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“When we’re playing really well together but we’re also creating characters and moments that make the audience gasp, that’s like… the best.”
Lisa Rowland is a professional theatrical improviser. She is a member of BATS Improv, Northern California’s most acclaimed and longest running improvisational theatre company, and in 2012, Lisa was voted Best Actor by the SF Bay Guardian’s Reader Poll. Off the stage, Lisa is a lecturer at Stanford University in the Theatre Department, teaching the same beginning improv class that put her on the path of improvisation.
In this conversation, the first episode of The Austin Meyer Podcast, Lisa and I discuss how she became a professional improviser, what it takes to captivate an audience when a story is being made up on the spot, and what other storytellers can learn from the spontaneity of theatrical improv.