J: Improv wise, you have been with a lot of teams. Your current UCB improv team Standard Oil has a mix of seasoned veterans and newbies. How is it changing teams?

PM: I think it might be my fifth team at UCB. I was on my last team for a long time. Any time your team gets broken up and you get onto a new team, there’s a sad feeling of (laughing) ‘Oh, I guess I’ll never see you guys again!’ But then you have to get immediately excited for your new team. You mourn the loss of your old team, but you get very excited about your new team and start thinking how it will be interesting to perform with a new teammate, or it will be an interesting combination. Maybe the new combination will work better than the old one was. 

I like to perform with all different kinds of people, even if I was on the old team a long time and loved it. You may get lazy as an improviser if you know one castmate will always come in and do a certain type of thing or trust another person to do something else, and then you end up less active as an improviser. Performing with a cast you haven’t performed with before keeps you on your toes, and you want scenes to be good for everyone. You don’t want to think, ‘I just called it in and sat back and let you do all the work or I was pushing my agenda and didn’t listen to you.’ I think it makes you be a better improviser.

When you get onto a team with all new people, sometimes you have issues with being too polite. You’re like, ‘No you, no you, you sir, after you, go right ahead!’ You have to get over that pretty quickly because that’s not good for anybody. Having more veteran people with newer people makes it exciting for veterans too. You want the experience to be good for someone who’s never been on a team before. You want them to feel, ‘This is exciting and I enjoy doing this and this is great. Instead of, ‘Oh no, that was horrible!’ When I was first on a Harold team, every show I hated myself. I would think, ‘Oh God, now I have to wait two more weeks to redeem myself!’ Instead of thinking about the show or team as a whole, I would think, ‘I’m not funny, I’m terrible, I don’t know how to do this!’ You get over that. Once you do it for so long, you become more team-minded as opposed to your own individual concerns. The team might have a great show and you didn’t feel good about it, but at least we had a good show.

J: Harold Night seems like a big event each week. Do you still get nervous, since the house is always full?

PM: I don’t. It took a long time for me to get to that point. I used to get really nervous. I would be terrified. I had really terrible stage fright. I would think, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Why am I doing this to myself? But once I got out there and did it, I would be happy about it. Now I don’t get nervous at Harold Night at all. I don’t think about whether something was the right move or if I understood everything. That’s all stripped away. The theater is packed, there are people on stage and also standing in the back. When I first started, the Harold shows didn’t sell out every week. The more people there, the greater the energy from the audience. If there are less people watching, there’s more hesitation to react from the audience.

The worst that can happen is if I have a bad scene, my teammates will help out. This supports better choices and makes me enjoy improvising more, and makes the shows better. The audience doesn’t have to sympathize with a cast having a difficult time on stage. The audience sees us having fun and knows we’re enjoying it.

J: When you’re improvising, do you come out thinking you want to work on a particular technique in improvisation games?

PM: I’ll think that. Sometimes Betsy Stover and I will be thinking, ‘Today I’m going to work on grounding the scene or I’m going to work on environment.’ Maybe it’s in the back of your mind and you might do it, like ‘oh I’ll go get a drink of water.’  Or I’ll try to notice the drapes or something. But once we start doing that, then we’re very much in the moment and what ideas we’re generating together. I’m ready to receive whatever you want to dish out. Anything I said prior to that, usually goes to the wind.

I don’t end the show thinking, ‘I really did work on environment, I did great.’ I don’t even think about it after. Once the show gets started, once you generate ideas in the opening, once I’m in a scene with someone, I’m very much in the moment. I try to disregard that there is an audience there and I try to pay attention and think about the situation we’re in together. I try to really listen.

J: In one of the reviews for your one-woman show, the reviewer basically said, watch out for her to move to L.A. Why New York instead of L.A.?

PM: It’s tough because many others in the theatre have moved to L.A. or are moving there, including a lot of friends of mine. Everyone I know who lives in L.A. now says, ‘you gotta move out here.’ I think about it, but when I started taking classes at UCB, in 2003, just for fun, I didn’t think I was going to be an actor, comedian or writer. I lived in New York before, I didn’t move to New York to become a comedian. It was just by chance. I really love the theater here. It’s a different feel than what I just guess L.A. theatre is like. There is excitement on Harold night and on Maude night. It’s a lot of fun to perform at the UCB Theatre.  New York is awesome for everything else that it has. There is so much to do, it’s steeped in history and it’s cool.