Interview: Geri Hall And Gary Pearson of MIDDLE RAGED at CAA Theatre

Geri Hall and Gary Pearson’s MIDDLE RAGED comes to the CAA Theatre this weekend for three shows. Exploring “the ridiculous complexities of life between 30 and 65, when the bloom is off the rose, but the thorns are sharper than ever,” the show is filled with sketches, songs and improv from the veterans of Second City and shows such as MadTV and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. BroadwayWorld spoke to Geri and Gary about their long term friendship, how a bottle of wine and a DIY will kit make for a truly weird date night, and why they think anyone can relate to MIDDLE RAGED’s theme of having to shoulder life’s responsibilities as a mature adult while still feeling like you’re 21 inside.

BWW: What was the inspiration behind MIDDLE RAGED?

GARY: Geri and I, we're veterans of stage. We've done a lot of comedy earlier in our careers. We've done a lot of stuff with TV, but we started doing sketch comedy on stage with Second City and other groups. We were thinking about doing a sketch show, and we went and saw a lot of sketch shows in Toronto. They were really funny, but they were all really young people dealing with stories and situations that come up in your twenties. We thought, well, that's all well and good, but it doesn't really reflect our lives and we wanted to bring something to the stage that really was about what our lives are like now. At this point in our in our lives, everything's different from when we were in our twenties, that's for sure. That's where it got started.

GERI: We were really strongly impacted by the idea that we wanted a show and a series of sketches that told stories about our life, or reflected our experiences back to us. And we started researching a bit and realized there were really no shows, at least anywhere we could find locally, that were addressing this material from both a male and female perspective. You have groups like Women Fully Clothed, brilliant friends of ours and brilliant sketch comedy, but it really is through a very strongly female lens, which is wonderful.

But, Gary and I are married--to other people, not to each other--but we thought would be really interesting to look at these issues: the idea of of aging and watching your body start to fall apart; what it's like to be in a long-term relationship when the bloom is off that romantic rose. How do couples keep things fresh when they've been together for 20 or 30 years? Because it goes by like that. What comedy was there to mine when you're in that stage of life where you're still trying to get your kids out of their diapers, but literally trying to have a talk with your parents about, maybe it's time to get them into diapers?

We sat down at my place with a notepad and said, okay, what's going on in your life, Gary? And Gary shared some things that he was dealing with in his house. And then he asked me the same question and I answered and we looked at this notepad afterwards and said, my lord, this is a sketch show. It's actually enough stuff for three sketch shows.

GARY: With kids in their twenties, they tend to think they're pretty immortal. But after you get around 35 or 40 years old, things start to creak and don't bend as well and your body starts to do different things, so health is a concern. We're raising kids, and in Geri's case, her kids are younger than mine. We're in two different stages; she's got young kids and I've got kids that are young adults that I'm trying to get out of the house. Those are different challenges.

Then there are financial challenges. We go to more funerals than weddings. People are dropping off, whether they're older people that were mentors to you or heroes. A lot of my comedy and rock and roll heroes have been dying off. It's kind of depressing. This whole world wasn't really on stage anywhere that we saw. So we wanted to take that in and put it out there and say we know what you're going through.

That's the most common comment that we get about the show, is that it's relatable. People will say, "I just had that conversation with my husband yesterday" or "We had that very same problem" and we hear that all the time, which is very satisfying for us.

BWW: it's a unique position to be in to be in this sort of sandwich generation where you find yourself having to care from both ends with both children and aging parents. It's a unique kind of pressure from both sides.

GERI: It's exquisite pressure.

GARY: And everybody goes through it.

BWW: What brought you back to the stage from television?

GERI: Gary and I were really lucky that we started at the Second City, but then got into television for quite a few years. When this show was in its very early stages, we just felt this overwhelming urge to return to our first love in performance, which was theatre.

You know, TV jobs are great. and they can help you pay your mortgage a little bit, but you're performing in a vacuum. You know, when you do something funny on a TV set, silence is what you're rewarded with. It's a really unsettling thing that performers have to learn to train their brains past. If you're doing funny work and the room is silent, it's not that you're bombing, it's that the crew has to stay silent. When you're on stage and you do something painfully, relatably funny, this wall of laughter is your instant reward. And I think theater actors are just junkies for that feeling. We needed a fix and we needed it bad because it had been a long time.

BWW: Your show even incorporates some improv with the audience, right?

GERI: There are 2 improv scenes in the show, one in each act, and that's a really cool thing because we get stuff from them. We find out more about a couple that's in our audience, and then we reflect that back to them. A lot of people comment that they really enjoy that. We have some fun with them and we try to be nice about it.

GARY: Geri thinks I'm mean. One of the things we do is "First Date," so we'll talk to a couple and find out what their first date was like. In some cases, they can barely remember, because it was 30 years ago. We've had couples that have been together for 30, 40 years and then we also once or twice had couples that were very early on in their relationship, like they've been going out a couple of months.

GERI: With one couple, it was their first date! And as Gary was asking him about why they were together and why he chose a show for their first date, he just very sweetly said, "Come on man, I don't want to mess this one up!" Yeah, "I really don't wanna blow it!" It was very funny and sweet, and we got an email from that couple afterwards.

I mean, one of our main goals with this show is to make it so relatable for the audience. We want them to feel that their lives are up on stage and they're very common experiences are up there. We certainly come from improv; the style of the Second City is such fun and that's really what we do. If you've been to a Second City show, this show is very, very similar except that it's just Gary and I. We don't get a second to take a breath. We never get to really leave the stage for more than three seconds because we're the ensemble. It's exhausting and it's the most exhilarating and fun experience of my life.

GARY: Geri and I are in the whole show, so we have the whole show to explore everything. We know that whatever we're doing in the improv has to be satisfied by the two of us. Nobody's gonna come in and save it, that's for sure.

GERI: It's actually a wonderful feeling, though, because it takes it takes the chaos factor out of improv when you know it's the two of you and that you are sitting down into a scene and you're not going to end the scene until it's resolved in a comedic and fulfilling way. The chaos is gone and we just get to just relax into improv, which is a beautiful and rare experience.

BWW: So speaking of it being just the two of you, a lot of the critics have praised your stage chemistry. I know you're not married, but you are clearly are having a lot of fun working together. What do you enjoy about this partnership?

GARY: Well, I always say, "she wishes!" No, Geri is a very good friend, and she's also pretty good at this. So it's good for me. I just have to stand near her and she does a lot of the work, so: pretty easy gig.

GERI: It all really does come down to our friendship. Those first few discussions of wait, could we do a sketch show? Should we do a sketch show? They were literally happening when Gary was very kindly bringing Starbucks up to my house when I had two new screaming babies. I was home with twins, blindsided by the wondrous exhaustion of parenting, and Gary would just come up with a care package of coffee and chocolate to get me through a day.

And it was in those really raw, real moments of friendship and normal life that we turned to comedy and thought, well, okay, this morning's been hard, but there's got to be a way to make this funny because there's funny in here for sure, even if I'm too tired to see it right now.

BWW: MIDDLE RAGED first coalesced in Toronto in 2019 at SketchFest and then at the Toronto Fringe Festival. What is it like going from Fringe to Mirvish, and has the show changed at all?

GARY: when Geri and I were talking about this years ago now, we said where could we play this? And we started out with a little club in Oakville doing some sketches on other people's shows, and we went into the Social Capital and did some sketches in Toronto. We thought, we could tour this thing all across Canada. How does that work? We have no idea. We'll have to figure that out. Maybe one day, you know, we'll get something interesting enough that Mirvish will take an interest in it. And we sort of laughed about that possibility, but sure enough here we are, which is really quite remarkable. That we made this out of our conversations and whatever out of nothing out of those muffins and coffee that we're here now and we are being presented by Mirvish is kind of astounding.

GERI: I would say that the seeds for what is now MIDDLE RAGED were all there and sprouting. But the show is so vastly different from our foray onto the stage at SketchFest. It's almost double the length. Much in the same way that we evolved shows at Second City, every single time we perform it, we're sharpening it and honing it based on audience reaction. As Gary said we started out on these tiny stages just really doing it for personal pleasure. We thought these things were really funny and really important to share.

But then we started booking, first around Ontario, and then we got a tour out east and a tour across Newfoundland and then a tour all across western Canada. We knew we had a good show, but we we were genuinely shocked at how emphatic the audiences were about loving it and about the joy of seeing themselves in the show. It was perpetually dawning on us that this show could be bigger than we even think it could be.

So as theater geeks as high school kids and as people who've been in the business for all these years, the joy of this upcoming run, I kind of still have to pinch myself and slap myself a bit. We're going to the CAA and it's gonna be such a joy. After COVID, we're so thrilled to be back in a place where the audiences could be packed or sold out again, because that's how comedy should be experienced.

GARY: These shows this weekend are pretty well sold out. Two of them are, and one still has a few seats in the balcony. So we know we're going to have a raucous crowd of 700 people.

BWW: I love the story of the couple on their first date that emailed you after the show. Are there other audience reactions that you've really enjoyed or that have surprised you?

GERI: We were out touring in Newfoundland, and when we landed in Gander where we were doing our show a few nights later, there was a huge forest fire burning just like 10 kilometers south of us. So it was literally so smoky in that town and the fire was so close that they put that the entire town on evacuation notice, meaning pack a duffel bag because at any moment you will get a 1-hour warning that you need to leave if the wind shifts.

So Gary and I were thinking, oh my lord, how are we going to get people in a comedy theater when there's a fire raging and their lives would literally be at risk to come see a show? And so, desperate to fill the seats, we went out to the park and just started handing out flyers. "We know you guys have a lot going on right now, but we'd love you to come see the show." One of the groups that we walked up to, this fellow said, "I'd like to be there, but I'm actually not from here. I'm from Ontario. But if you're ever playing Ontario again, I'd love to check you out." And as jaded actors, we thought, oh, sure, you'd like to check us out in Ontario. We said a nice goodbye and off he went.

Well, a few months later, we got a Facebook message from him saying, hey, I'm the guy that met you in Gander. I see that you're coming to this theater now. I'd love to come see you. He came to the show and then a month later, he emailed us and said, we had such a great time at the show, that now I want all my friends to see it. I'm bringing 10 friends. So he brought 10 friends back. He came an extra time to see the show after that. And so we surprised him at intermission and named him the official Middle Raged fan club president. We told him that if he ever comes to any other shows, he's got to be our guest.

Well, we just got a message from him that he's bought tickets for the CAA and he had a t-shirt made up that says Middle Raged fan card president. hHe's coming to see us at intermission. It's stories like that which remind us that this material really is resonating with so many people and that gives us the most incredible joy. I don't have the words to articulate that. It's beautiful.

GARY: We've done a number of shows around the GTA, and some people have come to see the show in one town and then they show up again in with with other friends in another place, and that's really satisfying. They're following us!

GERI: I think it's because the material isn't really about us. They see themselves in these issues that we mentioned, aging and caring for older relatives, or trying as a couple to write your will together for the first time. In real life, those things are pretty heavy and I think there's such a relief in a show like this to counterbalance those very universal difficult experiences with humour--sometimes dark humor--that is innately a part of that.

We have a sketch about a couple writing a will kit. Gary came over when my babies were very, very young, and said, how are you doing? The first year is really rough. Are you guys okay? And I said, well, we had quite a night because my mom realized how tired my husband and I were getting and she said, you two need a date. I'll watch the babies. Just go out. Go to a movie. Go do something fun. And we said, oh, that'd be amazing. That would literally save our lives at this point.

So we started getting ready to go to the movies. And then with all these postpartum chemicals coursing through my body, I had this horrifying realization that my husband and I were about to get in a car and drive away from our children and we didn't have a will in place. And I turned to him and said, oh my gosh, if we crash this car, who would the babies go to? There's nothing; who would our house go to? How would we know they wouldn't be destitute orphans?

I was just bawling my eyes out because it felt so real and so dangerous. And so legitimately, instead of a movie, we ended up driving to Chapters, buying a will kit from their kiosk and our date night was a bottle of wine as we handwrote wills so that maybe the next time we got an opportunity to go out the kids would be safe if that dark thing happened.

So I shared this story with Gary. And he burst out laughing and said, I know that was hard for you, but it's also ridiculous. So I'm going to write that up as our first sketch. And off you went, typing  his version of my night writing a will. And when it came back and I read it, it was literally at the end of that scene that I was like, oh, we've got a show. And that's a sketch that a lot of people come up afterwards saying, oh, we haven't even done ours yet because of that. We can't, we don't want to go there. We don't want to have those arguments. So that's the world of MIDDLE RAGED, the painfully relatable.

BWW: It sounds like it was a really fun night for the both of you. You and your husband.

GERI: Yeah. It was so fun. Wills and wine. And that's it, honest. I feel that paranoia is a part of getting older; that, as Gary said, when you're young you feel invincible, and then with every decade that passes you just see the million ways that it could come for you and it really informs all of your choices. It creates midlife crises in people. Some of your friends and people you know drop off from one thing or another. They leave the picture. So then that makes you really go, oh, jeez, maybe I should watch what I'm eating. Maybe I shouldn't drink so much. Maybe I need to start exercising, all those kinds of things.

BWW: It can go both ways. Some people take to it with extreme caution, and some people decide, you know, I see my friends drop off, I'm throwing caution to the wind and doing what I want right now.

GERI: That's right.

GARY: Yeah, there's that, too. I'm always telling my wife, I've never been to Paris. When are we going to do that? We have to go and do this stuff while we can.

Better that your midlife crisis is yearning for a trip to Paris, then, "You know what I've never done? Meth."

BWW: You created song parodies for the show with Jeff Rosenthal. Why did you want to incorporate song into the show as well?

GARY: I think that just goes to our history of doing sketch shows on stage. We want to give people variety. We do three or four songs, and the songs are touchstones for people as well. They know them.

GERI: I grew up watching the Carol Burnett show, so when I think of great sketch shows, I think of being taken on a wild ride where you never know what's coming next. Every episode of her show, you wouldn't know who the guest star was going to be, what song she was going to send up, what movie parody will we see that's of the moment. Second City is really in the style, where if you keep throwing new experiences at the audience, it never gives them a chance to get tired or bored with what you're doing. It's a comic onslaught of new experiences. Song is just another really funny way to tell a story and we can sing well enough that we get away with it.

GARY: Geri is actually quite good. I am not, but I do it anyway. I just do the best I can. The thing about doing songs in a comedy show is the expectations for your voice are not very high.

BWW: You can't really lose because either it's good, and that means that it's good, or it's not so good, and that means that it's funny.

GARY: I think I'm probably on that side of that line. But I do what I can. It is about variety. The audience really has to pay attention and they don't get bored because we're in one world for too long. It feels fast to us and I think it feels fast to the audience too.

BWW: There's something about cultural touchstones like movies and television and songs that are things that unite generations. And especially in the attempt to appeal to a certain age group, music transports you. And you're referencing things like Star Trek.

GARY: I have these enthusiasms and fan stuff that I've had my whole life and it's not too surprising that pretty much all of them show up in this show. We have a Star Trek joke. We have a Star Wars joke. You can go to all those places, and you can also go to really grounded places at moments too,  topics that have been interesting to me as a comedian and just as a human my whole life long.

GERI: We have a sketch about body image that in a hilarious way deals with this unfortunately very common experience of women looking in the mirror and not liking what they see. And there's something so incredibly freeing as a comedian to get up on stage and just say all of those things that if you were feeling them alone in your bathroom would be awful, but when you're sharing them with 700 people who are laughing because they've thought the very same things or feared the very same things, it's such a uniting moment.

With things like body image issues, it's all of us. I think that anybody who goes out and frolics in a bathing suit and has a good time has literally won a war, that they were able to get to that moment and just be present and enjoy it, not be overburdened by all the nonsense that we're fed our whole lives.

There's another sketch we do about the really intriguing challenges of modern parenting, that there are so many sources telling us how we should be raising kids and if we do this it's going to damage them for the rest of their lives, and if we don't do that it's going to damage them for the rest of their lives...and how do you even get through breakfast with all of these voices yelling at you?

So I love that we can have these light-hearted Star Trek moments and then these really grounded human moments too of we're all going through together. There's a way out and I think that way out is by laughing through it. I'm able to address some of those issues that are really, really important to me. The parenting sketches that we wrote really just came from my heart because I was like, oh, I don't know how to do this.

You don't realize it. You look at us and you see our older faces. You don't realize that inside we still feel about 20. No matter what age you are, you freeze. Everyone's freeze point inside is slightly different, but it's always young. And then you get to a point where you look in the mirror and you go, wait, that doesn't look like how I feel inside because I still feel very, very young. But now the skin on my neck is getting weird and my eyelids do weird stuff when I put eyeshadow on them. This floppy thing, no matter what I do at the gym, refuses to be changed. You realize that there's this common experience of being a young person tucked in this very strange cage that we traveled through life with and there's so much comedy in there.

We've really got enough material to do two more shows on this topic. But we're not done with MIDDLE RAGED yet. Middle Raged the first is just our joy, and there's still so many places we have't played across Canada. Even going into the States one day is a dream of ours, to take this show and march it through the suburbs of everywhere because this is a show we always say this is a show about everyone. Every person in the world is aging. It's the one thing that we can all say is absolutely happening to all of us--if we're lucky.

BWW: Is there anything else that I didn't ask you that you would like to talk about?

GARY: I usually like to say that I carry Geri through the show. I do the best I can.

GERI: And as you can see, he's a joy to work with, very humble.

GARY: And all that talk about body image, I do feel bad that so many of the people that come to our show can't measure up to my physique. But I gotta be me.

GERI: I guess I would just wrap with saying, I mean this from my heart, we feel so humbled and privileged to be able to do this show for people because when we started, we didn't know where it was going to go and if it was going to go anywhere. And as performers, to get to be on stage making people laugh for a living, that is the greatest privilege that I've experienced. We just thank every single person who buys a ticket to the show and we promise them in return we're going to make you laugh.

MIDDLE RAGED runs May 3-5 at the CAA Theatre.

Photos of Geri Hall and Gary Pearson by Jonathan Ellul

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