Sex T-Rex

Sex T­-Rex, Toronto’s hottest comedic theatre company, teams up with the Storefront Theatre for a double bill of old school cinematic entertainment and adventure. W​atch out WIldkat!​ and Swordplay, ​both award-winning A resident company at Toronto’s Bad Dog Theatre, has wowed audiences across the country since their inception nearly a decade ago. Watch out WildKat! premiered at the Montreal Fringe in 2014, receiving five star reviews from the CBC, The Torontoist, and Halifax’s The Coast, as well as taking home the awards for Best Show and Best Comedy at the Atlantic and Montreal Fringes. Swordplay: A Play Of Swords, the second half of this action-packed double feature, is a love letter to classic Swashbucklers and retro fantasy video games that inverts the genre’s stereotypes while offering a sophisticated parody on more modern offerings like Game of Thrones.

Watch out Wildkat! and Swordplay, both award-winning comedies by Sex T-­Rex, run March 11th ­- 27th.

Twitter: @sextrex
www.sextrexcomedy.com

Stageworthy:
http://www.stageworthypodcast.com
Twitter @stageworthyPod
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Transcript

Welcome to episode 10 of the Stageworthy podcast, I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. On Stageworthy, I interview people who make theatre, actors, directors, playwrights, and more, and talk to them about everything from why they chose theatre, to their work process, and anything in between. Sex T-Rex is a comedic theatre company which presents intelligent, hilarious, and inventive works of cinematic theatre.

Sex T-Rex presents Watch Out, Wildcat, and Swordplay, a play of swords, at Toronto’s Storefront Theatre from March 11th to 27th. Joining me were Caitlin Morrow, Connor Bradbury, Danny Pagett, and director Eric Toller. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook and Twitter at StageworthyPod, and you can find the website at stageworthypodcast.com. If you like what you hear, I hope you’ll subscribe on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use, and consider leaving a comment or rating.

I’m going to start with probably the obvious question, which is, what is Sex T-Rex? What is it? What is Sex T-Rex? Sexual Tyrannosaurus. It is a comedy company. Yeah, we started, what, like, god, eight or nine years ago as an improv team? I think eight.

Like eight years, something like that. And we would just do, we didn’t really know how to do improv, but we liked it a lot. So we would just do, like, very cinematic styles and kind of, like, movie parody improv.

One of our first formats was just taking a suggestion of two movie titles and then combining them. We still do that today. We haven’t learned.

We haven’t learned, no, no, no. Still haven’t learned. No, we’re not.

We do the same thing. Yeah. And so we didn’t really, we hadn’t really done a lot.

Most of us had done acting training. Almost everybody went to George Brown Theatre School here. You did too? Really? Yeah.

When did you go there? I, like, I graduated in 93. Oh, wow. I’m sure it was a different… Was that Peter Wilde? That was Peter Wilde.

That was down on River Street. So before the Young Center, it was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. We were there the transition year.

So we started on Peter. In 2005? And then partway through the year moved into the new building. Wow, yeah.

So it was a weird year because it was, like, both places where one was, like, breaking down, the other was barely built. And then the one that was breaking, the one that was barely built had, like, issues with water or gas or something. So then we all had to move back to the old building.

It was just back and forth. Was that on the River Street building? The one on King. Yeah, King River.

Oh, yeah, that’s what I thought you were going to say. Five-something King River. We spent three years there in that diseased draft.

Yeah. Oh, man, there was a… One person would walk in, they’d sneeze, and, like, by the end of the day, everybody’s like, I’m not feeling so good. The building had pneumonia.

Yeah, the building just constantly had pneumonia. It was, like, the shittiest haunted building. Just so that I have everybody, we can get a sense of everybody’s name, starting from this side, say your name and just go along.

Cool, yeah, I’m Danny Padgett. I’m Connor Bradbury. I’m Kaitlyn Laurel.

And I’m Alec Tuller. Okay, so back to this sex T-Rex thing, where did the name come from? We just had sex today. I still remember it.

I still do it every once in a while, when I’m drunk. Our original name was actually Sexual Tyrannosaurus, which is a reference to the movie Predator. Jesse Ventura has chewing tobacco, and he says, this stuff will make you a bonafide sexual tyrannosaur.

And that’s where the name came from. I think it was originally used as the name for a rock band band, like in the video game Rock Band. Colin had that as a rock band name.

And then when we, after theater school, formed an improv troupe for a tournament, we had to pick a name, and that was on Colin’s mind, I think, at the time. So did you guys, you went into a tournament, like not having any improv experience? I had done like Canadian improv games. Myself and Colin had done Canadian improv games in high school.

And Sean had done a fair bit of improv. Oh yeah, because I didn’t know Sean was… But like Fredericton improv. Fredericton improv.

Never together, and never long form like that, which was just, that one was just, we just did 25 minutes straight. We sat and told one story. And that’s still kind of what we do today.

You would improvise in improv. Yeah. That’s sort of blowing my mind right now.

Your first improv experience would be like, instead of like doing like an easy like one minute, you know, thing that you’d do like 25 minutes of… And now we do that, but like an hour. It’s actually overall, for my improv career anyways, it was harder for me to get used to short form than it was long. I think most of our brains work in a narrative sense, so we can latch onto that.

We’re all big into genres. So instead of like the joke, like get to the joke sort of thing, you’re thinking of story. Thinking of story, yeah.

There’s no jokes in the play. No jokes. Very serious.

Yeah, so we started doing scripted work in 2011, I guess. Maybe started in 10, based on a long form improv show called Callahan. And then it developed into a scripted show.

And then we really liked doing that stuff. And then we continued on writing scripted works ever since then. It was one or two shows a year.

So do you… I’m going to move this a little closer because your voice is quieter than most everybody else. I can speak louder than that guy. Use your theater voice.

I just want everybody to miss what you’re saying. So now when you said that scripted, do you guys like write down and sit and write a script or do you improv and then write it down and improv and write it down? Writing, we brainstorm the idea. And then the last few years, Sean and Caitlin have been on the road.

And Sean’s the primary script writer. But Sean and Caitlin were kind of talking every day, bouncing ideas off each other, writing a script. And then they would come back.

And then we workshop, improv. Go back, write, workshop, improv. How long would you say it takes you to put a show together? However long we have.

How long do you got? You want one now? I’ll get you now. For any given tour, we would have a meet and talk about what basically fight style we wanted to do next. And then whether it’s like guns or swords.

Lasers. Or lasers or fists. We would develop what genre we were going to do out of that.

Or if any of us had seen any good movies recently, then we would kind of latch onto that. Then Sean and I would go away, come up with character ideas, script ideas, sorry, plot ideas. We’d more or less start with the story.

And write the story. And then we wrote these guys in. And then we start with the jokes.

A lot of the jokes are written in, but so many of them come from just working on our feet. Yeah, a lot of them will come incidentally while rehearsing. Something will just pop up.

And they’ll be like, oh, that’s the script now. And the development incubation period is quite long. But once we have a script, we usually rehearse for about a month.

But when I say a month, I mean a couple times a week for a month. At what point do you get into an intense, like right before you go up, like two weeks before? Or does it just stay like this? It rarely gets super intense. It’s just working around people’s schedules.

It’s tricky. It’s usually like two to three times a week. And then probably it’ll be four or five.

Maybe on the final week. It’s also a longer term. You rehearse for sort of four to six weeks before we open.

I mean, we start usually about a month. We start May 1st, usually. And then we open in Montreal so far on June 20th or something.

So that’s like your schedule. I’d say maybe it’s a month before the preview show we always do. We always like to do a preview.

To make sure that we have a show. So you basically invite friends and family. And be like, this is going to be sloppy.

But we’ll get through it. And we’ll see what really works and what doesn’t. What was unclear.

Hey, we’ll get through it. Could you have Callahan with one of the scariest things I’ve ever done? We did our first run in the lobby before the show. And we hadn’t run it at that point.

And we did it in front of an audience. Also, that show was pretty loose. And that was my first time ever doing any sort of improv ever.

And I was just like, I don’t know what I’m doing here. What am I doing? But it went well. Yeah, I think it went fine.

The show got way better. Basically, since you left the show that week, it got so good. Yeah, that’s a common theme.

So you guys often start in Montreal and do a fringe tour across? We start in Montreal always. Because the fringe schedule works out that way. We’ve the most extensive tour we’ve done was Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, then Halifax.

We’ve never done Edmonton. We’ve just never been drawn in the lottery. But that is something we would like to do someday.

But yeah, always Montreal. We’ve done Montreal every year for six years. It’s a great festival to bring your work to.

And it is the most fun for it. Yeah, I remember that from doing Montreal. Everybody said, you’re going to have a blast in Montreal.

It probably won’t make any money in Montreal. Won’t make any money. But it’s a great spot to, because it’s such a welcoming fringe, it’s a great spot to get the nerves out and get the show going.

We work the kinks out. And not only are they generous audiences, although small audiences, they’re generous, but they also are free with feedback. And good feedback.

During the show. Not like, boo. It’s all in French, though.

I don’t understand you. It’s French for boo. It’s a bad thing.

There must have been a train of thought. We have that effect on people, yeah. So does Montreal Fringe.

Just thinking about it, I’m drunk. We all do, like a caravan of thought. I remember, I mean, doing Montreal, like I was saying earlier, at the same time you guys were doing Callahan in Montreal.

And after a couple, I think there was a two-minute dance party. Like one of the… 60-second dance parties? Yeah, a 60-second dance party. One went for two minutes.

I’m like, oh. It’s too much. So when you guys done Winnipeg, I mean, there’s some real breadth there in terms of the way that those fringes run.

And not to play favorites, because each fringe has its thing. Is there one that you look forward to more of the cities that you go to? Such a tough call. As you said, they all have their good qualities.

We keep going to Montreal because it’s close. And it’s the first fringe we ever did. And we know so many people there now.

Although most of them have moved here. Hi, Victoria. And we love so many people there in the fringe.

Toronto is great because it’s such a big city. It’s a great opportunity. Hometown crowd.

Hometown crowd. Get your name out there. And then Winnipeg, we’ve only done it once.

But holy crap, it’s so fun. And the really cool thing about Winnipeg, Toronto, the fringe happens. And it has huge audiences.

And yet, I would say most people on the street don’t even know the fringe is happening. Because of the population, you can still have huge numbers. And most people don’t know what’s happening.

Winnipeg, the whole city, the whole goddamn city comes out. And everyone, I fire people in Toronto. And they give me a stag face.

I fire people in Winnipeg. Or if I don’t have a flyer, they ask me to come back with a flyer later to tell them more about my show. And we sold out our first show.

And we’ve never been there before. And it was like 180 seaters. Like flyering in Winnipeg.

I remember the first time doing it, coming up to a group of people and being like, hey, can I talk to you about our show? And they’re like, yeah, yeah, please. And I was like, I didn’t really have a follow-up. I wasn’t ready.

I was like, oh, what? You ran away. You don’t have somewhere to be. Yeah, so far.

And you’re like, OK, sorry, sorry, let me, uh. You’re sort of preparing to wrestle somebody to the ground. Yeah, exactly.

Have a flyer. And pop them to a pole and take them. Yeah, the crowds in Winnipeg were older, which was also kind of surprising for us.

We usually play to a younger crowd. That was an interesting thing about the Winnipeg Fringe as well. Well, that was the, I think, we had a five-star CBC review from Montreal that they had come to see it.

So on opening day, we’d already gotten that review. And I think the older folks are big CBC fans. So it was just like, we were very surprised.

Because our audience is normally around 20 to 20, you know, 25, 30 kind of thing. And then this was in a different crowd. We’re like, oh, this is great.

We got a whole new. But getting that, I always appreciated that Winnipeg sent a reporter out to Montreal to see shows that were going to come to Winnipeg. It’s also amazing that the CBC in Winnipeg is so supportive of the Fringe Festival.

I have only done four fringes. But as far as I know, it is the only one where CBC does that. And so they’ve got a great locus.

The only one I think, Winnipeg, CBC there has like a Fringe page. They review most, if not every show. It’s so great.

And to come back here and be able to say, CBC saw our show, come see it too. It’s so helpful for us. But I guess the Fringe, it’s such a bigger event than Winnipeg that they have an incentive to cover it.

Absolutely. In Toronto, it’s like there’s like a bajillion things. There’s 70 festivals going on at the same time.

Same thing in Montreal, though. The Fringe in Montreal is like sandwiched between two larger festivals. Yeah, right.

Like the festival francophone at one end, like the jazz festival on the other. There’s always the indie thing, the car racing going on at the same time. Just like a street festival every week in Montreal.

St. Laurent’s always shut down. It’s amazing. You’re about to start doing a double bill at the storefront.

Have you done a combination show before? Like two shows at one? Nope. We’re masochists. We did our first double run, our first run of both shows in a row yesterday.

With the right break, like the 30-minute break. Yeah, and it wasn’t as exhausting as I thought it would be. I think we just got sillier with it.

We just got a bit more dumb later on with our jokes. But yeah, it’s… It felt good. Yeah, we’re doing two shows every night.

Well, Wednesday to Sunday, starting at 7.30. And I think we can do it. Oh, yeah. It’s also funny because we are doing… They are two separate shows, but they’re both just over an hour long.

So really, we’re doing one normal play. Like combined, we have the strength of one man. But you’re doing… I mean, they’re both genre.

One’s a western, and one’s like swords and sorcerers. Swashbuckling adventure, Elephant’s as Bride. Game of Thrones.

One, people get killed by guns, and the other, they get killed by swords. Yeah, just to make it really clear. That’s a good pull quote.

I’ve quoted myself a lot. Can you tell me a little bit about both shows? Can we? No, we can’t. Well, you have a great talking to do.

Let’s get a script, because I… They’re plays. So Watcher Wildcat is a western. As you said, it’s a revenge quest.

Wildcat’s on a revenge quest to find the man who murdered her pa. And then it encompasses most western tropes that you’d imagine, but we tell an original story. She teams up with Bill.

No spoilers. His name is Bill, and that’s all you know about him. Yeah, you find out pretty quickly what his deal is.

Yeah. Yeah, so there’s basically like train explosions, tumbleweeds, gunfights. No, not yet, but we should put that in.

There’s a beaver that smokes cigarettes. There’s, which we just added. We ride on horses, which are brooms in our show.

Guns are our fingers. We basically approach it with, what would a child do when playing in a backyard or whatever? Yeah, really, because you start with that baseline of being like, what’s the most like childlike way to play this? And then how can we try our best to make you forget that’s what we’re doing? Yeah. As you go, like to have moments like most of the time, it’s pretty clear.

And we like to think there are moments where you forget that forever. Well, that’s what’s sort of fun I find about the shows, is like it’s sort of, you have this childlike approach, and it does have a, it’s not improvised, but it does have an improvisational feel. Like everyone on stage is playing.

And what’s fun with the props and stuff with that is that it’s partly play, and then it’s sort of transformed into theater magic. Craft. Yeah, craft, where you’re using like fabrics to at one point be, you know, something very simple.

And then it’s something totally complicated and animated and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it’s the fun of the craft. And also to layer that on top of what you’re saying, the playful childlike fun.

But we also go for, particularly with Wildcats, a cinematic quality. Because like we started with doing movies and improv, and we kept that through all of our shows, I think. And so, for example, I know this is a podcast, but doing, explaining physical bits.

But, you know, for example, we try to play with camera zooms, and we’ll just take our two hands and zoom them in on our eyes for the like classic Western. And then, you know, if the camera’s pulling way out so that you see someone running on top of a train, we become finger mode, where we just, the person becomes a finger, and we’ll jump from the top of one train car to another. It’s really dumb.

It’s really dumb. So that’s like the stuff we use in Swordplay, and we try to basically do a movie on stage. Yeah, yeah.

And it’s bad. We tend to like, then you have to take, in the rehearsal process, we take the dumbness very seriously. Like, so it’s like, we really have to work on the difference between holding, the way you hold your hand can show, like, be sloppy and weird, or it can be very clear.

Because the audience’s imagination is so much part of our shows that we need to make sure that what we’re doing is clear, because otherwise it’ll… Yeah, and also, I think, with the clarity, and like the making the movie on stage, that’s, I think, what’s really also fun about it is that they are really uniquely placed. Even though they’re borrowing a lot from genre, and parody, and all that kind of stuff, a lot of the jokes rely on the fact that, like, for example, they’re riding on brooms as horses, and then they jump off and spin around, and just have like a staff fight. Which are technically horses.

They’re still horses. So we establish the audience’s imagination goes… So every time they hit with a horse, they’re neighing. Yeah, they stab someone with a horse.

What the… That’s a joke we took from Stratford, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Stratford is known for its… Yeah, horse brooms.

Horse. Adaptations. Very, yeah, very expensive broom.

So swordplay is… Swordplay, a play of swords, is… There’s swords in it. It’s essentially… We’ve taken the framing device of The Princess Bride, where grandpa comes to read to his kid, except it’s a video game. Instead of a book.

A old school, pixelated video game. We’re imagining our generation being grandparents. And what would we do with our kids? Books.

We’d play video games with them. Well, and books. But you know, so we… Grandpa and the kid, the modern of that era kid, are playing video games.

The kid’s unimpressed at the beginning. And then we launch into swordplay, a play of swords, which is kind of a Game of Thrones sort of, Princess Bride sort of send up. Three Musketeers, Scarlet Pimpernel, all those classic kind of stories.

And there’s lots of sword fights. We use foam swords. Lots of intrigue that we signal with gasps.

Yeah, every time there’s something intriguing, we all go… A lot of like disguise. A lot of plot twists. There’s swinging from chandeliers.

May or may not be dragons that appear. No, no, dragons haven’t existed. For thousands of years.

I mean, you say that, dragons definitely never appear. There’s fighting on staircases. There’s all kinds of the classic tropes that you would imagine from that era.

Sailing across the sea. Sailing on a ship. Yeah.

Oh, there’s like a Super Nintendo trap sequence. At one point, they have to go through the trap dungeon. So we have where we had finger mode in Wildcat, where we would become our fingers.

In this one, we have small pixelated cutouts of certain characters. Like 8-bit or 16-bit. Yeah.

So once in a while, we’ll drop back into video game mode and you’re basically seeing what the video game is they’re playing. Yeah. And we actually, we were really lucky.

We were brainstorming about, oh, how will we musically signal the difference of these worlds? And we’re like, oh, well, in the video game, because of the time periods, like you kind of would go with classical music generally. Not always, but sometimes you have that. And then when they’re playing the game, it would be an 8-bit, like a MIDI kind of version of it.

And at some point, we’re like, oh, wouldn’t it be funny if like, we want a happy thing for the opening little piece of like Princess in the Forest, like la, la, la, la. La, la, la, but don’t kidnap, do, do, do. Imagine if like Good Day Sunshine by the Beatles.

Imagine they had that in classical. Yeah, sure. Google it, find it.

Oh, amazing. But wouldn’t it be crazy if we like crosscut it with the 8-bit MIDI version? Let’s Google it. Oh, they have it.

Great. So the internet has everything you’d ever need. So every song has been done in 8-bit mode that you can possibly think of.

So whenever we hop back into the 8-bit, like blah, blah, blah, we have this kind of like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Kind of like. Sorry, what’s it, how’s it go? Uh.

Da, da, da, da, da. That’s just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s my line. Those are the 8-bits there, someone’s there.

And are these, these are shows that you’ve previously toured? Yeah. Yeah. I know for myself, when I’ve done some of the 1x stuff that I’ve done for Fringe, I get to the end of that and I’m kind of tired.

Because it’s one thing to do it when you’re rehearsing, another thing in front of an audience. How do you guys feel about doing these things back to back with, you said a half hour? Yeah. Will it be Red Bull? Lots of coffee.

I’m a Gatorade man, that’s what I like. I’d do Red Bull, I’d do Red Bull zero. Use my figure.

Yeah, I think it will be more like, I know I tend to, as exhausting as these shows are, I’ve always felt pretty good after them. You feel kind of energized from it. You sort of siphon all the energy.

You steal their energy. I often feel after a show that I’m so pumped with energy that I could like, lift a truck. You do.

Everyone is confused. Caitlin’s a monster. That’s where our budget goes to, paying for the trucks.

I think the adrenaline gets us through, especially when comedy does require an audience and when the audience is there and with you and laughing and having a great time. We just feed off that energy and it’s very energizing. For those few times when the audience is a little less energetic than you might hope, or less into it, do you have any tricks that you guys have learned to scream at them? Long live Russia! Yeah, no.

I think it comes with, we found that in Winnipeg being a thing. When we first went there, because it was such an older audience, you just learn that every audience is different. We finished our first show in Winnipeg and we were like, did that go badly? What happened? It felt like I didn’t quite feel, and then we saw people coming out and talked to them after and they were all so happy and like, oh thank you so much for the show, it was wonderful.

And we’re like, oh okay. They’re silent the whole time and then they give you a standing ovation. It’s because they’re paying attention so much, because they’re thinking it through so much.

We have this bit about, you can’t let them laugh. If they laugh, they’re not paying attention to the next joke. But we came from Toronto when we went to Winnipeg where we were performing for people basically between the ages of 20 and 40 for the most part, with obviously exceptions.

And then going to that crowd where people were hooting and hollering and totally drunk when they came to the show and everything was just a bit off the hook. Then we go to Winnipeg and it was like, just a bit of a different crowd. And I think that when the crowd, it’s rare that the crowd isn’t at least somewhat with us, but occasionally we had one show, our second show ever of Wildcat in Montreal, we had nine people.

That’s the smallest crowd. It was like a matinee. It was just one of those perfect riches brews, but they were really great.

One broom at one point launched off the stage and accidentally landed in someone’s lap and then she was a reviewer and gave us a great review. And they gave away free brew. It’s good to know what plays to a small crowd and what plays to a big crowd as well.

I also find that I know when we had a quieter audience, I’ve usually said you have to give more energy, basically. Because if you have a big audience, you do a little thing and they give you a big laugh, that pushes you along. But if they’re quiet and you just get a chuckle, you still have to give all the energy you would expect from that laugh.

Sean and Caitlin have all these, aside from the big laugh jokes, there’s all these really subtle, cool, Easter egg jokes in the scripts. When you have an audience like that, they’re more likely to get the really subtle references that something seems to be a piece of exposition, but there’s joke here, joke here, joke here. But you can’t catch it all if you’re in a laugh riot.

I think that’s what makes them rewatchable too, which is great. People always tell us that they’ll catch things the second time they miss, which is great. Which is what you want in a good comedy, I think.

It’s what I learned from watching The Simpsons, which is hide jokes in laugh moments. Because you’re laughing at that the first time and then another joke is made that you’ll miss completely. It’s like playing a video game the second time, finding all these little secret rooms and stuff.

Yeah, so if anyone’s listening, come see our show twice. See it five times! It’s funny that you mentioned the Simpsons thing, because that thing about rewatching it and having these hidden jokes apparently became more dominant in comedy, on TV anyway, with VHS. Because now people could very easily rewatch things.

And you have layers that you’re building for that, whereas before, if the joke isn’t laughed at the first time, it’s a bad joke. And there’s also this weird thing, too, that we talk about this all the time, and comedy is such a weird thing. It’s such a weird thing.

Why do people laugh at what they laugh at? I don’t know. But there are some weird rules that you can find as you navigate your way through this weird world of comedy. And one we keep stumbling on again and again is that joke cascade.

So if you make a joke and you build on the joke, you can make 25 jokes in a row as long as it keeps escalating. But if you make a joke and then you make a completely different joke immediately afterward, one of those two are not going to get a laugh. Even if the audience hears both jokes, like if the actor waits until the laugh dies down and delivers the line completely audibly.

We are scripted, but we do go off script a little bit here and there. And there are some moments more so than others. For example, this moment in the show, I always get a laugh no matter what.

But this one day, I did something a little different, and then I got this huge laugh, and then I gave my delivery the usual, and got nothing. It’s a weird rule. I can’t think of a better example than that, than our last show in Halifax.

Julian just has this moment at the end, he’s giving this monologue at the end, there’s this one joke that always, always kills. And he, I think, looking at the tape, he flipped his poncho once right before that joke. And got a huge laugh.

And people kind of chuckled at it, and then the next joke, wow. Just because of this little poncho. And it’s so weird, and so you remove the poncho flip, and then you get the laugh back.

People are just like, I’ve already laughed at the joke, I’m simply not ready. I mean, you can feel like you’re laughing through the whole show, and miss, and not laugh at half the jokes. I’ve had people see it twice in the front, and we had a 200 plus kind of crowd there, so big laughs when you get them.

And it was really funny for them the second time, it was like, oh, there’s all these jokes I didn’t hear, because I just couldn’t hear them. Because there was laughter. And of course, in the French slot, you have to hit your time slot, so we’re not stopping for laughs.

Especially in Toronto, they will turn the lights up on you, it’s crazy. They’re almost. They’ll give you a little leeway, as long as you don’t go too long.

They give you once. One minute over once. And after that… As much as we try to be sensitive to the laughs, and try to come in just as they’re dying down at a certain point, you’ve just got to get the show done on the French, which is totally fair.

I understand people’s schedules they want to keep, but it just means that people are not getting the jokes. It helps us with pace too, because our previews tend to run 90 minutes, and then we have to crush it down to an hour long. And that really makes you know what’s important in a script, what’s important in the moments.

Some jokes you have to cut that you don’t want to, which was great, because with this run we can add a couple back in, but most of the stuff we cut stays cut. Because the show runs at an hour three. So we added three minutes of jokes.

It’s like a bonus. Yeah, exactly. And we stay there an hour long each, and they may end up being that way, but even at the French, we were really pushing the hour.

Years ago I saw James Gangle do his one person show when I was there, I think it was his first performance. There was a full house, and every time there was a laugh he’d be like, guys we don’t have time for this. Shut up.

That’s actually a really good James Gangle impression. He’s actually doing the show concurrently. At the same time as us.

Except he’s dark. He could come on a Wednesday to our show, I’d love to do it. Did you hear that James? James are you listening? Come to our show on Wednesday, you’re not doing a show that night.

I loved doing that commercial about being a dad. Yeah, it was good. Even though you’d be a terrible dad.

We were talking about how you all went through George Brown, but what took you into theatre? What was it that drew you into this thing? For me, I always, I remember enjoying it the first time I did it, which was in grade 8. We had to do some weird improv thing that was chaos, sheer chaos. But I really liked doing it, I was always a bit of a ham. Growing up I liked performing, I would force my parents for hours on end.

I would hide in the closet and burst out and yell, it’s Guy Smiley! And then just do it again and again and again. That’s where that gig started. Still does it all the time.

It’s your best joke. It’s your only joke. It was really in high school, my drama teacher was Hellie Kivolot.

And she was the best bringer of talent. She could really work with people, she always knew how to bring things out of people. She worked with me and both of my younger brothers through that school.

And I watched her take people that had never been on stage and really just mold them. She was just great at that. She’s the best teacher I’ve ever had in anything.

She would also make you believe that this is something you can actually do if you want to. So that was probably what did it for me. Was that in high school? I had teachers who were like, you could do this if you wanted, you shouldn’t.

You won’t make any money. You should go to business school. I think she realized with me, I don’t think you’re going to do anything else.

She was like, Connor, you have to do this. You are good at anything else. One shot, big bear.

See, you can’t even do that. I’ve said this in another interview actually. When I was growing up, the first occupation I wanted was a wizard.

That’s my question. We all wanted to be wizards. We all wanted to be wizards.

I grew up reading fantasy novels. Obviously, I wasn’t like, oh, I wish I could. I was like, that would be amazing.

Then I got into writing through my love of fantasy. Then I was like, maybe I’ll be a writer. Then I fell in love with Shakespeare because of the way he structured his plots.

He’s pretty good. He’s okay. Have you heard of him? Sure.

I was into Shakespeare. A friend of mine was like, you should audition. My high school was doing Twelfth Night.

I auditioned for Twelfth Night. I did the Queen Mab speech. I had the paper in my hand.

I didn’t have it memorized. I was incredibly nervous. Sometimes she comes.

I botched the audition completely. I looked like our star actor of the school enough that she was cast as Viola in Twelfth Night. I got cast as Sebastian because I looked like her.

They’re twins for anyone who’s not familiar with both of them. I fell into theater. She’s very beautiful.

She’s got a great beard. She’s got very hairy arms. That’s how I got the bug.

I was like, hey, this is close to being a wizard. Ironically enough, no. This is probably the closest theater thing to being a wizard.

Being part of Sexty Rex. Cool. My dad is a puppeteer and is artistic director of a theater company.

You used to be made of wood. I was carved out of wood and then I became a real boy. I grew up with it and just assumed that that’s what people did with their lives.

Right away, my whole life, I was like, obviously I’m going to do this. Why would you do anything else? There’s nothing else. That’s basically it.

I took all the things that I thought I needed to take. Acting classes, dance classes, improv classes. All the things I thought I needed to take.

I graduated high school and I went into George Brown. Then my soul was crushed horribly. I thought, this isn’t theater.

I grew up with this magical theater thing. Theater should be fun and playful and beautiful and a wonderful experience. What the hell is this? It’s okay, you can swear it’s a podcast.

What the hell is this? Sorry guys, I didn’t mean to just beat you all up. You say the word hell, it shows up. Then after that, I was miserable and hated theater and hated everything.

Then I was friends with these guys and found comedy. Never in my life thought I could do comedy because I’m a girl. Seriously, growing up, you just don’t see it.

I didn’t see it. I never saw it. It just didn’t occur to me.

I never thought I could be funny. Definitely was never cast in any funny roles. Then I started to do comedy and it’s just like, oh.

Oh no, right, theater can be fun. Theater can be magical. Theater isn’t soul crushing.

It is what you make it. In that theater world, it’s so hard to get into the roles you would want to do. You have to be part of your own company for you to get to play a badass cowboy.

Yeah, I’ve always wanted to play violent characters. I love action movies and I’ve always loved action movies. I’ve just never seen myself in action movies.

Now I have, but not actually myself. I’ve seen women in action movies just kill it like Mad Max or whatever. Growing up, I didn’t.

When I was playing Star Wars, I always had to be Leia. There was just literally no other option. Playing Lord of the Rings, I mean, Eowyn can fight with a sword, but that’s it.

Otherwise, you’ve got Erwin. Boo. You’ve got Galadriel.

Then you’ve got Shelob. That’s it. I never had an opportunity to play these cool roles.

Suddenly, we did a lot of stage combat in theater schools. As you may know, that was my favorite class. That and dance.

Doing all this stuff, now I can write my own superheroes. The first show we did Callahan, I played the wife. I was like, never again.

When we pared down the cast and Danny wasn’t in it anymore, I took over a lot of your roles, so I got to play a lot of goons and fighting roles. I was like, yes, this. The next show we did, I got to play a killer robot.

The next show we did, I was an ass-whooping cowgirl. Then, a delicate princess. Definitely, there’s no plot twists with her.

In swordplay. She’s a dainty flower who needs rescuing constantly and isn’t evil at all. That’s been my journey so far.

Make it yourself. It is changing. Honestly, in the last five years.

In my adult life, it’s changed. It’s really cool. Otherwise, you had Ripley, an alien.

Yeah, exactly. Sarah Connor. Sarah Connor was pretty cool.

What do you want? I guess Metroid, but it’s basically a dude. Surprise! Is that robot a husband? She’s a babe. You only find out she’s a woman when she dies.

I know. As a kid, I just assumed that’s what you did. As you went into the arts and kept playing.

Because you went to Canterbury. I went to an arts high school. I did theatre there.

I did improv as well. The Canadian Improv Games and stuff. I think I was 16.

I directed my first play at a little tiny festival there. I was like, this is what I’d like to do. As an actor, I would get frustrated doing plays that I didn’t like.

And having directors that I didn’t respect. I was like, I don’t want to do this. I want to be a director that other people don’t respect.

That’s why we keep losing him out of our program. That’s another story. Actually, you know what? The real instigator was, I was going to go into physics.

That was my high school plan. Uh-huh. Actually, please still do that.

Support us all. I had an assignment for a math class or something. I’d do the same day as an assignment for a playwriting class.

I didn’t have time to do both because I had procrastinated. I was like, which should I do? I was like, Hendon Hod. I was like, what should I want to do? I was like, I want to write a play, obviously.

I was like, oh, shit. I kind of went from there. I did theater school for a little bit in Victoria for two years.

I was there for a directing program. I found it was pretty light compared to what I had done in high school. One of the professors was like, get out.

I was like, okay, cool. Then I went to York for film school. I graduated from there doing everything, but really focused on writing and directing kind of stuff.

Then I came out of film school. I’m afraid you’re not. I’m very closeted.

Closeted film school student. Conor’s gag is jumping out of the closet. You can’t have that gag.

I keep going to the closet. No, anyway. My ambiguous sexuality aside, I left, I finished film school.

Film was great, but it’s really like, it’s just a really challenging medium. It involves, usually, a lot of money and a lot of preparation. I am poor and ill-prepared.

Theater for me has always been really fun. My strength in film has always been working with actors and stuff and creating with people together and collaborating. Film, I still do it.

It’s still fun. We’ve made behemoth projects every couple of years. They’re just sort of massive enterprises.

With theater, it’s still a lot of work, but it’s way more play. It’s way more just like, you’re doing that stupid thing with your hand, let’s keep doing that stupid thing. Just the sense of play and fun.

You learned that from Stratford. Yes, exactly. Which I founded.

Rooms for horses, on out! And starting with theater, there’s a big indie theater-y, movement-y thing of just kind of do-it-yourself, which has inspired me, and I’ve been a part of as well. Hammering upstairs. Yes, you know, neighbors.

Yes. I’ve done film work, actually, with some of these guys as well. We did a feature film a couple of years ago.

It was very silly, about a play, of course. Coldplay. Coldplay.

Play the film, actually. Really dumb. Very, very dumb.

I do my own theater work as well, and it also has a very similar sense of trying to get sort of filmic genre stuff on stage, just because I feel like that’s the language that everybody speaks. We’re all so familiar with television and film that why not just use that language and then make it inherently theatrical in some way. Did it all do the D&D as well? Wait, wait, do you mean the D&D show or just play D&D in general? Both.

Yeah, because both. Not Danny. But not that he will never.

No, yeah, he did sometimes. Danny’s started doing more. I mean, you’re getting more into improv.

Yeah. I’m sure you’ve trained and done some stuff. I’m doing a bad dog show in April.

Yeah, we do. Sean and I produce the D&D show, and Connor’s in it, and Alec is in it as well. And, yes, it’s a barrel of fun.

We’ve also, it’s not just Sext T-Rex, although we’re producing it, we’ve brought in some incredible comedians. And nerds. And nerds.

Well, I mean, Greg was there with comedian slash nerds, so everybody in the cast fits both of those bills. That’s sort of necessary to do D&D. Yeah, and I say nerd with a big, open, loving heart.

I don’t, you know, I grew up being called a nerd my whole life and we’ve found a way to switch it into a good thing. It sort of sounds like a lot of what you guys have done is inspired by some nerding. Nerd culture? Because of who we were as children.

We’re just expressing our trauma through comedy. Trauma. Traumaty! No, we actually still play Julian, who’s not here, and is a core company member, and Sean, who is not here.

Sean’s our dungeon master. Julian, Sean, and I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons together now for nine years, since theater school. You guys were the first time that I ever played Dungeons & Dragons with one of you guys.

Yeah, that’s right. Were you guys playing during theater school? Yeah, actually, that’s kind of what got me through. It was sort of this batting Guitar Hero, because it was cool at the time, and I just immersed myself in the fun of Guitar Hero at the time.

But, yeah, D&D, Julian, Sean, Joe, who’s a core company member but is not here right now, and I played a two-and-a-half-year campaign that got us all through that crazy time. And, you know, there’s pictures of it on my wall still! Characters and stuff! And we’ve continued to play different campaigns, and actually, often, they end up being inspiration in some way or another for other shows, or just straight-up D&D Live, which is kind of the most obvious offspring of that. But, yeah, a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of tabletop stuff.

I think the D&D show works right now. I think it’s working really well. We’ve done three of this latest campaign, because it’s not like somebody asked me, like, oh, you’re doing a D&D show? Like, what edition do you guys play? I’m like, oh, well, it’s not.

Like, we all know the D&D style, but the show is a little more loose in that approach, so it’s accessible. Like, you need to be a bit of a nerd to watch it, but you don’t have to be a die-hard Dungeons & Dragons fan. But it is accessible to everyone, also because it’s set in the realm of Toronto.

And so, if you know anything about Toronto, which most people who live here do, it really, you can get just as much enjoyment out of hearing puns on a lot of things that you’re familiar with, like the Troll Toll Commission, which is the TTC, for obvious reasons. And there’s lots of kind of, you know, there’s lich hipsters that live in Parkdale, and all the dales are elven homelands, Cabbage Town’s where the hobbits are from. The Valley of the Dawn is where dragons come from.

And there’s a nearby orphanage called Degrassi, where lots of local monster orphan children, you know, who’ve been destroyed by dragons, parents have been destroyed by dragons, live. And it’s also the home of this evil, not evil, but massive fire-spitting drake that’s been kind of consuming the city for a long time. There’s all kinds of jokes you make, and it’s all Dungeons & Dragons related.

There’s the Gelatinous Club, is a wandering monster, and there’s all kinds of things that… My favourite is still Forthright Edds. Forthright Edds. Forthright Edds is a locate… Oh, and so, when the PCs or paying customers come in, they’re given a map of the realm of Toronto with locations and wandering monsters on it.

And so, the beginning, you choose where in the realm of Toronto the adventure’s going to take place. How often does the lab happen? Monthly. The last Monday of every month.

Do they ever show up? Is there a recap? Not yet. We are probably going to get into territory where that might be helpful at some point. But right now, we’re making sure that it’s episodic.

So, you can just come in and watch an episode. We’ll probably just play the first few minutes of a Battlestar Galactica episode. We still honour what happened in the last session.

So, if, you know, a character lost her beard. And the next episode, she didn’t have a beard. We still honour what happened.

But it is, at this point, by no means necessary to have seen anything we’ve done before to come in and appreciate it. Why is she a beardless woman? Why doesn’t she have a beard? Also, you get a discount on the ticket price if you show up in costume. So, we’ve had a number of cosplayers come up and show up to our show either because they’re interested in D&D or because they want an excuse to dress up.

And it’s been really fun to see that kind of thing starting to happen. And another project we’re working on related to the show is the Wandering Monsters. We’re working on our own monster manual.

So, we’re reaching out to local artists and we’ve almost got all of the Wandering Monsters drawn at this point. And we’re going to compile the Wandering Monsters manual for the D&D Live campaign. Do you find there are good crowds for D&D Live? Yeah, generally speaking.

A lot of nerds in the city. City for nerds. City of nerds.

I don’t know why they’re not promoting it. Getting regular people to come out to shows can be tough. But if people with passion like that, then a lot of these… I want to find another word for nerds right now.

These nerds have a lot of passion. But they do. They’re just passionate about the things they like.

And they will go to things. They’ll go to Comic Con multiple days in a row. Line up for hours to get autographs from people.

If they care about something, they’ll support it. By day, you mean? Yeah, yeah. But me.

I’m like… I call myself the Daywalker a lot of the time because I’m this kind of half-nerd, half-jock. Half-nerd, half-nerd. I grew up more playing sports and watching it.

And then you became friends with us. Became friends with you guys. The Daywalker does push you a little bit.

I know, I know. And the fact that he… The fact that you guys jumped into Dragons Live. The fact that he… He’s like Jose Nertista.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. And so, just as we’re wrapping up, the Wildcat in Swords of Swords… Swordplay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know the lyrics to the opening song? It just came to me. So it opens on the 11th? Yeah, we have a preview on the 10th.

It opens on the 11th and it runs until the 27th. We’re dark Monday, Tuesday. Otherwise, every night we have two matinees on Sundays.

Yeah, so the Wildcat at 7.30, Swordplay at 9 every day. There’s a half-hour intermission where people can go get right sauced. And we have a deal where if you bring your own sword or gun, you get arrested.

Just to mention. So, in terms of where people can find you online, website? Oh, yes. Sextyrexcomedy.com and that’s very important.

Google Sextyrex, you find all kinds of fun things you can’t unsee. When there’s not any spacing in it, it’s Sextrex. That’s why I could find it because I actually put the spaces in and I’m glad I didn’t.

There’s no Sextrex. Yeah, that’s a whole other Google search. I really have to stop producing my artwork.

On Twitter? Are you guys on Twitter? Yeah, we’re on Twitter, at Sextyrex. We’re always doing stuff at Bad Dog Theatre. We’re artists in residence there.

We have two monthly shows there. We do kind of a, who knows, something different every month monthly show. And that is on a Thursday, any given Thursday of the month, depending on Bad Dog’s schedule.

And the other one is D&D Live the last Monday of every month. Well, thank you guys so much for talking to me today. Thank you.