Pittsburgh is launching their first festival later this year, but they’ve been planning it for a long time. I first met the producers at The Detroit Improv Festival and the were anxious to learn as much as they could. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a freshman festival so hungry for info on how to put on the best festival possible. As a producer of a festival myself, I’ve spoken to Brian Gray many times, and I had the opportunity to chat with him about his hopes for the upcoming festival.

Pittsburgh is doing their first festival this year, but the improv scene has been around for a while. What was the spark that led to the decision to put on a festival?

The idea for a festival has been gestating for a long time. Years ago, I talked to some of the comedy leaders in town about doing a local/regional festival but it never caught on. Since then, three institutions (including two brick-and-mortar theaters) have opened in Pittsburgh dedicated to teaching and performing comedy. There’s a lot more momentum and a lot more local talent. We’ve had members of the Second City touring company drop by for a jam after their show and tell us how amazed they are at what we have hidden away here. Yet the average Pittsburgher and many in the national comedy community have no idea.

Last summer, two area stand-ups (who also do improv) asked for my help bringing improv into a festival that they were planning, and the Pittsburgh Comedy Festival was born.

Indelible Photography

Improv has been alive in Pittsburgh for thirty years but only within the past three has there really been consistent teaching and a growing community. This meant students becoming indie teams becoming house teams with weekly performances and so forth. We have teachers here who’ve trained and lived in New York, Chicago, LA and some who came up the ranks in Pittsburgh and are an amalgam of these styles. As a new scene, we have yet to develop a unified voice (not sure we ever will), but here are some observations I’ll make:

• Accessibility: Pittsburgh audiences are not used to seeing live comedy. If you come out and do your “Reverse Harold”, people won’t know what to make of it. We are still trying to define improv for many people in town and having small successes putting up high-quality improv that has an easily understandable structure (e.g. an improvised musical).
   
  
• Experimentation: Pittsburgh has a lot of performance opportunities compared to the small community of artists, which opens doors for experimentation. New groups, duos and one off shows can get a shot here. One incubator of experimentation has been a show in its third year at the Steel City Improv Theater called BYOT (Bring Your Own Team). At BYOT, improvisers write an idea on a hat and are given 5-7 minutes to try it out. These can be anything including groups, duos, sketches, “games”, late night monologue jokes, etc.
   
  
• Variety: It’s not just about the improv scene! Pittsburgh is great at allowing improvisation to feed stand-up and vice-versa. Arcade Comedy Theater books improv and stand-up, as well as sketch, comedy music, even magic! They also offer classes in many of those forms. After 10+ years of improv, I just took my first stand-up class and have been telling all my improv peers to follow suit. The class was about discovering your voice, being yourself onstage and learning what is funny to you–all relevant to my improv. This belief that studying different modes of comedy will improve ourselves as comedians is fundamental here.

I know the producers have spent over a year traveling to different festivals and talking to festival producers around the country. What have you learned? What have you seen that you want to do? And what have you seen that you think you can make even better?

We’ve learned so much!

This is our first year, so we are taking an agile approach of trying some ideas and being open to some failure and learning from our mistakes. We won’t pretend like we will do this better than those who’ve been in the game 5 or 10 years.

We have responded to some festivals better than others, and we want this specifically to succeed in Pittsburgh. Our goal for PCF 2014 is to create a small successful festival where performers feel re-energized and audiences are pumped to see more live comedy in the weeks and months to come at our existing comedy venues.

To that end, we are focusing on one venue with mostly evening performances (save our family programming). We want it to be something special to be involved in PCF. And rather than have to find the “good shows”, we want performers (and largely comedy novice audiences) to know that they can drop into any performance and have a great time! We’ve been to large sprawling festivals and smaller intimate festivals and we feel the latter will be a successful model for us this year.

We also really want a focus on the performer community at PCF. Some festivals go out of their way to make you feel like you were taken care of and you just get filled with warm fuzzies thinking back on your experience–that’s what we want to create. And because so few of us are a big deal on the festival circuit, we are looking out for the little guy. We don’t have a lot of details confirmed but we are going out of our way to make this festival as cheap (financially) as possible while as high value as an experience as we can. There are a lot of opportunities to meet and network with other improvisers, play with them and learn from them even outside of workshops.

Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson we’ve learned: when festivals take care of their performers, performers want to come back year after year. That is what we’re striving for with PCF 2014.

One note I would add that may be unique to Pittsburgh (I at least have not been exposed to this side of other festivals) is a huge effort to involve community partners. Collaboration, public/private partnerships, Art+Tech are a huge part of the Pittsburgh culture, and Brian is working hard to find symbiotic relationships with area partners. Here are some examples so far:

• We worked with Carnegie Mellon Information Systems program to create a more interactive/social display of our schedule
• An executive consulting firm and a professor at the Entertainment Technology Center are doing a TED-style talk during the festival about how they use improv in their day-to-day work
• Co-marketing efforts with the University of Pittsburgh Performance Collaborative and The Pittsburgh Fringe Festival.

What’s going on in the city when the improv isn’t happening? What should people see?

Phipps

I have been in Pittsburgh 14 years now and I still find new, amazing and wonderful gems in this city every year. I’ll pick a few in different categories.

Do this first: Phipps Conservatory is right down the street from our venue and full of plants and art.

A “Pittsburgh” thing to do: Eat a Primanti Brothers sandwich. We’re famous for these. It’s meat, coleslaw and fries on a sandwich. Alternately, check out the Duquesne Incline. Some of the country’s oldest continuously operating inclines and beautiful views of the city.

Want better food than Primanti’s? Check out our burgeoning food scene at Salt, Avenue B, Tender or Meat and Potatoes, just to name a few.

A Pittsburgh attraction: Catch a Pirates game at PNC Park. The ballpark, opened in 2001, features great views of the city over the Allegheny River and a 50/50 shot at some good baseball. There are games Wed night before PCF kicks off and Sunday afternoon after the festival.

A little culture: Pittsburgh has great museums, large and small. I’d recommend the Andy Warhol Museum and The Mattress Factory for off-beat art. There’s also the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History a short walk from our venue.

Worth sticking around for: extend your trip to see Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright (about 1.5 hours drive North of the city) or the Bayernoff Museum (20 mins North, a mini-mansion with secret passages and one of the largest collections of automatic musical instruments). Both require reservations in advance and are 100% WORTH SEEING.

If you come back another weekend (which I recommend!), you can also check out:

Art crawls: downtown once a quarter and for the young and hip crowd, head over to the Penn Avenue Arts District on the first Friday every month (followed by a great dance party).

Killer small theater scene: Bricolage, Barebones Productions, City Theater, Pittsburgh Playwrights, Quantum Theater, Uncumber Theatrics (to name a few).

You’re surrounded by a lot of great cities. Many performers will be driving to the festival, but many will be considering flying out. That’s an investment. What do you hope they’ll take away from the festival that will make it a great experience for them? And for you?

I would love performers to leave PCF thinking:

• They really went out of there way to take care of me and my group.
• We had a fun show on an amazing stage–large and open but with an intimate feel. And built for theater. That’s where I like to perform improv.
• I met so many amazing people! I took advantage of the happy hour, the drink specials after shows, and hit up the performer/volunteer party and felt I had a lot of time to connect with other performers.
• I am really thinking about my work in new ways. I took some great workshops and got to ask a burning question at the comedy panel.
• Overall, I had no idea there was such an amazing growing scene in Pittsburgh. I’m definitely coming back for PCF 2015 if not before!

If you’d like to visit Pittsburgh, submit now.

Currently Bill is an instructor at The Torch Theatre and producer for the Phoenix Improv Festival. He tours teaching and performing across North America.