BREAKING NEWS: The Patch has learned that a prominent Kenilworth couple has been hijacked by playwrights. The following details are known: Stanton and Elizabeth were once members of the North Shore elite. But when Stanton was sent away on insider trading charges, their life careened in directions only the great dramatists could have imagined. That is, if the great dramatists were actually Chicago’s newest break-out comedy talents.
Stanton and Elizabeth are characters created and played by Wilmette residents Anne and Greg Taubeneck, the latest stars to emerge from Annoyance Theatre’s renowned improv training grounds. Their play, “Get Your Hands Off Me, Chekhov!,” imagines what happens when Stanton and Elizabeth’s crumpled post-conviction life is forcibly taken over, in successive scenes, by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Mamet, Tennessee Williams and Samuel Beckett and overlaid with the quality improv that made Chicago famous.
The Taubenecks, who have been married for forty-five years, met while performing in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum” at the University of Illinois. After college they took a long break from theater. Anne, 67, worked for the Chicago Sun-Times as a food writer and then as a free-lance travel writer. She later free-lanced for the Chicago Tribune as an arts and entertainment writer. Greg, 71, retired in 2006 as executive vice president and executive creative director of Leo Burnett where he co-created United Airlines’ “Rhapsody in Blue” campaign among many others. After they retired, they decided together to pursue a second career in comedy.
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The result is “Get Your Hands Off Me, Chekhov!,” a smart and inventive parody playing to enthusiastic crowds every Wednesday night at Annoyance Theatre’s intimate new digs. The night we were there, audience laughter and applause frequently punctuated the clever dialogue and songs. Credit for the score also goes to Second City’s Jonathan Wagner who created the music and sound design and appears onstage as a hilariously intrusive musical director.
The show reminded me of one I saw back in the late ‘90s, also on a vaunted Chicago stage; a sketch show written and performed by Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey in their pre-Saturday Night Live days. Although the Taubenecks’ show is different in tone and content – they bring a depth to the humor that only comes with life experience – the two performances have in common the certainty that one is witnessing exceptional talent rising. The Taubenecks’ writing blends references that are literate, local and looney. Their impeccable timing, delivery and technique – listen for the callbacks about the dogs and the children – had the audience sitting up straight, fully committed, in anticipation of the next comedic delight.
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So if ever you needed a reason to travel to the city mid-week, this is it. But go soon. The show is playing only through July 30th. Some advice learned the hard way: purchase tickets in advance.* When we arrived at the theater on July 2nd, we found the show sold out. We and others had a wait (in the very comfortable new bar) while theater managers kindly figured out how to accommodate the overflow.
I was fortunate to speak with Anne and Greg about their new life in comedy. Their story is also a Chicago story and a love story. Please read on for an edited version of our phone interview.
Q: How did you become involved in comedy?
Greg: We were writing parody songs for the Evanston Woman’s Club benefit show. Lisa Bany, who teaches at Second City, was also involved. She got together a group of cast members and started improv classes out here. We formed a little improv group called “Mouth To Mouth” and it gave us the bug. We decided we’d take the whole Second City curriculum at the Second City Training Center downtown.
Along the way, we read a book by Mick Napier (Improvise.: Scene From the Inside Out), the artistic director of Annoyance and it struck a chord. So then we went to Annoyance and did the same thing all over again because they have their own curriculum. We had a couple of classes with Mick himself and somewhere along the way he found out that in our prior lives we’d both been writers and he said, “Why don’t you write a show?” It took us a year, but what we finally did was “Get Your Hands Off Me, Chekhov!”
Anne: The idea started with a class at Second City taught by Rachael Mason, who ended up directing our show. Her class included an exercise doing improvisation in the style of different playwrights. That was the starting point.
Q: What struck a chord about improvisation?
Anne: It’s really fun and it’s incredibly challenging. It’s hard to make it good. Also, we both had a long-time interest in theater. Improv has a lot of aspects of theater. A part of it is creating characters and that’s something that’s fun to play around with.
Greg: Everything is made up. Also, it teaches you how to listen because one of the main elements of improv is listening hard to what’s just been said so that you respond to it and add to it.
Anne: There is a lot of funny stuff that goes on, so it’s really enjoyable to be in a class with people who have a similar interest. They can be very funny. It can be hard, but there are usually a lot of laughs involved.
Greg: There are not many times in life where you can just be goofy and it’s protected because everyone else is doing the same thing: coming up with off-the-wall ideas and seeing what happens. There is nothing you can’t decide to do in improv. You can decide to be a quacking duck. It gets pretty deranged as long as everyone is in agreement and can add to it.
Somebody described improv as jumping off a cliff because you just don’t know what’s going to happen. Although we’ve both been writers, we’ve never done it this way where you start with a base of improvisation and then you use that to build scenes. That was brand new to us.
Anne: We definitely got that idea from improv. Neither one of us had anything like that in our other jobs. The whole Annoyance experience has been really, really great. We love those people, Mick and Jen (Estlin – Annoyance’s executive producer). Their teachers are wonderful and the new theater is amazing.
Q: What is your writing process? Do you divide it up or do you collaborate on everything?
Greg: A combination of both. When we collaborate, we sit down together and toss ideas back and forth. But Anne just sat down and wrote a lot of the Shakespeare scene, the first scene, and then she laid it on me, like “What do you think?”
Anne: And then Greg wrote the opening and a lot of …
Greg: … the Mamet.
Anne: One thing that was really fun about writing was the research. The Tennessee Williams section is a parody and a silly take on “A Streetcar Named Desire.” We went back and watched the Marlon Brando movie two or three times and had fun playing around with the characters and dialogue.
Greg: Makes it easier when you’re stealing from the masters. They’re doing some of the work for you.
Q: It sounds like a lot of fun. Hard work, too.
Anne: It was more fun than not. I don’t think we would have done it if it was simply hard work because in our previous lives we both had deadlines and stress. With this, we worked at our own pace, so it came together in a fairly non-stressful way.
Q: Do you ever have differences of opinion about material or has one of you ever suggested something and the other says, “Whoa, that’s going too far”?
Greg: It’s usually me who gets too cheesy or crude and Anne will call me on that.
Anne: Mick saw it on June 4th and he gave us some notes. When we started adding jokes, Greg went off the rails. We were like, wait a minute!
Greg: When we fall asleep we’re now watching the Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft movie, To Be or Not to Be. It’s hilarious. But you know, a lot of that stuff is cheesy jokes, which I like.
Anne: There was a point when it was like, “Hey, I think that’s one too many!”
Greg: I was piling on one too many …
Anne: But other than that, we seem to go along pretty smoothly.
Q: Do you have a favorite story about studying at Annoyance?
Anne: We did a couple of week-long intensives at the old Annoyance Theater on Broadway. Some people even came in from other countries. Mick is quite a draw. Sometimes after Mick’s classes on Saturday, he would ask anybody who wanted to join him to have lunch …
Greg: There was a place called Crew Bar which is a gay sports bar right next door to the Green Mill.
Anne: So we would almost always go. It was so much fun to get to know the other students better and to get to know Mick, too.
Greg: Until we read his book, we didn’t know that much about him. But he turns out to be an incredible person, really amazing. Just a great teacher and he’s a hell of an improviser himself when he gets up on stage.
Q: What is marriage like between two comedians?
Anne: Neither one of us is tremendously serious, although sometimes you have to be. But we have a similar take on stuff.
Greg: We have the same sense of humor and we often have similar reactions to the same things.
Anne: There’s so much in life that’s absurd.
Q: How has improv influenced that outlook?
Greg: Sometimes there are discoveries or funny things that happen in improv and you think, yeah, that’s a way to look at life.
Q: What is an example?
Greg: Looking at these playwrights, that improvised exercise was really good because you think of these guys, Chekhov or Tennessee Williams, as very serious but in improv you think, what is actually silly about what they’re doing in their total seriousness?
Anne: For an exercise, we had to do improv in the style of Chekhov. We had previously done a “Great Books” class as part of the New Trier Extension and we had a book group that continued outside of the class. We read Three Sisters and really studied Chekhov. So we were familiar with the Chekhovian style which gave us a leg up with that kind of exercise.
I had to improvise with somebody and immediately went into, “I must leave the farm. The goats are too hungry. The goats and the cows. And I must go back to the city.” It was strictly from reading Chekhov that gave me that start.
Greg: Everybody is so lonely and desperate.
Anne: I’m not sure if it was funny to anybody else, but it struck me as being very fun to do.
Q: What was the inspiration for the plot of “Get Your Hands Off Me, Chekhov!”?
Anne: We get a lot of free vanity magazines in the mail and it occurred to us that it might be interesting to consider how some famous playwrights might tamper with the lives of a very privileged, entitled couple. Their lives at first seem “dreamy” but then the playwrights take over and pull them into some very unusual situations. Our director, Rachael Mason, helped us shape the narrative along the way and Mick Napier and Jen Estlin also had some input.
Q: What is your drive home like after the show? Do you talk about the show?
Greg: We discuss it. Certain things, are they working or aren’t they?
Anne: What works, what got a laugh.
Greg: So usually there is a little bit of a “Hmm, did that work, should we change it? Should we drop it?” I can’t imagine people who do this for a living and have to perform the same thing five, six times a week … it just seems so hard.
Anne: It’s kind of exhausting.
Q: And comedy is hard. You guys make it look easy. But it takes a lot.
Greg: Well, we’re so insecure that we rehearse it relentlessly.
Anne: The other thing is we usually wake up at some point in the middle of the night because we’re kind of old and we’ll both say the next night, “Well, I ran the whole show while I was awake last night.” We know each other’s lines because we’ve done it so many times. If we’re doing something else, we’re swimming or something, we’ll run the lines.
Q: What is your advice for people who dream of doing comedy but don’t know how to get started?
Anne: Take an improv class. People say, “Oh, I could never do that. I could never take an improv class.”
Greg: That’s ridiculous.
Anne: Oh, yes you could. Anyone can do this and anyone can have fun doing this. It’s eye-opening how much fun it is. It is challenging, but there are different techniques that you learn and it’s a lot of fun to be in these classes. The classes are a great way to network with other people. Most of them are a lot younger than we are, but sometimes we meet people who are closer ….
Greg: Not that far …
Anne: Nobody as old as we are.
Greg: Some are young people who would love to make careers out of it. But not all of them. We met teachers, a retired policeman. We’ve met lawyers, of course. They’re thinking about improv as a way to help them think on their feet. All kinds of occupations. It may be predominantly much younger people, but not always. You’d be surprised at who turns up at these classes.
Q: What are the differences between Second City and Annoyance?
Anne: Second City has a lot more classes …
Greg: A lot more classes in a lot more areas. If you go on their web site, you see hundreds of classes in all sorts of things.
Anne: I like Annoyance because it is smaller. We’ve got to know all their main teachers. They are all great improvisers and they’re really funny, nice people and you can go to the theater and bump into them. Second City is more like a big …
Greg: … big operation.
Ann: You can go there and probably won’t bump into one of the big people there. Annoyance, especially now in this new place, the bar is a hang-out. It’s a community.
Greg: That’s one of the nice things about those classes. [You can] go up to the bar and have a drink and get to know [fellow students] and teachers, too.
Anne: And Mick, who runs the place. He’s done a lot of work at Second City, too. Right now, he’s out in L.A. working on a TV pilot, but lots of times he’s around. That’s how we first met him. We went to something at the Annoyance and he was behind the bar. We’d read his book, we recognized him and we went up and introduced ourselves. After that, we would bump into him and say hello.
Greg: He’s easy to talk to and he does some incredible card tricks, too.
Q: That’s one of the things I love about Chicago comedy. It feels like a community and people are really accessible.
Greg: Yeah, you’re right about that.
Anne: That’s a wonderful thing about it.
Q: The community seems very welcoming. If you have an idea, there are places to make it happen.
Greg: Chicago is for improvisers what Rome is for devout Catholics. People come here to study from all over. We got to know a guy who went to a couple of our classes who is from a little town in Sweden, but he’s an improv nerd. He loves it and he wants to go back and teach it. Very funny guy.
You make a great point about the city feeling like it’s more welcoming and mutually supportive, people supporting each other, going to each other’s shows …
Anne: True.
Greg: … and then you run into them at various places. It is a community.
Q: It seems people are genuinely interested in each other’s success.
Greg: There’s less pressure, too. You think of L.A. or New York if you’re really in the business, well, your career can live or die there, but in Chicago there isn’t that intense scrutiny and worry.
Q: What’s next for you?
Greg: Damn good question. We’re agonizing over it now, trying to come up …
Anne: … with an idea. We’re so involved with what we’re doing now that we haven’t really blocked out time to just sit down and say, ok, where could this go? We’ve done a little bit of that, but not too much because we keep rehearsing this show.
Greg: It was this time last year that we started on this, so now is the time. We better get on it if we want to do anything else.
Q: How would you fill in the blank, “The couple who laughs together _____.”
Anne: The couple who laughs together stays married 45 years.
Greg: Can’t improve on that one.
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*GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME, CHEKHOV! is every Wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. through July 30, 2014 at the Annoyance Theatre, 851 West Belmont, Chicago. The play is part of a double bill titled, “Altered States” and shares the evening with FLIP/FLOP an improv exploration of flip-flopped gender roles. Tickets are $12 or $10 for students.
For more information and to purchase tickets online: www.theannoyance.com or call the box office: (773) 697-9693.
Metered street parking is often available on Belmont. If not, there is a parking garage on Sheffield across the street from the Vic Theater.
