Witness… The Ambulatory Expired

Here we are. Four weeks into the podcast, and now the never-before-seen-or-heard stuff is finally being released. I’m really excited for everyone to hear the next three episodes for the first time. This also probably means that these behind the scenes blog posts will be sufficiently shorter, so if you’ve been reading them, you won’t have to slog through anymore. Or at least not as much; it’s my writing, so there’s bound to be some slogging. See? I’m already wasting your time by talking about slo—

So! “The King of Sheep.” This one was always planned to be the biggest one of the bunch, not just because of its length, but because of my intention was always to cast another seminal Endgames Improv team, The Recchia. This team has been there since the beginning of Endgames, performing a weekly, free show for going on ten years now, Your Fucked Up Relationship. The premise: audience members volunteer their names and stick them in a bowl. One name is picked out of said bowl, and that person comes onstage and is interviewed about a fucked up relationship they experienced in their past. Not “we argued a lot and decided to part ways” fucked up, but rather “they slept with all my friends, stole my money and my dog, wouldn’t move out and slept on my couch for three weeks after we broke up, and even had sex with more of my friends on that couch!” fucked up… Although they’ll receive those dull, run-of-the-mill stories every so often. After the interview, The Recchia performs a montage of scenes inspired by details from the interview. The show, when performed live, was always sold out (or full capacity at Stage Werx, as no tickets were technically “sold”), and was an introduction for many people who would soon sign up for an Endgames class of their own. (The Recchia still performs YFUR, by the way, albeit in a more digital, social distanced setting, which can be viewed here or here every Friday at 8. If they don’t get an interview, they still do a fun Living Room for your viewing pleasure. Do yourself a favor and check it out!)

The Recchia records over Zoom.

(I shut my camera off while the actors perform, hence the profile pic of me wearing a panda hat.)

Needless to say, The Recchia is a bit intimidating, but not just because they run the longest running Endgames show. The team is and always has been primarily made up performers who also teach for the company. That’s not a prerequisite or anything, but when I first started taking classes, the majority of the team was definitely made up of familiar faces on the Instructors page of the website (where I now am featured, haha, oh, life, you and your wacky twists and turns). Admittedly, that may just be me feeling the intimidation, as I first met some of them when they were my teachers, and even though we’re peers now, that image never really fades away. Oh well, that’s the life of an introvert, I guess.

The team, like any other improv team, has gone through many personnel changes, and in fact, when I first came up with the idea for “Sheep,” some of the roles were written with different performers in mind. One new member, in fact, I couldn’t fit into the already to-the-brim story, unless they just wanted to make zombie noises, so when you listen to the episode, you’re technically down one Recchia member. But don’t worry! They have a big role in next week’s episode.

Back when I first knew I wanted to write a zombie story for the team, the original title was “The King of Prawns.” Don’t ask me why; it just sounded like a weird-yet-catchy enough title. Of course, the problem with coming up with your title first (curse you, R.L. Stine, for teaching me this concept!) is that your story should probably justify it in some way, and there was no way I could connect zombies to the metaphor of the hors d’oeuvre staple (or I just didn’t bother trying), so I changed it to sheep. Whether or not I did that with the idea of “sheeple” who are single-minded drones in mind, I honestly can’t say, but I don’t want to give myself that much credit.

First row: Scott, me, Chris, Keara. Second row: Cat, Max, Corinne, Sal. Third row: Nish, Lena.

With this episode, I really wanted it to be an immersive experience. Not that I didn’t do my darndest to make all the episode immersive, but because of the epic scope of this particular script, it definitely felt appropriate to do so. After all, it has the highest number of settings and characters, and it involves a lot of action. Now you might be thinking, “Andy, last week’s episode, ‘The Blue Diamond,’ had a lot of action, too.” True. But “Sheep” was actually recorded before “Diamond,” and was the fourth episode recorded overall. Episode 5, also fairly large in scale, was recorded before “Sheep” (literally the week before, actually), but as you will hear next week, it is a pseudo-crucible with one set. I don’t know why I have to explain all of this or even defend myself because of it, but there it is.

In any case, like I started out saying before the rambling kicked back in, I wanted this episode to be immersive, which meant learning more about the editing process. This whole podcast endeavor was an opportunity to learn how to use GarageBand, which has been extremely fun and beneficial. Here, I was able to play with panning audio, sounds coming from a distance or behind barriers, and trying to match the dialogue with the ambience of the setting. It’s not perfect, I will admit, but I still enjoy the end result, and like I say in the FAQs on the About page, it’s the story and the performances I’d like you to focus on instead of the quality of the audio. In other words, don’t be so picky, brah!

—Andy

These people? They’re some funny effing people.

(I think Chris just did a very amusing retake of a line here.)