Yes, And... from p8 sold-out weekend stage shows and weekday shows by local troupes, corporate event pro- ductions and advertising campaigns.The ad work is done through the company’s Four Day Creative wing and some of the local troupes come from Four Day Weekend’s 4U sketch and improv training center, It’s run by performers who studied at such storied com- edy institutions as Second City and the Up- right Citizens Brigade. 4U’s classes are free. The thriving theater production has sur- vived a global recession and a viral pan- demic and has produced three television pilots that led to a single-season, five-minute talk show series on The CW called Small Time. They’ve met and even performed with two U.S. presidents. They’ve produced un- counted commercials for global corpora- tions that earned the company’s first Addy Award, a key to the city of Fort Worth, an en- trepreneur-in-residence with Texas Chris- tian University (TCU) and two theater shows that continue to sell out on Friday and Saturday nights. “Sometimes I’m like I cannot believe the show has been running 25 years,” Wilk says. “I’m so proud, and other times I’m like, I’m still doing improv?” THREE BLACK CHAIRS AND A BAG OF WIGS The group came together in 1997 after its founders grew disillusioned with the loneli- ness of stand-up and the short-form format that populated most live improvised shows. Ford, Wilk and Grant started the group and recruited Ahearn for their first run. “Ahearn was saying, ‘I’m gonna catch you guys at the show on Friday,’” Grant says. “Da- vid said, ‘Yeah, you’re gonna be in the show.’ “We wanted to do a lot more edgy stuff,” Grant adds. “We’d been inspired by Second City. We’d been going there and seeing their stuff with people like Tina Fey and Steve Carell. They would start every show with a Pirandello. Basically, it’s like you would start off with just a little fake-out to the audience. Oh, the show’s starting but there’s some sort of problem where this light didn’t come on and there’s a feeling of disturbance in the audience and then you’d let them off the hook in a way that’s funny.” The crew spent as much time as they could in between odd jobs performing spectacles and busking outside the theater to bring in au- diences or taking classes around North Texas and even as far away as Second City in Chi- cago. Wilk would hitch a ride in the back of the plane belonging to his father, Dr. Larry Wilk, who ran canceled checks for the U.S. Federal Reserve across the country long before the process could become digitized. “It would take me 27 hours to go to a three-hour class in Chicago, but I loved it,” Wilk says. “I wanted to do it right and learn.” A feature story about the group appeared in 10 10 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in which re- porter Todd Camp followed Wilk and his crew for a week, including on his father’s flight route to Chicago. They also staged some out- door spectacles to drum up interest in the shows and attracted sizable crowds with their “attempts” to mimic Richard Branson’s globe- crossing balloon ride and by re-creating the “I’m the king of the world!” scene in James Cameron’s Titanic in a much smaller A 25-Year Timeline of Four Day Weekend 1997 Frank Ford, Troy Grant and David Wilk each kick in $700 to fund the first six-week run of late-night shows at Casa Mañana in Fort Worth. David Ahearn becomes the fourth per- former when, according to Wilk, Ahearn tells the group that he hears they have a funny show in the works and they tell him, “Yeah, you’re in it.” The fifth member Oliver Tull is re- cruited when Wilk says the group needs some- one with “real talent.” 2000 Rain almost ruins Wilk and his wife Amy’s wedding reception on the roof of the Caravan of Dreams in downtown Fort Worth. The wed- ding party takes refuge in a 121-seat theater that had gone unused for several years. The space becomes Four Day Weekend’s first offi- cial theater. 2001 Wilk says an audience member approaches the group after a show and says, “Oh my God, this is awesome. Do you teach classes?” He says yes even though they didn’t. Four Day starts a five-level improv and sketch training course in between shows. The same year, they start doing shows for corporate clients and this eventually becomes a cornerstone of the theater troupe’s income and business model. 2008 The housing bubble threatens to eliminate the theater’s corporate shows. So they develop a training curriculum to teach businesses how the basics of improv comedy performing can help them with public speaking, presentations and creativity in the workplace. 2009 The group continues to perform in Fort Worth and for corporate and private events >> p12 and start attracting television networks. FOX funds a pilot for the group called Get Lost, about a comedy troupe that gets sued by an audience member who slips and falls in their theater. 2011 Four Day Weekend is invited to hold its “Yes, And” training seminar in Washington D.C. at the Democratic National Caucus with a per- sonal invitation from U.S. Rep. John Larson from Hartford, Connecticut, who read about the group in Southwest’s in-flight magazine. During their visit, the group meets President Barak Obama. 2012 The group performs a show for the Fortune 500 company Fiserv in Las Vegas in which they share the stage with President George W. Bush. Four Day Weekend also premieres its first TV show to make it to the airwaves on The CW with the five-minute, late night talk show parody Small Time. 2015 The Armed Forces Entertainment Tour invites Four Day Weekend to travel the globe per- forming for troops stationed in places such as Kosovo, England, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands. 2016 Four Day Weekend casts its first female cast member, Emily Zawisza, to its main shows. She also serves as the company’s director of cor- porate development. 2017 The educational publishing house Wiley re- leases the group’s first book Happy Accidents: The Transformative Power of ‘Yes, And’ at Work and in Life. Four Day Weekend cele- brates its 20th anniversary with a performance at Bass Performance Hall. 2018 Restaurateur, friend and fan of Four Day Weekend Jason Boso buys the Sears Street building once used by the Contemporary The- atre of Dallas across the street from his popu- lar Truck Yard restaurant in Lowest Greenville. He only plans to use the lower floors for office space and offers Four Day a partnership to bring a second weekly show to Dallas. 2020 The coronavirus pandemic brings live enter- tainment to a halt and Four Day performs what Wilk calls a “pandemic pivot” when the group turns its new Dallas theater into an on- line broadcast studio for shows for its fans and company clients. The theater also launches its 4Day Creative sector to create and produce professional videos and commercials for cli- ents, which earns them an Addy Award the following year. 2022 The group performs two 25th anniversary shows, one at the Fort Worth theater on Fri- day, May 20, and the second at the Dallas theater on Saturday, May 21, with current and original members including the first five play- ers along with Zawiska, Anthony Bowling, Andrew Hammer, Grayson Howe, Joshua Roberts and musical director Ray Sharp. Wilk announces at the end of the Saturday night show that he’s retiring his long-running, show closing character Timmy, a pie-eyed, 8-year- old orphan kid who meets a “Big Brother” or “Big Sister” from the audience to inspire an improvised scene based on their story. The show closes with Timmy’s father, played by Grant, reuniting with his son after a 20-plus year absence. Josh Roberts, David Wilk, Frank Ford and David Ahearn re- create a photo of the troupe’s founding members, with Roberts subbing for Troy Grant in the original. MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JUNE 2–8, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
