After the Annoyance Theatre lost its Lakeview space last June, cofounder Mick Napier discovered he couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking him about the future of the company. He says the only question he heard more often was “Do you have a cigarette?” Eventually he got so sick of fielding queries he got his response printed up on some business cards; when someone asked, he’d just hand them a card and walk away.
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For Napier, shutting down the theater was a relief. “I didn’t shed a tear,” he confesses. “Closing Co-ed Prison Sluts earlier in the year was much sadder. That was the end of an era.” For a long time he’d been avoiding the question of what to do next. In the early 90s he got hooked on the Internet–he participated in news groups, became fascinated with role-playing games, and downloaded pictures from Usenet (“You can imagine what kind of pictures I downloaded,” he says with a leer). At one point he carried on a long E-mail correspondence with a fellow at the south pole.
He had pursued opportunities to further his career. In 1995, after he’d made a name for himself directing at Second City, Napier landed a gig writing and directing a sketch-comedy show for HBO Downtown Productions and began commuting to New York. He suggested to the producers that they call the show Alt.Comedy. “No one there knew what that meant,” he says. Instead the show was called Exit 57, and though it enjoyed a two-year run on Comedy Central and earned five CableACE nominations, Napier was unimpressed by the big-time entertainment business.
Napier began to imagine a different Annoyance, a fully integrated production company that could perform live shows, commit them to video, and teach improv as a way of creating new shows. He dreamed of starting a high-tech company that could produce films, digital animation, streaming videos, and short comic bits for the Web. After the theater lost its lease and closed Co-ed Prison Sluts, he realized the time had come to take the company to another level. “The only way for the Annoyance to continue is to up the ante,” he says. “I am not interested in the Annoyance being just a theater again.”
In January, Annoyance Productions made the second cut and was ranked among ten finalists, but only the top three won prize money or funding. Since then the Annoyance has been courting investors, and it’s been rough sledding: the last two quarters have been the worst for acquiring venture capital since the recession of the early 90s. But the company is in a much better position than it was six months ago. “Working on PrairieFire made me wish I’d written a business plan for the Annoyance ten years ago,” says Napier. Now, at the very least, he can throw away those cards.
