XL COVER STORY

ColdTowne finds light in the dark

New Orleans comedy troupe that reunited in Austin after Katrina wins acclaim mining grim territory for laughter.

By Shermakaye Bass
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, July 10, 2008

Imagine, if you will, goofy pedophiles lurching through the night in an imaginary stagecoach, stuffed cats delivering speeches by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, hurricanes that decimate entire regions. ...

Few improv troupes could spin such darkness into comedic gold, but somehow ColdTowne can. A band of quick-witted upstarts who relocated to Austin from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, they found plenty of material in their harrowing experiences during the storm, producing the fiendishly fatalistic "Hurricanes Are Funny" within two months of their arrival in the Texas capital. Austin got it (how could you not laugh at a skit where two housemates are fleeing a hurricane, and one's berating the other for not cleaning the George Foreman grill before evacuating?), and the city quickly adopted ColdTowne as its own.

Now, the comedy troupe's five founders — Chris Trew, Tami Nelson, Michael Jastroch, Justin York and Arthur Simone — have their own theater space and comedy conservatory, regularly playing sold-out shows as a quintet (ColdTowne) or in various configurations (Lovey and Lovey, for instance, with just Nelson and Jastroch). In less than three years, the group has developed a semi-cult following for its absurdist satire, delivering delicious jolts and headily leavened truths every weekend at its lair off Airport Boulevard.

"New Orleans defiantly seems to cultivate its own sort of dark humor," Nelson says about the influence of the Big Easy. "It's because death is a large part of the culture. It's everywhere ... the culture of New Orleans incorporates death in its celebrations, like jazz funerals, second lines. There isn't the same cautiousness of death there. It can't exist because living life that big leads pretty quickly to death. Big food, big celebration, big big drinking. (ColdTowne) definitely felt a freedom in expressing a dark side of ourselves coming out of that culture, but more than that, we are comedians.

"We put the 'ha ha' in the place of the 'ouchie.' "

From horrendous to hilarious

Fearless and cocky by nature (coming from New Orleans, hello ... ) and made more fearless by their ordeal that late summer of 2005, this wolf pack of pranksters can infuse almost any taboo with satire and humor. In fact, "ColdTowne" and "dark satire" could be synonymous if it weren't for the fact that some of their audience-driven improv is pure-D dada.

Rarely, if ever, does the troupe resort to blue humor or potty jokes — even though a lot of the material can challenge the bounds of tastelessness (all truly innovative comedy does). And as time has passed, they've done dozens of shows at various locations across town, from the Alamo Drafthouse, the Austin Museum of Art and Spider House to the new United States Art Authority, recently launched by ColdTowne Theater's landlord/patrons Conrad Bejarano and John Dorgan.

Sinister material works for ColdTowne, even though there's no rhyme or reason to it. Some comics just have the timing or the chutzpah (or that certain arch of a brow) to make horrendous things seem hilarious. More than self-effacement or the ability to poke fun at oneself or society, in this case it's vibe and intellect, intuiting one's audience and knowing one's onstage playmates as if they were family.

"I totally trust these guys," says Nelson, 32, whose "Lovey and Lovey" duet with longtime friend Jastroch took "Best of Fest" at this year's Frontera Fest. "I can look into Arthur's eyes across the stage and know what voice is going to come out of his mouth, or I can see into the future with Chris Trew ... and know I'm going to be doing a scene about 'blank' with him in 30 minutes. We're just so well connected that it's very easy to play with them. Not to say I'm not often surprised. I am."

As the sole woman in the troupe, Nelson has to wear a number of hats and, perhaps more than the other four, respond quickly and intuitively to whatever's thrown her way. She's fluid, organic, rarely ruffled. The rest of the gang say she's like ground zero to them — as in ground control to Major Tom.

"It's very strange, but (the combination of personalities) works for us," says Trew, 27, the group's youngest member and one of its biggest comedic risk-takers; he's very physical, with a boisterous and left-field wit. "It's surprised me, but it feels really nice. What keeps us together is we all have similar goals and share similar philosophies behind improv."

Jastroch, 30, interrupts to adds his 2 cents' worth, common among this band of characters: "We're all so radically different in the ways we approach it — maybe not the underlying philosophy but the way we approach performing and maybe even living our lives — but it ends up working really, really well on stage."

Good reason to brag

ColdTowne does have very legit bragging rights.

Since opening its theater in October 2006, the group has infiltrated the local comedy scene, honing improv skills each Saturday night at its location next to I Luv Video. Over the past two-plus years, the members have nabbed multiple kudos, including four Frontera Fest "bests" this year ("Best Improv Troupe" being one of them) and garnering the Austin Chronicle Readers Poll nod for same in 2006 and 2007, as well as XL's "Funnywriter for SketchComedy," 2006 (honors went to Trew).

Simultaneously, the five have created the popular ColdTowne Conservatory, which so far has enrolled about 130 students in its five-level improv/sketch/stand-up program (several recent ColdTowne grads are headed to New York in August for an improv festival) and graduated 25 students. And by touring constantly, the group has gained a national reputation, Trew says.

"We've hit almost every major, and minor, comedy festival in North America over the past two years, and people now know about us," he says. " ... In Toronto last year, it was like 'I've heard good things are going on down there.' Or in Chicago, which most people will say is the mecca for improv, there are people who are in the 'in crowd' and are teaching at Second City who are talking about wanting to move down here because of what's happening here with the comedy scene, and ColdTowne in particular."

Comparing their Austin audiences with those back in New Orleans is like comparing chicken fried steak to catfish couvillion. The two couldn't be more different, says Arthur Simone, 30, probably the most experienced performer and actor of the five.

"Here in Austin we've done a lot of improv shows, and I can count the number of times we've gotten naughty (blue) suggestions on one hand — on one hand with three fingers cut off," he says. "The Austin audiences are just so open and smart, and there is a different level of interest in what people can accomplish on stage."

Jastroch, the group's "marketer/communicator" and a former music writer in New Orleans, nods emphatically.

"New Orleans is a very fertile town for creativity but not as rich a ground for getting things done," he says. "In New Orleans, we were playing for, like, five people who'd wandered in off the street half the time. Or playing a sports bar in the suburbs to drunk fishermen. ... Our first show in Austin (fall 2005), we were not doing anything different, but there were probably 50 people in the audience and they actually got what we were doing. I was like, 'Maybe we should stop playing to drunk fishermen. Maybe that's not our target audience.' "

Finding one another again

Before they could locate their target audience in a city far from their hometown, though, the five (who'd been part of the eight-member, original ColdTowne in New Orleans) had to locate one another.

Discussing the fateful weekend of Aug. 28, 2005, when Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast, heading straight for the Crescent City, all five say they never expected that Friday night show to be their last in New Orleans. Afterward, they each said good night, see you tomorrow. By Saturday afternoon, all five were in various states of evacuation.

York, Jastroch and Nelson wound up in Houston, while Trew docked in Dallas and Simone in Shreveport, La. Within a week after the hurricane, the five had convened in Austin for an improv show. They wanted York to join them full time in their adopted city, but the 30-year-old who often plays the group's straight man had family business to attend to. He returned to New Orleans for another eight months, until the four lured him back to Austin with the promise of a theater and conservatory of their own.

Early on, the four had decided to make it work in Austin. Soon after the storm, Trew, Simone, Jastroch and Nelson gathered at a restaurant near the University of Texas, and all agreed that everything had changed — their priorities, their work, even what they found funny. They decided to start fresh, and through a friend of Nelson's, met Dorgan and Bejarano. Amazingly, though they'd never seen ColdTowne perform as an entity, the two entrepreneurs offered the company a makeshift home in a storage space next to their I Luv Video store on Airport Boulevard. Eventually, the troupe persuaded Bejarano and Dorgan to let them use a second space connected to the storage-cum-comedy shop; that space is now being converted to a bar area for the theater.

"When we evacuated to different cities," Simone says, his tall body slumping at the recollection, "here I was in Shreveport at my parents' home, watching my world collapse on TV, and all I could think is, 'I want to be with these people; they're my family, as well.' "

Trew says the troupe's re-forming was natural and unexpected.

"When we were in New Orleans, it wasn't like this," he says. "ColdTowne wasn't everyone's number one priority. ... We all had our own things, our own lives and jobs. It wasn't like when I'd talk to somebody (back home) they'd say, 'So what's ColdTowne doing?' So when we came here, part of that first week of us being here was everyone finding out, 'We're in love with each other ... Let's find a way to get back together."

And so it went.

Looking to the future

Though they're not rolling in lucre — "we're still looking for that million-dollar donor," York says — they've managed to secure their home through proceeds from the conservatory and their roving Thursday-Saturday shows, creating a bona fide buzz, regionally and nationally. Recently they've begun looking to the future — and taking their work to a new level for the first time since they left South Louisiana. They want ColdTowne to be Austin's own Second City, and as part of that plan, they're finally getting things down on paper, working on some screenplays and scripts and expanding beyond improv.

"These people inspire me," says Simone, the most eccentric and perhaps funniest of the five. "They almost pimp me at times into doing things I wouldn't normally do. ... There have been times, plenty of times, where for instance Chris Trew dared me to do something — like he dared me to do a one-person improv show with my dog." (Trew adds, "Actually I booked the show before he said he'd do it.")

"Buddy Daddy," as the skit is now known, won a "Best of the Week" at Frontera Fest 2008. Now Simone and the dog have taken to the road whenever possible — most recently performing à deux at the Twin Cities Improv Festival in Minneapolis.

York says it's often like that — someone in the company will sign someone on for a wild ride, always knowing that the unsuspecting player can pull it off. He compares them to a wickedly witty family, sibling-like, who can argue over minor things like how long the stuffed cat should be able to quote Goebbels before it becomes truly bad form, or just unfunny. Other than those types of things, the group are of a piece, thick as thieves. Kind of like the Three Musketeers — one for all and all for one.

"I think the thing that you'll notice about us, if you look at that whole conversation about the cat and Goebbels, is, yeah, we had different ideas about how this offensive Nazi speech could go into (the show), but the similarity is that there was no doubt that this cat was going to make a Goebbels speech," York says. "As different as we are, we all knew that. We each have a very dark sense of humor and we also very much appreciate just idiotic, lame comedy, as well."

They discovered how well they could synthesize those opposites through trial by flood.

And though Nelson says there's no real how or why to it, the company innately knew that substituting "ha ha" for "ouchie" back in 2005 would be critical to ColdTowne's post-Katrina survival.

"We're comedians. We have to (laugh). It's a coping mechanism. It's therapy. It's the only way we knew how to make sense of this mind-numbing tragedy," she says. "Since we all escaped Katrina relatively unscathed, it was like we were given a free pass, a do-over. We didn't know what else to do, and moving forward with all of our energy and love and passion and strength made us feel like we were doing something positive. Something positive had to come out of the storm for us."

As it turns out, Austin helped them find the upside to that storm, the silver lining, if there can be such a thing. It's doubtful ColdTowne would call it the pot of gold at the rainbow's end, but at least here it's warm and safe and dry. And, better still, A-Town gets ColdTowne; they're keeping each other weird.

The many faces of ColdTowne

Core ColdTowne:The core quintet, which has various incarnations, performs at 10 p.m. every Saturday at ColdTowne Theater, 4803-B Airport Blvd. Admission: $7-$10. Call 524-2807 or go to coldtownetheater.com.

'Lovey and Lovey':Throughout July, special Friday night performances of 'Lovey and Lovey' are at 10 p.m. at the United States Art Authority, 2908 Fruth St. Call: 524-2807. Admission: $10.

Teen improv: Aug. 11-17, ColdTowne conducts its first Teen Summer Improv Intensive, for ages 13-17. More information on the Web site.

ColdTowne Conservatory: Information about improv and sketch comedy classes on the group's Web site.

Note: Tickets for all ColdTowne shows are available online at www.coldtownetheater.frontgatetickets.com.