Flying Funny: My Life without a Net

by Dudley Riggs

  Then I took away their scripts. “Please do the scene again without the script. You know the plot; you know your characters. Now do the scene again the best you can, with your imagination engaged. Keep the characters and the cues, but make new dialogue from the words that come first to your mind. Make it up as you go along.

  “Don’t worry about the right words. These are the right words because they are your words. They are free, honest words because they come from what you and your character know at this moment in time. Keep an open mind.”

  The workshops were successful in gathering together talented freethinkers, actors, artists, and writers who wanted to be a part of something new. After a while, the actors began to trust themselves, trust their talent. They started to trust me. They started to bloom.

  Youthful energy prevailed. Signs were posted backstage—thoughtful shibboleths that defined how the actors viewed the process and their art:

  We are free to fail, but we are free to do anything.

  Free to do what others are afraid to do.

  Free to do really outstanding work.

  We can do anything!

  Trust, honesty, and freedom unlock the artist to be great.

  These were hip kids—they got it. And so it grew.

  Eventually, we got to the point where the actors were simply given the idea of a scene with an interesting theme—for example, “newly married couple entertaining in-laws.” Onstage, the actors each added ideas, created small talk, and the scene became richer, building toward something interesting.

  After a year at Stefano’s, it was time to put ourselves under our own roof. I wanted to create a coffeehouse with the elegant atmosphere of places I had seen in Vienna. We searched for a location: we wanted an “interesting-looking” building with two rooms that could be both a café and a theater available at a low rent. We drove around looking for a building that was interesting—not necessarily one that was appropriate—and found an old radiator repair shop a little farther east from campus on University Avenue. This would become the Café Espresso.

  When my father and I had left Europe after our circus engagement had ended, we had had a fair amount of money, but had been told we weren’t allowed to bring British currency into the United States. So our feeling was that we better spend it. My father invested in small, lightweight, easily fungible cameras. I bought a rack of Penguin books that weren’t available in the States (my copy of Henry Miller’s banned book Tropic of Cancer was confiscated at customs) and a very heavy copper La Pavoni espresso machine. My Grandmother Riggs had introduced me to rich espresso coffee when I was eight by taking me to a coffeehouse called Caffé Reggio in Greenwich Village (it is still there). And so it was that eighteen years after visiting Reggio’s for the first time, I brought the first espresso machine to Minnesota.

  We painted the walls a deep royal red, hung heavy gold brocade drapes that had been rescued from the Radio City Theater, displayed copies of Rembrandt paintings in gold frames, and put “Café Espresso” in gold leaf on the front door. At Stefano’s we had offered an all-jazz jukebox, but here we played only classical music. Through an early customer, I found a marvelous woman, a Hungarian immigrant, who offered to make Sacher torte. And I had to learn how to bake my own “salt and pepper” bread for the one sandwich we offered: a European ham and cheese with good mustard.

  “Nordeast” is one of the liveliest parts of the city now. But in the late 1950s it was a rough neighborhood with hard-drinking bars, church missions, Scientologists, and the Socialist Workers Party headquarters down the block from us. We were not welcomed by local merchants, who were inclined to believe that anyone selling espresso had to be a beatnik. Customers were outraged by espresso cappuccino at fifty cents a cup. Business was slow. But because of bridge construction over the Mississippi, symphony-goers on their way to see the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra at Northrop Auditorium had to go right by our front door. Thankfully, Café Espresso became popular with people of artistic taste.

  All the same, Café Espresso was started with three strikes already against us: an espresso place with Viennese decor in 1957 Minneapolis, a new kind of entertainment based in satire and audience participation, and a restaurant being run by two people with no previous business experience.

  When the Café Espresso building was sold two years later for urban renewal, that eviction landed us around the corner at 207 East Hennepin. We did the move with help from our loyal clientele. Regular espresso drinkers volunteered to hand-carry the entire contents of the café the two blocks to Hennepin. But now we had no parking lot. During the first three years at Café Espresso, our income went up; we moved around the corner, and it went right back down.

  East Hennepin was the first time we had my name over the door. The building had been a beauty parlor, and one of the reasons they probably went out of business was that they’d invested in a huge sign—an eight-foot-high, two-sided panel. Richard Guindon, a coconspirator who later became a syndicated cartoonist, took on the job of painting a new sign; he completed “Coffee House” on one side of it and then asked the question: What are we going to put on the other side? This was the first time my name was part of our operation: Dudley Riggs’ Café Espresso.

  We kept the same menu, music, and feel, but now we had no back room. Up front, there was a bar with our coffee machine and café, and at the other end we used two platforms on one side and another in front of the piano on the other. The question was: How do you create a backstage? Some wanted curtains, but I thought we ought to use three revolving doors, the backdrop I had used performing in vaudeville as part of The Crazy Carpenters.

  The two stages and three doors, which became our trademark, allowed us to make the quick entrances and exits needed for blackouts. I liked being able to get one or two thoughtful sentences from one actor, but made funny by the suddenness of another actor’s entrance. Surprise moments to create an unpredictable rhythm to the revue.

  When the audience already knows where the scene is going to go, a blackout allows us to start something else, then come back and finish that scene. You’re smartening up the audience to accept the cutaway scene—say, insert a scene from Oedipus in the middle of another sketch. Tiresias appears and speaks a line from a Greek tragedy that adds substance to the comedy sketch. Make the audience think “Where did that come from?” I think we must constantly be ready to surprise the audience with something new, even if unrelated or illogical. Virtually every actor I’ve worked with had something they would love to say onstage, even though it had nothing to do with the show.

  At the same time, I didn’t want the café to be labeled as a beatnik coffee shop. What combination could I live with to stay in business but still produce Instant Theater and develop Fliffus? We tried it all. It was a time of constant serendipity, new people, and new chemistry. It was of a time of “Let’s just see if it works.” We had a poet who was quite brilliant at reading poetry accompanied by a jazz trio. Someone would come forward with a new play they’d just discovered. Maybe it was not quite what we were looking for, but we honored the work and provided opportunities to emerging artists. We were offering a lot of what seemed almost forbidden pleasures in those times—jazz, experimental theater, political satire. Out of The New Ideas Program I eventually evolved the Brave New Workshop’s guiding principles: “promiscuous hostility and positive neutrality.”

  With The New Ideas Program as the umbrella, there were soon three groups doing performances in my little theater, all working for no pay. The Ad Lib Ad Absurdum continued working with audience suggestions and improvisation in the mode of Word Jazz and Fliffus. It was my favorite.

  The John Birch Society Players performed on Mondays and leaned toward singing parodies and political songs with commentary in between. The third group was named The Brave New Workshop and performed written sketches. At the time, the newspaper people in town put on a yearly variety show called The Gridiron Show. When I sent out a call for scripts, several newspaper people showed up. That w
as how the first little group of writers and performers came in, including Irv Letofsky, Don Morrison, Dan Sullivan, and Gary (Garrison) Keillor. My old friend John Lewin—who would later join the Guthrie—also wrote sketches. John would put together a little revue production with his scripts, and then we would add improvisation. (I was calling it Instant Theater, and to qualify as Instant Theater, it needed to be connected to audience suggestions.)

  It took all winter, but in June we had our opening night of “The Instant Theater Presents The New Ideas Program!” We started the show with the cannons of the 1812 Overture and the sound of the espresso machine kicking out steam.

  I knew from the circus that bill posting was the way to get attention for a show, so we slapped up a few hundred posters over one weekend. Dick Guindon used the red, white, and blue that became our signature colors after that. He painted a flag in the top corner and “SATIRE.” “A BRAVE NEW WORKSHOP” was the headline. With posters all over town, we were no longer a secret. Overnight, people knew about the show. And they even bought tickets. The show was a hit, though still sloppy, and it was the beginning of using sketch scripts generated by that circle of writers.

  This was a period in our history when improvisation became a very small “i.” When we split into our three little companies, the one that became most popular was not improvisational; it was scripted. But the feeling of the room and the style of production remained the same. I wanted “comedy theater for thinking people.”

  As the two other groups (Ad Lib Ad Absurdum and the John Birch Society Players) were absorbed into the Brave New Workshop, I decided to come up with a new show every month. This was the first time we had an “announced” schedule of shows, allowing an audience to plan. And the first time we had a format that so nicely jibed with my old newspaper routine from vaudeville. We could focus on one idea, satirize it, put up a bunch of sketches around it, and give the shows a revue structure of all-original material.

  I remember almost constant recruitment, finding actors from the university and the drama program at Columbia Heights High School. Three of those kids became professional actors: Pat Proft, Mike McManus, and Tom Sherohman. Al Franken and Tom Davis also came into the Brave New Workshop through the recruitment of our summer youth programs.

  I was mostly directing and producing. I enjoyed saying, “I now present . . .” like an Ed Sullivan of this little world. There was a range of tastes, but the scripts always had to have my approval before hitting the stage. By the time we moved to south Hennepin, the writers’ list included about twenty-five people, and I was always busy selecting scripts that fit our mission.

  With each move came an additional new audience, and that tended to influence how we performed. Various pieces were artistically successful or got good reviews but didn’t have sustainability for the audience. We wanted to be the loyal opposition to both political parties. Satirize everyone. Have no sacred cows, with no subjects off target. Our job was to mock and expose vice and folly.2 Everything was fair game. And when an issue picked up momentum, we went with the momentum. I began to think of this approach to running a theater as “flying without a net.”

  2 Some show titles were The Vietnam Follies (1966); The Lyndon Frolics: Great Fables from the Great Society (1967); The Race Riot Review (1967); The Future Lies Just Ahead: The Watergate Story (1972); Bedtime for Reagonomics (1983); 1984: Orswell That Ends Well (1984); What’s So Funny about Being Female? (1989/91); Censorship of Fools; or, Jesse at the Helm (1990); The Recession Follies: BUSHwhacked (1992); Without a Clue: The Dumbing of America (1994); No Newt Is Good Newt: The Congressional Follies (1995); Campaign in the Neck: This Election Is Riggsed! (1996); Whose Lie Was It Anyway? (1996); Saving Clinton’s Privates (1998); and Obama Mia (2011).

  16

  Theater without a Net

  “In this theater, we’re not doing Shakespeare; we’re not doing Chekhov. This is not meant to be great and lasting literature. What we’re doing is found in this performance only.”

  Looking back, being able to walk onstage without rehearsal or a script, presenting material that is created at the very moment it is being performed—that was my goal. An actor’s nightmare? No, my vision for Instant Theater.

  Instant Theater was not instant. It took time to develop a way of working that actually worked. I kept looking for people willing to listen to just the possibility that this crazy Fliffus idea was not hatter-mad. I searched for actors and an audience who believed that there is joy and freedom in surprise, in knowing what the circus flyer knows—that a fall sharpens attention. No one wants gravity to win, but we are excited by the possibility. The flyer learns to succeed by rehearsing failure. With Fliffus we learn to grow from our mistakes. We build on, add on, and improve the presentation. In the circus, we performed with a net. This was theater without a net.

  For actors to trust each other and trust the process, we had to create an environment where they felt safe to improvise, to speak their ideas freely. Only then could Fliffus succeed.

  We started generating scripts, and as soon as the actors merged into the writing process, the shows became more improvisational. Eventually, actors were expected to develop ideas, improvise in rehearsal, and write their own scripts. The Brave New Workshop went from being a “writer’s theater” back to my original notion of an “actor/writer’s theater” based on improvisation.

  We had also developed a thinking audience, by ensuring that their ideas could be heard. It was all about trust and ideas, and doing things at the right time.

  Every new show was ignited by some current event. In a way it was like the newspaper bit from my vaudeville act. In this case, I would provide a triggering word or concept. The actors would improvise around a big table in the basement, go home and write drafts, bring them back in, and we’d work it all again. They’d trade drafts with one another for rewriting until eventually I’d give the final OK on the production, which then continued to develop in rehearsal and performance as news changed. We were able to develop actors who could be fearless and able to think on their feet, and to fly “net free.”

  I was asking actors to make a jump from being “a moving chess piece” to barely controlled stage chaos.

  And I was asking myself to try and control chaos. I was the title guy, the 3 × 5 index card guy, the triggering idea guy, and the director and producer. I developed what came to be called by others as the “Riggsian Rules.” The number one rule: there is no rule. Unless it’s this: “All ideas are welcome.” To have good ideas, you had to have a lot of ideas—everyone’s voice must be honored. Improvisation only works in a democracy. Our stated goal was to make everyone else look good. “We” not “me.”

  Ultimately, entertaining the audience was my primary goal. But alas, not all ideas work in a given production. Some ideas had to wait and grow before being performed. The idea was that all ideas are heard, but not all may make the cut. So there had to be someone to say: “We’re not going to use your idea in this show.” Once people believed that everyone’s ideas would be considered—which in itself took some work—they then had to learn how to handle having their ideas denied, changed, delayed, or eliminated. Thankfully, they kept working.

  And the theater thrived! Conditions at the time were ripe for us to shake things up. There was a somewhat repressive mood in Minneapolis when I first arrived; people were very proper and a little uptight. Anything after 10 p.m. was said to be sinful. All kinds of things were forbidden pleasures then. When we did our first shows, we practically had to explain what satire was. But in the circus I had learned that to be successful, I’d need to do something others were afraid to do.

  Once we got into the 1960s, people were beginning to shake things up all over the country. And the Brave New Workshop happily began attracting a hip audience of people progressive enough to enjoy our shows. We found an audience willing to take a chance on a theater that was inventing itself. They came with an expectation of being entertained, but also offended. That is the balancing act:
to enlighten and offend, but not so much that the audience won’t come back. I used to say, “We want to make ’em laugh first, and then they fight about the issues on the way home.”

  Back when I first met Marylyn Rice, she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I was pulled between pursuing a career in show business and a college education. Marylyn and I talked about a life in show business and the fact that there are defining limitations: (a) acts that are too expensive to mount, (b) acts no one wants to do because of the risk, and (c) acts you can only do if you have some immense special talent. I came from the tradition of “Let’s do what everybody else is afraid to do.” But what did this mean for me?

  Grandmother Riggs had warned me about show-biz hyperbole: “Don’t believe your own adjectives.” I sometimes had the feeling that what we were doing could never be quite right, but it was right enough to continue. There were very few occasions when I’d look at the work and say, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” But then some guy walking by after the show would say quietly, “Mr. Riggs, you seem to have lost your way.” And yes, the show didn’t work that night. But he had been a fan for a long time, and so I’d think about it. Every time I thought I should shut the theater down, I realized I didn’t want to throw away the audience that took years to develop or the actors who also took years to develop. Just when I considered quitting, some political outrage like Watergate or the frozen Congress would need to be addressed, I would see something in the news, and I’d think, “There’s a show in that.”

  It’s all a work in progress.

  P. T. Barnum had long ago figured out a way of approaching the public that still has currency: The Greatest Show on Earth! The best slogan ever, even if it wasn’t always the truth. So much about the circus depended on hyperbole and incredible grandiosity. With the Brave New Workshop, I wanted less hyperbole and as much truth as possible. That’s what I saw in improvisation: truth comes from there, truth for that particular moment. While the old comedy traditions often denied truth, I wanted comedy to be funny because it was true.