I think we found a new format

Saturday night at Arlington Heights was a tremendous success, even though some of the audience had clearly stumbled into the wrong show. "Any theatre that would play Brighton Beach Memoirs" would certainly have a family friendly Saturday night show. But the second time Joel belted out "Have you guys seen this video about this guy who gets fucked by a horse?" as a fake audience member, during a fake Q&A, they weren't in Brighton Beach Kansas anymore. Only two people walked out, but the rest, as good a sports as they were, were a little unsettled during the raunchier parts. Over 100 audience members just "putting up with it" translates into a weird vibe by the time it gets to stage. She show is sweet as Zoe Dunkle finally finds a group of friends, and DJ and Paula decide to reconcile their relationship and their record collection. We even got an "awwwwwww." And then, to reward them we changed to topic to Horse fucking. Sorry guys.

I'm sure it's been written in the other blogs, but Joel took the show with his "guy in the crowd" routine. I'll switch this little bit of Joel praise around to say that our FORMAT stole the show. Our format was very loose, allowing us to make up freewheeling bits, like Joel Audience Member, at the last minute and throw them into the show, very Cafe Ashie (see footnote), except all grown up. The new format: all of us stay on stage, that way if I find what Justin said funny, I can be seen laughing. We have thrown theatricality in the pukey smelling dumpster behind the Heartland Studio Theatre with 600 pound prop bags. We had no props. We had a table that had one piece of costuming per character, hats mostly, and a pair of Sam Seder glasses for my teacher character. Stephe is on stage with us, at a desk with a computer and mixing board, fulfilling his lifelong goal of being a DJ, or at least looking like one. Since we were doing a live version of a radio episode it was the most sound effects, music, and production heavy show we've ever done. It literally was Episode 53: We Didn't Start The Fire onstage in front of four mics.

This is a show that combines how tight we want our material presented (Fire is one of the tightest scripts in our arsenal) with how loose we want our stage presence to be. It's very inviting to the audience. It's friendly. No more blackouts. No more running around backstage slamming into Sandy while trying to find all 12 pieces of my Brent Wickerman ensemble. Nope. Now I would just put on a visor and the rest is character in front of the mic.

And I really feel like were are on the precipice of inventing something. The Rock and Roll literary show. "Schadenfreude's Rent Party: The Rock and Roll Literary Show" - that has a nice ring.

I never thought I'd say this, but I could go for an open run? I just heard Justin's heart explode, no, his real heart, we don't do the fake heart anymore either. (see footnote 2)

(footnote)
Cafe Ashie was the very first place that Schadenfreude ever played, we came up with a brand new sketch show every week, we wrote them on Wednesdays and brought a paragraph describing the sketch to a bar that smelled like Archie Bunkers lung called Cafe Ashie (now called The Starlite in Andersonville). We would then improvise off the paragraphs. The group then featured Gillian Vigman (Sons & Daughters) and Ike Barinholtz (MadTV) but I'm thinking of starting a lie that Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Horatio Sanz, Seth Meyers, and Josh Meyers were in the group too.

(footnote 2)
We ended every show from 1998 - 2003 with Justin going ballistic, ripping out Sandy's heart, and biting into it, covering him with fake blood. What made this so funny was that Justin was in his 20's. So we don't do it anymore.