Off Broadway In Chicago

The 9^th annual Chicago Sketch Comedy
Festival is over, but my jaw is still on the floor. My first experience at the
festival was seeing week one's Sketchubator - a living, growing inside joke
amongst the performers and staff where groups sign up and perform for each
other once the public is gone. My last experience of the festival was week
two's Sketchubator, and I'm still in shock at some of the things that went on
in that theater. Most aren't fit to print, but lets just say performers made
good use of a home pregnancy test, a bucket, and a lot of toilet paper.

Tim Soszko, Brian Posen, and Brian Peterlin of Bri-Ko

Earlier in the day, though, I caught Bri-Ko, Sketchfest creator and producer Brian Posen's three person act along with Tim Soszko and Brian Peterlin.
For 40 full minutes, the trio had an audience made up of as many kids as adults
absolutely rolling in the aisles - all without saying a word. Their silent
comedy abandons voice and video, and relies on a complicated balance of sound
cues, props, audience interaction and, most importantly, the impressive ability
to instantly express any imaginable emotion.

On Friday night, I asked Posen when I could get
an interview with him for this piece. He told me 1:45 Saturday afternoon. He didn't
tell me that's when Bri-Ko was performing, but I'm glad I got tricked into
being there. After the show, I met him in the lobby as he excitedly played with
a fan's cell phone - they happened to have the same phone, and Posen was
mashing them together, wondering how they might mate, or if they were in fact
cousins. Real life Brian Posen couldn't be more different than the character he
plays in Bri-Ko - as we sat down in his dressing room, I realized it must be
really difficult for him not to talk for the 40 minutes his show lasts; words
and stories poured out endlessly, obscure numbers from festivals years ago were
instantly recalled. Posen's love for this festival is apparent in all facets of
its production, environment and his persona. Our conversation follows:

Let's
start with the basics. How was Sketchfest born?

It started in 2001.  I had a show that I was going to produce here - I was doing
a whole mess of shows - and in 2001 we were going to do this musical but the
budgets were way too high. So as we kept meeting, productions meets, month
after month, we couldn't get the budgets down, and my mom got sick, so I pulled
the plug on the musical but we still had space here for January to March 2002.
So, it comes to the end of October and the lady says they can't find a renter,
so I said, 'Oh, I'll do something with the space.' I'm thinking, 'What am I
going to do?', and I had just started with Cupid, my musical sketch group, and
I'm thinking, 'Ok, but can they sustain a 7 week run, 6 shows a week?' I said
no way. You know, and I'm thinking 'What else?'. Well I just directed Stir
Friday Night that just opened, an all Asian sketch group - and the sketch scene
wasn't like it is now, there were maybe just a handful of groups - and I
thought, ok, maybe if I get Stir Friday Night, and the all Hispanic group
Salsation and Gayco, which is an all gay group, and the Galileo Players, which
is all about science, what if I get them all together and say, 'Hey, do you
want space to do a 4 week run?', and I keep the box, and maybe we can break
even, because it costs over $2000 a week for each theater. So I sent out a
bunch of emails, made phone calls, and in less than 2 weeks I had 33 groups
signed on. So great, so here I'm in November now - how do you create
this? So I give each group a 4 week run, and then when that group was done, the
next group would come in, and go over that slot, and it ran 7 weeks.

And
it was successful?

Yeah, we made a couple thousand dollars, and
then what I did with that money is - it was Brian Peterlin, myself, and two
other guys - and so the following week, I called their girlfriends, and told
them to pack their bags. And I took the money, and I said to the guys, 'You
gotta take work off Thursday and Friday, we've got this industrial to do', and
they go 'ok', you know, so I drive to Midway, and I said, 'Can you help me with
these bags of props?', - and they're wheeling their own luggage into the
airport, and they ask 'When is the shuttle coming?', and I go, 'Here' - give
them the tickets and they say 'What is this?' I said, 'Your bonus - you're
going to Disney World. Plane leaves in an hour, your girlfriends packed your
bags.' So that's what we did with the profits the first year.

And then I said, 'Ok, how do you really do a
festival?', and then I took Cupid on the road and we went to all these
different festivals and we watched how they did their techs, and their traffic
patterns, and their this and this and this, and I go, 'I like that - that sucks
- I don't like the way they treated actors here', all that stuff, and so I
started the next year, pined it down to three weeks, opened it up nationally
and we had 54 groups. But I hated that there were 2 other shows going on at the
same time as we were doing the festival because they kept going 'SHHH, you gotta
be quiet, ya know, and I hate that sound. So the next year I said I'm gonna
rent out the whole theater complex for 2 weeks and see.

And
when was that?

That was in 2004. And after then it just took
off.

It
took off from there. The first thing I saw was Sketchubator - my first
experience of the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival was something only the
performers are allowed in on.

And it was tame.

That
was tame?

Tame. That was tame.

What's
happened in the past to make that night look tame? Rumors fly around as to what
goes on in that theater after the doors are locked.

Probably when some guys brought live chickens
and did an auction on stage. Some guys repelled off a ceiling in a scene. One
group just threw massive amounts of cold cuts at the audience. Last year there
was blood all over the stage, that's why the curtains are trashed - blood everywhere.

Just
to be clear - fake blood?

Yeah, someone was having a baby, and they were
sort of cutting people up.

So
what's the reason behind Sketchubator? Where did this come from?

The reason behind Octasketch, Sketchubator,
MasterSketch, all these forums and panels they used to have - you know
everything that I used to do on the side, in addition to the shows, education
stuff, lasts maybe 3, 4 years, and then I go, its done, we did it, lets try
something new. Originally we had forums - so Sunday morning, bagels, coffee,
orange juice - groups would come and sit in a roundtable and just talk about
their processes and stuff. People came, maybe about 40 or 50 people came, but
it was painful after drinking till 5 in the morning. And then we had panels,
where celebrities, like SNL people, and Reno 911, and all these important
people, and they would sit up there and get questions from the audience, and
that was fun and expensive and didn't make money - lost a lot of money doing
that shit, but that's fine, its educational. Then we did something  called MasterSketch, and groups would
sign up for a slot, they'd do a sketch, and get feedback from the panel. And I
loved that. Harold Ramis was on that 2 years ago, so that was pretty cool. And
then Octasketch we did for 5 years I think, where the Monday between weekends,
4 sketch directors would get assigned 5 actors, all from different groups, and
they had 8 hours to create an entire 30 minute show to perform that night. Same
problem with MasterSketch though - the first 2 years we did it, a group would
come, they'd perform and they'd leave. And I'd go, "Wait! You gotta see
this guys work" - no one is seeing each other's work, so I try to create
all these avenues where people are seeing each other's work, that they're
talking to each other, they're networking, communicating, they're discussing
how to do it - all of these ways just to get people eating and drinking and
breathing and talking, ya know?

It
definitely had a different sense, when groups are making each other laugh as
opposed to when groups are making an audience laugh - it speaks to that.

Yea, we understand it. Like Superpunk did this
one sketch, where they sang a song describing your typical sketch show.
[Singing] Here's our big opener, and this
political scene, and the office scene, and now the goofy scene! Ya know,
and its so funny because, its like every show has that scene and the scene
afterward is the office scene. It pokes fun at us, and anything can happen.

I
worked at the Lakeshore Theater briefly - the stand up club down the street,
and its such a different feel coming here. There, its big names and filling
seats, but with sketch comedy its first about the people and the community.

No egos here. There's no "Best Sketch
Group Voted as the Best In Chicago!" I won't put one group over another.

So
does sketch comedy stand out for that reason? Is there only ego in standup?

There is in the sketch community too, except
for these two weeks. There is - "oh this guy's over at iO?"
and this and this, alright, alright. I don't allow it here.

I
love that environment.

This is what I think theater's all about.

That's
related to something else I was hoping to ask you - what do you wish you could
brag about more? What's going on here that people should experience?

The vibe.

The
vibe?

The vibe. Yea, that's it, its just a
celebration of the community. Everyone's collaborating, talking. There's no
ego. There was one group last week that came in saying, you guys are gonna be
blown away by us. Its like when you see a sign on the side of a restaurant that
says "good food" - if they're advertising it, its not good. And sure
enough, their goods wasn't there. They weren't present, they weren't part of
the - we didn't even see them at the parties afterward. So when someone comes
in with that pretentiousness or something, its quickly squashed. What do we do?
We go, we embrace them.

So where
does it go from here?

Umm... to the 10th Annual
Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival. [laughs] What's next? You know what, this keeps
redefining itself. It would be great to have 100% bulls eyes across the board,
and we can do it, and we'll get the covers, we'll get the covers of Time Out and Reader with 10 years. So I don't know, I think if it ain't broke,
don't fix it.