Squirrel Comedy Theatre is Building Something New
By: Eli Yurman
Tags: Cities, Improv, Entertainment, Comedy, Theatre

Squirrel Comedy Theatre is Building Something New

Graphic by author; Logo provided by Squirrel Comedy Theatre.

Squirrel Comedy Theatre is the new kid on the block, and is already making a name for itself with its focus on diversity, transparency, and equality. The theatre has arrived to fill the improv-shaped hole left in the center of the NYC comedy community after the Upright Citizens Brigade, one of the city’s most prominent comedy theatres, announced in late April that it would be permanently closing its remaining New York locations due to additional financial stresses created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview with Local, two of the Squirrel’s co-founders, former UCB New York artistic director Michael Hartney and former UCB performer/teacher Maritza Montañez, explained that right from the get-go the founders of the Squirrel (all of them UCB alums) knew they didn’t just want to recreate a scaled-down version of UCB. “It was clear that we should forge a different path forward, our own path forward,” said Hartney.

The Squirrel was launched on November 30 by Hartney and Montañez, along with their fellow co-founders Lou Gonzalez, Patrick Keene, Corin Wells, and Alex Song-Xia. On its website, the theatre describes itself as “a non-profit that aims to be New York’s premier destination for sketch and improv comedy, with world-class live shows and classes from a diverse group of the city’s best and brightest performers and writers.” Already a tall order, the mission statement goes on to emphasize the theatre’s commitment to diversity and transparency, stating, “We want this community to more closely resemble the vibrant melting pot of the city we’re in. The Squirrel will not merely give diversity a seat at the table; it will be the table.”

The UCB Theatre, founded in 1999, has faced criticism in the past for its lack of diversity and racial sensitivity, and has struggled in recent years to implement the kind of large-scale changes necessary to address those criticisms. Hartney explained that one of the advantages the Squirrel has in this regard is that it’s starting from scratch from a place of diversity.

“You know, the UCB 4 was four straight white people — which is fine, of course, that’s legal last I checked,” Hartney said, referring to UCB founders Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh, and laughing at his own joke. “But the six founders of the Squirrel are majority queer, majority POC, and we are committed to maintaining that type of representation not only in our leadership, but also across the board.”

“It’s not that UCB didn’t have diversity and inclusion on their radar,” Montañez added, “it’s just that it’s really hard to make that part of your basic framework when it wasn’t initially.”

Both Hartney and Montañez agree that placing an emphasis on diversity will only benefit the theatre’s comedic endeavors. “We’re going to be more funny because of how diverse we are, because so many different POV’s are being represented,” said Hartney. “Together, we can create something greater than the sum of our parts.”

Hartney and Montañez have both dedicated years of their lives to making people laugh. Montañez began training at UCB in 2011, while she was studying history and creative writing at NYU, and has stuck with it ever since, focusing primarily on improv with splashes of sketch and character work thrown in for flavor. Until the COVID-19 shutdowns, she’d spent the last few years teaching at UCB as well as performing.

For his part, Hartney has been living in New York for the last 18 years doing comedy, working in film, theatre, and television, and studying, writing, performing, and teaching at UCB, until he became the artistic director of the UCB Theatre in New York for the last year and a half of its existence. “When I was eight I knew I wanted to do comedy,” he told Local.

With such deep love for live comedy, it’s not hard to imagine that social distancing has taken its toll on Hartney and Montañez, along with the rest of the performing community. Montañez explained that some types of comedy have adapted to a virtual format better than others. “I’ve been very jealous of how well characters and sketch translate to Zoom,” she said. “Some of the sketch stuff has been pre-recorded, and some is more live and interactive, more like a variety show. And it works really well — I think people are being really thoughtful about scripted programming especially, and how to make that work.”

Hartney said that for him, improv is the final frontier of figuring out how to perform over Zoom. “I’ve been doing a scripted character show since May,” he said, laughing, “so I almost feel like a grizzled veteran of the industry at this point as far as streaming comedy shows goes.”

He thinks that sketch comedy “works really well because most people have just pivoted to just shooting sketches like you would a short film. I think people’s shooting and editing skills have really come a long way,” he added. “I’m famously a Luddite, and I even know a little bit about how to cut stuff together now. Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Hartney and Montañez were both quick to clarify that by calling improv the “final frontier” they mean they’re making progress — it’s by no means an undiscovered country.

“One of the things that’s been really helpful is we have someone who’s helping us with tech,” Montañez said, referring to Kurt Cruz, the former tech director at UCB. “He’s been very game to try things when we were like, ‘Oh, what if when we added a scene, there’s a quick sound?’ and he’s just like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’”

“I think any elements that can be introduced to make it feel more like a show make for a better show,” added Hartney. “I think the thing we’ve found, because of the limitations of Zoom…is to make the shows feel a little more produced, just because making stuff up on the spot on Zoom feels so loose and crazy.”

The Squirrel’s most recent live show.

Performers aren’t the only people that have been forced to adapt — teaching comedy has required some adjustments as well.

“I’ve definitely had to reconsider exercises that we would have done in person,” Montañez said, “because almost everything has to be sort of recalibrated for not being in the same space. But all of the stuff that I really like the most about teaching improv is related to listening, or to using your emotional intelligence and having a perspective on what’s happening. And that all works pretty well.

Unlike sketch classes, which Hartney suspects might be able to stay online even after the world returns to normalcy, improv comedy is fundamentally a very physical activity. Montañez spoke at length about the ways she’d begun navigating that necessity while teaching through a screen.

She explained that as a student, she’d felt that the most helpful physical exercises were ones that involved moving like a specific type of person, so the challenge became how to translate those activities onto Zoom. Instead of “move like this,” Montañez said, it became “what did you do when you did that? What does that feel like in your body? What are you changing? Where’s the tension in your face?”

“It’s also kind of weird seeing yourself on camera,” she added. “I’ll be like, ‘I feel like I’m communicating anger,’ but what I’m seeing is yeah, I do just look sad. Which is for sure a Maritza problem, but it is interesting to see that and be like, ‘OK, what can I do? How can I keep adjusting myself?’”

Despite the weirdness of online improv and all the difficulties that come with it, the response to the Squirrel’s launch from the comedy community has been resoundingly positive, and many of their first wave of classes have already sold out.

“I didn’t expect the response to be on the scale that it was,” Hartney told Local. “I thought people were going to be very kind and it would be a lovely little boutique of a launch.” He said he’d led the UCB performing community know about the launch ahead of time, “just because having performers find things out via a press release is a little demoralizing. But truly like six minutes later, I got a DM from Vulture. It was like, oh, so they’re interested in talking about this. That’s cool.”

One of the big differences in structure the Squirrel has compared to other major comedy theatres is that none of their classes have prerequisites or requirements. “At the end of the day, we’re not requiring that anyone take prior classes, period,” Hartney said. Each class comes with a short course description, as well as a recommendation as to who the class might be aimed for, but, said Hartney, “If someone wants to jump in the deep end of a class, I mean, you know, power to them.”

Classes also won’t be a requirement in order to be eligible to perform with the Squirrel, again standing in contrast to other prominent comedy institutions. The Squirrel doesn’t have any house teams at the moment — as Hartney says, “That ain’t yet,” but they’re constantly accepting pitches for shows at their email address (thesquirrelnyc@gmail.com) and they’re already putting together their calendars for early 2021. Currently, they stream live virtual shows twice a week, on both YouTube and Twitch.

The last major departure the Squirrel makes from its comedy forebears is its commitment to paying its performers, something UCB was often criticized for not doing. Like with addressing diversity, Hartney and Montañez think their advantage comes from starting from scratch. “I think in a lot of ways, UCB’s inertia on that issue was because they’ve been doing it the way they’ve been doing it for so long,” said Hartney. “Their mission was, and I think it’s a good one, to make shows as inexpensive as possible, but because of that, the box office was low because the tickets were so cheap.”

Once they have physical shows to sell tickets to, the Squirrel team hopes that by finding a middle ground — making tickets a little more expensive but still affordable — they’ll be able to generate more revenue and give their artists a cut at the door.

“It’s especially important that it’s already a part of our business plan,” said Montañez. The Squirrel has been accounting for paying performers in their budget from day one, which gives them a leg up, she said. “It really does seem like a lot of the problem was that it was a huge rerouting that UCB couldn’t undertake.”

“I think it’s worth mentioning that no one will be making a living performing Squirrel shows,” Hartney interjected. “They’ll be lucky to get a chopped salad with the money they’ll be making.”

“But,” added Montañez, “it’ll be nice to not be losing money performing.”

Due to COVID, the Squirrel is currently entirely virtual, but there are plans in place to procure a physical space, and the theatre is accepting donations to that end. “I’m looking forward to a very exciting period of time where we are very aggressively pursuing bargain-basement New York real estate,” said Hartney. “It will probably be so stressful and I will want to die, but it will also be very exciting and if we do it right, we’re going to have a cool success story to report on.”

Squirrel Comedy Theatre hopes to build on the foundations laid by its predecessors to build something new, different, and, just maybe, better. Even the name of the theatre is a light dig at UCB.

“When we were brainstorming names, Michael brought it to our attention that when people leave the Church of Scientology because they have taken some issue with it, but they got something from it that they are taking away with them and find value in, those people are called squirrels,” Montañez said.

“And so we feel like we’re coming from an institution, we took something from it, we’ve gotten a lot of value from it, and we want to keep teaching the things we found valuable.”