Moving On. Moving Forward.

I think sometimes improvisers get hell bent at working at certain theaters or making a house team, and then they stay too long at places out of frustration or insecurity.

I think moving on is even harder if you work with improv gurus, whom you make your higher power because you think they have all the answers. I know because I have done this too many times to count.

Often when we stay somewhere too long, we’re not only doing because we want to achieve a goal or get validation. Sometimes we stay too long because we fear that if we leave, we’ll miss out on a great opportunity that is just around the corner or that if we leave our improv and our life will fall apart.

In some cases, if we have been at an improv institution for a little while and still haven’t reached the “top,” it may be best to stay a little longer. But in other instances, the best way to apply what you have learned from that teacher, school or theater is to leave.

That was my experience working with Del Close back in ’80s. I learned a lot from him, especially about doing honest monologues as opening for the Harold. In fact, I enjoyed that more than improvising scenes.

Del was a guru and I willingly drank the Kool-Aid and believed his type of improv was the only true form of improv. Eventually, I left and found The Annoyance Theater, which was quite a different style than Del was teaching, even though a fair amount of the improvisers there had studied with him.

Though I had done pretty well at iO and had made a house team there, at The Annoyance I reached a new level of creative and critical success by doing my one-person show, “I’m 27, I Still Live at Home and Sell Office Supplies,” that I would never have achieved had I stayed at the iO doing Harolds.

The show was influenced by Del and his work, and my director Gary Rudoren, who also had been a student of his, played a big part in that as well.

And then eventually I left the Annoyance Theater and years later started teaching at Second City before I left the Training Center. But that transition, too, helped me because I took what I had learned there and actually got better as a teacher, and in some cases, as a person. Once I stopped teaching in Second City’s institutional system, I didn't have to hide behind their name and reputation, which did not work well with my people-pleasing ways, and find my own path as a teacher.

I say this because recently, after 17 years, I left group therapy. Being in group was certainly hugely influential in my life, but after that much time, I felt I had learned everything I was going to learn there, and if I stayed, I knew I would stop growing.

And while I'm happy that I made the decision to leave, doing so has brought up those same feelings I had each time I left or was fired from a theater. But when I look back at each of these transitions, I realize that didn’t fall apart when I left. I actually got stronger, wiser and better looking. We all have to move on sometimes or we stagnate. And sometimes it's our decision to move on and sometimes it's not, but either way, every new transition means we are moving forward.