Witness… The Second Season

Well, we have arrived. Season 2 has started. Episode 1 is out for your listening pleasure, and the following five Mondays will be just as pleasureful. Presumably; I don’t constitute what does and doesn’t provide pleasure. That’s way too much responsibility to hold. And it’d be kind of narcissistic of me to think that my podcast is a guaranteed pleasure-provider. I hope it is, but I haven’t seen any reviews (which might be a good time to say the cliche podcast thing and say, “Remember to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts blah blah blah.”) In any case, something that gives me pleasure is the excitement of being able to share these episodes with the world. I’m really proud of this season, both in terms of content and the effort with which it took to create said content. Not just by me, mind you; yes, I write, direct and edit every episode, but they would be nothing if it weren’t for my talented friends lending their voices for a few hours. A huge, huge thank you to everyone who acted this season; you brought this silly, weird shit to life. You are all truly the best.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten the sappy stuff out of the way, let’s talk about the creation of “The Butler Did It”!

Believe it or not, there was a time when this could have been a Season 1 episode. Back when I still had the naive notion that I would be able to put all these episodes on as live plays, “Butler” was going to be the fifth one in the series. In fact, after I had finished writing Season 1’s “The King of Sheep,” I immediately got to work on writing this skewed take on murder mysteries. I got about halfway through before I got stuck. I started from scratch a couple more times, but wound up getting stuck at the same part, so instead of wringing my hands in the hopes that doing that would break through the writer’s block (it usually doesn’t and only makes my fingers ache… I might be wringing in the wrong way…), I moved onto the next story I had in mind, which was “The Eurydice Rescue,” S1 E5. Then, of course, I realized I didn’t have the means to successfully put on live shows every four or so months, and decided to press pause on the whole shebang.

What got me all stuck, you ask? 🤷‍♂️ Who knows? It’s always hard to say why writer’s block rears its blocky head in a writer’s direction. The need for perfection, maybe? Or something like it? Running across a plot hole or a plot contrivance or something having to do with plot, because plots can be pesky? It was also three or so years ago, so I can’t remember, but what I do remember are two things: 1) there was a lot of psychological workmanship involved in “Butler,” and 2) the improv team for which I was writing this was having some major lineup changes, so accommodating for those may have felt like more work than it was worth.

Chivalry Club (or, Chiv Club, as they are affectionately known) was an Endgames Improv mainstay. I swear, at one time or another, every all star I looked up to while I was just getting started had a spot on the team at one point or another. In fact, I think my first bit of improv jealousy came about when Russ, someone with whom I went up through all the class levels, was invited to become a member of the team. He totally deserved the slot, of course; dude’s fuckin’ funny. But it was one of the first examples of seeing people I considered compatriots moving up in the world of improv, while I still felt small and anonymous and on the bottom floor. Oh, young improviser-Andy. How sad you were!

When Endgames started doing shows six nights a week (let’s take a brief moment to remember the glory that was pre-Covid life… … and moving on), Chiv Club began doing Throwback Thursday. The show, which, I’m sure you can guess, was put on every Thursday and involved volunteers submitting a photo from their personal way-back-when and, when chosen, coming down to be interviewed about it, fodder from said interview being used for the subsequent improv scenes. After their main coach moved on, I coached the team in a guest capacity until finally becoming their permanent coach once a new Endgames House Team program was implemented (see, young improviser-Andy? You did move up in the world!). By that point, the show had gone through some schedule changes; thankfully, the meme-verse allowed Chiv Club to keep their original premise, so Throwback Thursday became Wayback Wednesday became Flashback Friday became nothing because Covid ruined everything 😢.

From left to right: Anton Shuster (Vlad), Sal Testa (Winslow), and Conor Allen (Row) at Throwback Thursday, 3/8/2018.

At some point in between deciding to do stop the live plays and coming up with the podcast idea, I must have decided that what I had written so far of “Butler” was trash and I should probably start from scratch. So I trashed the whole thing. Let this be a lesson to any aspiring writers out there: NEVER THROW ANYTHING OUT. Anything could be useful, and if you come to that conclusion long after the allotted 30 days before your trash or recycle bin empties itself for good, then you’re shit out of luck. That’s how I felt after I decided to give “Butler” another go: luck-shat. However, it turns out I had a bit of luck hugging the rim of that shit bucket (what is this metaphor???), because even though I had deleted the independent Final Draft file, the collective Imagine if You Will file I had originally used to write all the scripts was still available. I had merely gotten rid of a copy-and-paste version. So I began tackling “Butler” yet again, reviewing what I already had with fresh eyes and deciding, okay, I’ve got something I can work with.

From left to right: Sahil Desai (Trivedi) and Leila Carillo (Madame Ophelia) at Throwback Thursday, 3/8/2018

This brings us to the whole psychological workmanship I mentioned earlier. I’ve always been interested in the concept of point of view and how things can be skewed based on personal biases, poor recollection, etc. It’d also been a dream of mine to write some sort of Rashomon-esque story, wherein the same moment is seen from different perspectives. With the original intended theme for “Butler” being TRUST, this seemed like as perfect a time as any to make things hard for myself and Rashomon it up!

What this meant for me was making sure that the characters present in the various flashbacks were consistent with how the narrator of each flashback was likely to see them. So, lo and behold:

My trusty, dusty whiteboard.

For some reason, though, I had trouble reconciling everything I’d put on the whiteboard with the kind of story I wanted to tell. I don’t think it was until I realized that instead of TRUST being the theme, I needed to simplify it and make PERSPECTIVE the theme, with TRUST kind of being a mini-branch stemming off PERSPECTIVE’s trunk. This certainly made things easier, and I was able to finally finish the script.

Casting was also a cinch. Some of the performers I had written roles for had moved on from Chiv Club at this point, but I’d loosened up on the idea that only current members of a given team could act in each play. Hell, I don’t even care about “teams” at this point; it’s just whoever I think is right for the role. The only current members of Chiv Club, which is to say, ones that hadn’t either left or moved on during good ol’ quarantine, were Conor, Leila, Oleg and Sal, with Anton having moved to L.A. and Chloe going back to school. Lexi and Sahil were two former team members that had left a year or so prior, whereas Will, I haven’t even met him in person! Will, a noted improv performer and teacher from Florida, came into my orbit during quarantine when Conor started producing a weekly online improv show called Improv All Stars. Conor invited Will to guest in a few episodes before we invited him to join the team full time, although the team roster was already kind of a revolving door. Understandably, though; performing improv online is… it’s a thing, a thing that happened. It was fun, mind you, and always a blast to see and play with lovely faces in tiny boxes, but nothing compares to the real life thing, which, thankfully, as of today, is back, albeit with some masks. If only those masks were like Snap Camera filters; we had WAY too much fun with those. In any case, as these episodes are recorded over Zoom, it didn’t matter where everyone was, because the miracle of the internet was at our disposal. Huzzah!

From left to right: Anton, Sal, and Lexi Diamond (Dart), at Throwback Thursday, 3/8/2018.

(Are they sobbing over the miracle of the internet? Doubtful.)

So that’s the story of how “The Butler Did It” came together. I hope you enjoyed (or will enjoy) the episode (and if “will enjoy” does apply to you, why are you reading the Making Of blog before listening to the damn thing?) and I hope you enjoy (no “enjoyed” here) the rest of Season 2.

Oh, and for the record, yes, I do know who did it. But I’m not telling.

—Andy

Conor is not amused that I’m keeping the solution to myself.