#kelly buttermore
For a very long time, I was part of a theater’s house team system. (I’m not anymore, for a variety of reasons that I’ll delve into in future posts. Stay tuned!) For the uninitiated, the house team, in a nutshell, is the ultimate goal for an improviser with an allegiance to a particular theater. Basically, you go through the levels at the theater’s training center, after which you’re eligible to audition for placement onto a team. That team can last anywhere from several months to several years, and gives performers the chance to perform weekly in front of an audience.
It should come as no surprise that women are the minority on these institutional teams - after all, there are still statistically fewer women doing improv than men, overall. Looking at the makeup of teams at the three largest New York theaters, the gender ratio sits at about 30% women to 70% men. Some theaters’ teams are more balanced than others, but on average you’re looking at two to three women per team. Speaking from my own experience, I was a member of five different house teams from 2006 to 2014, and for the majority of my time on these teams, I was one of two women. (Though, I should note that in 2009, I was a member of one of only two teams in the theater’s history that was split 50-50 between men and women. That team also happens to hold another badge of honor in the theater’s history, as one of the shortest-lived teams ever assembled. We were, in a word, terrible. Gender equality does not beget quality shows, my friends!)
So, what does it mean, exactly, to consistently be one of only two women represented on stage, on a night that is intended to represent, theoretically, the best talent the theater has to offer? How does being in that minority change the way you play and the character choices you make, and the way you interact with your fellow players? How does it change the way you view your position and your self-worth as a player, both on that team and in that system as a whole? What impact does it have on your relationships and interactions with other women on your team and/or in the system, both on stage and off? How does the competitive nature of the team system as a whole play into the greater notion of what it means to be successful, and what does it mean for a woman to want, need, and attain that success?
I have framed these all as open questions, but, as far as I’m concerned, they are definitive statements. (And there are a lot of them, hence why this post is part I! Otherwise, this post would be about 100,000 words long, and not even I have that much patience for my own writing.) Listen, I would love to sit here and tell you that my house team experience was no different because I was a woman, that I felt entirely equal to my male counterparts on any given night, that I “held my own” every single time, but that is categorically untrue. My experience as a female improviser on these teams *was* different precisely because I am a woman: it was different in exceedingly positive ways, and profoundly negative ways, too. I look forward to sharing these with you in this series of posts.
Today, I want to begin to address this topic by talking about the question of responsibility and representation, and specifically, the sense of responsibility a female improviser feels when she steps on stage as part of a theater-appointed ensemble. I have a theory, and it is this: because they are in the distinct minority on these teams, female improvisers often feel a unique burden of responsibility to represent for their entire gender on stage. We feel that it is our job to play strong female characters on stage, and make the sorts of confident, layered, interesting and - maybe most importantly - funny choices that best represent women as a whole. Because there are fewer of us, and because a selective, competitive process brought us here, we as women on stage in this capacity feel like we have to prove ourselves worthy of being there at all. I can pretty much guarantee that this feeling of responsibility has never crossed the minds of the guys on your team, which, too, makes total sense: white male improvisers feel no sense of obligation to represent their gender on stage, because it’s already wholly, dominantly represented literally everywhere. I don’t fault anyone for that, but I think we can all agree that it’s the truth.
I felt this sense of responsibility on every team I was on, the good ones and the bad ones. It can be incredibly empowering at times, and it can also severely limiting. Let’s start with the empowering part first. It’s an amazing feeling for any improviser to step out on stage and kill it by making a definitive, confident character choice, but I think it feels like a special sort of win for a woman in a male-dominated field. I’ll give you an example: when I was my last house team, I had a go-to character which could best be described as a Grade A Bitch. Whenever I did this, it fucking destroyed every single time, which I think was the result of the combination of me always being so much smaller than my scene partner, and the fact that I’m not a bitch in real life. It was an empowering choice for me at that time, because it allowed me to have the last word and the dominant voice in the scene and on that stage. (The irony doesn’t escape me that I did this by playing a terrible person and a total stereotype, by the way.) In portraying this character, I felt like I staked my claim, and by getting a huge audience response and driving the scene, that I had lived up to my responsibility and showed that I was a masterful improviser who could hold my own among the guys up there.
Conversely, that burden of responsibility was especially heavy in the shows where I had scenes that didn’t land. I can remember plenty of nights where I was given a great opening line by my scene partner that I either completely denied/negated out of fear, or just simply didn’t know how to reply to. Instead of making a strong choice, I made either a weak choice, or, worse, no choice at all. We’ve all been there, and the resulting scene feels like the longest, most painful three minutes of your life and may lead you to question every decision you made that brought you to this point, or at least it did for me. When those scenes were given mercy edits, I retreated to the sidelines feeling a sense of gratitude that the scene was over and that I could finally stop sweating, but even larger than that, a sense of profound disappointment in myself, like I had failed myself as both an improviser *and* a woman by showing that level of weakness. I felt like I was letting everyone down.
I don’t have a single, easy solution to easing this burden of responsibility, but then again, this blog is not about neatly tying things up, especially since improv can be such an intensely personal and subjective experience for people. I will say this: Knowing what I know now, and doing the work that I’m doing presently, I wish I could go back in time and tell my former house team-member self that, in terms of gender or anything else, the only responsibility I had was to myself and creating good work. The newfound confidence I have in my abilities as a performer since graduating from that system has allowed me to begin to let go of the feeling of needing to represent for my gender. I believe that that level of confidence is more difficult to find in a team system, as it is a system that is built on inherent competition.
That being said, I think there are ways to lift that burden for women who are presently on these teams, I really do, and it lies in a fundamental change in the way improv is taught and the ways that teams are directed, and the way gender is addressed in the improv classroom, with both men and women. That’s a topic for another day, so for now, I’ll leave you for the weekend by inviting you to share your own thoughts and experiences in this area, if you wish! To be continued! See you Monday!
