Fourplay Branding
In 2015 my buddy Mike Breen and I produced a show called Fourplay at The Annoyance Theater’s short-lived NYC branch.
Each show was four original ten-minute plays performed by a rotating cast of NYC comedians. The results varied by how much work the comedians put in, but we had some pretty spectacular standouts—the coolest being the first-ever performance of the Not-27 Club’s Three Busy Debras.
For the branding I knew I wanted to play on Playbill’s style. They’re ubiquitous in NYC theater and they represented the stodgy “Establishment,” and that’s everything we wanted to take the piss out of from our run-down Brooklyn basement.
If I’m going to parody something I like to mimic the style as closely as possible (in comedy, that’s called “establishing the base reality,” and you just saved yourself $400 in improv classes). It makes any changes you make even more pronounced and signals to the audience what you’re trying to say.
In this case I was trying to say “this show is called ‘Fourplay.’”
We also wanted to make Playbills to pass out to people with information about the shows. We never really had a chance, because comedians are notorious procrastinators and people couldn’t give us synopses about their plays because most people were writing their plays an hour before showtime. Still, it would have been a cool experience, and here’s a taste of what they would have looked like.
The Annoyance Theater didn’t last forever but the shows we did there were an absolute blast. I look back on it—and Fourplay—very fondly.