Acts and Answered: Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein

This week for Acts and Answered I interviewed Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein, the writers behind the hit comedy Girls Only, now playing at the Garner Galleria Theatre. I was immediately taken by how warm and welcoming these two women are. There is a tendency for women not to open up and share with each other. Be it competitiveness, shyness, or what ever reason -  that was not the case with Barbara and Linda. I just loved getting to know them, of course they were also very funny. I had the distinct feeling that I was getting to be the fly on the wall of years of friendship. Tomorrow I’ll post my review of their show Girls Only. Today, enjoy this Acts and Answered and I hope you are as taken with these two very talented women as I was.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your backgrounds.
Linda:  Well, I grew up in Idaho Springs. I have been performing improv comedy in different forms for about 17 years now. That’s what brought me to perform with the trio that we started - A.C.E. (Which stands for an American, a Canadian, and an Englishman - the three members of the troupe.) We’ve been writing comedy shows for about 10 years now together. Girls Only is one of those shows that came out of that collaboration. Through Barabara’s contacts I did some commercials and some voice over work. I’ve traveled around a lot with A.C.E., and I’ve been performing Girls Only for the last 7 months. 

Barbara: I guess I started doing improv in high school. That was where I caught the bug. In grade 12 I was in the drama club and I’d won the drama award. So I thought “Ok, this is what I am meant to do.” And I still have the little charm that was the award.
For college I went to the University of Manitoba in Canada, for a Bachelors of Education, but my major was in Theatre. I was in quite a number of plays - I just knew that was my passion. I did make sure I finished the degree to have something to fall back on though.  I lived in Japan for 3 years after college, then moved to Colorado. That’s when I met Linda. We hooked up in an improv group with Matthew (Taylor) and we were in that for about 3 years all together, then we formed A.C.E.  I also did a lot of sketch comedy with Bovine Metropolis and I did some improv with what was then Comedy Sports but is now Impulse Theatre.

...ok, this is what I am meant to do"

Q: How did you come to write Girls Only?
L: With A.C.E. we’d committed ourselves to one show a month, which was unheard of and kind of insane. But it was what we wanted to do, and we just had a ball doing it. Then one month, in the middle of the summer, Matthew had to go out of town for an extended period of time. We didn’t want to skip the show that month so Barbara and I decided to write a show that was focused around just the two of us. Around that same time we had just shared with each other our childhood diaries. We died laughing while reading them to each other. 
Here we had this opportunity to write a show around just the two of us. We are both girls so we thought we’d focus on just girl stuff.  We started talking about what it meant to be a girl and what womanhood meant to us.  We did this show and invited just our girlfriends, for one night. We wanted to have fun and to see if it would work. And then we walked away thinking, “hmm, something special just happened”
B: I remember standing on the stage at that first performance thinking “This could be in the Galleria Theatre” cause it’s that kind of show. It really is a cabaret kind of show - a variety show. I wouldn’t call it a “play.” There is improv, sketch, music, dance, video, and audio –its very multimedia. That is A.C.E.’s trademark. Every show was like that. When we did it that first night, we didn’t know a tech person who was female, so we did all the tech from the stage. We controlled the lighting, the sound, everything. So it really was like we were hosting it from our bedroom. We had asked one girlfriend to video tape the show for us, but it never worked out. She’d forgotten to take the lens cap off so we have no record of that first show.
Then, a couple years later, Matthew had gotten busy and we thought it was a good time to re-visit it. I was pregnant, and the timing was perfect.  We took it to the Avenue Theatre for 4 shows and it sold out. After that, we took it to Canada for the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. All these women were clamoring and lining up at the door and we realized that this was outside of our fan base and it was still working.  Then in 2008 we brought it back to the Avenue and we sold out for 6 weeks before we’d even opened the door. Since I was pregnant, we ended it at 7 weeks, then the DCPA picked it up and we’ve been at the Galleria since September.

Barbara (left) and Linda (right)

Q: Did you change the show at all for different locations?

L: That very first show had pieces that don’t even exist anymore, so we totally changed it. Like this tap dance we used to do. We were tap dancing at the time for fun, we totally thought we could tap dance. Anyway, the ending now is much better. The puberty piece has morphed a thousand times. And really when we wrote the show it was all improvised.  That’s how we did our shows. It was completely unscripted. So the first 17 -20 shows were like that. Then we sought out advice about how to get the show to where it is today and one of the first things that was told to both of us was “you need a script.” Oh a script? So that was a big transformation. So we sat down together and wrote out the script. It morphed a lot, but not in the intent. It is definitely funnier now.
B: We are always riffing. It changes every night. It’s in us to improvise, so we keep finding new lines, and new bits, so eventually the show will be 10 hours long. We are very good at adding lines, but not so good at taking them out. But it totally came out of improv. Except for the songs, we wrote the lyrics to the songs.

Q: Speaking of intent, what is your intent with the show?
B: Our original intent? Well, it was really “Hey this is about us and its funny and its comedy. That’s it.” Then, we realized that the intent is all about YOU, the audience. That was kind of a real eye opener for Linda and I. So many women leave thinking, “that was about me. That was MY girlhood. That was MY womanhood.” A woman the other night said “its such a celebration of women” and it really is. You leave thinking “I am SO glad that I was born a female” We all went through the same thing. We all share the same thing. You can call it sisterhood, but it’s about YOU the audience – and we are telling everyone’s story.

...its such a celebration of women”

Q: Many women have a sort of universal cattiness. Have you had any one ask about that perspective?
L: Our show is so positive and nice and gentle and maybe a little naive, that it doesn’t even broach that kind of stuff. Probably because it’s not really in us. What is in the show is what is in us. We don’t go exploring the shadow side of women at all. There is enough of that. You can go see that somewhere else.
B: If someone is  looking for that kind of show, they will be disappointed. Or they might be inspired to think differently. Linda and I created the show that we really wanted to be in.

Q: How are men receiving the show?
L: The few men that we get have always enjoyed themselves. We don’t poke fun at them. We acknowledge them if it’s needed, we invite them to come a long and join us. But by enlarge, they just enjoy and laugh and enjoy the fact that their wife or girlfriend is having a good time.
B: We have such a small percentage of men that come. One weekend there might be 2 or 3, so its pretty rare. But we do find a way to involve them. And it’s definitely not a good place for women to meet men.

...it’s definitely not a good place for women to meet men."

 
Q: Do you have any advice for young women getting into the arts:
L: We were both in our 30s and we thought, why wait for someone to write the show that said what we wanted to say? We wrote the show that we wanted to be in. We didn’t wait around for the perfect script to fall in our hands. I think people should have that sort of authority over their own career or their own path and embrace it. Years ago I’d made the decision that I wanted to do improv comedy for a living and it wasn’t even a choice. There was no other career for me. It was what was in me and what felt right, and eventually that was the case.
B: I think the main thing is that we tend to avoid our intuition. If that is what your gut is telling you, and if every other part of you is scared – then that is absolutely what you should do. When I wanted to quit my job and do the acting thing full time my agent wasn’t even in support of that but I did it anyway. There wasn’t anything else I wanted to do. I enjoyed teaching, but it wasn’t my passion. When I’m performing improv then time goes away. Our show is over before I realize it. We hit the final number and I think how are we here again? Time just doesn’t exist. So if someone finds that in them, go with that intuition, don’t question it. What do you have to lose?
L: I had an improv teacher once say “Never wait till you're ready. Cause you’ll never feel ready.”

Never wait till you're ready. Cause you’ll never feel ready.”

Q: Do either of you have any role models in comedy?

Barbara (left) and Linda (right)

B:

Carol Burnett. Absolutely.  I just loved the character work on her show, and the way they played with each other and had fun. Also, SCTV – which was the Second City group. I used to love Cathrine O'hara and Andrea Martin. They really inspired me to do improv and sketch comedy.
L: I don’t think anybody in showbiz today wouldn’t mention Carol Burnett. But my sense of humor anyway is totally Bob Newhart. I just adored him from a very young age, and I still get a kick out of him. He isn’t a female, of course, but definitely an inspiration.

Q; What else should people know about Girls Only?
B: It’s a great girls night out. You can definitely come with one other person or by yourself – but it is such a fun experience to have with your girlfriends. What we are finding is that you all have the same thing to talk about when you leave, and everyone has something to share about their life or their diary or different secrets. It’s kind of a fun thing to do as a group.
 

Q: What is your favorite breakfast cereal:
L: Peanut butter captain crunch. Without a doubt.
B: That’s so weird – mine is Captain Crunch too! But my story behind that is that I’m from Canada and we never had Captain Crunch. We went to California when I was 7 and my Aunt had it and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. My mother never bought it again. And even now, when my husband buys it, it doesn’t taste as good as I remember. But it still is my favorite. Fruit Loops are a close second though.