If you’re doing comedy or funny theater, what’s the last thing you should include in your show? For years – for most of entertainment history, in fact – the answer would have been behind-the-scenes struggle. No one wants to see that show about how you’re drifting apart as a double act, how touring live comedy just doesn’t pay the bills, or how your company is in the late stages of collapse. Remember when Morecambe and Wise reveal the tensions in their off-stage relationship? Of course not. It didn’t happen. It wouldn’t have brought you any sunshine.
But times are changing. In the age of autofiction, reality TV and trauma comedy, the lines between fact and fantasy are blurring, both onstage and off. For a long time, the duo Max and Ivan were grateful that their chosen artistic niche, narrative sketch comedy, gave them characters and fictions to hide behind. “So many stand-ups feel compelled to look for material in their inner lives,” says one half of the pair, Max Olesker. “Or they live their lives with half an eye on ‘how is this going to be a comedy?’ That can be unhealthy; you can lose sight [difference] between you, the artist, and you, the actual person. So I’ve always smugly thought, ‘we’re lucky, we don’t have to exist in that unhealthy space.’ Until now, when we suddenly find ourselves scrolling through emails, putting personal photos on stage and excavating our lives in more detail than ever before.”
He’s talking about the couple’s new show Life, Choices. No spoilers here: suffice it to say that after years of acting out their own made-up comedy plays, Max and Ivan have now taken their own lives as their subjects. The raw material of Life, Choices – sometimes very raw – is the difficulty of maintaining a comedy partnership into middle age, when parenthood, unpaid bills and “a sitcom that ended up in the trash” (or, in Olesker’s paraphrase, that ‘still waiting for the second time’). -season call”) all start to pull you in different directions.
Their urge to dramatize this stuff is not unique. One of Max and Ivan’s occasional directors, comedian Tom Parry, was behind a great example of this subgenre when his sketch group Pappy’s performed their Last Show Ever in 2012. and went their separate ways, celebrating the camaraderie they had enjoyed along the way. Just last month, performance mavericks Sh!t Theater organized a work-in-progress of Or What’s Left of Us, chronicling a year marked by heavy personal and professional loss. This month, comedic theater mainstays Spymonkey premiere a version of Aristophanes’ The Frogs, which also happens to explore the fortunes of a company rocked by the voluntary exile of one member (Petra Massey, off to Las Vegas) and unexpected early death from another member. , Stephan Kreiss, in 2021.
After Massey’s departure, the company began working with playwright Carl Grose to devise a version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which one horseman had left to work in Las Vegas. When Kreiss died, it was shelved, leaving the remaining artists, Toby Park and Aitor Basauri, to wonder, “what should we do now that there are two of us? What are we going to do now? And that’s how The Frogs were born,” says Park. “It is the very first double act in the Western theatrical canon.” It is also about a journey to resurrect a recently deceased, much-missed theater maker (Euripides).
“The struggle of these two characters” – Dionysus and his slave Xanthias – “is similar to the struggle that Toby and I are having now that Stephan and Petra are not there,” says Basauri. Which might have been enough in a previous era: Spymonkey might have staged the piece and kept their own struggles subtextual behind the scenes. But in this production the ancient Greek story (in an adaptation by Grose) is merged with scenes depicting the disintegration of the company. “We go back in time in the show to revisit the Spymonkey office,” says Park, “and there’s a little shrine to Stephan and a defaced photo of Petra.” (“I’m afraid,” he adds, “it won’t get Carl many royalties from other companies doing this.”)
Why are you doing this? Why not let Aristophanes do the work? On the one hand, creating theater in this way – where the players’ stories are as prominent as the play’s story – is consistent with how Spymonkey has always worked. “Any time you put a group of people on stage,” says Basauri, “you want to take into account the dynamics that govern these people.” What’s the story behind the story? “Exactly. There’s always one. And if the makers don’t take it into account, they won’t make such a good show.
“It also fits very well with the world of the clown,” he adds – and as a fantastic clown he should know that. “The clown will try to tell a story that is important to the clown, even if it is very bad.”
Max and Ivan had also taken steps in this direction before. Their 2019 show Commitment portrayed Olesker’s spectacular work organizing partner Ivan Gonzalez’s real-life bachelor party. That hour had enormous emotional payoff, and as the couple searched for the heart in their current circumstances, they could see no further than the subject of their early middle age (Gonzalez had recently become fathers), their relationships with their aging fathers, and the difficulty of organizing another show in Edinburgh. “It kept coming back to the idea,” says Olesker, “that if we were going to make a show, this is what it had to be about. And to do it justice, we ended up exposing our inner workings in ways we hadn’t done before.”
Is that a difficult process? When you watch Life, Choices, you are amazed at the frankness with which Max and Ivan portray their relationship offstage. “There are areas in our lives that aren’t on the show,” Olesker says, “and that was the result of negotiation and talking.” There were also things in the early drafts, Gonzalez says, that felt too real or not funny enough, “so we took it out.” Even the truth must be fictionalized. “It’s all the truth,” he says, “but it’s a selective truth that works for the show.”
Is it a therapeutic process? Well, partly – insofar as if you want to address your personal crises onstage, you have to talk about them offstage first. Spymonkey is a bit allergic to therapy language: they expose themselves in The Frogs because it’s funny, not because it’s healing. “We believe that tragedy and comedy are very close to each other,” in the words of Basauri. But he does admit that the show may give more free rein to emotion than the company’s previous work. “Because we think it’s great that the audience experiences that in a theater show, with a story that explores the pain that comes from the loss of a friend. And then we break it up with comic relief, in the best sense of that word.
The risk here, of course, is self-indulgence – and both sides express their aversion to navel-gazing in the strongest possible terms. “We didn’t want anyone to actually have to worry about the economics of putting on a two-person narrative comedy show,” says Max Olesker. “We want to be accessible to people who have never seen us before,” Gonzalez says. “A lot of people have to grow up and deal with adult life – not just us.”
Spymonkey – half a generation of seniors of Max and Ivan – has no doubt that their situation is recognizable, because it is about “aging white men in crisis,” says Park. “To grow older as white men, not knowing how we fit together and reevaluating where we are, feels like something valuable to engage with right now.” He speaks for both companies – for all artists who make this kind of work – when he says: “If all the frustration and not knowing how to remake ourselves and deal with loss means anything to us, we have to trust that we ‘re not alone’ and that it also means something to the audience.
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That will certainly happen – because 21st century audiences are getting a charge of ‘the truth’, whether or not it is in a complex dance with (2500 year old) fiction. That is our particular cultural moment, whose currents are pulling toward identity and authenticity (some would say solipsism), while metaphors are falling out of fashion. The artists involved deal sensibly with these movements (“the nudity and the realness felt like something exciting to play with,” says Olesker), but are not under their spell. “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s worth acting on,” says Gonzalez, as Spymonkey defends their decision to filter real-world issues through ancient Greek fiction. “It’s more fun to tell a story,” says Park, “then that story is overlaid with your own stories and situations. And then there’s the theatricality. We always had a lot of fun making ‘good theater’, but that failed, and that’s our kind of clown.”
“Maybe we should learn that now,” he adds a little sadly: “make a show of it, just from us.” After all, the company is looking for a new role. But that wouldn’t work, Basauri sighs. Real world truth works best in small doses. “For some people, the truth can be enough if they show a great personality. But me, I’m very boring offstage,” he deadpans. “Toby and I are funny on stage, but in real life we’re pretty boring.”
• Max and Ivan’s Life, Choices runs from January 15 to 20 at the Soho Theater in London. The Frogs is at Royal & Derngate, Northampton from January 19 to February 3.