Yes, And... from p10 simulated ocean. Pretty soon, Four Day Week- end started selling out its main shows. “One group that helped us get through year one were the TCU students,” Ford says. “College kids could go out to a show at 11 p.m. on a Friday or Saturday and helped build up our name and reputation. It was all word of mouth. We had to kick butt on the quality of shows. Nobody could miss.” Four Day Weekend had grown a dedi- cated following but needed a bigger space. The following year, they found it when Wilk and his wife, Amy, had a wedding reception on the roof of Fort Worth’s Caravan of Dreams. The rain forced the wedding party to move inside to a huge, 121-seat theater space that had gone unused for years. “You run your show for eight weeks and then what you do is you go dark and you cast, rehearse and build sets,” Wilk says. “So with all of that downtown, nobody could af- ford to make it go, and we’re like, ‘Hey man, we’re three black chairs and a bag of wigs.’” The group also set up their first official home right when the city of Fort Worth started planning to build out its downtown area to bring in more visitors. “Again, lightning in a bottle,” Ford says. “Synchronicity has been the key to our success.” MAKING FUN Four Day opened its second theater in Low- est Greenville in 2018 when Truck Yard owner and former Four Day student Jason Boso bought the old Contemporary Theater building across the street for his corporate offices and offered Four Day the chance to use its main theater and upstairs space as a second location. “They’re my friends, and I like what they do,” Boso says. “They’ve been around for 20- plus years, so I figured they weren’t gonna screw it up if they’d been doing it for 20 years.” The shows then and now are a mix of short-form games in which suggestions come from the audience with words or say- ings written on post-it notes and cards so it’s easy to avoid obvious political references or the drunk smart ass who just wants to yell dumb shit like “Pineapple!” “Penis!” or “Tampon!’ all night. That jumps off into long-form scenes and musical numbers built on characters and stories. They don’t tell you what they’re going to do and then do it. They just do it. “Four Day is sort of its own animal in a sense,” says cast member Daniel Matthews. “It’s a different style of improv in a nicer venue. It’s polished, is the general adjective that I use.” Even though scenes are improvised, Four 12 12 Day has developed recurring characters that have become audience favorites, such as the Fort Worth cops Officer Muchacho (Wilk) and Deputy Doyle (Ford), with whom they inte- grate a live backstage video feed to mimic the jumpy camera style of the long-running reality series COPS. Wilk has closed the majority of his shows with a character named Timmy, a pie-eyed, optimistic, orphaned kid in a back- wards red cap and football jersey who pulls someone out of the audience to be their big brother. Wilk retired the character at the anni- versary show in a sickly sweet scene in which Timmy’s dad, played by Grant, finally returns to pick up the ageless boy wonder and tells him how much he loves him. The group’s NPR parody gave birth to the improvised songs of blues singer Blind Stinky Fruit Rollup, played by the group’s fifth member Tull, whom, Wilk says during Saturday’s show, was hired when they real- ized “we need real talent.” “I love the music,” says cast member Col- ten Winburn, who performs improvised songs in Four Day’s talent show parody seg- ment America’s Got Idol Factor, in which made-up bands and singers improvise im- pressive lyrics and songs. Musical director Ray Sharp plays piano throughout the show and Winburn plays guitar and even a loop machine to produce a solo a capella tune. “Four Day generally has a lot more music involved in the show, especially compared to other theaters around here,” Winburn says. “Another big thing that sets it apart is the production value. We’ll take something es- sentially that’s just a short form game, but we add a video intro or sound effects to it. It heightens the quality of it.” The video production also helped grow the corporate arm of the theater’s work, which brings in about 70 percent of its reve- nue. It came out of the Great Recession of 2008 when entertainment was the first thing to get cut out of people’s budgets. This forced the troupe to find another way to make money as a “happy accident,” Wilk says. “That one gave us an entire revenue stream off of corporate training,” Wilk says. “That was really not on our brain.” Zawiska, the troupe’s first female cast member, who also works as Four Day’s di- rector of corporate sales, says part of the for- mula for survival comes from learning how to produce something when one avenue closes, as happened during the coronavirus pandemic. Without live shows or corporate events, the group converted the Dallas the- ater into a multi-camera studio to stage live presentations, workshops and shows on Zoom during the shutdown. “It was an opportunity to look at our strengths in the team we had [but] in a dif- ferent perspective,” Zawiska says. “It was a little bit of building the plane in the air and adapting and figuring our what works but being able to do it in a virtual space. And by the summer of 2020, we were rocking and rolling with new content every week.” New members also add their particular talents, such as Matthews, whose training in puppetry created the popular “Four Day Weekend Junior” segment in the Friday and Saturday shows, where a cheery kids’ show host and a bipolar, anthropomorphic cat teach kids complex subjects through guest experts and songs. “In improv, you have to set people up for success,” Ford says. “You can’t set people up for failure. If we were making fun of instead of making fun with, making them look dumb for two minutes for a cheap laugh, then the whole thing is dumb. You just can’t do it long-term like that.” From top left, clockwise: Daniel Matthews with his cat puppet, Sallie Bowen and Bonnie Criss perform, a group stand up routine and music director Jordan Fruge. Such dedication doesn’t just build up performers in Four Day’s show. It also builds up Dallas’ comedy community as a destina- tion for storied talent with a reputation that spreads far beyond the state’s borders. “They just validate live entertainment in Dallas,” says Sean Traynor, the district manager for the Improv comedy chain, which has locations in Addison and Ar- lington. “Let’s just say you’re thinking of going to see a play, and it’s the worst play you’ve ever seen in your life. Like, ugh, that play was terrible. I’m not going to do that again. When someone gets there once or twice a year and wants to see stand-up comedy or improv, it’s important that they see something amazing. They go, ‘Man, that was just a good time. Why don’t we do that more often?’ It literally tells people, ‘Don’t stay in your shell. Netflix isn’t ev- erything’ and the next thing you know, they come see us.” Comedy isn’t built on competition or even commerce. Wilk says it’s built on cama- raderie. “At the heart of it, we get to play with our best friends and they end up paying for it,” Wilk says. “We would’ve done it for free and we did for many years. We just get to play for a living and be with our best friends and meet new best friends.” 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.com dallasobserver.com
