BY BEN WINTERS
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Schadenfreude is funny and everything, sure, but to develop an audience in those shaky early months of existence, they followed an important dictum of the entertainment business: If you don’t charge anything, people will come.
Very early in 1998, the Playground hadn’t yet landed at their space on North Lincoln Avenue, and they were performing Friday nights at Café Ashie. Schadenfreude arranged to go on at midnight after the improv revue; Playground audiences could stick around and get a freebie, and the nascent sketch group’s buddies could check out their show for nothing.
"We went on at midnight, so it was rough. But people stuck around," says ensemble member and sole female Schadenfreudian Kate James. "We were just inviting friends, and friends of friends to come have a beer…we did 13 weeks, doing brand new shows every week. A lot of it stunk."
The Schadenfreude story, like so many other tales of Chicago comedy success, actually begins at Second City, where in the December of 1997 a guy named Adam Witt, while taking classes, sought out several like-minded fellow students to form a sketch group.
"A lot of people out of the training center, as they still are, were doing their own improv shows at venues around town, and Adam said, 'Let’s just do a show of all sketch,’" says Marshall. "So we got together that December and just started writing, just started throwing ideas out."
Something clicked among the young comedians that Witt enlisted–besides James and Marshall, the new group included John Bolger and Justin Kaufmann–as evidenced by their positive response at Café Ashie.
In the spring, the Playground ended the run at Ashie to seek out a more stable environment, the Schadenfreude crew got busy with their level five classes at Second City, and summer saw the new group on hiatus. Sort of–James, Marshall and Kaufmann headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a small cast version of the Schadenfreude set. They received a positive response, which paved the way for the group’s recent return to the festival this summer.
"The best part about it was that we learned what to do and what not to do this time [in 2000], when we took over a quote-unquote real show with seven people," says James. "We knew what to say, how to market, where to stay."
While James, Marshall and Kaufmann were sowing the seeds for Schadenfreude’s future overseas success, Witt, while crashing at a friend’s place in Roger’s Park, stopped into the Heartland Café for lunch. It would be a fateful sandwich. Soon after, Witt arranged with Heartland owner Mike James to rent out the adjacent Heartland Studio Theatre, which he occasionally leased to various itinerant companies.
When they started at the Heartland, Schadenfreude was the third company performing on Friday nights, and company members remember hanging around outside the theatre with props in tow, chatting with their audience until the previous entertainers vacated the premises. But soon enough Schadenfreude proved themselves a welcome tenant.
"We had really good audiences because we had been off for a while," says James of those first Heartland shows. "Mostly at this point it was still friends of friends or word of mouth…the theatre seats 47, so we turned away people and we would tell them to go next door to the bar, and we’d be there in an hour, and then after [the show] we’d take our whole audience over there."
With Schadenfreude’s fast-growing fan base milling around theatre and bar, the longtime owner of both suddenly had an unexpected cash cow on his hands. According to James, "Four or five weeks into [the run], Mike James approached us and said, 'Who are you guys? What do you do?’ He’d owned that bar since '77, and I don’t know if this is true, but he said that he had broken records of bar tabs. It’s a real local bar. I’m sure that the people who have been there their whole lives hate us."
Local resentment notwithstanding, Schadenfreude cut a deal. The Heartland’s owner, never an enthusiastic theatre manager, made them de facto landlords. They use the space whenever they want, rent it to other groups if they need to, and pay him every month.
Thus began the group’s epic open run at the Heartland; from November of 1998 to July of 2000, they strutted their stuff every Friday and Saturday night at 10:00 p.m., always to an enthusiastic capacity audience (even when the door price shot up from nothing to three bucks, and then to five), and to enthusiastic critical response. Everyone from the Tribune to Newcity to the Daily Herald came out and loved what they saw–a fast-paced satirical revue with up-to-the-minute political and social relevance, forthright and silly.
The fans kept on coming, and it wasn’t just friends of friends for much longer. Schadenfreude–which by this point had grown by two, with the addition of Stephen Schmidt as technical savant and Mark Hanner as a glad-handing pre-show host–kept honing their skills, slowing down the writing process and focusing on their group dynamic.
"In hindsight, I think we were all unconsciously saying let’s get our own style now that we have this sort of underground place," says Marshall. "Let’s really get in there and work on the group dynamic and our writing style and get our own voice."
"Our goal was, if you came back every five or six weeks you’d see an entirely new show," says James."Which kept the die-hards coming because they’d want to see the new things. Plus it kept the medium people who’d say, 'Oh, I haven’t been there in a month and a half.’ We had a lot of those people, that would come back. Which is great, because you’re not seeing the same show all the time, and it doesn’t force us to write a whole new show every week. So we can turn out one really great thing, instead of six really shitty things."
With no director, Schadenfreude’s shows are created in a truly egalitarian spirit, with egos left at the door. James and Marshall explain that the key to writing sketches collaboratively is that no one member gets offended if the others lay hands on their idea.
"There isn’t a scene that goes on that not all of us have changed," adds James.
Whatever they’re doing, it works: After a lauded show at the Chicago Improv Festival and the last weeks of the long run at Heartland, Schadenfreude did 19 shows in Edinburgh, earning enthusiastic responses even when the Brits and Scots didn’t get their American references. In late September the whole team flies out to Los Angles, on the invitation of 21st Century Fox, to do a showcase.
But Schadenfreude isn’t counting on TV stardom (though the tech-savvy group is at work on a "documentary" about a fictional alderman named Ed Bus, tentatively titled The Bus Stops Here). They plan to return to the Heartland for more fun early next year, with a gig in New York planned for spring of 2001.
With non-profit status squared away and some money in the bank from a string of college gigs and a fundraising campaign, they’re looking to open their very own theatre by 2002.