▼ Culture Yes, And... Improv troupe Four Day Weekend has thrived for 25 years with a simple formula: Just go have fun. BY DANNY GALLAGHER PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATHY TRAN T he performers of Four Day Weekend usually don’t need to warm up. That’s what happens when you’ve done a show for 25 years. “It’s like a telepathic vibe. The conversa- tion is our warm-up,” says troupe member Grayson Howe. From the OGs to the young’uns, all mem- bers are dressed in dark formal wear on this Saturday in May, ready for the last of two 25th anniversary shows. You might think they were pinch hitters for pallbearers at a funeral parlor, if you couldn’t hear the con- versations in the upstairs green room of the Four Day Weekend’s Dallas theater on Sears Street in Lowest Greenville. Josh Roberts explains his signature show drink. It’s called a Colorado Bulldog, which sounds like a joke when he mentions that it’s “a White Russian with Coke in it” and yes, he meant the soda. It’s not a bit. That’s just the setup. His warm-up involves doing made-up commercials à la Suntory’s Hibiki 17 ads, which Bill Murray’s character did at the start of Lost in Translation. “Life in shambles?” Roberts asks with his hand glommed on an imaginary drink. “Good. Colorado Bulldog.” The chatter gets more show focused as the sold-out crowd descends. Almost all 25 years worth of performers will get to take the stage at the theater on either night for a retrospective showcase of improv, charac- ters and videos. “Do we go downstairs after Elvis?”troupe member Emily Zawiska’ asks, referring to the music that marks the start of the show. The only person who isn’t cracking jokes about cast member Oliver Tull still doing the show just a few weeks after an invasive back surgery or the snacks in the green room is founding cast member David Wilk, who started the theater company with Frank Ford, David Ahearn and Troy Grant. Wilk is but a blur between rooms as he checks on tech, the box office, a crowd filling two floors of seating and probably 20 other things out of sight. All of this is what makes a show like Four 88 Day Weekend’s work. It’s just friends, old and new, coming together to sew up the seams before the show and playing together in front of an audience when it’s time. “It’s really fun to be around talented, cre- ative people,” Ford says. “For the longest time, when we started in improv especially, this is a young person’s game. We thought we can’t still be doing this in our 30s. The audience would never allow for this, and then you get in your 30s and it’s funny. We don’t care. We just like funny. We would never have thought we would still be around doing it. We thought six weeks. That’s it.” The six weeks Ford mentions happened in 1997 with the troupe’s first run of shows at the Casa Mañana theater in downtown Fort Worth. Wilk says he, Ford and Grant put up $700 each after persuaded the own- ers to let them do a long-form improvised comedy set each night — something no one was doing with any regularity in Dallas or Fort Worth — after a performance of the off- Broadway musical Forever Plaid. The three met while doing short-form improv around North Texas, becoming active in places they’ve long since outlived, like Ad-Libs in Deep Ellum. “There were plenty of working troupes, and we were all scrambling for space,” Wilk says. That’s when Grant suggested they move the show to Fort Worth. “We all piled in our cars and drove over there on a Wednesday night and the square Four Day Weekend comedians (top, from left) Oliver Tull, Daniel Matthews, Emily Zawisza, Paul Kolker, Grayson Howe. Andrew Hammer is on the floor. was jumping,” Wilk says. “I mean it was popping. I remember looking at Troy and saying, ‘Wow, if you’re in downtown Dallas at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, your Greyhound bus is late.’” The six-week run of shows led to the dis- covery of a huge, unused theater space in Fort Worth that’s grown into a comedy produc- tion juggernaut. Four Day Weekend is still more than capable of producing >> p10 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
