Podcast: Play in new window | Download
You can follow this podcast on:
Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. I’m your host Seth Payne, sitting down today with the charismatic, energetic, dare I say spunky Macey Schiff.
As a side note, we had to record this episode in my car. So you’re going to hear a very gentle—soothing, one could almost say—car hum underneath. But without further ado, Macy Schiff.
Highlights from my interview with Macey Schiff
I’ve known Macey for quite a while now. She’s always been a predominant figure in WIT’s program. She’s currently on Madeline, which we’ll talk about and touch on later. She’s going on ten years experience with improv, which is crazy.
Some of the following responses have been edited for clarity. But you can hear the full interview by listening to the podcast episode.
What’s your comedy background?
My dad is an actor. I definitely got my theater and comedy blood from him. I danced a little bit when I was in elementary school and middle school, but I ended up quitting that to play soccer. When I started high school, we did fall plays and spring musicals, and I did all of those.
My first introduction to improv was Whose Line Is It Anyway. My dad loved the show, so my whole family would watch it. And we had an improv troupe perform at my bat mitzvah for the first night when everyone came in out of town. I hated it.
The planning of the whole bat mitzvah weekend was a group effort, and we had a lot of friends and family come in from out of town. We were trying to find something to do with everybody on a Friday night, and we thought we could stick them in a room and throw in an improv team in front of them. That’s how we ended up with an improv troupe at my bat mitzvah, just because it was a thing we could all do. It was ridiculous. They were doing short form, and it was the kind of improv troupe in Pittsburgh that would perform at a bat mitzvah party on a Friday night in 2003. I remember, even at 13, thinking, “Hmm. No.” I had very high standards for comedy as a teenager.
When I went to college at the University of Delaware, we had a big activities night on our second or third day on campus, and it was divided up by section. I was meandering my way through the theater section, wanting to sign up for anything but being super intimidated because I was a freshman.
I was writing my name down for something, and then all of a sudden heard, “Hey!” And there was this guy standing next to this table yelling at me. And he said, “You should sign up for this. We’re Riot Act. We’re an improv team.” So I gave into the peer pressure and signed up. I had never done improv before, but I got heckled into auditioning by this guy. His name is Mike McFadden, and of course, now we’re friends because, long story short, I auditioned and got on the team.
There were two improv teams on campus, and mine was the newer one. So when I auditioned as a freshman, I became the first person to be on the team for all four years of college.
At that audition, Mike, the guy who heckled me, invited me and another auditioner to a house party. That my first introduction to improv people and the community in Delaware, and everyone was really, really nice. So I was really excited to find out that I got on a team.
What was your your college improv team like?
We would do long form and short form, like four or five short form games and then a 30-minute long form at the end, which is an intense show. Bless all the people that sat through our shows. My first year, I think there were six or seven of us, and my last year I think there were nine or 10. We rehearsed two times a week every week for the school year, except for holidays.
We did La Ronde, the invocation, the reverse narrative. La Ronde was always my favorite, which is why when I got to D.C. and heard about Improv Actually, I loved the show for so many different reasons.
We were self-taught, self coached. We would take rotations directing rehearsals. I’d direct two rehearsals in a row, and then the rotation would continue on, and then two months later, I’d direct two rehearsals in a row again. It was cool. And it was a great way to not only learn how to take direction from teammates and be collaborative, but also how to take ownership and leadership of a rehearsal in your own right.
How did you end up in DC?
After graduation, I stayed in Delaware. I graduated and was promptly like, “I don’t know what the fuck I wanna do.” Here we are six years later, and I’m still like, “I don’t know what the fuck I want to do.”
The summer before my senior year of college, I had an internship in DC at PBS headquarters with PBS Kids. I loved PBS Kids growing up. It’s all I watched. I was Wishbone for Halloween twice, and I had a Wishbone birthday party and Wishbone bedding. So interning at PBS Kids was kind of like a dream, and one of my best friends was also interning at National Geographic. Between the two of us, we formed a really tight-knit group of six interns who would do everything together.
It was a really, really solid way to fall in love with a city. I saw it through rose-tinted goggles because of this incredible experience that I was having with these incredible people. All I knew when I graduated was that I wanted to get back down to DC and, ideally, somehow, with PBS again.
When I moved to DC, I had no interest in starting improv. I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do when I started living here.
How did you get back into improv?
When I moved to DC, I didn’t know anybody. I knew two people, but that’s very different than moving back and having a group of friends and having a job where you could make friends.
Where I was working at the time was still PBS, but it was a satellite office of a television show that was produced through the New York member station. So we were incredibly far removed from the headquarters where I’d worked. There were 11 people in the office, and I had friends there, but making a solid group of friends was not really an option.
I went back to an alumni weekend at the University of Delaware that summer, in 2013, and I had this moment where I thought, “Okay, Delaware doesn’t feel like home. DC still doesn’t feel like home. I need to do something to make some sort of a change.” So I went back and Googled improv and found WIT.
I called, and I remember being so surprised by how nice they were because it seemed like such an established community. They had an established group of people. And when you look at a theater company, it kind of seems like a hard thing to break into.
I ended up in a Level Two class, and I’ll never forget the moment when I walked into Centronía. Mel Harker was standing there, and said, “Hi, you’re going to this classroom. Your teacher’s JC.” Then she said, “Oh, you two can go together. This is Ryan. He’s in your class, too.” And it was Ryan Krull. He was the first friend I met through classes. JC was my first teacher. I loved him. I forced him into friendship with me. Our love language is hate, so we just give each other shit non-stop.
I almost switched out of my Level Three class because we were all going to try to get into the next level class on Wednesdays. Then it sold out, and my friend Nicolette and I were the only ones who got into it. And we both wondered if we should switch to be with the others.
If I had actually switched—I was very close to switching—I would not have met Denny Johnson and Connor Gorman. And if that had not happened, I would not have done my FIST team Brunch.
When Connor texted Denny and I to see if we wanted to do FIST, I was literally having a conversation with my friend saying, “I don’t think I’m going to have friends,” because I’d come from such a fragile place where I didn’t have friends and didn’t know how to make friends and thought this is what adulthood meant, just slowly passing time on your own until eventually you met up with people somewhere that isn’t where you live because who has friends where they live, right? That’s what I thought. I was like, “This is how it is. I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life.”
So I was having that conversation, basically saying, “I really like these guys Connor and Denny, but our class is over. I don’t think I’m going to see them again.” And then Connor texted Denny and I to ask if we wanted to form a FIST team. This was 2013, going into 2014, and I had no idea what FIST was. I thought, “This sounds weird. But I’m gonna say yes.”
At the time, I was down for anything, literally anything. Connor was the visionary. He said, “Okay, we’re going to rehearse on Mondays with a coach, we’re going to rehearse on Thursdays just ourselves, and then we’re going to hang on the weekends.” And I said, “Yeah, sounds great.”
Looking back on what we did for Brunch, I just think, “What the fuck?” We would rehearse on Mondays. We would rehearse on Thursdays just ourselves. Also, we had classes together on Wednesdays. And on Saturdays, Connor would come down to DC—he was living in Olney with his family at the time.
Denny would show up to all of this stuff, too. This is before he was married. It’s so funny to think about it now, having heard about Chad all this time without having met him. And now, I went to their wedding, which is really cool. If you had told the Macey that moved to DC and was so despondent and thought that she’d never have friends that she’d be going to this wedding and then more improv weddings and then sitting in a car with you, talking about the fact that I’ve been going to all these improv weddings….
My dad told me, “You just gotta give it a year.” And then after I signed up for WIT classes, he said, “Mace, it took you six months.”
That encouragement came out of moments of desperation. I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that when you have rose-tinted goggles, when they come off, they come crashing off. It’s not like you just get to lightly take them off and place them on the table and walk away. They come down hard.
The summer that I spent in DC, I absolutely had rose-tinted goggles. I didn’t know I had my job when I first moved to DC. I had been in the interview process and thought, “I just need to get down there.” So I had lined up temp work and a job in a restaurant because there was nowhere else I wanted to be. I thought I just needed to get there and figure it out.
The Friday before I moved, I got a call from Religion Ethics, which is the television show I worked for. They asked me if I was free for a phone interview the next Monday, and I was. So I moved to DC on Saturday, had that phone interview on Monday, then found out I got the job on Wednesday. On Wednesday, I called my boyfriend at the time to tell him that I got the job, and in the same conversation, he broke up with me.
It was just so much in one week. And when all of these things are happening, ideally, they’re the kinds of things that you have a community around you or some friends, some kind of support. My roommates were great sports. I had one friend who would come meet me at the end of my shift at the restaurant, and we’d just hang out and talk, and then I had this other friend whose place I’d go over to. But I felt like I was sort of going through the motions for a bit and didn’t really have anything to tether to.
For the next however many months—I’m not a sunglasses person, but I bought a pair of sunglasses because I’d just spontaneously start to break down on the Metro. I couldn’t walk around the city and trust the fact that I’d be okay. I would sit on the Metro and see these groups of friends with each other and think, “How the fuck do I find these people? How is this happening?”
So I think finding WIT, in particular, was…I don’t know if there’s ever been one single thing that has caused such a drastic pivot in my life, which is cool. And having that solid community and support system gave me the comfort to do other things. So I have no hesitation to go to concerts or movies by myself now or try different things and just see how they go because there’s not this pressure of, “Oh my God, this has to work, or I still have nothing.”
How did you end up on Madeline?
I’ve been on Madeline for four years now, since the start. They call me the OG Madeliner, which I guess is true.
After the Harold audition cycle, Denny, Connor, Ryan, and I all ended up on Madeline together. So that was like magic. We were on that team together for a while. Connor ended up moving to Chicago that October. Then Denny and Ryan joined Commonwealth the following year, so we got some new additions. The first new round, we added Patrick Slevin, John Carroll, Isabel Galbraith, and Liz Sanders.
After that, we got Jonathan Murphy. We had Jonathan as a guest coach and loved him. We wanted him to be our coach, but he didn’t want to do it. We wondered why he didn’t want to be our coach, and then we found out it was because he would rather be on the team.
I’ve been on Madeline through all sorts of things, and there are times where people ask, “Do you think you’ll ever take a step back?” And the WIT community, of course, has sort of turned into this support system that I knew I had always wanted. I didn’t realize just how much I had always wanted it until I found it.
Just a few months ago, I was looking at an internal transfer to a job in Boston, and the hardest part of it was the thought of leaving the community and all that has come with it, like very, very, very, very best friends, people who feel more like family than some of my actual family ever felt. It’s crazy. I went up to the office in Boston and came back. And I don’t remember what she said, but Kaelan Sullivan, who is one of my best friends, texted me something super great like, “You’re going to love it. We’re going to miss you. We’ve got your back.” I was in a Lyft driving through the Mall, and I just broke down in the back of the Lyft. I decided I couldn’t move to Boston. It did not feel right. It’s one of those things where I wanted it to feel good, and it just did not.
Are you working on any other projects?
I direct and perform with Improv Actually. I was one of the original cast when it came out in 2014 under the direction of Dan Miller. I really love to figure out what makes people tick, and the idea of developing relationships and studying relationships is always something I’ve really, really enjoyed, been interested in, love studying the process and thoughts behind. So when the description for Improv Actually came out, not only was all of that involved, it was also a La Ronde, which I love. I remember seeing the description and just thinking, “Oh my god.”
The focus on vulnerability, intimacy, real life deals, relationships, things like that, is something that I really loved because that’s my favorite style of improv to do and perform and coach. I just fell head over heels for the show and did it for two years. Then Dan reached out to me and asked if I’d be willing to take over as director, which was cool.
When did you start coaching Trustfall?
I went on a big trip in 2016 for about a month and a half. I did Israel, Greece, and Jordan. And I got back and had brunch with Kaelan, and she was talking about how Trustfall was trying to find a coach. She asked if I was interested, and I said, “Yeah, definitely!” It just worked out, and I’m just now realizing that I’ve been coaching them for about two years.
They’re such a fun team to work with because there’s this level of trust there because they were friends first in class. That sort of enables them to feel comfortable making scarier choices and do bolder things because they know that they’ve got the support of their teammates.
I feel very lucky to have found them. For example, yesterday was not a great day, and I knew I was coaching. I walked into Kelsey Peters’s house and instantly felt better. In those moments you kind of realize the bad days, what happens on those days, are not the only things that define you. It sort of reminds you that you do have all these other aspects of life that contribute to who you are as a person.
And I love the initiative that they took with The Pinch shows, Trustfall and Friends. That’s all them. I think they were doing that even before I took over as their coach. It’s just something that they did. I love their commitment to bringing in indie teams. I’m really, really proud of them and really, really proud to be their coach.
What was your biggest aha moment in comedy?
Kate Symes was Madeline’s coach for a while, and she had this wonderful ability to see exactly what we needed as individual players in the moment. There was this one time where we were doing a scene, and as soon as she said this, I realized this is something that I do in real life, too. She said, “Macey, your characters don’t have to fix everything. You can exist in the chaos. Sometimes it’s fun to exist in the chaos. Don’t try to fix it all.”
As soon as she said that, I thought, “Oh my god, I do that all the time.” But it had never occurred to me before. And admittedly, I still catch myself trying to fix things, but now I know what I’m doing, so I can stop doing it. That was one of the biggest aha moments for me.
What’s a time you felt like you failed in comedy, and how did you overcome it?
Something that I have had to work on with Improv Actually, in particular, is letting go of this feeling that I control everything. I’m not a control freak, but say we have a show where we walk off and don’t feel good about it. I oftentimes take on full responsibility and feel wholly responsible for whatever happens on the stage just because I am the director. I think I should be the one who’s making sure that we, as a team, have the tools we need to go out onto the stage and do what we need to do. So something that I’ve had to learn is to not feel like a failure when we have a show like that and to not walk off stage and get into my head and think, “This happened because I did this and that.”
But getting over that is a work in progress. Talking to other people helps. And I realize that I have never in my life walked off of a stage feeling like I didn’t have a great show and blamed it on the director or coach. I’ve never walked off and blamed it on another person. The cast is incredible. I love them, and we all are a pretty solid unit. I don’t think there’s anyone on that team, or at least I would hope not, that would walk off the stage and think, “This show did not go well because of Macey.”
So just taking a step back and trying to shift the perspective on it a little bit has helped me move through that. Obviously it’s still not completely gone because I think any time you take ownership of a project like that, you do feel some level of responsibility about the outcome.
But we also have awesome shows! I’m literally realizing this as I’m talking to you about it right now: I never walk off the stage after an awesome show and think that happened because of me. I don’t feel responsible for the successes of the team. I know that the successes of the team are because of each individual player and what they did in the show. I only feel responsible for the shows when we walk off and we’re kind of like, “That didn’t land the way we wanted it to,” not the ones where we walk off and we’re like, “That was fucking insane and awesome, and we loved everything about it, and it all felt so good.”
But when you care about something, you do want to protect it, and you want to protect the people that are involved.
Anything else you want to say?
I think one of the most wonderful things that I’ve realized about the improv community is that we all have tiny moments where we’ve influenced someone else in a way we don’t even realize or are not even aware of. I’ve had people come up to me and say things, and it’s incredible. I only vaguely remember it, and I did not realize what was happening would have made such an impact.
I feel like that has happened to me when I’ve told people things, too. I wonder if Kate even remembers giving me that note. Or not realizing in the moment how significant it was meeting Ryan and Connor and Denny. All these little things that have very much shaped my improv past and my development as a person.
I guess my advice would be to look out for and let yourself truly experience those moments, no matter how little or big they may be.
Where can we find you online?
I’m on Madeline ad Improv Actually (when it’s up in the spring). I really only go to Twitter when I need to say something about my favorite band, which is Matt and Kim. But I’m on Instagram and Facebook.
Thanks for tuning in!
Tune in for the next episode. Thanks guys. Wow, what a great episode. I had fun. I learned a lot about comedy. I learned a lot about Macey, learned a lot about myself honestly. And that’s always great.
I hope you guys enjoyed the podcast. I will see you on the next one.
You can follow this podcast on:
