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This is the second episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast! I’m your host, Seth Payne, as always. The music we play at the beginning of this episode is by Zach Mason, our guest on the show today. Zach is a DC improviser, director, writer, and general comedic performer, a real renaissance man of comedy.
Highlights from my interview with Zach Mason
Zach actually has his very own podcast called Like Yes, which you can find on iTunes, so give that a listen when you’re done here!
Some of the interview questions and answers have been edited for clarity, but you can hear the full version in the podcast recording.
Can you give us some background on your comedy career so far?
I’ve always related to other people by trying to make them laugh. I did a lot of class clown kind of stuff through high school. I also started drawing when I was really young. When I was in my early 20s, I started doing comics. A lot of those were a simple drawing with a joke under it. I got really into that and was doing some longer stories that were less funny. I did that for a bunch of years and was doing comic shows, going to other cities and tabling and selling comics. That kind of worked those joke writing muscles.
About four or five years ago, I was in a pretty dark depression and realized I needed something that was going to get me out of my head and put me around other people. I loved comedy, so I thought I’d see what improv was like.
I’d done some theater stuff in high school and thought it was really fun. I enjoyed that experience and liked being around those people. It was a very creative energy and a very nurturing environment. I wanted to reconnect with that energy a little bit but also be more comedy focused.
The idea of stand-up, at the time, seemed totally scary. Being alone onstage felt very isolating, whereas improv was more building a thing together. So I started looking around different theaters in DC to see which ones offered improv classes.
The main options at the time were DC Improv and WIT. My entire knowledge of their classes came from their respective websites. DC Improv’s website was like, “Do you want to get on Saturday Night Live? Take these classes!” But I was in my 30s, so that didn’t seem accurate to my situation. The tone of WIT’s website was more, “Do you wanna to try improv? Cool. Read these ten books.” And I thought, “Okay, I’m with that. I get that. That is the nerd way, and I will follow it.” So I signed up for classes and went straight through their curriculum.
Along the way, I started a couple indie groups and eventually got cast on a WIT Harold team.
What was your Harold experience on Diviglio like?
I auditioned for Harold once, and I got really lucky. I hate auditions. Even the idea of an audition makes me so stressed out.
I think I was cast because—I’m prone to low self-esteem anyway, so I’m going to attribute it to the fact that WIT was starting two brand new teams, LIZARD GIRL and Diviglio, at the same time. They had 24 slots to fill, so that was a help. It was a very unique situation because most people don’t get in on the first audition.
I loved being on the team. I love everyone on that team.
First, Kristin O’Brien, who’s my best friend, and I were very lucky to get cast together. Both of us have anxiety issues and were texting each other the first day of practice, just saying, “We don’t have to go. I don’t want to meet new people. This is a lot. We should just quit. It was very nice for them to offer, but let’s just do anything else.” So I think it was helpful that we were both on the same team and were able to talk each other through it.
The full team was Kristin O’Brien, Ari Kaiser, Erin Murray, David Brescia-Weiler, Jesse Chimes, Jenny Koch, Sabrina Shamir, Caroline Yates, and me. Ari Kaiser and Erin Murray actually came into the group later, and that version of the group, for me, clicked so hard as soon as they came in. It just felt like, “This is The Group.” It was such a great mix of energies. WIT did a really good job with the chemistry.
Can you talk about your duo projects?
I really like duos. The more improv I do, the more I appreciate time onstage, patience, and the ability to say a thing, let it sit, then react. I appreciate being able to trust my scene partner enough that I can give them space and have them trust me enough to give me space. That’s such a huge thing. I really love it.
I do a duo with Kristin called Zach and Kristin. “Zach and Kristin Will Make You Cry” is one of the shows we do. It’s a structured show with some sketch, some improv, some videos, and some other things. We wanted to have a show that we could sell and show to a venue. It’s not a roll of the dice the way improv is. They know exactly what they’re getting because we can tell them what the segments are.
We started the duo because we wanted a project that relied less on consensus kind of stuff. Our joke is that we needed a thing nobody could take away from us. So that’s kind of what Zach and Kristin became.
How did In Lieu of Flowers start?
Lura Barber and I started working on In Lieu of Flowers in September 2017, and we were back and forth with Mark Chalfant, WIT’s artistic director, for a couple months hammering out details.
The show was an idea from Palooza. Lura and I were in a show on a Sunday morning and another show on Sunday afternoon. We both needed to kill two hours, so we walked around and were just chatting. We got along really well, and she suggested trying a duo and seeing how it went.
We set aside weekly rehearsals that were supposed to be for our duo. I’d go over to her place, and we’d be like, “Cool. We’re gonna improvise. But first, let’s hang out and talk about art and music and whatever.” Then we’d realize it had been three hours. Each week, we said, “Alright, I swear, we’re gonna improvise today. BUT FIRST, have you ever seen this YouTube video?” So we were basically hanging out but with this regimented schedule once a week.
At one point, Lura was talking about pancake art, and I’d never heard of it. She said, “If I ever have a funeral, I totally want there to be pancake art at my funeral.” So it was this offhand joke, and I thought that would be a really good show. Somebody could tell us what they wanted at their funeral, and we’d do it for them on stage.
Originally, it was much more of a joke idea. We wanted tons of props, and a huge crew so that we could literally have people go run somewhere to buy stuff and bring it back. It would be more like a Palooza energy, that sort of high-energy weirdness. We’d say, “You want balloons? You got balloons!” and somebody would come in with balloons. “You said you wanted a jet ski? We got a jet ski here!” Wish fulfillment was sort of the tagline for us.
We decided to reach out to Mark, and he thought it sounded like an interesting idea. We also decided there was more to work with if the show was serious and had real dramatic stakes and emotions and grounded relationships. It morphed into what it became, which is a much more serious show. It has some aspects of the wish fulfillment, but it’s much more grounded in emotions.
When we started the show, we had the broad strokes. We wanted the tone to be very specific, sincere, and grounded. It’s allowed to be funny, but that’s not necessarily what you have to be aiming for with every line or move. Just like in real life, if something is sad, it’s just allowed to be sad.
Through the process of our rehearsals, the cast shaped a lot of the details within those broad strokes. I really give them co-creator credit in the sense that we had the basic framework in place, the scaffolding, but they really helped build the building.
What’s the structure of the show?
Lura and I do crowd work to figure out who we want to talk to and choose someone with the best energy for this type of show. We want them to be open enough to talk about their life and not freeze on stage, but we don’t want them to try to be funny. We want them to be honest.
Our rule for selecting is that we don’t take anyone who’s a performer. We’re trying to minimize that chance of somebody coming up on stage and trying to be funny, whether or not they even mean to. It’s just in your training. If you’re doing improv three or four times a week and somebody puts you on a stage, you’re going to gravitate towards something wacky. It’s going to be in your DNA. We want somebody who’s going to be honest and give us information. Then the cast can pull the funny out of that.
Lura and I interview the person, and when they go back their seat, the music comes up. The cast moves the stage around and re-stages it as a funeral. They do eulogies and cross-talk in the pews. Then the music swells again as a transitional element. They clear the stage and do a montage where they can do whatever they want, inspired by the funeral.
The only rule throughout the show is that the person whose funeral it is cannot be depicted because we couldn’t think of a good way to portray that person where they wouldn’t feel even more uncomfortable watching their own funeral. They’re already seeing us depict their friends and relatives talking about how much they miss them, and that’s really weird and hard to watch. We also didn’t want it to turn into a roast or in any way make the interviewee feel picked on.
At the end, the cast goes back to the funeral to button everything up. That part is usually the most grounded and serious because, by that point, we’re really trying to bring everything back to the tone of the beginning, which is, “This is a real person who really exists. And in this reality, the reality of the show, they’ve died. And these people who care about them are sad. They’re upset that this person is gone.”
What are your thoughts on co-directing a show?
I think that’s a really smart decision on Mark’s part, that he really wants people to have co-directors or at least an assistant director because it encourages people. If, at the start of that process, Mark had just come to me and said, “Hey, Zach, do you want to direct a show? I’d say, “Are you out of your mind? Of course not. No. I couldn’t possibly do it.”
It had to almost happen the same way Harold happened for me, where Kristin was my buddy. Now I have Lura to be my buddy through this directing process.
We’re both so proud of the show. We’re so proud of our cast. We call them sweet baby angels. We love them like we’re their mom and pop. I’m the mom, and Lura’s the dad because she’s a little more stern and a little harder to get the affection and approval from. Whereas I’m just like, “You all are beautiful and perfect. You know how your father is, but he loves you.”
Do you think you’ll do more WIT productions in the future?
I would love to. I’m very conscious of not wanting to take up too much space. I think it would be weird for me to try to do anything in the near future because I want other people to have a shot. But I love it. I would love to just be someone’s assistant director or producer.
Since In Lieu started, I’ve had a lot of friends come to me with ideas or things they wanted to do. I tell them, “I would love to help you do this thing.” I don’t even want to shape the creative angle at all. I just literally say, “How can I help you do this thing?” Because the process is so fun.
What’s been your biggest failure within comedy, and how did you overcome it?
Kristen and I work on our show once a week for a few hours. We take it very seriously, and we think the show is really good. We’re really proud of “Zach and Kristin Will Make You Cry.”
When we first started out, we rented a small theater in Silver Spring, and we had friends come to watch it is as a sneak preview to make sure everything worked. We got their feedback, then booked DCAC to do a “real” show.
We did a bit of crowd work, then put on a video so we could go backstage and change. For this first show, we’d come in and tested everything, and it worked. We had a projector, an amp, a screen, all this stuff. Getting it all there on a Friday night in Adams Morgan—it was on 4/20—we’d lugged all this stuff in through the alley, and there are so many rats in that alley behind DCAC, so many rats.
We hit play and ducked to the back. And we heard everyone go, “Aaaww.” We came back out, and the start-up screen of the projector had come up. It wasn’t getting enough power, so it kept rebooting.
It was so embarrassing. We’d sold out the show. We’d been promoting it for weeks. It was a rare instance of us being confident. We were saying, “We believe in this show. We think it’s good, we think it works. Please come see it.” The audience had paid us money. We’d had an opener that was so solid, and everybody was all warmed up and happy. Everything had gone great until then. And it just felt so embarrassing.
When we were in the back getting changed, I said to Kristin, “We should just leave. Let’s just go. There’s a door right here to Rat Alley. We will disappear into the night, start a new life. We’ll do this duo, we’ll just go somewhere else. We’ll have new names.”
That was a really big failure in that moment. It felt like, “We fucked up, this sucks, this show doesn’t work. People are going to be mad at us. People are gonna be disappointed.”
We came out and said, “We’re really sorry. The tech stuff’s not working. We’re gonna do it old school and do the show without the tech elements. We’ll still have costume changes, we’ll still have sketch, we’ll still have improv.” But it just felt like we were digging ourselves out of a hole for the rest of the show. But it ended up being one of our best shows because we came so hard after that. We were like, “Oh fuck, we gotta bring it now. We have to look at each other. We have to be on point. We have to really, really try.”
So I’m really proud of the show in the end, but it started out horribly. I felt so, so bad. Elements where we’d included music or video because we knew we needed a costume change ended up being empty space on the stage. We tried to cover it by going to the back to change and then shouting to the audience, “Right now you’d be seeing a video with Tilda Swinton.”
I think that ended up being part of the charm of the show, that we were trying to persevere even though it had gone off the rails.
What was your biggest “aha moment” within improv?
It’s probably around fighting. When you’re coming up through classes and you’re anxious, you have that fight or flight instinct anyway: “I’m on stage. This is uncomfortable. I feel weird. I’m hyper-aware of people watching me.” Your brain is going a million miles a minute, so it’s really easy to get into a conflict.
You turn the smallest thing into a fight because you think, “Well, at least that’s a thing. Now we’re fighting, we’re talking, I’m not frozen. I’m having a fight with you about a Pop-Tart, even though that’s dumb and too big, and I shouldn’t care this much about Pop-Tarts.”
I think once I got to the point where I was able to defuse those fights but not negate them… like if somebody was really amped up because I ate their last Pop-Tart, instead of trying to meet that energy and saying, “Well, I care as much about this as you do,” saying something like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s going on, man? Yeah, I ate your last Pop-Tart, and I’m really sorry. But you seem really upset.” And not negating them, not getting meta, not shitting on the performer, but getting to what this is really about: “Why do you care so much about this? What does this represent to you?” And kind of dig in to find that.
I think that was such a big thing for me because I would be in a scene and feel trapped. And I think just telling myself “wait” internally, but also sometimes just saying “wait” out loud is such a huge thing to make the record skip a little bit and get out of the groove you’re in is such a huge thing.
Getting permission to do that and giving yourself permission, having coaches and teachers who tell you that you can do that, is such a big thing because when you’re starting out, it feels like you’re in a stream, and you’re being carried along by the momentum of the scene, and you’re not allowed to hop up on shore for a second. But you can! You can say, “Man, you’re doing this weird thing right now. Why are you doing it?”
In real life, if someone keeps doing something strange or unprecedented, you would say, “Hey man, why are you doing this? What is this about?” And that doesn’t have to be done in a way that calls out your scene partner or critiques their improv or anything like that. It’s just saying, “Wait, what is this about? This is about more than this physical act, it’s more than me chopping these carrots. What is this scene about? Why should the audience care, and why should I care?” Getting to that and asking for that information or justifying it, helping your scene partner find their why if they don’t have a clear why, is a huge thing.
Where can we find you online?
Look out for shows by Colossus, Badlands, and Zach and Kristin (on Facebook or on our website). They’re my main projects going forward. I’m also on Twitter as @ZachFMason.
Thanks for tuning in!
This has been the Comedic Pursuits podcast with Zach Mason as my guest. We’ll catch you on the next one with improviser and stand-up comedian Kara Kinsey.
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