The Intelligencer, Bucks County Advance, Philly Burbs.com:
"Comedic freedom"
By: Naila Francis The Intelligencer
In Jill Whelan’s adult improv class, students are learning to
let loose on stage — even if it means falling flat on their face.
It’s a scene taken right out of an Indiana Jones movie.
The intrepid adventurer and archaeology professor, it seems, has gotten himself stuck in a tunnel of snakes, along with his feisty assistant.
As the two plot a daunting escape, trying to hold an encroaching sense of futility at bay, the assistant blurts out a saying she reserves for just such predicaments:
“My poodle is in love with my hamster.”
She doesn’t like the way the scene is unfolding.
It should be simple enough: During a fox hunt, the lady of the manor accidentally shoots the handsome stable boy in the rear. But just as she’s removing the buckshot, her fiancé rides in with the hounds, catching her off-guard in a decidedly compromising position.
“Cut!”
The frustrated director decides to re-imagine the scene — with the cast embodying personas from “The Wizard of Oz”! Abruptly, the stable boy becomes a Munchkin, the high-born lady the Wicked Witch of the West and her fiancé none other than Oz himself.
When that set-up fails to please her, the director becomes even more outlandish, demanding that the three channel John Wayne, Barbara Walters and Truman Capote, respectively.
In the back of the room, Jill Whelan is howling.
It’s a Monday night at Penn Treaty Park Place in Philadelphia, and the talented film, stage and television actress — best known for her role as Vicki Stubing on “The Love Boat” — is teaching her weekly improv class.
As she runs her students through an arsenal of exercises — Scenes from a Hat, Speaking in Song Titles and Random Audiences Lines in Your Pocket, to name a few — the Yardley resident sets up one outrageous scenario after another and makes even the most mundane rife with humorous potential.
In an exercise dubbed Hollywood Director, which is set up to have the individual chosen as director keep changing the script on set, she suggests that the more improbable the script changes the better: “Do it backwards, do it like (Bob) Fosse or Twyla Tharp dancers … or like isosceles triangles ….”
With only about two hours of class time, including a break for snacks, Whelan keeps a brisk pace.
On this particular night, she moves through six different drills, rotating students through both group and solo scenes that emphasize skills such as character development, forwarding a plot line according to a specific theme, creating a visual within a scene and using physicality to generate laughs.
But whether they’re making the most prosaic of instructions — threading a needle or stuffing a turkey, for example — somehow ooze sexiness, enacting the “world’s dumbest criminal being caught in the act” or making rowdy Irish drinking songs out of “something (they’d) like to keep a secret,” each exercise also hinges on two of improv’s most fundamental skills.
“It’s always listening and reacting,” says Whelan, who studied and taught improv classes while living in Los Angeles and began teaching this class in March. “It’s important that the actors learn how to create whatever world they’re playing in on that stage, whether it be a desert or Wild West saloon or an operating room. Some exercises make them spatially aware of creating sets out of pantomime and painting a picture for an audience.
“But they all rely completely on forcing an actor to listen and react.”
Whelan, who also runs an acting studio for children in Yardley, considers improv one of the purest forms of acting for precisely that reason.
“As an actor, you have to listen to what’s being thrown at you, and whether you’re hearing that line for the 44th time or the first time, you still have to find something new to bring to it,” she says. “Improv is a wonderful way to make decisions quickly about building characters.”
But not all who attend the weekly funny fest have acting experience or aspirations in the field. From a retired police officer to a dean of students and an IT project manager, the students hail from different backgrounds. Some are looking to brush up on dormant skills and others to learn something new. Many come to find a release not readily available in their everyday lives.
New Hope’s Susan Coleman studied theater while she was in college but instead became an interior designer. She’s devoted the last several years to raising her three kids, one of whom is taking acting classes with Whelan. Although she says that her dream was always to appear in the cast of “Stomp,” when Whelan informed her that she would be starting an improv class, the possibility of eventually performing with a troupe seemed like the next-best thing.
“I need an outlet. I’m starved. I give my life to my kids,” says Coleman. “For me, this is my sanity.”
The cathartic experience is part of improv’s appeal.
Though she says she’s wanted to be in a sketch comedy troupe since “Saturday Night Live” made its television debut in 1975, in real life, Terry Marsden is a former English teacher who is serving as the dean of students at Ridley High School in Delaware County. Dealing with dysfunction and children in crisis all day long, she relies on her sense of humor to get her through.
“I get a lot of material from my kids. I bring in a lot of their characters — and their parents,” says Marsden, who also teaches a few classes at Mike Lemon Casting in Philadelphia.
Whelan offers her adult improv class as a place where students can laugh and play, bringing them back, in some ways, to their childhood, and that uninhibited part of themselves that was little concerned with judgment.
“For adults, what is most enjoyable for me is to watch them feel that free again. You have to be comfortable enough to explore and try things out and do something that may not particularly work,” she says, “because we learn from our mistakes as much as we do our successes and that’s very true with acting as well.”
In a nurturing and supportive environment — “She really does mother us,” says Coleman, noting that Whelan will always find something kind and positive to say about each individual’s performance, no matter how terrible — the students learn to trust each other, and themselves.
Part of that training is being willing to risk looking the fool or totally tanking in a skit.
“The nice thing about doing improv in a group is that you have seven other people who’ve got your back,” says Mike Russo. “When no one in the audience likes you, you’ve still got your family.”
Russo, a Doylestown musician, has done extensive background work in film and television, appearing as an extra in shows such as “Law and Order: SVU” and in upcoming films like “The Bounty” with Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler and “Morning Glory” with Harrison Ford. He signed up for Whelan’s class after his daughter took one of her workshops at the now-closed Atlantic Books Warehouse in Montgomeryville. Though he’s used to appearing onstage — he was recently part of the band in the Montgomery Theater production of the musical “I Love My Wife” — Russo is finding that the old adage, “dying is hard, comedy is harder,” certainly holds true.
Yet one doesn’t necessarily have to be funny to be a success at improv. As Whelan builds the class up to eventually writing and performing their own skits as part of a troupe, she stresses that comedy is about finding the humor in communal angst, connecting with audiences in ways they find relatable.
“You can’t come to this class as a stand-up comedian and think that’s your pass in,” she says. “What is essential, first of all, is not self-editing. You have to bring your gut and go with your first instinct because your first instinct is always the right one.
“Audiences are juvenile in that if you challenge them — ‘I’m going to be really funny now, here I go’ — the audience is not going to laugh. If you’re not trying to be intentionally funny but play the scene honestly and legitimately, that’s where the humor comes from.”
Though she admits she’s a big fan of potty humor and relies at times on swearing, she encourages cleverness over shock value.
“What I try to do is correct that natural tendency to go straight for the crutch, which would be the swearing and cursing, and make people work harder,” she says. “A lot of times, people will rely on that as a crutch because they’re insecure about just responding honestly and playing the scene honestly. … The well-placed f-bomb every once in a while can be funny. But in reality — I bring up Bill Cosby as an example all the time because he never swears on stage and he is a brilliant comedian.”
The scene is Saigon, near the end of the Vietnam War, where the last helicopter evacuating the Americans is about to pull out. A U.S. soldier seeks his Vietnamese lover one last time to tell her goodbye.
As she begs him to stay in a vignette no doubt intended to be intense and ultimately moving, the two trade far-fetched lines about the unknown origin of a pair of panties, a botched Botox job and the sudden onslaught of a rash.
“If you’ve never eaten naked in a crowd, you haven’t lived, my friend,” the young woman cries, trying to penetrate her GI’s resolve.
The room roars, and as the soldier grabs his crotch, bemoaning the rash that makes his departure even more imperative and limping around with a mixture of pain and befuddlement, the laughter becomes explosive.
Edwin “Bo” Diaz, the retired police officer who now runs a gym in the same building where Whelan’s class is held, is playing the role of the soldier. The exercise has students drawing random lines penned by others from their pockets at key moments in scenarios provided by Whelan. Though his physical movements are generating uproarious laughter, Diaz eventually tones them down, focusing more on the lines he is delivering — and prompting Whelan to later offer a bit of constructive criticism.
“Your physicality is innate. Learn to trust it and use it,” she says to Diaz, and then to the rest of the class, “He’s cutting it, but if he’s getting a laugh out of his physicality, let it roll.”
That ability may not be inherent to everyone in the class, but the example points to exactly the instincts an improv performer must learn to trust.
“Do not stop a laugh by talking or walking through it,” Whelan advises. “Let it happen — it’s a gift to you.”
Naila Francis can be
reached at 215-345-3149 or nfrancis@phillyburbs.com.
Where’s Whelan?
It’s been five years since Jill Whelan, a California native, moved to Yardley, with her husband, who is originally from Princeton, and their two sons.
She’s since opened her own acting studio for kids in Yardley and also runs her own company, Lower and To The Left Productions through which she’s created her one-woman show, “Jill Whelan: An Evening on Dry Dock,” interspersing musical numbers with reflections on her 30-year show-business career along with anecdotes about the stars she’s met along the way.
While her first priority in moving to Bucks County is being a mom to her kids, she still has plenty on her agenda, including, she says, a crusade to save the Bucks County Playhouse.
Here’s a brief look at some of Whelan’s future plans:
“Venus Diaries,” a new radio show that will begin as a podcast through her Web site in January. “It’s the real-life version of the ‘Sex and the City’ women,” says Whelan. “This is really a forum for the real-life, no-holds barred world of women; it will be like opening the bathroom door and hearing what we really talk about.”
Liberty City Improv, a performing troupe comprised of her adult students. “Initially, that was always one of the goals, to give everybody an opportunity to showcase their talent,” she says, of her Monday night class, “but it’s also to give them a chance to do some writing on their own and skits on their own.”
Additional adult improv classes: “I like helping people find their voice,” she says. “There’s something so exciting about watching an actor find new ways to build a character. … I really like watching them develop.”
To learn more, visit www.jillwhelan.com.
December 27, 2009
New Hope's 54 Magazine:
From 54 Magazine
Jill Whelan - From Childhood Stardom to Family Success
Posted in: A Closer Look By Kara Seymour
Dec 10, 2009
It’s tough to put a label on Jill Whelan’s career. While her role on “The Love Boat,” where she played Captain Stubing’s daughter, Vicki, and her turn as the infirmed child passenger in the comedy classic “Airplane” put her squarely in the spotlight, Whelan’s path as an actress has since unfolded in an array of varying projects and performances.
Whelan left Los Angeles about five years ago in exchange for a simpler life. Far from the palm trees and marquee lights of Southern California, she now calls Yardley home. Still, the thousands of miles that separate Whelan from the epicenter of professional acting has not hindered her ability to make a living doing what she loves. Instead, she continues a busy career in Bucks County, where she currently teaches acting lessons, co-hosts a Podcast on women’s issues called the “Venus Diaries” and takes on various acting jobs, including a recent role in the short film “Looking For.”
Childhood Stardom
Whelan’s career as an actress began quite by accident. “I started because my mother was a teacher, and she needed a place for me to go in the summer,” she explains. At the age of seven, Whelan took part in a community-theater production of “The King and I,” and, according to her, everything “just kind of snowballed from there.”
She soon landed an agent, secured her first paying job in an M & M’s commercial and additional acting gigs quickly came her way. In the late 1970s, Whelan was cast in the “The Love Boat,” a show on which she was featured for nine years. “It was an absolute blast,” Whelan says, on the time she spent shooting the popular comedy. “I traveled six weeks out of the year to all of these exotic places. It was just an incredible experience.”
In addition to her iconic roles in both television and film history, Whelan has also appeared in the soap opera “The Young and the Restless,” as well as held parts in more than 100 plays.
Switching Gears
Whelan began teaching while still living in Los Angeles. At the time, she specialized in working with aspiring adults bitten by the acting bug. But her perspective changed when the mother of a student who attended school with her son Harrison asked if Whelan would tutor her daughter - who was preparing for a pageant – in the craft. Whelan, pregnant with her second son at the time, accepted. Little did she know that she’d be bed-ridden and confined to a hospital room for the final two weeks of her pregnancy.
With the pageant right around the corner, Whelan had her young student come to the hospital for the last few lessons, where she taught from bed. “She ended up doing great in the pageant,” she recalls.
Her dedication to teaching continues to this day, even after moving across the country to marry her husband Michael and raise her second son Grant. Whelan says she finds a special pleasure in working with children. “What I like about teaching kids is that they are so willing to try anything,” she says. “I love working with kids. They don’t have the same filters that adults have.”
And while adults may be more self-conscious during acting lessons, Whelan says she particularly enjoys helping them let their guard down: “I love to re-introduce them to playing because that’s what acting is.”
Teaching From Experience and the Heart
Whelan currently offers acting and voice instruction for adults and children. Her lessons focus on everything from basic acting to musical productions, comedy improvisation to scriptwriting. Once a week, Whelan teaches an adult comedy improvisation class in Philadelphia. Improv, she says, forces performers to listen and react based on the mood of the audience and their fellow cast mates.
Whelan, who obtains her clients mostly through word of mouth, says her students benefit from her many years of experience behind the camera. “I’ve been acting for 30 years,” she says. “I’ve worked with some incredible people who’ve taught me some incredible things.” Whelan learned the craft from such stage greats as Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra.
Whelan says her students range from beginners to professional actors and actresses. She aims to meet the specific needs of each client but is also dedicated to utilizing an array of activities and exercises so that students emerge with a diverse skill set. “I want them to have a taste for as many forms of acting as possible,” Whelan says. That means during the course of a typical class, Whelan may have her students practice a monologue, give them tips on how to break down a character or ask them to partake in an improvisational comedy exercise.
And students seem to appreciate Whelan’s teaching style. Alexandra Coleman, a 12-year-old pupil from New Hope, says her lessons with Whelan have helped set her apart in auditioning for school plays. She’s also been able to land paid roles in television commercials. Coleman says she started taking acting classes because it sounded like something fun to do, but she soon realized her experience with Whelan would lead to more than just a hobby. “Once you start coming,” Coleman says, “you realize you could leave a great actress.”
For more information about acting classes or Whelan’ podcast the “Venus Diaries,” visit www.jillwhelan.com.
© Copyright 2009 by 54 Magazine
Bucks County Woman Magazine Article Link:
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