Is the LA Indie Improv Scene Dead?
no, but it is branded
Improvisers love to say “the indie improv scene is dead.” I’ve heard it in both New York City and in Los Angeles for the last 20 years.
They’re saying it now about Los Angeles. There’s no big indie improv shows, the old timers say, just a little theaters putting together their own teams.
But those small theaters (disclaimer: I co-own one) ARE the indie teams.
The indie improv scene is not dead. It’s thriving. It’s just been transformed. From tentpole indie SHOWS into small THEATERS.
It used to be: TNT, Room 101 and Crashbar. Now it’s WE, WGIS, Shared Experience and The Pack.
Terms
An “indie improv team” is a team that puts itself together. It’s not cast by a theater. They pick their coaches, book their own shows, decide how much they will rehearse.
An “indie scene” happens when there’s enough indie teams who know about each other and are performing each other’s shows.
An indie scene can be an exciting “place.” You don’t need to pass an audition from the big theater. You can get stage time when you’re still new. You can meet friends. Stars emerge, who are “doing great” in indie shows.
Usually, an “indie scene” is an offshoot of a big improv theater. An indie scene evolves when a theater has a big community, but not enough stage time.
The improv theater is the planet, and the indie scene is a corresponding moon.
So you’ve got the UCB Theater, and then its indie scene: Maybe we’re talking Stem Kidz, Shag, Old Milk, Gusher, Gunk, Money Talks Bullshit Walks, Seahag, Shelby, Dough Dough, Astronomy Club, I’m Susan, PB&J, plus the longtime indie stalwarts like Funk Shuffle and Dick Cannon. Many more are out there, I’m sure.
That’s a lot of teams!
What’s missing, say the people who think the scene is dead, are the number of popular tentpole indie improv SHOWS.
You can’t count UCB’s Cagematch or BYOT — those do feature indie teams, but they’re part of the main planet! Those are great shows, but they’re not indie.
A Knowable Tribe
From 2008 until about 2012, the indie improv scene was largely defined by three shows: Tuesday Night Thunder, Room 101 and Crashbar.
(This was a little before my time. I moved to LA in 2014. I did some short interviews with folks to get my info but any mistakes here are mine)
They were on different nights so they didn’t compete. They usually were at difference venues: TNT was at The Clubhouse, Room 101 was at The Complex, Crashbar at the Impro Space.
It is perceived as a golden age because the size was just right. If you watched each one for a few weeks, plus Harold Night at UCB — you would be well versed in the indie scene. You felt like you knew “everyone” in the scene.
I’m sure there were plenty of folks who felt left out. But for the many small teams participating, you felt like you were part of the scene. You could look around the audience and recognize the faces.
Quality Shows, Big Audiences
The folks running those night were passionate about the quality of their improv and the shows they produced.
They’d try different themes to make their shows stand out: charity events, competitions, etc.
There was friendly competition to get the big improv teams. Crashbar was savvy about getting big teams early in their run. For a little while, when there was a new house team at UCB, Crashbar would invite them to do a set so the new team’s first “public” show was there.
Room 101 eventually tried doing destination shows — like a night where the “show” happened in a car. Three audience members in the back as the driver/passenger did a set.
TNT always ended with a jam. The jam was legendary. Tons of folks in the UCB indie scene met each other and got on stage first at the TNT jam. The other shows would often have jams, but I always felt like the TNT jam was THE indie jam.
Planets Too Big
Then, planet UCB got too big and it swallowed its moon.
UCBT opened its Sunset space and added two stages. A second “main stage” (UCB Sunset) and also a small third stage - The Inner Sanctum. Around the same time, The Clubhouse moved to a venue that had two full stages.
Suddenly, the indie improv scene was too big. Shows were competing with each other on the same night. The number of people applying to be in shows exploded. Audiences were divided amongst a lot of shows.
The producers of the big three shows were getting fatigued. Crashbar stopped, and Room 101 soon after.
Indie improv continued. TNT kept going until Covid shut down the theaters (and even a little bit after, when lockdowns first lifted).
But the sense of a knowable indie tribe felt gone.
Destruction of the Planets
Then the big theaters imploded. iO West closed, Second City shrunk and then left. UCB shut down and re-opened smaller.
In place of the big theaters, the smaller theaters either started or solidified. WE Improv grew, The Pack grew. WGIS (the one I co-own) and Shared Experience started.
If you are doing improv in Los Angeles, you are probably on one or more of these planets.
There are SO MANY teams at these places. WGIS currently has 12 teams. Shared Experience listed 14 teams on their Instagram account. WE Improv has 15 or so different teams playing over the next few weeks (not official house teams, but many are teams that are formed of WE students who play mostly at WE). The Pack has four house improv teams listed in their upcoming shows — might be more!
New Theaters: Planets or Moons?
The question is: are these theaters mini-planets, or are they moons of the UCB?
Meaning: Are they indie or not?
If you think each of these theaters is its own planet then yes, the indie improv scene is pretty dead. There are not many teams/performers who are completely separate from all of these newer theaters.
To get on a team at these places, you sorta kinda have to take some classes there. Maybe not that many, but some. That doesn’t FEEL indie.
Then again, it also doesn’t feel too institutional. There’s a very wide variety of improv backgrounds and experience levels on these teams. There’s a variety of styles. People are on multiple teams.
Also, the walls are down between all these places. If you were doing UCB in 2012 you probably didn’t know what was going on at Second City. But if you’re doing WE you are also likely doing something at Shared Experience or WGIS or UCB also.
Each theater is evolving its own shows and themes. Showdown at Shared Experience, the 3x3 at WGIS, the Fantasy Draft at WE, Bithole at the Pack.
There’s friendly competition between them, they push each other to try new things.
These theaters take the formerly scattered improv scene and organize them into just a few hubs.
Just this past April, Mach Improv organized its second annual indie festival (The lovingly titled MILF festival). The stages were Clubhouse, as always, but also WGIS and the Pack.
That feels indie. In the old style sense.
The current generation of LA improvisers will look back on the era of the little theaters, the way previous generations looked at TNT, Room 101 and Crashbar.
Conclusion
Is the indie scene dead? No, it exists as a league of small theaters. It’s not AS independent as the scene around 2010, but it’s close enough that it does the same function in the larger improv society.
Sound off in the comments with rebuttals, corrections or, dare I say, that you agree!
(Thanks to Nick Mandernach, Lilan Bowden and Casey Feigh for helping me do a bit of checking on timelines)
Plugs
The World’s Greatest Improv School: The improv school I run with Jim Woods and Sarah Claspell. We’ve got classes online, in LA and even a few in NYC!
How to Be The Greatest Improviser On Earth - My improv book, available at Amazon. Kindle or print (also on my web site for more if you don’t want to buy from Amazon). It’s a hodge-podge of advice I wrote in 2016 about doing improv. If you’re broke and want a free PDF version just email me and I’ll send it over.
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-A lot of the "UCB indie scene" you list at the top are/began as WE teams: Stem Kidz, Shag, Money Talks Bullshit Walks, PB&J, and I thiiiink Seahag and Shelby.
-It feels misleading to mention MILF2 being at WGIS/The Pack as an example of the theaters and indie scene newly overlapping, as 1) MILF1 already incorporated that theater when it was the Ledge and 2) the choice to "collaborate" was inspired wholly by geographic proximity.
-You are not including the detail that WE and WGIS were at the Clubhouse before getting their own physical space, and the Pack was at the Complex (?). (Likewise, SES may be getting its own space.) Also, the fact that Moving Arts (where WE actually started pre-pandemic) stopped being an indie venue. The menu of available indie venues shifted after the pandemic as places had closed or moved, and the old institutional knowledge about how to book your own show was largely irrelevant. (Likewise, no accessible/universal knowledge hub has filled the vacuum of the old "LA indie shows" google doc, which was essentially a yellow pages for indie shows, and detailed how to submit to perform on each.) When the small theaters opened their own spaces, the landscape of available spaces to perform became newly vertically-integrated; your team HAD to be through a theater, because that was the only way to physically get stage time.
Had a cool little indie team that I self started and put a lot of work into but then more theaters started running more teams and the turnover time increased which made it difficult to really solidify an identity for ourselves. Would love to get on an improv team again, but my heart is worn out from managing one so I’m not self starting again. I will have to join one or get onto one, whenever that is.
What’s more attractive: forming one with friends or a person with institutional power saying yes to you? In the entertainment world, it will almost always be the latter, very rarely the former. Yet it’s always the former that has the best shows.