Photography By Theresa Arnold
Ed Reggi is sitting outside Meshuggah, in the University City Loop, when his attention is pulled away by an everyday encounter playing out just a few yards away. A zealous U. City police officer is taking his parking-enforcement duties seriously, writing up a ticket as a woman springs up from her nearby table to beg for mercy. Her plea for clemency falls on deaf ears, and the ticket is written after a mild back-and-forth exchange. In watching the process, the ever-lively Reggi has captured some good material for the afternoon, even as he’s temporarily taken leave of our conversation.
“Where are we? I’m sorry, I’m lost—proof of my ADD,” Reggi says, coming back to the interview. “That scene ... there’s something that I’m going to draw on for the rest of the day.”
An attention to detail, a quick wit and a quest to “be in the moment”—these are the keys to Reggi’s success in local, national and even international improvisational circles. He’s been featured at the International Toronto Improv Festival, and last year he performed at the first Philippines Improv Festival: “They bused kids in from the barrios,” he says. “I don’t even speak Tagalog—I had a translator—but it worked.
“Improv,” he continues, “is the parlor game of theater. It’s what people did before TV. When it works, people don’t feel like they have to work at it. The ticket is cheap; they don’t have to worry about any preconceived plot. Modern theater is so perfectly scripted out and there’s such spectacle, the audience doesn’t get to manipulate and shape the production. But in improv, they’re part of what happens.”
A prolific performer, emcee, writer, festival organizer, promoter and teacher, Reggi has been a central character actor and artistic director in several local companies, including his current troupe, the Paper Slip Theatre. He’s also the driving force behind the annual St. Louis Fringe Festival, which will bring actors from Chicago, New York and L.A. to St. Louis on September 9 and 10. And he’s taken several shows on the road, including his two-person acts The Marty and HomoErratic.
Although his bread and butter is still the wide variety of work he does all around St. Louis, plus his position as director of the theater department at the Center of Contemporary Arts, his talents are in increasing demand around the country.
“I travel at least one week a month, and that can be to upper Michigan or the Philippines or the outskirts of San Diego—any place that books improv,” says Reggi. Sometimes he’s leading a weeklong session for a group of talented high school kids. Sometimes he’s training a corporate group new to improv.
“That can be a tough group,” he admits, “especially the process of meeting with the human resources directors. I’m sitting there trying to make them understand what it means to be in the moment, and they are getting into it and getting all excited, and they say, ‘Yes! We love it! Can you do it in an hour, with a detailed agenda?’”
For relief, there’s the festival circuit, where Reggi can touch base with his contemporaries and recharge his batteries. “Chicago is the heartbeat of improv,” he says, “but even a festival in Louisville or Memphis or a little college town will do.”
He also goes away to work on projects—but he never stays away too long. “The powerful thing about theater is the instantaneous building of relationships,” he says. “They are forged instantly onstage. When I’m alone, I miss the crazy, helter-skelter randomness of working with other people. If I’m in the moment too long, I miss being jostled out of it.”
And then he’s jostled again, and the adrenaline builds: “I try in those busiest, craziest, most hectic times to try and not punish myself, to simply know that something’s not going to get done.
“I was away for 10 days in Door County and it was very beneficial,” he adds, “but the silence was deafening. Three more days, and I would’ve had to come back.”
When he returns home, it’s to his partner, Scott Emanuel, and their two Dalmatians in a house in Maplewood that is itself “really improvised. I’ll get a gift and hang it right there and then.” How does Emanuel keep pace? Reggi chuckles: “Scott is so absolutely in the moment, he doesn’t even know it. He’s a social worker, so he does a lot of what I do but in real-life situations.”
Asked what makes Reggi tick, Emanuel retorts, “A whole lot of batteries.” Then he turns serious. “Who you see onstage is exactly who you’d meet offstage. That’s why people are attracted to him.”
Since attending Fontbonne College (now University) in the late 1980s, Reggi has continually come back to St. Louis. “I had lived in New York all my life,” he says. “I was born in Brooklyn near Coney Island, in a neighborhood that used to be Hasidic, and I was surrounded by all different religions and cultures and colors and shapes. It shaped my life. I had two brothers, and parents who were Italian and Jewish and so liberal, we were nothing. After high school, I was sort of floundering, looking for a good college, and I ended up coming here to audition for Webster, Lindenwood and Fontbonne. I knew I wanted to go to a smaller school, and it was a great experience.”
Classically trained at Fontbonne, Reggi didn’t get bitten by the improv bug until he got involved in theater sports in New York. “It was a way to make theater like sports, get more men back to watching,” he explains. “There was a referee and two teams of five actors each, and they’d challenge each other. I got involved in the mid-’80s, and then I never did it again. ‘Improv’ is sort of a dirty word in many theater schools. It’s what hip-hop is to ballet teachers: ‘How dare you?’”
In the late ’90s, he studied at Second City in Chicago and got bitten all over again: “I realized improv was just another acting technique, organic and fresh and very alive.
“Improv shouldn’t be opera,” he adds. “It shouldn’t be that complicated. It’s not about being fast or quick-witted. It’s about being totally blank.” When he teaches a COCA summer camp, he introduces a game called “Say What?” Two-person scene: Astronauts on the moon. No script.
The first kid talks. “Say what?” Reggi calls, and the boy has to say whatever he just said in an entirely different way.
“There’s an alien!”
“Say what?”
“There’s a bug!”
“Say what?”
“There’s your mom!”
“OK, react.”
Other kid: “What is your mom doing here?”
“I think she’s here to check up on me.”
Another tie to St. Louis is Reggi’s seven-year relationship to Emanuel, a duration that’s “like an eternity in the gay world,” he jokes. “It’s like 50 years—no, 49. Wait—42. I’m not very good at math.”
Actually, he is—or at least at computers.
His heavy work, teaching and performance schedule is uploaded daily to his self-produced, self-titled website.
“I learned very early on that you either wait tables or you do something else,” he says of past stints as a computer programmer. “If I wasn’t working and needed to make some money, that’s what I did. Even now, I’m totally insane over logic. My dad was an electrical engineer—definitely solid-state; nothing digital about him. What I love is debugging something when it goes wrong.”
He knows it’s a paradox—improv is about spontaneity; it’s absolutely anti-mechanical.
But paradox is so very human.
Once he was doing a show called How We First Met, interviewing couples and then improvising their stories. “I don’t blink anymore if someone says, ‘Oh, I met her in a leather bar,’ but, on this particular night, this couple kept giggling and the story wasn’t making sense. Well, it turned out they were swingers, and they finally said so, in front of this very conservative audience. Thank God for the gods of improv. Every once in a while I’ll pull out this piece of envelope and rip it open like Karnak [the Magnificent, a charactor Johnny Carson made famous on The Tonight Show], and it will give us a genre in which to do the improv. Well, I reached for that slip of paper, and it said ‘biblical.’ We did Jacob and many wives.” He pauses. “If that piece of paper had said ‘PBS documentary’ or ‘mystery,’ it would never have worked.”
Yet another pull to St. Louis is Reggi’s amazing ability to link gigs. Whether it’s playing a frat-boy jock in a student film about STDs or introducing a belly-dancing troupe at COCA to “doing improv in the ’hood,” he’s been able to stay busy, gradually becoming one of the bright lights of the local arts scene.
These days, he’s in the more enviable position of turning down work—not that he does so with any regularity. Teaching, especially, is something he can’t resist slot- ting into his schedule.
“He’s got a big personality,” says Debbie Corson, director of arts and education at Young Audiences, one of Reggi’s frequent clients. “He does so much for the arts community. That’s the other thing that’s so incredible: It just seems that he is always available. Some artists are really hard to schedule, but not him. He always says ‘yes.’ You think, ‘How in the world can he do all this?’ But he does.”
Stephanie Riven, executive director of COCA, calls Reggi “the consummate professional. He’s a wonderfully engaged teacher.” Kathy Bentley of the Community Health in Partnership Service says he’s taught a variety of inner-city kids through her organization’s programming, often in tandem with health specialists. “Reggi has this wonderful ability to adapt to any situation, any group of people,” she adds. “He’s not afraid of any situation; I love working with him for that reason. He’s a real community artist.”
In Reggi’s mind, “all art empowers the individual. And dramatic arts put you through the process of being a person. You play a character. How often do we get a chance in our daily lives to watch other people? Drama is the only art form where you get to play someone else. It gets you out of your own world, out of your own comfortable place.
“I think it would solve a lot of the problems in our educational system if we were to give that opportunity to a lot of kids,” he adds. “Kids are funny. They’re less in their head, though they are in their head, too. At 4 or 5, their world has already become black and white. They really can be rigid. But when they do get it, they’re far easier than adults. When they catch it, they’re gangbusters.”
In June, Reggi rounded up former students and Paper Slip actors to compete in the 48 Hour Film Project. Friday evening, they received their assignment: They had 48 hours to make a seven-minute film that included the line, “If you do that again, I’ll scream”; a character named M. Marso who was a dance instructor; and a flotation device. The category their team drew was romance.
Reggi’s team made it to the finals and won the Best Use of Line award. “The difference in our production was, we were not going to go home and storyboard until the wee hours,” he says. “We were going to do what we do best: improvise. So I had actors say, ‘If you do that again, I’ll kiss you.’ ‘If you do that again, I’ll send you a check.’ We played with it. And the last line of the film was the real line, ‘If you do that again, I’ll scream.”
Not content with a single film, Reggi rolled three into one: puppy love, love on the rocks and rediscovered romance. Rabbi James Goodman played the dance instructor, teaching tango and waltz steps in a narrative superimposed over the film. “At the post-party, a producer said, ‘We were shocked that the improv team did the most soulful, intelligent and tender film.’”
Reggi just smiled. “Comedy doesn’t have to be over the top,” he says. “The comedy is in the reality.”
The magic of improv comes “if I stand there and I don’t know what I’m doing,” he adds. “Then I know it’s working. I go back and look at the shows and have absolutely no recollection of them.”
Still, the art is deliberate. “Even when I’m hosting, I control the blackout, the ‘where and when’ the scene’s going to end,” Reggi continues. “I want to take the scene to the point where people think it will end and they say, ‘Aahhh’—and I keep going—and sometimes they want to kill me because I go way beyond. That’s when the magic happens. If you locked the 10 smartest scriptwriters in the world in a cave and challenged them to come up with that scene, they couldn’t. Because it has to happen in the moment.”
