Friday Nite Improvs - Show History

Show History

The show began in 1989 with a group of several University of Pittsburgh theater students gathering in rehearsal spaces to play improvisational theatre games. From there, the show found several homes, most notably the Pitt Theatre and the Studio Theatre in Pitt's Cathedral of Learning, its current home.

Jeffrey DeVincent attended the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program for Theatre Arts, began in 1990. DeVincent had worked closely with The Second City Artistic Director Michael Gellman at Northern Illinois University in Chicago (he was directed by Gellman in improvisation and in a live production of Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It With You ). DeVincent and eight fellow actors started an informal improv workshop for the undergraduate students, with Jeff directing. The group met every Friday night in various rehearsal spaces on campus — frequently Cathedral of Learning room B16/B18 — and called themselves the "Late Nite Club". This group included Chris Potocki, Dereck Walton, Barbie Williams, Shawn Williams, Fletcher Kohlhousen, Pattie Miles, Walter Herschman, and Rachel Resinski.

As more actors and their friends attended, the number of workshop attendees quickly became too large for small rehearsal spaces. In addition to the group's increasing size, the idea of the project changed. Whereas Jeff's co-host, Pattie Miles sought a more structured workshop with the more experienced improvisational actors as teachers, Jeff wanted to create a show in which anyone could take the stage and perform.

Friday Nite Improvs' first performances began in September 1989. The workshop that had begun with eight people had grown to draw an audience nearing 250 people, violating fire codes and Pitt regulations. Admission was one dollar, and the collected money went toward the weekly post-show parties hosted by Lee Piper.

Theatre department students and local actors mostly comprised the audience in the beginning. Jeff encouraged everyone to attend, and it soon grew to become a city-wide phenomenon, somewhat cult-like in nature. In 1990, the Pittsburgh media took notice, writing positive reviews and preview articles, and the audience swelled tremendously. The original eight members, along with regular audience participants, enjoyed a certain celebrity status on Pitt's campus and in the Pittsburgh theatre community.

Each week, DeVincent began the show by welcoming the audience and going over the rules he had created to encourage performers: Failure is OK, No Booing, Always Welcome, Support is Encouraged, and Always Listen. He then announced that it was time to play Freeze, which Jeff believed was the foundation of all other improv games. Freeze sometimes took up the first 90 minutes or more. Occasionally the group played other games after, including the improvised cult soap operas "Corn Town" and "Shalico."
DeVincent went onto directing professionally, acting (touring for three years with fellow FNI alum, Dereck Walton, and appeared in television commercials and voice-overs), casting, theatre critic/contributing editor (Pittsburgh City Paper), agenting, and teaching theatre in the South on the university level.

Chris Potocki, the second host of Friday Nite Improvs, ran the show from 1993 to 1994. Under Potocki's leadership, Friday Nite Improvs was without a permanent home, so each Friday, the "secret location" of that night's show was spread by word-of-mouth. Potocki hosted FNI in the Cathedral of Learning's studio theatre, The Pit Theatre, the Stephen Foster Memorial, an outdoor amphitheater, and the basement of a Victorian home. Potocki created much of the format that the show used for more than a decade later. One week, Potocki and his sidekick Fletcher Kohlhousen displayed a six-foot wooden clown that they had found in a Shadyside dumpster where, only a week before, the police recovered a severed human head. They named the clown "Winky" and made him the show's mascot.