New to Toast
This fall, in one of the group’s first performances in early October, new Toast member Abi McNeely caught quite the surprise when she had to guess the word “paranoid” from a series of hints from the other members. The catch: every time the audience laughed, she was brought a marshmallow. She stuffed her clothes, tilted her neck and racked her brain doing all she could to balance the mess. Needless to say, she was decked in little chunks of white fluff by the time she figured it out.
Toast is USC's oldest improv group, currently in its 14th year, and while plenty has changed, they still have a few traditions.
Every year, they welcome their new inductees with a live trial in their first performance. As intense or anxiety-inducing as this may seem, the group vows to maintain a lighthearted spirit.
“We’ll come up with a way to initiate them, but we’ll try to be nice about it,” said Alexandra Herstik , a third-year mass communications student and Toast performer. “The babies never know what’s going to happen. They usually don’t even know that something will happen.”
Ryan Stevens , a third-year English student, explained that the game is less about hazing and more about introducing the members to the unexpected early on.
“Last year one of us was a Sharknado,” Stevens said. “Basically, the point is to keep the new members on their toes, and surprise them with what’s going on. It’s always a different ‘gotcha’ game.”
Making it up as you go
Traditional themes include a “sexy” Toast performance and a dress-up night for both audience and performers. Other than that, Toast is rather flexible in how they approach each show.
Working with the same crew in uncertain situations on a regular basis, you begin to develop a sense of how what goes on outside Toast affects the energy of each show and each rehearsal. Vic Whitten, a fourth-year public health student, doesn’t see this energy as superfluous; rather, it's essential to the process.
“One of my favorite things about improvising is that whatever day you’ve had, you bring that to the table,” she said. “All our members come in, whatever they’ve experienced that day, that dictates how they’re going to perform that night. I think we learn a lot about how we deal with our own stressors by expressing that on stage.”
Herstik finds that picking up on these cues is fundamental to enjoying oneself on stage. By learning to read your fellow performers, you're committing to the process.
“A big part of improv is trust. It’s scary walking out on to the stage not knowing what’s going to happen,” she said. “You have to trust the other person that walks on stage with you. They’re going to have your back onstage and you have to trust that it will be a good scene or at least die trying.”
Despite the support of trust, nervousness for that sort of thing will be inevitable for some. After all, nearly anything could happen onstage. But it’s important not to confuse the butterflies for leeches.
“Most of the people in Toast adopt a ‘use it’ attitude. If you’re nervous, that’s fine. Don’t deny that you’re being nervous,” Stevens said. “If you trust the person in your scene then you know it’s going to work well because there’s no plan. You can’t feign a plan that isn’t there.”
Andrew Freix, a second-year computer science student, looks to the extensive repetition as an assurance that everything (or at least most things) will go over well.
“Even though we don’t know what the scene is going to be, we know that we’ve done this enough where it’ll be something good,” he said.
Rules are for breaking, except these
Many comedians take dark turns to muster laughs from an audience. And with the great uncertainty of improv, there’s a sense that touchy issues could surface. But Toast has cautions laid for approaching such topics.
“If you’re going to take a topical issue or something that is risqué, you always go on the side of the people who are being hurt or oppressed. Never make fun of people, unless they’re in power,” Stevens said. “That’s just good-natured humor. You go after the big guy.”
After all, improv is a conversation, not a showcase. Thus, it’s important that everyone present is on the same page to avoid “going blue.”
“We try to always play to our intelligence and the audience’s intelligence, so we don’t have to cheap shot,” Herstik said.
Aside from the bawdy humor, there are other surefire, red-flag topics that will have the audience sitting, waiting around for the next joke. Toast members know to pick the subject matter that provides welcoming laughs rather than inside jokes.
“References aren’t the strongest humor,” Stevens said. “Anything can make a good scene, but it has to be about two people’s relationships. If you build a scene only on something that certain people are going to get, then you’re leaving someone in your audience cold and if you leave just one person cold then you’ve messed up.”
Rivalry?
As it is, the two big improv groups on campus are Toast and OverReactors Improv. But this page isn’t all that they share. Actually, OverReactors Improv was born of Toast in some kind of slimy improv meiosis.
Stevens founded the OverReactors with Kat LeeHong and Connor Brunson after not getting into Toast his freshman year, though he would later audition again and join Toast.
“We thought ‘We love Toast, they’re awesome,’ but there’s one playground and it’s full, so let’s just build another playground,” Stevens said.
Despite the links between the two, each group uses different playground equipment. They have different formats. Toast is more long-form comedy, according to Whitten, while the OverReactors are short-form.
But the boundaries are not exactly rigid. Stevens describes Toast as a “rotating cast,” claiming that there are even performances where the two get together, mixing and matching lineups.
“The point that all we want — both Toast and OverReactors — is to do improv and entertain people,” Stevens said.
Some people in some places doing something
Toast only has one theater major right now, but it used to consist overwhelmingly of theater majors. From 14 years ago to today, the big constant in it all has been Benson Theater.
“Benson was a space which they felt they could go and play in. In a big theater you will always have to reserve space,” Whitten said. “Benson is a place for freeform, experimental things.”
Today’s group looks to the aging theater’s former improvisers as muses and inspiration. Whitten, one of the senior members of the group, has seen the mix of changing faces and steady traditions.
“Former Toast members serve as a huge reference point,” she said. “We still play the games they’ve created.”
Beyond the theater, there's a certain quality to the traditional Toast routine that induces both a nose on the grindstone and a loose, comfortable affect.
“We come in roughly five to 10 minutes late. We do a warm-up — mostly an energy thing — and we usually do a long form,” Whitten said. “On a show-week, we rehearse every single night, doing the games that we want to play. It’s pretty much what we want to do and what we need to work on.”
All that work comes back to that one crucial element in a good improvised performance: trust.
“Building trust comes from working in a tight space a few nights a week," Whitten said, "and being with your best friends who make you a funnier person.".
Toast’s next and last show of the semester will run Dec. 5 at Benson theater at 11 p.m.