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Humiliating ones, too. Just ask James Bewley, a goateed, smirking Lobster who carries around a few extra pounds. While he played a dancing student who goes to great lengths to please his instructor, Bewley was nude onstage for an entire six-performance run seen by thousands. "Most people thought I was wearing a 'naked suit' until I turned around," whereupon the audience saw his bare, very real ass. He grins. "But why would I wear a suit like this?"
The non-cerebral strand of Lobster humor was foreshadowed by Out of Bounds, a comedy group founded at Brown University by many of the core Lobsters, who attended the school in the early '90s. Perhaps the most notorious incident was a sketch that called for actor Jon Wolanske to literally piss his pants onstage.
"It was in the script but unrehearsed," recalls Wolanske, who is tall, innocent-looking, and almost unnervingly sincere. "I drank four or five beers before going onstage in an effort to work up the fluid count." As well as, presumably, the nerve.
"In the scene I was really nervous about asking a girl for a date. She said yes, and I said I was so excited that I was going to piss my pants. And then I did."
So much fluid came out onto the floor that people thought it was fake, he says. The rest of Out of Bounds' performance that evening was done with the urine pooled onstage.
"I still have the underwear," Wolanske adds.
Out of Bounds-ers Daniel Lee, Marc Vogl, and Paul Charney left the East Coast for San Francisco the year after their graduation from Brown in 1995. They launched Killing My Lobster with fellow alums Brian L. Perkins and Mike Zurer. Brown graduates Wolanske, Mara Gerstein, Erin Bradley, and Bill Donohue, Vassar alums Abby Paige and Maura Madden, and Rhode Island School of Design alum Bewley joined in the next few years.
Gerstein had pulled in Madden, a hometown friend from Manhattan, who brought in Paige, a fellow comedienne from Vassar. Bewley had met the Brown group members through participation in a production of Six Degrees of Separation in Rhode Island.
But why San Francisco, when New York would seem the obvious destination for East Coast collegians looking for a comedy career? For one thing, Lee says, he spent a year after college there and found it overwhelming. Also, Vogl says, San Francisco had a lower cost of living than the Big Apple and a reputation as a supportive environment for the performing arts. And finally, many in the group had a desire "to get 3,000 miles away from our families and hometowns," says Vogl.
Once here, they had immediate intentions to start performing together. "We were just at an age when we thought we could do stuff," Charney asserts. Without consulting the others, he reserved the theater space at Grasshopper Palace -- with no performance planned. Essentially, he dared the Lobsters-to-be to improvise. "I told them, 'Either you can do something with me, or I'll be doing a really bad one-person show.'"
The performance went reasonably well, but the group toiled in near-obscurity for the next few years. Vogl and Charney in particular contributed large amounts of their own money to the organization, which was run out of an apartment shared by a few members in the Lower Haight. The costume room was the back porch. All 12 members had their own apartment keys; someone was there almost every hour of the day making press kits, sending out postcards, or honing sketches. The Lobsters, then as now, were disciplined about their work, and stories of wild parties and debauchery are few and far between. When compared to the wild times of comedians like John Belushi and Chris Farley, the Lobsters' lives seem downright tame. "No Lobsters have been to rehab," says Vogl.
The seriousness of their effort paid off, however, when a performance at the 1999 San Francisco Fringe Festival called Killing My Lobster Boards Flight 354 finally propelled them into orbit. The Fringe Festival booked them at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, which, at 300 seats, was the biggest space they'd ever performed in.
The hourlong show took place in an airport and was highlighted by a skit about a Palo Alto high school Spanish teacher who called herself Señora Lori Dow-Moore. Sra. Dow-Moore, played by Paige, was leading her "Spanish Dos" class when she mistook a man reading a Gabriel García Márquez novel for an actual Colombian. She pestered the man ad nauseam with rudimentary Spanish questions; of course he didn't speak a lick of the language.
The sketch went over so well that the group received a "Best of the Fringe" award and was invited to do three more performances for the festival. The Lobsters wrote up 354 as a pilot TV script, and, at the instigation of Wolanske, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, they acquired an agent and found themselves shuttling between Northern and Southern California on an almost weekly basis.
They ended up doing a showcase for HBO executives at that network's performance space in Hollywood, and for a year were in contact with them about the possibility of filming a series à la Mr. Show or Kids in the Hall. In the end HBO didn't bite.
Vogl, the most caffeinated and hippest-dressing of the group and its main public-relations person, seems uncharacteristically reluctant to talk about the disappointment. "When it all came down, our first obligation was to do good work here," he says. It seems likely that had the HBO gig worked out, the Lobsters would have flown the Bay Area coop. But they're still here, and trying to make the best of it.
"We want to keep establishing a strong audience base, to grow into an institution, to make [the Lobsters] a part of what the San Francisco experience is," Wolanske says.
