The Buzz Intro Interview | Couch House Collective

Responder: Nick and Ansley Lynn-Rulon, Founders
Name of Company: Couch House Collective
Name of Show: Glass Half Full

“We’re inviting our audiences to come and play –– this is not a “sit down and watch” theatre experience. We’re asking for your help. Mops and Grimey are going to save the planet, but they can’t do it without you.”

Why should people see your show?

Glass Half Full is taking the existential dread we all feel about our planet and asking two clowns to do their best to save us. To us, that really doesn’t seem too far from reality.

We’re inviting our audiences to come and play –– this is not a “sit down and watch” theatre experience. We’re asking for your help. Mops and Grimey are going to save the planet, but they can’t do it without you.

So come quick! The Great Salt Lake is drying up, California is on fire, and Mops and Grimey have the last bucket of water on Earth!! What should they do with it?

What about festivals intrigues you? And why the Atlanta Fringe?

Nick: I discovered the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in college and had the life-changing opportunity to work there for two summers as an event manager with a venue company, C venues. At the Edinburgh Fringe, I saw experimental works by artists from all over the world challenging the traditional theatre formats I’d grown accustomed to in the United States. I saw some shows that were world-class, and even more that were just absolutely terrible. It was the bad stuff that inspired me the most—no where in the United States had I seen a platform for amateur artists to fail. Ansley and I grew up in a theatre academy where we were taught to “fail boldly,” and outside of college, I found there weren’t many places to fail, to try, to experiment, to take risks. The Fringe was that place.

I’ve long since wondered why there aren’t Fringes everywhere here at home. Little did I know there has been one right here in my back yard! I am over the moon to have this opportunity to take a risk like this right here twenty minutes from home.

What inspired you to create this?

First and foremost, we were both students of the late Ron Anderson: a clown, teacher, and friend who spent his youth traveling rural Wisconsin performing with Friends Mime Theatre. Our art is deeply informed by Ron’s teachings. Everything we know about clowning came from the “Ron Anderson School of Foolishness.”

Our friend Grimey was born from a weekly variety show in Columbus, GA called No Shame Theatre. At the time Nick was an actual custodian at the Springer Opera House, and Ansley had taken to referring to him as the ‘grimy custodian.” While grappling with growing climate anxiety, Nick had the idea for a clown who lived in the world’s trash. The earth’s grimy custodian. Grimey, the Custodian was created to be a mirror of ourselves and the way we foolishly and endlessly try to fix a world on fire by recycling foam cups.

And Mops is simply our better half.

Life has been weird the last few years, to say the least. How has the “real world” affected the art you’re creating?

Ansley: I graduated with my acting degree in May of 2020. I finished some of my classes online, but being that most of my classes were performance based at this point, many just ended in “Y’all get an A, and I’ll figure out how to have this class virtually next year.”

I left college wholly unprepared to be a full time actor, despite 4 years of training. So I didn’t. I got pandemic job after pandemic job, and eventually found a line of work I love more than I ever could have guessed — and it’s not in a theatre at all!

Without the pressures of being a “professional,” I assumed this would free up my art. I would love art for the sake of art again. But instead I found that every day away from acting, I was more and more afraid to be seen again.

Glass Half Full is me jumping into the deep end and refusing to let fear of the unfamiliar shut me off from being an artist again.

So I’m coming back to theatre, but it’s not how it was when I left it.

I fully believe that theatre, as we’ve known it, is dying. Well, ok. Let it die. In the new world we’re living in, where everything is preferred behind a backlit screen, Glass Half Full is a commitment to unsubtle theatre. Theatre that can’t be virtual.

What have you learned from working on your show so far?

We are deeply grateful to get to work with our best friends. That includes the other members of Couch House Collective, but most importantly, each other.

Working with your life partner has its challenges, for sure! We will have been together for 10 years this November, and married for 2. We know what each other is thinking long before we ever say it, and that makes for a lot of heated debates while barely getting a word out.

So along the way, we’ve learned a lot about listening more patiently, a skill that all actors and artists can benefit from. (Especially the ones that are married to each other!)

Plus, we’ve read a whole lot of deeply depressing research about the climate crisis! We sure hope Mops and Grimey have a plan up their sleeves because it doesn’t seem like anyone else does.

There’s a mysterious stranger in the back row of your show, wearing a big ol’ N95 mask and a baseball cap and there’s something weirdly familiar about them, and then they come up afterwards to tell you they loved your show. In your WILDEST DREAMS, who is this mysterious stranger? (Bonus points if your mysterious stranger is an Atlanta celeb.)

Is there an answer other than Andre 3000?!?

[Ed note: No, there is not.]

But seriously, we would love for our Atlanta area elected officials like Mayor Andre Dickens, Senator Rev. Raphael Warnock, Senator Jon Ossoff, State Reps, City Council Members, etc to come see our silly skit. We hope they would take Mops and Grimey’s policy suggestions to heart.

Fringes are the place to really push the boundaries so we gotta ask: are you inviting your family to this show are “Hey, maybe sit this one out you guys…”

Nick: Absolutely. I live to look foolish in front of my loved ones.

Ansley: Absolutely not. My parents are extremely supportive, so I’m sure they’ll be at every show. But my deepest fear is someone at my job saying, “wait, did I see you in clown makeup this weekend?”

Will your show change the world?

Nick: HAH, no. But it may make a few people smile, and that is good.

I’m not going to pretend to believe that educating 100 people about climate change is going to have any measurable impact on the world. We only hope to provide some relief or momentary brevity for the few people like us that might sometimes feel like they are drowning in fear. And maybe some of those people will find a way to change the world 🙂

Zoom meetings: dress up head to toe or Donald Duck it?

Ansley: Soooo… Like I mentioned earlier, I finished my degree in the early days of the pandemic. Only one of my classes actually had meeting times –– a once weekly meditation class.

Our sleep schedules were ruined week one, so naturally, I woke up 10 minutes late for one of our classes. I panic jumped out of bed, ran Nick out of the room, threw on a sweatshirt, and joined the Zoom. It took the professor asking us to all to stand up and step away from our cameras for an exercise for me to realize, I never put on any pants.

Thank God Nick got my text asking him to crawl into the room and put pants at my feet, so I could slip them on without anyone noticing. I guess we really hadn’t mastered the whole “just turn your camera off for a minute” thing yet.

Nick: No, wear pants. Don’t be weird.