Good Sports

Every day, hundreds of Vancouverites walk past the first home of Vancouver TheatreSports League. Some even go in. And some order forty-nine cent hamburgers. Downtown on Thurlow Street once stood the City Stage, the first place that a comedy-loving theatregoer could see TheatreSports in Vancouver proper. And now, it’s a McDonald’s.

Jay Ono, VTSL’s director, remembers the City Stage well. It’s where he, then a teenager, was goaded by a friend into seeing this crazy new theatre show. Reluctantly, he went. Little did he know it would mean the beginning of a life. “At that point, improv wasn’t popular or cool. There was no CIG, and improv wasn’t yet on TV. So I was kind of like, what is this?” His curiosity piqued, the young man started hanging out at City Stage (soon to be renamed the Back Alley Theatre) on a regular basis. Thus began a relationship with improv in general, and TheatreSports in particular, that continues to this day.
TheatreSports first came to Vancouver courtesy of Keith Johnstone (see our excerpted interview with Johnstone, here). Coming from Calgary’s Loose Moose in 1980, Johnstone brought the concept of competitive, game-based improv play to a group of Vancouver theatre actors, saying, according to Ono, “I’m just throwing this out there; do what you want with it.” Johnstone’s brand would soon spread across the country; it would be many years, however, before VTSL officially franchised the name (the legal battle around which is a story in itself, and one that’s been written about elsewhere. I won’t get into it here). The shows caught on like wildfire. When Ono first started attending and playing in them, the lineups were going around the block, and performers passed a hat at the end of the evening as a way of getting paid. Ono remembers that the ten to fourteen dollars they initially made in a night would often be spent on beer.
Soon enough, the Back Alley performers realized they had something. They incorporated as a not-for-profit in 1985. For Ono, improv was starting to be addictive. “Doing a good show was, to me, like floating on air,” he says. “You get in the zone. You know in the first thirty seconds that you have nothing to prove to the audience and they love you and every word that’s coming out of your mouth.”
As the shows grew steadily more popular, especially after Expo in 1986, performers from other cities (Calgary in particular) started flooding into Vancouver. In the eight years that followed, the Back Alley Theatre became a place where future stars of improv, theatre and film first exercised their creative muscles.
It was during this flush period that Pearce Visser first started performing with VTSL. He came to Vancouver in 1990, having done improv in Edmonton with a very early incarnation of Rapid Fire. He came to be a mainstage player in the same way many do—he saw a show, took some classes, was cast in the rookie league, and from there was cast on the mainstage. He’s now one of the most veteran improvisors VTSL has, and has seen the company grow and change drastically. “There are more people from different places in the company now than there ever were before. We’ve drawn from a wider spectrum of actors and improvisors,” he says. “In the very early days it was kind of cliquey, because you wanted the show to do well and you wanted to play with people who you could trust. It’s a little more open and bigger now, and I think it’s thriving a lot better. The general feeling is better.” Visser acknowledges the problem of competition. “Comedians are funny that way. There’s always a sense of competitiveness. But it used to be quite…there was a backstabbing that used to exist. Now I think it’s more supportive.”
Visser’s comments are echoed by Ono. The opening up of VTSL is something he knows firsthand—he was one of the people who initiated it. In 1993-1994, VTSL was struggling. The Back Alley lease was ending, and the rent was being raised from $6000 to $17000 a month. At the same time, the company had gone through five GMs in as many years, and a persistent vision was lacking. These were hurdles that most companies would find difficult, never mind a struggling not-for-profit theatre. At this time, the company wasn’t paying its actors, and many were embittered by the fact that they were bound to a verbal conflict of interest agreement that disallowed them to do paid improv elsewhere, or to charge more than VTSL for a gig.
Ono, along with then cast members Gary Jones and Dave Cameron, founded That Improv Group, and started going against this. For Ono, it wasn’t anything personal. “We love this company,” he says about his thoughts at the time. “But we’re at our peak as performers so we have the right to get as much work as we can.” It was a risky move, but it began a process of opening doors that allowed VTSL to stay vital—and continues today. “Within the last two years we’ve added ten different people from all of these different groups [from across the city],” Ono says. “Different perspectives and diversity are really important to having the art form grow.” At the time, however, the idea seemed blasphemous. In the end, the policy was loosened and refined as a direct result of That Improv Group’s risky business. Now, it reads as follows: Don’t badmouth or undercut the company, and don’t take clients from VTSL. Within those boundaries, you can play wherever you’d like. Ironically, Ono notes, he is now responsible for enforcing the policy he helped to inspire with his rule breaking.
After what Ono calls “the dark era,” VTSL started trying to pull itself out of trouble. A fortuitous meeting with the Arts Club began a partnership that continues to this day. With both companies looking for theatre space, a deal was discussed in which the newly vacant Stanley Theatre space would house VTSL as well as the Arts Club. VTSL did some fundraising, but in the end the space ended up belonging exclusively to Arts Club productions. In what Ono calls “the settlement of the divorce,” TheatreSports got the Revue Stage on Granville Island, on a ten year lease. The Arts Club runs the box office, the bar and the security at the venue. “Generally people in this company think—and I’m trying to get away from this—that the Arts Club cheated us,” Ono says. It’s something he wishes to dispel, because the Arts Club played a major part in the capital campaign that secured the Revue Theatre, and they also aided VTSL in paying off a large mortgage. And there’s always the future to consider—there’s a chance that VTSL’s next venue may also be in collaboration with the Arts Club. “That [negativity towards the Arts Club] still permeates, and I think that you’re reminded of it every time some little thing goes wrong.”
Even though its time in the Revue is limited, VTSL has seen some of its most successful years in the theatre. It’s something Ono cherishes, even while thoughts of a new venue are always forefront in his mind. “It’s funny, because talking to you reminds me of when we moved into the Revue Stage, about two weeks in; I was sitting there going, ‘Finally, I don’t have to worry about this anymore. Ten years is so long from now!’ And now here we are, ten years later.”
It’s become Ono’s job to balance both economics and artistic goals. “Artistically, there becomes the whole thing of business versus art,” he says. “That’s probably the hardest thing about having a one-headed organization is that I’m constantly trying to find solutions that fit both.”

The difficulty of doing so has driven him to create an artistic advisory committee, made up of mainstage players. One of these is Nathan Clark, who’s been with the company for eight years. Like Visser, he started with workshops, and progressed up through the ranks to the mainstage. He’s now also part of the Canadian Comedy Awards nominated sketch group Canadian Content and plays, along with Visser, in Urban Improv. For him, it was a natural progression to join the committee. “We’re taking some nice strides, and I’d like to see that continue,” he says. “I’d like to see more variety of shows throughout the week. Still have the TheatreSports shows, but to open up and have more longform and experimental stuff.” Clark, like many improvisors, wants to see improv regarded as real theatre.
Fellow cast member Denise Jones, who’s been with the company for five years, agrees. “The more I see improv at festivals and elsewhere, the more excited I get about it being treated as art.” Keeping that artistic goal in mind, she says, has the potential to make the company stronger. “Opening a new show, you know your ass is on the line to make great theatre, because you don’t have a script. Nothing brings more of an ensemble feeling than that.”
Ono’s—and VTSL’s—challenge going forward, then, is to honour the cacophony of artistic voices, to innovate with new and creative shows while keeping the TheatreSports brand fresh, and to find a home in which all of this can take place. Sounds simple, right? Oh yeah, and then there’s competition. “We’re very lucky to have the diversity and range in this company that we have,” Ono says. “But we’re a small dot on this huge map. You search improv groups and there are hundreds of them, and lots of them are doing excellent work. So it’s good to keep that in perspective. It’s good to be humble.” i.ca