culture
WDWMKR’s Wake: No Sombreness Here
All-female improv team WDWMKR retired their troupe last week with an Irish wake-style celebration.
All female improv troupe WDWMKR play their last set at their "living wake" last week.
The ladies are all dressed in black, but the mood is definitely jovial, and it’s one shared by the packed house. Everyone here for WDWMKR’S Irish Wake has come to laugh, and the ladies throwing it for themselves wanted it that way; they’ve decided to call it quits while everyone still remembers their all-female comedy troupe fondly.
Backstage after the show, long-time member Paloma Nuñez lists the group’s reasons for calling it quits in precisely this way. “If you could be alive for your own funeral, wouldn’t you want to see what people would say, and see who shows up?” she asks. Many people did show up—including former members of WDWMKR.
When Impatient Theatre Company Artistic Director Kevin Patrick Robbins commissioned the team in 2007, there were a lot of female improvisors who wanted in. “Women are objectified a lot in improv,” explains Nuñez. She doesn’t mean to say that male improvisers are all sexist. What she means is that being thrust into stereotyped and gender-biased character roles happens a lot when there are just one or two women in a large group of guys. As a woman in a male-dominated troupe, often, “you end up being the mom, or the girlfriend, or a hooker,” says Nuñez. “With WDWMKR, we didn’t get stuck in those roles. We’d be whatever we wanted to be, or whatever the scene needed—a mechanic, or a cop, or sometimes, a hooker,” she laughs.
Jess Grant moved to Toronto in 2008 and quickly found herself a member of WDWMKR after starting out on an “incubator” improv team. “I’d been doing short-form improv before I moved here, but I was really blown away by the long-form improv I saw, especially WDWMKR.” (Long-form emphasizes developing a character and reacting truthfully over the course of a scene.)
The final line-up of WDWMKR, from L to R: Paloma Nuñez, Mandy Sellers, Meagan Crump, Jess Grant, Kirsten Gallagher, and Annie Bankes.
Like Nuñez, Grant found she improved significantly as an improviser by performing with other women. “There’s a whole different set of instincts you develop; with men, you find yourself boxed into less dominant roles. In an improv scene, power and status isn’t freely distributed—you have to grab what you can get and run with it.” She’s carried these lessons to other shows. “I had an instructor point out once that at any given show there’s going to be female improvisers in the audience,” she says, “and if they watch you step aside in scenes with guys, they’ll start to think they should be doing so too. WDWMKR was great because it showed that as a woman, you never need to be on the sidelines.”
And yet, the group’s coach is a man, Kevin Whalen. “It’s funny,” he says, “WDWMKR has always had male coaches, and one all-male team I’m on, Standards & Practices, has always had female coaches.”
The alumni of WDWMKR may miss playing with each other as a group, but they won’t be spending much time publicly mourning. Nuñez, for instance, was leaving town the week after the wake to attend the Charleston Comedy Festival with fellow WDWMKR alumni Mandy Sellers, and the other ladies are all busy playing around Toronto. They’re all grateful for the bonds they formed with each other, and for how WDWMKR helped them develop as performers.
Whalen, meanwhile, considers himself lucky to have been able to see them in rehearsal as well as on stage: “The fun of improv is living in the moment, especially when the audience sees you shit the bed, or do something fucking brilliant,” he says. (Most scenes fall somewhere in between those two extremes.) “I feel really privileged to have seen that in a rehearsal setting with WDWMKR, sometimes as the only audience member.”
This post originally stated that Paloma Nuñez was leaving town the day after the wake, when in fact she left the week after to attend the Charleston Comedy Festival.