L to R: Rick Delancey, Brad Lassiter, John Blevins, Jessie Bunting, Andy O’Neill, Jesus, Viramontes, Andrew Grau and Francesca “Cecca” Caviglia at a “Sundry Sundae Sunday” event.
BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC | For owner Ali Farahnakian, the newly renovated Treehouse Theater (154 W. 29th St.) is a homecoming of sorts.
In 2002, he started the Peoples Improv Theater at what is now the Treehouse space.
After PIT moved to E. 24th St. four years ago, Farahnakian kept in touch with the landlord, who told him the 29th St. space was available again — and if Farahnakian wanted to come back, he could.
“So we decided to go back and open it again, but as a black box theater called the Treehouse Theater,” he said in a phone interview.
The theater opened in May of last year, and Farahnakian said that it seemed to be needed.
“It [is] a 50-seat black box theater in an area where there’s not a lot of theaters,” he said. “And black box theaters are going under left and right. As it stands, I felt like if I had the opportunity to put something there that I should. We figured it would be a way to put some art back on the block.”
Farahnakian also owns a rehearsal space called Simple Studios at 134 W. 29th St. and a bar called Pioneers at 138 W. 29th St. (also, like Treehouse, between Sixth & Seventh Aves.).
The idea, he said, is that people could potentially use the rehearsal space, take a class or see a show at the Treehouse Theater and then grab a drink at Pioneers after.
In addition to open mics, improv and comedy shows, stand-up, readings and theater, the Treehouse Theater offers classes in acting, movement, music, writing, dance and improv.
Farahnakian is no stranger to improvisation. Growing up in North Carolina, he said was always interested in comedy, but “never thought it could be a real career.”
Upon graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he studied at Chicago’s famed The Second City and ImprovOlympic (now iO), and was a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade in 1991. He then moved to New York City in 1999 to write for “Saturday Night Live.”
The Treehouse Theater lobby.
After leaving the show, he was looking for a place to teach improv classes and found the theater space in Chelsea, which already had risers.
“It was time to start a theater,” he recalled. “I had been doing [improv] for over a decade at that point. I was an apprentice, really, of other people’s theaters. It was a post-9/11 New York and there was this feeling of what can I do to help — what can I do with the rest of my life? It seemed like starting a theater, a comedy improvisational theater, was something I could do. That’s how we started the PIT.”
Farahnakian said that the Treehouse Theater comes from a long line of theaters. Before it was the PIT, it was the Currican Theatre.
“It’s been a theater there for almost 25 years,” he said.
There are challenges for a new theater — the fixed costs of bills such as rent as well as building an audience, he said.
“The first year of any business, especially a theater, is just trying to stay in business and find an audience and a group of people who want to utilize the space,” said Farahnakian.
“People are familiar with the space, they know it, they have a fondness for it,” he added. “It’s a good space. It’s got good bones and it’s got good energy and it definitely wants people in there playing make believe.”
When it first opened, it had the name This Theater, explained Rob Reese, the theater’s resident director, and they quickly realized that people didn’t like getting into “a vaudeville [Who’s on First?] routine every time they talked about what theater they were going to.” The name was changed to Treehouse Theater in August.
Reese said that while they are very much committed to improvisation, the Treehouse Theater is about expanding to all areas of performances — “trying to get the energy and spontaneity and joy that you find on an improv stage in regular theater, for lack of a better term.”
There is a series of different theatrical improvisation classes for both the novice and experienced, said Reese in a phone interview, as well as scene study, monologues, voice and modern dance classes.
Reese also teaches classes and has extensive experience in improvisation. Like Farahnakian, he was part of the Chicago improv scene and was in Farahnakian’s shows. He is the founder and artistic director of the improv company Amnesia Wars and has toured the United States and the world teaching workshops and performing.
He has known Farahnakian for around 18 years and said, “he drew me into” the Treehouse Theater.
Also a writer, one of Reese’s plays has been included in “Playing with Canons: Explosive New Works from Great Literature by America’s Indie Playwrights,” which is edited by Martin Denton, who has been immersed in the indie theater scene since 1999.
The anthology is a collection of 18 plays that are all adaptions of classic literature rewritten by modern playwrights over the past ten years or so, explained Reese.
On Wednesdays, the Treehouse Theater hosts a reading series featuring one the plays from that anthology. Every Sunday night, there is “Sundry Sundae Sunday” — a variety show comprised of the theater’s resident companies each doing a set for around 20 minutes.
Also upcoming is “Many Mansions,” from Feb. 11 through 26. Written by cartoonist Brooke McEldowney, according to the press release, the play follows a young atheist, Cecily Gosling, who “boards the subway at 42nd Street to find religious ecstasy in a waiting room” — and more adventures.
For more information, visit treehousetheaternyc.com.
