Toronto Fringe show Tonight’s Cancelled looks at anxieties of sketch comedians

Share

"I was naive. I thought I'd show up in Los Angeles, open up the limousine door and sign a million-dollar contract," Stacey McGunnigle says. "But that's not how it works."

For one of Canada's most gifted comedians, it is comedown time, literally so. At the beginning of the two-hander sketch show Tonight's Cancelled at last month's Toronto Fringe Festival, McGunnigle stood atop the stairs at the Annex Theatre. There, she told an audience about auditioning for Saturday Night Live and landing the lead in a NBC pilot.

Top of the steps. Top of the world.

As she walked down the stairs, however, she began listing the things that have more recently gone wrong, including the news that the sitcom (Ellen More or Less) was not picked up by the network. On the stairs opposite her was Jason DeRosse, whose own career dip somewhat mirrored McGunnigle's fall from hot-thing status. By the time the former Second City castmates reached the stage, they were lamenting the fact that they had to lay out their own cash for the opportunity to present their production at the Fringe.

Tonight's Cancelled, one of the hits of the Fringe, interspersed sketches with short soliloquies – "monologues of honesty," McGunnigle calls them – in which the two comedians discuss their own in-flux situations as it pertained to their careers and personal lives.

McGunnigle, for example, tackled her casting quandaries, saying that she's not slim or young enough to be the thin, quirky girl anymore, but not full-figured enough to be the curvy, quirky woman.

The sketches, including one in which a man and woman are embarrassed about their bodies and prefer to have sex in the dark, shared the same themes of uncertainty, anxiety and trust.

"Both Jason's life and my life were in transition," says McGunnigle, upbeat and red-haired, speaking in a near-empty cafeteria at the Globe head office. "Everything was working out, except it really wasn't. We're telling the audience that life's sometimes not what you think it's going to be, but so what? Let's joke about it – let's put this out on the table."

After McGunnigle's pilot wasn't picked up, she decided to move (with her husband and two dogs) to Los Angeles anyway. There she settled into the audition mill, and, in the process, stopped doing what she does best, which is to create material. She also found herself at the mercy of others' decisions. "I had left it to other people to put me in the conversation, as opposed to putting myself there," says McGunnigle.

So she called DeRosse in Toronto and hatched the idea of writing and performing Tonight's Cancelled with him. Part of the show involved the resurrection of a pair of their Second City characters: McGunnigle as a sullen teenaged boy, and DeRosse as an understanding stepfather. From a poignant Second City sketch, the two characters are fleshed out for Tonight's Cancelled.

"It's typically portrayed as an unlovable relationship, but Jason and I are exploring it, and people have responded to it," the Ontario-bred comedian says. "And, in a sense, the characters are Jason and I. We bicker and yell, but we love each other regardless."

Compared to the have-suitcase-will-travel standup artists, sketch comedians have a tougher time finding stages upon which to work. On stage, when McGunnigle and DeRosse more than once lament about paying to play, they were talking about entry fees of $600 to $700 (along with production costs) to mount a production at the Fringe. Artists receive the ticket revenue, but it's a roll of the dice.

Because Tonight's Cancelled was selected as one of the Toronto Fringe's top shows, the production was reprised at the Best of Fringe showcase at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. Those extra shows assured that the show was profitable for McGunnigle and DeRosse.

On the flip side, something like the surreal, brainy Behold, the Barfly! sketch show at the Fringe this summer, with its large cast and without benefit of extra Best of Fringe performances, would have been less profitable.

"It's ridiculous that we've decided to do this as a career," McGunnigle says of the ensemble comedy vocation. "There's no net."

As for the future, the hope is to tour Tonight's Cancelled on the Fringe circuit and to sketch festivals. After the frustration of Los Angeles – "I got a little sucky and really loved a glass of wine for a while," McGunnigle says with a laugh – the comedian's morale is back up, and she's still based in California.

"Creating the show has been an awakening and a reminding of what Jason and I are capable of," she says. "The successful people we all know, they didn't wait around. And I think that realization comes with failure."

Step by step, then, a comeback is in upward motion.