Interview by: Josephine Clarke, Guest Writer
Welcome to the Mess Fest Interview Series! In the days leading up to Mess Fest, we will be sharing interviews with the many great comedic minds across the festival. Today, Josephine speaks with Kenna Bartlett and Stuart Williams about how Dungeons and Dragons and improv are connected, nerdy comedy that isn’t cringe, and sex fish.
Can you start with giving your names, pronouns, year, and major and what you’re doing in Mess Fest?
Stuart: I’m Stuart Williams (he/him) and I am a fourth year Comedy Arts Major. I’ll talk about what we are doing first. I play Dreltaac Slafran in Adventures of Fates and Fellows and I am one of the directors Of Dice and DILFs. I’m also the dungeon intern in that, technically. With my friend Joel Davila we are doing a duo act called “You are Cordially Invited to the Wedding Reception and Wake of Stuart Williams and Joel Davila, Respectively.” And I am one of the many directors of Fac-Off, a faculty improv show.
Kenna: I’m Kenna Bartlett (she/they). I am a second year Theatre Management major. I am the Dungeon Master for Of Dice and DILFs. I am the stage manager for Bound for Error and Lapse in Judgment, both are long-form improv shows. I am a writer and performer in the middle school sketch show. And I am also performing in “The Musical at the End of Time,” and I’m running tech for some other things.
Josephine: So you’re doing a lot?
Kenna: Yes, I’m doing a lot of very different things.
Josephine: In true comedy fashion.
So we are here to talk about the first projects you both mentioned, The Adventures of Fates and Fellows and Of Dice and DILFs, which are the live Dungeons and Dragons shows that are happening. However they are slightly different. Could you describe the projects?
Stuart: So Adventures of Fates and Fellows, [is] obviously a live D&D improv show. We started in Wrights of Spring last year. We have an assembled cast of characters that we all wrote and stuck with and the angle that we wanted to approach this with is if this was like a D&D show, the audience is seeing a live table-read of an episode. We have a sitcom thing that we try to emulate and Lazarus Howell, our DM (Dungeon Master) has several tropey episodes written down. He’ll get a suggestion from the audience at the beginning and from that he will take [the suggestion] into, and apply it to one of those plots. So that’s the main thing that I think sets Adventures of Fates and Fellows apart from Of Dice and DILFs is that it’s a set cast of characters, but I’ll let Kenna talk more about that.
Kenna: Yeah, so, Of Dice and DILFs. When we first started this show, it was Sarah Metz [who] had pitched it to Mess Fest as some kind of improvised Dungeons and Dragons real-play show, but we weren’t really sure what that was gonna look like until we started this process, and Lazarus and Stuart have been instrumental in helping us make this show happen in terms of figuring out what it was. What ended up happening is every single element of our real-play show is improvised. So, this comes in with me as the DM, I have an element that’s improvised in which the cast has written out about 12 story hooks that are all just TV show style log lines and I, at the top of the show, roll a D12 (twelve-sided die) and that is the inspiration for the plot; whatever log line it ends up on is the plot of the show. And then for the players, all of us have thrown into this pot an indeterminate amount of character sheets. I really don’t know how many there are at this point, I think we’re trying to get to 20 so we can roll a D20. The players roll a die and that is how they determine what character they’re playing. So most of the time they are playing a character that they did not write, they’ve never played before, and we have varying levels of experience amongst the players as well, so we have some folks who have been playing D&D since they came out of the womb and poor Eli who barely knows the rules. It’s really all over the place. So that’s where our shows differ, where we really don’t have anything planned out. We take a location from the audience and that’s how we do it.
Josephine: Gotcha. So you’re much more of a randomized experience whereas Adventures of Fates and Fellows is coming in as if this is an ongoing series that the audience is almost privy to.
What does the production process look like for these two shows?
Stuart: The processes are very similar, even though the shows themselves are quite different. The main crux of a rehearsal is just doing a session. Getting a beginning, middle, and end in one hour flat. That is very hard. The fact that anyone has ever done it is a miracle. There’s also more character discussions, like making characters in Of Dice and DILFs.
Kenna: Our rehearsals look and feel very similar to rehearsals for any kind of long-form improv show. At this point, I’ve stage-managed a couple of other long-form improv shows and so I’ve been in the room for those types of rehearsals quite a bit. You basically just do it. That seems easier said than done. If you fall flat on your face, you talk about it at the end of the day and then come back to do it better. It’s just a matter of trying it and not being afraid of being really crappy.
There have been a couple of times when I am running a session and I will say something really embarrassing, but then somebody usually picks it up and is able to save it. That’s what is beautiful about these shows. If somebody throws an idea out there that is really crappy, because of that time pressure, everyone is willing to salvage those moments. There have been times when someone asks me a really weird question and I just say “yeah, that’s what happened,” or “yeah, that’s in the room.”
Josephine: The eternal “yes and.”
Kenna: One time one of our players, who was playing a water-based character, asked “is there a fish in this room?” I just said “yeah,” and it ended up being the entire focus of the plot from then on.
Stuart: Was that the one at the Annoyance?
Kenna: That was the sex fish one! That fish ended up being the key to all sexual knowledge in this realm.
"Getting a beginning, middle, and end in one hour flat. That is very hard. The fact that anyone has ever done it is a miracle."
In things like podcasts, video media, and streaming there’s been a rising popularity for actual-play tabletop roleplay content. How does this medium translate to a live experience?
Stuart: Like you said, we’ve performed Fates and Fellows twice total live. It’s tough doing it live and unplanned because there’s this element of having to generate the whole thing completely on the fly. Usually, with these live play podcasts and whatnot, they have written the campaign. There’s a lot of elements that you don’t even think about because you’re just playing D&D at a table. Like one of the biggest notes we get for either show is more movement because some people find it fine to just sit and watch people play at a table, but that’s not what a lot of people are coming to a comedy club for. It’s finding small ways to incorporate movement without taking too much away from the tabletop experience that I think is really important.
Kenna: Well, I have been playing D&D for years now, so I have a lot of regular D&D experience under my belt. There are moments when someone is casting a spell, the DM doesn’t know what that spell means, and everyone has to pause for a minute so we can look through the book (Player’s Handbook). Dungeons and Dragons is a very mechanically heavy game. To be frank, nobody cares. Nobody in the audience wants to sit there and see you struggle to do mental math. There’s an element of playing very fast and loose with the rules in a live-play show. We do that in an even more exacerbated way because of the nature of our shows. If something is funny and it makes sense in the context of the narrative, we just let it happen whether or not it is technically correct.
Stuart: There’s the adage of “rule of cool” in D&D; it’s like that to a ten. It’s more like the rule of funny, because you’re not just trying to do a good D&D show, you’re trying to do a good comedy show. You have to be funny with it.
Josephine: So it’s about sacrificing the “integrity” of the game at times for the bit or for the punchline.
Kenna: And also sometimes being a hardass on the rules is the funnier option. There are moments when someone rolls really bad on a really important role, that is funnier than me just letting them do whatever they want to do.
How do your comedy studies come into this format?
Stuart: It really is a natural blend. At the end of the day, D&D is improv. As far as the players are concerned, they wrote their characters, but everything they say and do is improvised. There is a ton of overlap. At their core, it’s one and the same.
Kenna: I think what’s really special about doing live play is that there is an incredible amount of trust required between ensemble mates. There is an incredible amount of trust that your fellow players are going to make those special moments happen and they’re going to support you. I have an immense amount of trust in my players from a DM standpoint. I don’t know what this story is going to look like. I have to trust that if I don’t know what’s going to come next, one of them is going to say something that will get me there. If one person is trying to be in charge, we will all fail because that’s not how improv works. It’s a team game.
"I have an immense amount of trust in my players...I have to trust that if I don't know what's going to come next, one of them is going to say something that will get me there."
How does this work that you’re doing right now fit into your comedy vision?
Stuart: Something I’m really passionate about is doing nerd comedy that isn’t cringe. Doing nerdy comedy in a way that’s sincere and doesn’t require prior knowledge. That’s the thing: We don’t know who is going to be in the room. It could be the biggest D&D nerd alive or someone who barely knows what it is. We have to make the show just as funny and accessible to both of those people at the same time. I’ve always loved D&D, and finding a place to apply it in a way that makes sense to a more general audience is very important, and these shows are just two of many ways to do that.
Josephine: Making nerd things for not just nerds.
Kenna: I come from a similar mindset with this. I’ve been a nerd forever. I love Marvel movies, I love comic books. I’ve been super involved in it since I was a kid. When you’re a thirteen-year-old girl and you say you like superheroes, everyone is up your butt about it because that is not a “girl thing.” As I’ve gotten older and gotten more engrossed in what nerd culture looks like, I’ve seen the toxicity that exists in a lot of those spaces and how there are people of a certain demographic trying to keep people of a different demographic out of those spaces by telling them it’s not for them. I think that is so ridiculous. Nerds are people that have traditionally been seen as outcasts, and so it should be a space that welcomes people in. I have found an incredible home and community of fellow nerds everywhere I go. It’s something that really brings people together. I am very passionate about making nerd spaces more inclusive and more accepting of people of all identities. Part of that is making nerd content more accessible generally. It’s doing shows like this so that people who have no idea what D&D is can have a little sample of it and see if they are interested in learning more. There’s a lot of small ways we can make it more inclusive, and these shows are ways we can do that.
Beyond laughter, what are you hoping that the audience will experience when they come to your shows?
Stuart: I want them to watch the show and get interested in D&D, or even just improv in general. Like if they saw how fun it was. I want to inspire them to do something, D&D or improv or not.
Kenna: I want people to shamelessly have a fun time participating in something nerdy. It is so easy to feel embarrassed when you do those kinds of nerdy things but if people can sit in the audience and see us doing it, being silly and goofy on stage, I hope that it helps make people feel more comfortable and enjoy their nerdy interests without shame.
Adventures of Fates and Fellows performs 1/11 at 5pm in the Annoyance Small Theatre and features: Lazarus Howell, Stuart Williams, Rockie Wenrich, Kathryn Courtney, Trevor Dudasik, Sarah Metz and Logan Munoz.
Of Dice and DILFs performs 1/13 at 9:30 pm in the Annoyance Small Theatre and features: Sarah Metz, Justin Jacobs, Eli Carey, Kenna Bartlett, Gabe Manglano, and Conor Reid.
Love what you’re reading? Subscribe to our newsletter!
Comments