meant to be made fun of. That is sacred. You don’t touch that. I love that idea of pushing people’s buttons, then coming back from it.
I think a lot of comedians talk about this idea of what’s inappropriate and taboo and exploring it, but it’s sometimes used as a shield, and it’s not always done well. Since you like a darker, gloomier type of humor, what do “taboo” and “inappropriate” mean to you? When is it actually inappropriate?
I’ve seen a lot of that done badly by people who don’t have respect for what they’re talking about. It’s like a rape joke. How can you make fun of that if you don’t actually empathize with the survivor? I’m not saying you have to be raped to be able to understand, but you have to go into those situations with empathy and a level of commitment to understanding.
Going into the funeral in In Lieu of Flowers, they brought in people before doing the show who counseled the cast on how to do a funeral in an appropriate way so they could be respectful of people who have gone through a loss or trauma.
I guess when I bring up something about trauma, I tend to stick with trauma I know. I talk about what I know most of the time when we’re doing sketches. And I try to bring empathy to someone who’s gone through the traumas I’ve experienced. I’ve lost people in my life. I’ve lost family members. I have been through the fire with that.
If you don’t have that experience or if you can’t identify with somebody in that way, you shouldn’t be joking about it. Or if you want to make a joke about something you don’t understand or that you haven’t been through, talk to someone who has. Just talk to someone.
After I make a joke where I think it might have been offensive, I check in with people to see how a person that has been in that situation feels. If somebody’s lost a parent and I know they’re in the audience, I immediately feel bad if I’ve done a scene where somebody has lost a parent because I know they’ve gone through that trauma, and I don’t know how raw it might be for them. And maybe I’m too much of an empathetic person for doing that, but I’d rather be that than be like, “Well fuck them for coming.” I’m never going to be like, “Fuck you for having feelings or being too sensitive.” I was called too sensitive my whole damn life. I’m tired of that.
Some things are just not done with tact or kindness. I try to approach that with kindness.
Thanks for tuning in!
The original season of The Comedic Pursuits Podcast is still running, but thanks for listening to this sneak peek episode of Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch.
Subscribe to the podcast at any of the links below to stay updated on new episodes, and remember to grab your tickets for Want and Need.
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