Instant Festival
Brian Posen teaches improv at Second City, Columbia College, and Act One. He writes and performs in his own sketch comedy troupe, Cupid Productions. But he never thought of putting together a sketch comedy festival until he was recovering from a particularly rough year. Last February, his mentor Martin de Maat died. “He gave me my job at Second City,” says Posen. “I took over his classes at Columbia College.” Things got worse when Posen’s mother died of renal cancer in July. “She had had one kidney removed 12 years ago, and she was all right for years and years. Then it hit her again.” Posen, who had been doing preproduction work for Kingsley Day’s musical Aztec Human Sacrifice, got into bed and stayed there for a month.
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Aztec Human Sacrifice–completed in the late 80s as part of a musical theater development program at Columbia College–was to have received its first professional production from Posen’s shoestring theater company Broutil & Frothingham, which had rented space at the Theatre Building January 12 through March 2. With the death of Posen’s mother, the show was postponed.
Within a matter of days it seemed everyone on the comedy scene was talking about the idea. “It was like this grassroots thing,” says Kim Clark, director of the writing program at Second City. “Students of mine were coming up to me and telling me about this thing Brian Posen was doing at the Theatre Building.” Soon his E-mail box was filled with requests from troupes eager to perform “in a real theater.” Sketch Fest was born.
Last September Leonard and Boom Chicago founder Andrew Moskos arranged to meet and hash out the issue of “stealing each other’s performers,” says Leonard. “We had one of these great two-hour, three-hour dinners.” Out of that dinner came the idea for the exchange. Now the only questions remaining to be answered are which company will suffer the greatest culture shock, and whether or not that culture shock will be good for comedy.
