If you’re doing comedy or comic theatre, what’s the last thing you should include in your show? For years—for most of entertainment history, in fact—the answer would be: backstage squabbles. No one wants to see the show about how you’ve drifted apart as a double act, how the live comedy tour isn’t paying the bills, or how your label is in the advanced stages of collapse. Remember the show where Morecambe and Wise talked about the tensions in their off-stage relationship? Of course you don’t. It didn’t happen. It wouldn’t bring you sunlight.
But times are changing. In the age of auto-editing, reality TV and trauma-comedy, the lines between reality and fantasy, onstage and offstage, are blurring. Max and Ivan have long been grateful that their chosen artistic niche, narrative sketch comedy, gave them characters and plots to hide behind. “A lot of standups feel compelled to mine their inner lives for material,” says Max Olesker, one half of the duo. “Or ‘How does this turn into comedy?’ They live their lives half-heartedly. This can be unhealthy; you may lose your vision [difference] between you, the executor, and you, the natural person. So I always smugly thought, ‘We’re lucky, we don’t have to exist in that unhealthy space.’ By now we were suddenly going through emails, staging personal photos, and digging into our lives in more detail than ever before.”
He’s talking about the couple’s new show, Life, Choices. No spoilers here: Suffice it to say that after years of playing multiple roles in funny games of their own making, Max and Ivan are now focusing on their own lives. Life is the raw material for Choices — sometimes very raw — parenthood, unpaid bills, and the difficulty of maintaining comedic partnerships into middle age, when a “canned sitcom” (or, as Olesker puts it, “still waiting for the second one”). -call of the season”) all begin to pull you in other directions.
Their impulse to dramatize these things is not unique. Comedian Tom Parry, who occasionally directs Max and Ivan, was behind a great example of the subgenre when sketch troupe Pappy’s staged Last Show Ever in 2012. This set through the ages depicted the growth of this goofy trio. and they were going their separate ways, celebrating the friendship they had enjoyed along the way. Just last month, performance world powerhouse Sh!t Theater staged the ongoing run of Or What’s Left of Us, which picks up the bones of a year of heavy personal and professional loss. This month, comic theater luminaries Spymonkey are premiering a version of Aristophanes’ The Frogs; This film also explores the fate of a company rocked by the self-imposed exile of one member (Petra Massey departs for Las Vegas) and the unexpected early death of another. , Stephan Kreiss, in 2021.
Following Massey’s departure, the company began designing a version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with playwright Carl Grose, in which a horseman leaves to work in Las Vegas. When Kreiss died, this was shelved, and surviving artists Toby Park and Aitor Basauri asked the question: “It’s just the two of us now, what are we going to do? What will we do now? And that’s how the Frogs came about,” says Park. “This is the first double act in the Western theater canon.” It is also about the journey of bringing a recently deceased, much-missed thespian (Euripides) back from the dead.
“The struggle of these two characters” – Dionysus and his slave Xanthias – “is similar to the struggle Toby and I endure when Stephan and Petra are not here,” says Basauri. In a previous era, this might have been enough: Spymonkey could stage the play and keep his own behind-the-scenes struggles in subtext. However, in this production the ancient Greek story (in Grose’s adaptation) is combined with scenes depicting the dissolution of the company. “In the show, we go back in time to revisit the Spymonkey office, where there is a small shrine dedicated to Stephan and a defaced photo of Petra,” says Park. (“I’m afraid,” he adds, “that this won’t result in Carl getting a lot of royalties from other companies by doing this.”)
Why are you doing this? Why don’t we let Aristophanes do the work? On the one hand, doing theater this way – featuring the actors’ stories as much as the play’s story – is consistent with the way Spymonkey has always worked. “Anytime you put a group of people on stage, you want to consider the dynamics that govern those people,” Basauri says. What is the story behind the story? “Absolutely. There’s always one. And if the creators don’t take that into account, they’re not going to make a show that good.”
“It also fits very well into the world of the clown,” he adds, and as a fantasy clown himself, he should know that. “The clown will try to tell a story that is important to the clown, even if it is really bad.”
Max and Ivan had also made previous moves in this direction. Their 2019 show, Commitment, depicted Olesker’s amazing work with organizing partner Ivan Gonzalez’s real-world bachelor party. That hour had a huge emotional payoff, and as the couple searched for the heart in their current situation, they couldn’t see beyond their early middle age (Gonzalez had recently become a father) and their relationship with their aging father. and the difficulty of organizing yet another Edinburgh show. “The idea kept coming up that if we were going to do a show, it had to be about this,” Olesker says. And to be fair, we exposed our inner workings in ways we hadn’t before.”
Is this a strange process? When you watch Life, Choices, you are struck by how candidly it portrays Max and Ivan’s offstage relationship. “There are areas of our lives that don’t make it into the show, and this was the result of negotiation and conversation,” Olesker says. There were also some things in the early drafts that didn’t feel too realistic or funny enough, says Gonzalez, “so we took those out.” Even reality needs to be fictionalized. “It’s all true,” he says, “but it’s selective truth that works for the show.”
Is it a therapeutic process? In part, if you want to address your personal crises onstage, you must first broach them offstage. The Spymonkeys are a bit allergic to therapy talk: In Toads, they bare themselves because it’s funny, not because it’s therapeutic. In Basauri’s words, “We think that tragedy and comedy are very close to each other.” But he concedes that the show may “stir up more emotion” than the company’s previous work. “Because we think it’s okay for the audience to experience that in a theater performance, a story about the pain of losing a friend. “And then we’ll end it with some comic relief in the best sense of the word.”
The risk here, of course, is self-indulgence, and both parties express their reluctance to navel-gaze in the strongest possible terms. “We didn’t want anyone to really care about the economics of producing a two-person sitcom,” says Max Olesker. “We want it to be accessible to people who have never seen us before,” says Gonzalez. “A lot of people, not just us, have to grow up and deal with adult life.”
Park has no doubt that the plight of Spymonkey, Max and Ivan’s seniors for half a generation, is relatable because it’s about “aging white men in crisis,” he says. “As white men, getting older, not knowing how we fit in, and reevaluating where we are feels like something worth engaging with right now.” He speaks on behalf of both companies (all artists who make this type of work) and says, “If all these disappointments, not knowing how to reinvent ourselves and how to deal with loss, mean anything to us, we should trust that we’ve made it. ‘We’re not alone’ and I think this has meaning for the audience as well.
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It will certainly be so; because 21st century audiences are excited by “the real,” whether or not it is in a complex dance with (2,500-year-old) fiction. This is our particular cultural moment, with trends turning towards identity and authenticity (some might say solipsism) as metaphor becomes obsolete. The artists involved are wise to these trends (“openness and realism felt like an exciting thing to play with,” says Olesker) but are not in thrall to them. “Just because it’s right doesn’t mean it’s worth doing,” Gonzalez says, and Spymonkey defends his decision to filter real-world problems through ancient Greek fiction. Park says, “It’s more fun to have a story to tell, and then have that story mesh with your own stories and situations. And then there’s the theatricality. We always have a lot of fun trying and failing to do ‘good theatre,’ and that’s because we’re the type of clown.”
“Maybe we need to learn to do that now,” he adds with some regret: “just make a show out of us.” After all, the company is looking for a new role. But that won’t work, Basauri sighs. Real world facts work best in small doses. “For some people, the truth can be enough if they present a great personality. “But I’m so boring off stage,” he said. “Toby and I are funny on stage, but we’re pretty boring in real life.”
• The Life of Max and Ivan, Selections is at the Soho Theater in London, January 15-20. The Frogs are at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton, from 19 January to 3 February.