Streakers caught in kitchen at the Feve

Hannah Blumenfeld and Ireta Kraal recently met up with three of the members of Primitive Streak over coffee at the Feve. Here's what Jeremy Ellison-Gladstone, Dave Marcus and Sarah Bendix had to say:

Hannah: Where does the name "Primitive Streak" come from?

Dave: I think it has something to do with the cockle cell; when the cockle cell splits apart, there's a space between the cockle cell and the actual splitting apart.

Jeremy: The original people in the group picked it kind of arbitrarily. It's some really obscure biological term that is in books.

Sarah: The definition's on the webpage.

Hannah: How many people are in Primitive Streak?

Jeremy: Twelve humans and one ferret. In all seriousness, they are the hardest working and most talented performers I know at Oberlin. There are people who have been with the group for years and one who just started this semester but there's this very solid, very committed level of expertise throughout the entire troupe.

Hannah: Is Primitive Streak an exco?

Dave: We're a group that's not chartered. We usually have auditions dependent upon how many slots are open for the group. Auditions tend to be really just a lot of fun. Some people audition just because in the auditions you play games. We generally look for basic skills, listening. Someone who likes to hear themselves talk we really don't have much interest in.

Jeremy: If it were an exco, it would have to involve marijuana or cattle, and both of those are expensive.

Dave: One of the things we emphasize in auditions is that you don't really have to be funny to make it into the group. The funniness, that all comes with the skills that we get, that we build up.

Ireta: Are you guys mostly theater majors? Who makes up the group?

Jeremy: We're less than half theater majors now, which is good because most theater majors are a lot like Satan. We have a real interesting cross- section of people in terms of personality.

Ireta: What is their range of experience?

Sarah: This year our group's older; we don't have any freshmen, but we have people who have never really done acting before Primitive Streak or before Jeremy's exco. Last year we had someone who'd done professional improv. It really spans.

Ireta: Do people with more experience tend to do better?

Sarah: The training that we get is pretty good.

Jeremy: Each semester starts from scratch. We start from very basic skills. Next semester we're not going to have any new people so we can move a little quicker through the initial stuff. Sometimes we have a lot of new people, sometimes we only have one, sometimes none.

Dave: We also have a wide variety of people who like meat and eat meat, some people don't. We're about half vegetarian.

Sarah: We don't have any vegans, though.

Dave: But we have nothing against vegans. We actually like vegans a lot.

Sarah: Despite popular belief.

Hannah: How does a Primitive Streak show run?

Dave: We've got an audience out there. We have many different games. Right before the show, the members find out what games they're going to be playing in.

Jeremy: Basically we do a lot of rehearsal before the first show and then we learn different games that are all centered around audience suggestions, completely improvised, and we get, as an ensemble, as comfortable as we can with the games. Then I go through and I pick who's going to play what for that show. It's different for every show, different combinations of people playing different combinations of games. We always rehearse through the whole semester; we do six hours a week.

Hannah: What's the most noteworthy or horrendous audience suggestion you've ever been faced with?

Dave: One time I was playing Floor Pie, this game where the audience writes sentences on little slips of paper and in the middle of the scene we freeze and someone picks up a sentence and has to read it as part of the scene. Someone wrote "blah blah blah I went to the store blah blah blah penis blah blah blah vagina blah blah blah fucking shit." It was unpleasant.

Sarah: For the most part, we do get a lot of inappropriate suggestions because you're asking the audience. Except for a situation like that, where it's written, we're picking them out, hearing and giving them to people, so you can just not take bad suggestions.

Ireta: Is there a certain game that works best for you? Is there a favorite of the audience?

Jeremy: They're different depending on who plays them, when they fall in the show, and what the audiences were. It's neat to think about different combinations and how they'd work and how a certain game will work with this combination and then with this and if I swap these two people how does the game change? I also like to make people have nightmares about their performances by really degrading them in kind of an ultra-masculine military style.

Hannah: How do you mentally prepare for the really quick thinking that's needed?

Jeremy: There's a certain number of skills which do take a lot of focus. It's less of a sense of "Quick, quick!" and more of being able to listen and being able to trust yourself and the ensemble.

Ireta: Are there certain audiences that work best with you? Do you come in and evaluate the audience?

Dave: Our best basis is the Cat in the Cream, partly because it's one of the most wild shows of the year; it gets packed, there's a lot of energy in the room, and it's hot.

Jeremy: Some audiences are really great, but some of them have less personality than a Matzo Ball. It's good for us to play for different crowds. We're planning on going on tour in the spring, to Cornell and to Williams and Brandeis and a bunch of other mildly elitist places. We're also going to be performing in Cleveland next semester at a club. One thing that's really nice is to get a chance to work with different kinds of audiences so we can continue to focus on doing the improv well regardless of audience response. We've had a show almost every week this semester and that's been a real challenge for us.

Ireta: Are you planning on continuing one show a week for the rest of the semester?

Jeremy: We're off until Dec. 4. That's our last Cat show. That's five shows for this semester, the most we've ever done. It's time for Streak to take a nap...not together, mind you.