All Fired Up
Kevin Gillese on Rapid Fire Theatre, Scratch and why Edmonton improv is king
In Edmonton, there’s only one name in improv: Rapid Fire Theatre. And few people have a personal and professional history so entwined with Rapid Fire as Kevin Gillese. As Rapid Fire marks a transitional point in its history, so does Gillese, the improviser. What better time to talk about both?
“First of all, you need to know–Rapid Fire is the longest running TheatreSports show in the world,” says Gillese by phone from his home in Edmonton. This is no small feat, and it speaks to Rapid Fire’s longevity as a company that it started out as a group of people who wanted to try this new form–TheatreSports–that friends in Calgary (under the direction of Impro author and improv auteur Keith Johnstone) were throwing around. This was in 1981, around the same time that Kevin Gillese was born. Fifteen short years later, Gillese would find himself at Rapid Fire’s doorstep.
“Rapid Fire has this event called the Nose Bowl, which is an improv competition for high school kids. The prize is to play a TheatreSports show on the Rapid Fire stage, and it’s usually won by 17 or 18 year olds,” he says. Gillese was fifteen, and had little improv experience; what he saw onstage at Rapid Fire had him hooked. After his team of rogue young improvisers won Nose Bowl (which has since been combined with CIG to create the Wild Fire Festival), there was no getting Gillese away from the company. “I started hanging out and picking up garbage after shows, helping clean up, anything just to get a smattering of stage time,” Gillese remembers. Being a blank slate of sorts, Gillese quickly aligned with what is now known as the Rapid Fire style. His close alignment with the style becomes obvious when he tries to describe it: “It’s fast, we’re known for playing fast…” he says. He hesitates.
Gillese’s hesitation is understandable: the company is in the middle of a fundamental shift. While transition is nothing new to a company with twenty-plus years under its belt, it’s clear from talking to Gillese that these changes are, at least to him, the most major in the company’s history.
Until recently, Rapid Fire was a small, core group of players assembled under the artistic direction of Jacob Banigan. “In my time at Rapid Fire, Jacob was the company,” says Gillese. “In many ways his teaching still reverberates.” Under Banigan, the players, including Gillese, Chris Craddock, Josh Dean, Ron Pederson and Mark Meer (among talented others) came together. This is a time in RFT’s history that Gillese describes as “mythical.” Soon enough, much of Rapid Fire’s core talent left to pursue avenues in major city centres: a theme in the company’s history.
When Banigan himself left to teach and live in Austria, another longstanding RFT member, Chris Craddock, took over as Artistic Director. But Craddock, too, had other pokers in the fire: a play he was involved with suddenly got picked up…off Broadway. Facing the possibility of their AD not returning any time soon, the company called on Gillese to take the reins as Acting AD. And that’s where he sits as we speak. Hesitating to describe the style of a company that is, for the moment at least, his to define.
Gillese’s work within the company, however, is not solely limited to artistic direction. A few years ago, Gillese left Edmonton for Toronto to pursue the graduate comedy program at Humber College. Upon his return, he had an idea–take Rapid Fire’s long form improv show, CHiMPROV (which Banigan had created) and “Torontoize” it.
“In Toronto, everyone’s got their little troupe,” he says. “These groups are great, because they go off together to practice and perfect their shows.” Gillese pitched it; Craddock bought it (Banigan had already left for Austria). And so was born Scratch, Gillese’s two person show with fellow RFT player Arlen Konopaki. A few years later, Scratch is “the touringest improv show in the world,” a fact Gillese relishes.
Aside from Gillese’s desire to revolutionize CHiMPROV, Scratch was born out of the wish, on his part and Konopaki’s, to combine the best elements of both short and long improv forms. “What we like about short form are that things can get really crazy, you can have lots of jokes, and people who’ve never seen improv before can get into it because it’s accessible,” he says. “And we combine that with the things we love about long form, like fully-formed stories and characters that you get to know and care for, and moments of actual dramatic tension–real theatre.”
Scratch’s CHiMPROV experience was so successful that the group decided to tour fringe festivals and then Europe–a path forged for them, as Kevin points out, by eight-year-long touring Winnipeg group CRUMBS (read our interview with CRUMBS, here). It’s because of CRUMBS that Europeans (Germans especially, says Gillese, who calls the German improv scene “off the chain”) are hip to Canadian improv. And that paved the way for he and Konopaki, and their status as the “touringest.”
Getting out and into the world with Konopaki was also a big eye-opener for Gillese, who’d been in Edmonton and with Rapid Fire for almost a decade at this point. His appreciation for RFT’s situation only increased as he saw improv in other cities and countries. “We are so fucking lucky,” he says. “We have this great company and this great theatre [the Varscona, which has been RFT’s home since 1994].” And that’s not all–in his travels, Gillese realized that RFT was unique in the way it treated its improvisers. ??“We want people to be so successful that they have to leave,” he says. A great example of this are people like Dean and Bannigan, but another recent one is Gillese himself. During Improvaganza, Rapid Fire’s international festival, last year, Kevin got a call to audition for Second City Toronto. He’d come highly recommended, and they wanted him to audition immediately. But Kevin’s loyalty to Rapid Fire and the importance of a successful Improvaganza held him back. He spoke to RFT’s General Manager, Karen Brown Fournell. She told him to go, no questions asked.
From Toronto came an opportunity to audition for Second City Chicago, for which Gillese was called back from a pool of five hundred to audition again with just forty players, most of which–if not all–were Second City trained improvisers. From Toronto, Gillese had found he didn’t necessarily fit the SC style, and that he might be thought of as “this wild child from the west coast who was too aggressive.” In Chicago, Gillese toned down–he shaved, and even wore a suit. Although he wasn’t immediately cast, he’s glad he went; he feels that he’s “climbed the first rung of a very long ladder.”
“Rapid Fire’s style is story first, absolutely. What blew my mind at Second City is that they don’t seem to care about story at all.” Instead, Gillese says, they asked to see him being funny, performing in a broad range of characters, and something they called “point of view,” which Kevin distilled as “making intelligent commentary on the world through my improv.” Though he appreciates this approach, it’s obviously very different from Rapid Fire’s. “I totally respect that company, both for its reputation and for the respect they showed me.” As of press time, Second City has invited Gillese back to Toronto for Spring auditions. He won’t be there, because Scratch will be touring in Australia–hitting the world-renowned Melbourne International Comedy Festival, among other stops. Then it’s on to Europe in the fall (with Kurt Smeaton subbing for Arlen Konopaki in light of scheduling issues).
After we spoke, Gillese officially signed on as Acting Artistic Director with Rapid Fire. Toronto and Chicago may beckon, but Edmonton…well… “Edmonton is fucking cold and shitty most of the time,” says Gillese. But it’s home. “I’d always assumed bigger, nicer cities had bigger and better companies than Rapid Fire,” he says. Nope. “It turns out that this safe little incubator nestled in this brilliant arts and theatre community is actually a breeding ground for success. We’re forced to find ways to entertain ourselves; we can’t just walk down to the beach.”
Once more, the question of Rapid Fire’s reputation is raised. Gillese is more certain this time around. “For the first time, I’m starting to think, ‘Oh shit, I represent Rapid Fire.’ Before I was always like, ‘Who am I to say? I am merely a student of the form.’” i.ca