Improvisational performance groups have always held a very special and stellar place in cabaret's history of the last thirty-plus years. Chicago City Limits, The Groundlings, Gotham City Improv and Scared Scriptless have always shared the spotlight not only with one another but with cabaret's brightest lights. But in the 1980s, one group and one group alone dominated the field. Their name was ForPlay, they were the brainchild of the brilliant Katha Feffer Cato,

and they could be found every Friday night upstairs at the Duplex when it was still at 55 Grove Street, taking audience suggestions for scenes and obviously having nothing more than abject fun by delighting the crowds.

Mrs. Cato, who was then Ms. Feffer, was initially introduced to improvisational workshops at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. "The second I saw their road show, I knew I could do it. They held workshops after a show, and I jumped up on stage and never looked back. I formed a college group, called Just Us. We performed all over the Southwest, at colleges, high schools, parties, clubs, you name it." It was a matter of time before Feffer received her MFA in Theatre with a heavy concentration in Improvisational Performance. "When I went to University of Oregon," she says, " I was a teaching fellow in an excellent theatre department. At that time there were no courses in Improvisation, and I was uniquely positioned to change that. As I completed my course of study for my Master’s, I was given many opportunities to infuse the curriculum with improvisational techniques and challenges. I wanted to prove that improvisers were not wise cracking jokesters; they are well-trained actors capable of developing characters with interesting things to say. And very,very quickly." She adds, "I was able to convince them to award me a Master's with a specificity in Improvised Theatre, and I don't think they really knew what hit them when I came to town. In fact, my thesis project was a one-woman Improv show. I remember it as a mix of very intoxicating, terrifying, ridiculous and fulfilling." She chuckles, "Can you imagine? People paid money to come see me make stuff up!"

ForPlay came together in the early 1980s, when Feffer opted to hold auditions in her then-habitat in California, knowing that she'd be relocating to New York City soon after, and wanted to be able to grace the city's shores with an already-complete ensemble. "I wanted to come into NYC already cast in something," she says, "so, after my first year in the Master’s program at Oregon, I held auditions and spent the summer galvanizing the group and performing everywhere and anywhere. That was a great summer. And we were always called the ForPlay Improvised Theatre. Sometimes the name worked in our favor, and sometimes it didn’t, but people remembered it." (And, mercifully, still do). Thus. the original group worked in Oregon for a year and numbered six members besides Feffer: these were  Todd Hermanson, Melanie Leslie, Mike Maples, Dan Conroy, Mark Joseph, Vickie Walker and Angela Masters. "Many of us moved back to NYC within nine months of each other," she says, "and in NYC, the group was Mike, Todd, Melanie and Angela besides myself,and then Angela dropped away. I held auditions again, and some wonderful folks joined us over the years: Dan Bucatinsky, Sue Peahl, John Swist, Jeff Clinkenbeard and Gail Dennison, to name just a few."

Her favorite memories of working with the group are varied. She says, "I loved it that on my second day in NYC, we were rehearsing on a rooftop. I loved it that we jammed in Central Park. I loved it that we hung our own posters, made cold calls, performed sidewalk stunts to get attention. I loved it that we called the press ourselves, walked into agents offices, etc. We rehearsed six days a week, we ate breakfast together, we spent holidays and birthdays together, we fought, we were funny together, and most of the time we were mostly good to each other. I remember some outrageous rehearsals where the improvising would go for hours. I also remember some unbelievable style work by Todd Hermanson and Mike Maples. I remember the musical abilities of Melanie. The razor sharp wit of Rhet Wickham, the characters of Sue Peahl, Doug Nervick’s wry wit, John Swist’s total abandonment, Dan Bucatinsky’s instant connection to the audience, Jeff Klinkenbeard’s consistent commitment.. She goes on to say, "I am the most proud of the fact that we pioneered the long-form Improv, the Herold into the NYC Improv scene. I had fallen in love with the form in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, when I had taken some classes at the LA Connection, a seriously great place to dig in and improvise. But like all of the other groups in NYC in the 80’s, including Chicago City Limits and First Amendment, we always performed very traditional Improv shows called game-sets, which are a series of Improv games, and theatre games like “Fill in the Blank” or “Emotion Calling.” A Herold is a series of improvised pieces that share a common denominator.

A Herold can be linear or….otherwise. Well," she continues, "we had climbed our way from sidewalk shows and rooftop rehearsals to the Friday night comedy group at the Duplex at 55 Grove. Even though we did game-sets, our rehearsals included a lot of long-form work. We finally broke out our first public Herold on July 4th in 1985, and that is no coincidence, we wanted to establish our independence as a different kind of improv group. It was a great experience. We definitely got the audience’s attention when we started weaving storylines, and creating through-lines. Of their initial debut on that night, Feffer says, "I remember seeing stunned faces looking up at us from the tables.

I have always loved the first fifteen terrifying minutes of a Herold, when no one really knows where we are going, and I have always adored the last fifteen minutes of a Herold, when the cast knows where we were going, but the audience doesn’t. We performed every week for seven years, and most of the time there was a moment when we all saw the golden road to the end of the Herold. And we would construct the end while playing the middle." Another tremendous milestone for ForPlay would come in 1989, when thy moved from downtown Manhattan into Times Square at the Producer's Club, a black-box theatrical space located above the original Improvisation comedy club on West 44th Street. "We had originally done four years at the Duplex," she tells me, "and then we did two years in a rehearsal room, that we changed into a little theatre every Saturday night. By that time I had met my future husband, Don Cato, and he was producing the group. He found a backer, and he found the Producer’s Club and got us a nine-month contract, at a really decent rate with unlimited use of the space. We did five shows a week.The Producer’s Club at that time was on a single floor, and in a state of disrepair. The week before we opened, we cleaned the entire space, painted it and re-wired it, and rebuilt both the lighting booth and the seating area. That was a great week." Was it ever surprising for Feffer and the group to receive the acclaim and awards that were bestowed upon them? "Well," she confesses, "yes and no. We worked really hard for it.

We did weekly mailings, we were blogging by snail-mail but we just didn’t know it would be called that one day. We campaigned hard for an audience, we fly-ered, we hung our own posters, we worked the TKTS line in the snow and the rain and the wind, we hit the theatre crowd as they left theatres, and we even did random cold-calling. Early on, we got a great review from the late Bob Harrington, and then we employed a very tenacious press agent, Penny Landau, who worked very hard for her clients. We won the MAC Award in 1989, and that was so great for the whole group. When Sherry Eaker called me to tell me she also had a Bistro Award for me and the group, that was and still is so humbling." She hastens to add with a grin, "We had some snarky things happen to us to0, but it all sort of evened out." One is therefore compelled to ask, what would possibly lead to the group's dissolution? "Well," Feffer says, "by the time that we had our own theatre, internal intrigues had begun to do a number on us. Some folks wanted to break out and do their own thing, but couldn’t bring themselves to tell me, and I wasn’t very approachable on the subject. A final blow came when a cast member approached our industrial clients, representing her own group while still performing with us, and that was difficult. Many of the original members had moved on by then, and I disbanded the group and took six months off to get married.

I then called two of the newer members and asked them if they wanted to work on developing a product that could be booked into corporations and other industrial venues. It was just three of us, and we called ourselves Triple Play. We worked for several years, and we did some good shows on the road. But," she says, "when my husband and I got custody of his two daughters, all of that changed. Not long after the arrival of the youngest, I began my move into Youth Development."

Where are the members of ForPlay now, including Feffer? "Well," she says, "Thank goodness for Facebook, I have been able to keep an eye on folks. When we disbanded, there was so much passion that it was hard to stay connected. Mike Maples is a writer in LA, has had some success, and one of his scripts made it to TV. We have stayed in touch and I love his work. Todd Hermanson is a high school theater teacher, and performs a great deal in the Portland area, Rhet Wickham has a successful consulting business in Florida. Johns Swist teaches Improv, and has a good group here in the city, Melanie Leslie is a lawyer and teacher on the college level, and . Dan Bucatinsky is doing very well; he produced "The Comeback" and has many other successful projects under his belt, as well as raising a lovely family. Over the years, we had about thirthy people come through the company, and I have heard that others are in Los Angeles as well." She contunes, "As for me, I am the Director of After-School Services at Henry Street Settlement, and over the years I have brought Improv into the program and have been able to share this passion with hundreds of young people. Each year I come out from behind the administrator’s desk to direct a youth production or a youth program.

I have been able to take kids to perform at the Public Theater, The Apollo (twice!) and we had a very successful collaboration with Chicago City Limits for a few years. I am also working with the Queens International Film Festival. My husband Don Cato I co-direct their Youth Initiative, and each year we put filmmakers into selected Queens schools to run a crash course in independent filmmaking. This year our goal is three schools and five films in forty-eight total working hours. We just finished three days of after-school pre-production (six hours) with the young people, and this Saturday, we and several parents will be meeting at the Frank Sinatra School; we'll shoot all of the films between 7:00 am and 5:00pm.

The finished films will be screened at the Festival’s award ceremony on November 15th and the young people will be envelope runners for the ceremony." She concludes, "It is such a great program and so much fun! Oh, and one more thing," she adds, "over the years, I have done one-woman improv shows, for benefits and such. In 2006 and 2007, Don wrote and directed me in a scrappy little B-movie called "Be My Oswald"(bemyoswald.com). We toured some B-level festivals and had some nice wins. We also had some nice reviews, and we had some fair reviews, and we had two that tore the entire thing to bloody shreds and left me practically lifeless. We have also created an eighteen-part YouTube Series: The Department of Positive Commentary. Our favorite is Part Ten. (http://www.youtube.com/user/6fjack#p/u/7/A0MlsBMpLR8)