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Other CIF Interviews:

Don Hall of WNEP

Yuri Kinugawa of Yellow Man Group

Stan Morse of Liquid Radio Players

Mick Napier of Annoyance Productions

Dan O'Connor of TNN's Lifegame

Slotnik, Katz & Lehr of Slotnik, Katz & Lehr

Susan Gaspar of The Free Associates

Interview by Jeff Catanese

Susan Gaspar is the Artistic Director of The Free Associates, an improv troupe that specializes in styles parodies.  I was able to speak to her immediately following her company's show Charlie and the Fiction Factory that was presented as part of the Chicago Improv Festival.  Ms. Gaspar showed herself to be affable, but businesslike.  It was apparent that she loves what she does, and would demand nothing less.  -JC

What do the Free Associates do?

The Free Associates are known for unscripted parodies of styles, whether that’s literary styles, theatrical styles, cinematic styles, television or musical.  We are in our eleventh season, and we’ve done everything from Tennessee Williams to 1970’s disaster movies.  We work without a script.  We do longform improvisation using the audience’s suggestions, and we treat them as the writers, if you will, and just let the arc of the story flow organically.  Our shows are usually an hour and a half to two hours long.  Mostly original characters unless it’s a style where there are set characters, such as BS, which is currently running and is a spoof of ER.  Everyone knows who those characters are so all the actors always play the same characters.

How long have you been in operation?

We’ve been around since 1991 and we’ve been in residence at both the Ivanhoe Theater, which is now closed, and [we] recently moved into the Royal George Theater in February, where we are now in residence.  We’ve also done some touring around North America.

Roald Dahl is a risky choice for an improvised children’s show.  Why did you choose him?

We wanted to experiment for a long time with a “family” style, or children’s literature.  We thought it would really feed our style of improv well because it’s so freeing, and so imaginative and creative and open-ended; anything can happen.  And does in Roald Dahl.  With every page you don’t know what’s going to happen and usually the craziest possible thing does.  So we’ve been toying around with it.  We workshopped it with the Skokie Public Library a couple of years back.  They hired us to do workshops with some of the kid’s that come in for weekend reading programs.  We just picked Roald Dahl out of our heads because we knew he was very popular with kids as young as six and all the way up to teens, and lots of movies have been made from his work, so everyone is familiar with it.  The program went great, everyone loved it, and we said, "You know, this isn’t a bad idea for a show in our regular season."  So last summer we mounted it and I came up with a plan as far as how to cast it and how to bring the style to life in a show format.

There is a lot of pathos and cruelty in the works of Roald Dahl, did you have to work around it, or scale it back to tread the line that he does with his books?

The cool thing about what we do is that, since it’s parody, everything is blown up one hundred fold.  So what we did, in order to make that work for us is to take that and exaggerate it even more, which then adds the comedic element.  His books have a lot of comedy anyway because they are so ridiculous.  What we did was take the stuff that might be scary or intimidating to the kids and made it funny.  They still get the edge because it’s a horrible, nasty thing they are talking about or doing.  But it’s so ridiculously blown out of proportion that it invokes laughter.  And that’s generally what we try to do as far as the comedic element.

How has the response been from family communities?

Well, the show’s no longer running.  It ran for four months, and we toured with it a little bit.  We shut it down just because we had to move on with our other productions.  But we had a huge response.  It was critically acclaimed, and sold wonderfully well.  Of course our most popular performance times were the matinees.  We got lots of families and lots of kids, and, interestingly enough, a lot of older people, who remember the books and the films when they came out in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s.  It was almost nostalgia for them.  We were packing them in, and people would come back show after show because they knew it was going to be different, and they wanted to see a different story.

Do you have plans to continue producing shows for a family audience with the Free Associates?

Y’know, we may in the future.  We’ve had a lot of people interested in it, and we still get calls for remote shows of [Charlie & the Fiction Factory].  We don’t have anything in this season coming up that’s family oriented, but for the first show of 2002 we are planning a parody of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Based on both the books and the TV series [Little House on the Prairie], because people remember both and sort of equalize them in their minds.  So that will have a mix of middle-aged and adult audiences who remember the books, and children who watch the shows in reruns, and families who watched the show together in the seventies.  So I think we’ll garner all ages for that thing.

Since your company concentrates on parodies and styles, what would be your advice to a shortform improvisor or novice who wants to work on styles?

I think it helps to really enjoy styles.  If Styles is your favorite game then you pretty much know that that’s an area in which you want to concentrate.  I knew the minute that I auditioned for the Free Associates that this was for me, because Styles was always the thing that got me fired up onstage.  It was never enough for me.  It was three minutes of doing Shakespeare instead of an hour, and I always thought, “I want to do that character further.”  So if you have that instinct, if you’re the type of improvisor or the type of actor that’s not satisfied by not doing a character in a style for a couple of minutes, and you want to further explore and work with others in an ensemble way to build a story together, then you know this is the type of work you would enjoy and would find challenging.

I think it also helps to love to read and do research.  With every style we do there is a very intense research and rehearsal process so that we are all on the same page, and equally entrenched in that style.  That’s very important so that the style comes across as a unified piece, and not everyone’s personal impression of that style.

How do you incorporate the reading with the rehearsing?

Usually we all read a couple of the books before the rehearsal process begins so we have a starting point for discussion.  Then we’ll read several books together or we’ll each assign a book to our selves and then report on it and discuss it.  From there we’ll do further discussion and research such as character archetypes, themes, recurring imagery, locations that always come up, if there’s a moral point at the end that seems to be a unifying factor in this type of style.  Once all of this is in our heads we just throw ourselves on stage and believe that what we’ve digested will come out.  By that point there’s no turning back.  You just have to physicalize it and believe that all that stuff that’s in your head will come out through your mouth and through your body.  And once you’ve gone that step you pretty much…  You either got it or you don’t.  Over the course of the rehearsal process you can tell, and you’ll feed each other.  That’s the good thing about it.  You may be feeling iffy about “what happens if I make this kind of choice,” and somebody else will feel great about it, and through the course of the rehearsal process the style will just organically develop.  On its own, almost.

To facilitate that, do you work with a regular company?

We have a resident company, but we also job in actors show to show.  We only have a six-member company.  Sometimes it’s not a big enough cast.  BS has a cast of eight, so there’s always additional actors in.  Sometimes we’re not all right for a particular show or style, and sometimes we are just not available.  So we always have a bevy of additional actors that we job in.  Some people work with us for more than one contract period, some just come in and, sayonara, we never see them again.  It varies.

What’s the most important element of improv?

The most important thing about improv for me is freedom.  That’s what theater, I think, is ultimately all about.  The freedom to choose, the freedom to express yourself, and to just show what life is to you in the moment.  That’s why I stick with improv, and that’s why I’ve chosen theater as my profession.  I think what we do is a perfect combination of traditional theater and improvisation, and that freedom is completely embodied in product.  That’s my hope.