I Am YEG Arts: Glenna Schowalter

Sorry Not Sorry Improv company member, Glenna Schowalter brings the laughter with her thought provoking and ​‘nerdy’ material. The performer, writer, and technician has been involved in Edmonton’s theatre scene for nearly a decade, and Glenna best characterizes her arts practice as ​“collaborative storytelling.” In this week’s I Am YEG Arts story, Glenna shares how she subverts expectations through comedy and the genesis of the improv/​drag show she co-created, All the King’s Men: Mansplaining with Drag Kings (catch a performance at Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival!)

Tell us about how you got your start in theatre, working in technical roles to your current focus on comedy and storytelling.

I grew up convinced that I was quite shy. I had it in my head that I was a shy kid that didn’t like attention. That was a lie, I liked attention when it was supposed to be there, like when I was on a stage. At the end of elementary school, I auditioned for the school play, and I got in. We all got in, but still it was like my first time making the choice to be on stage. In high school performances became more competitive and I joined the tech side as I did not get cast in certain shows. 

I completed MacEwan University’s theatre production diploma and worked in the industry for about a year after I graduated. I got the chance to do some work on the Fringe Festival as part of the site crew, and I worked at various festivals including the Works Art and Design Festival. 

After about a year working in the theatre industry, I was like, ​“I miss writing essays.” I went to U of A and I got my Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature, and then kind of on a whim I applied for their graduate program and immediately got my Masters in Media and Cultural Studies. I successfully defended my thesis in 2021. 

All throughout that time I never stepped back from theatre and I got into the performing side in the comedy space specifically in 2017 when a friend reached out and said, ​“Hey, my improv company [Sorry Not Sorry] is holding auditions. Do you want to come out?” I auditioned and got in. A lot of members of the company were in a sketch group so I also started doing sketches, and then I branched out into stand up. Now I’m coming back to the tech side of things. I got to build a lot of props this summer and it really filled my heart with joy. 

Tell us about how you use comedy as a device to challenge the status quo and expectations. What is it about comedy that lends itself to exploring and challenging topics?

Part of that I owe to my academic career. I took a special course called Comedy Across Cultures and discovered that comedy and horror are actually genres that are very closely linked. How they work is by subverting expectations. Horror subverts your expectations to make you afraid or to shock you and comedy subverts your expectations to make you laugh or to shock you in a different way. Comedy is such a good way to directly challenge something, either by making it ridiculous, or my favourite thing is to present something as quite ridiculous and then show the audience how this person, character, or idea actually has some humanity to them and is relatable.

A lot of the characters that I bring to Sorry Not Sorry Improv may at first glance appear shallow or silly, usually associated with femininity in some way — I’m a staunch feminist. For example, I had a character who was basically an MLM girly [multi level marketing]. She was in a literal cult but she couldn’t understand why people who bought into the product and lifestyle she was selling were having trouble recruiting other people. For her it was easy because she was young, pretty and charismatic. So, on the outside, someone could see that character and think, OK, I’m making fun of this specific type of woman. But I’m actually making fun of the systems that create this specific type of woman. And part of what I did with that particular character was to show that she was stuck in a situation where she didn’t have any power, that her entire life was planned out for her. She was restricted to these things and her finding this group — destructive though it may be — was the way out. I really love making people laugh and then go, Huh.

Tell us more about Sorry Not Sorry Improv and your involvement with the group.

Sorry Not Sorry is a local improv group which even during my tenure has changed quite a bit. We have landed on the brand of ​“unapologetically improv”. That’s our tagline. The idea of being not sorry is because in improv you can’t be sorry — if you were going to fail, you must fail strongly and confidently because then it’s funny. Then it’s done and everyone forgets, and it’s gone forever. That’s the joy of improv for me. 

We’ve really settled into our niche of a nerdy improv company. We do a lot of genre improv, and this started with yegDND, which is our Dungeons & Dragons flagship show. The company was created around the show. 

We do shows that play with genre and appeal to specific crowds. We have a show that is based on professional wrestling, except it’s improv. We have a show inspired by Magic the Gathering, and we draw the cards and use them as suggestions for scenes. We have a show inspired by animé. We have a show — one that I designed — called Monster of the Week inspired by the supernatural monster fighting shows like Buffy or X‑Files. And there is a spy espionage show. We cover a lot within specific niches, but by doing so, we’re doing what we love and hoping to find audiences that love that as well. 

As the co-creator of the improv/​drag show All the King’s Men: Mansplaining with Drag Kings, tell us about the impetus for creating the show and the male persona, Gaz O’Lean, you’ve developed for the show.

During my first Fringe with Sorry Not Sorry, I participated in Cream of Improv Soup, which featured experimental formats pitched and designed by company members. Me and my friend Shanni Pinkerton wanted to do something with male characters. I had it in my head to be more of a Wayne’s World type situation, but Shanni was more involved in the drag community and as it continued, it went more in that direction.

At the time there was this prevalence of men doing podcasts and not all of those hosts had the expertise to deal with the questions they were being asked​.It was very important to us that with All the King’s Men these boys represent the type of masculinity we want to see. My king, Gaz O’Lean, I wanted to be a gamer guy, he’s a friendly, trying his best but ill-informed kind of a fellow. Shanni developed Marq, just one name like Madonna, or Cher. He was much more of a laid back, chill, kind of stoner vibes fellow. And the premise was that we were best friends doing this podcast out of our basement. Thank you for coming to our basement. Give us your questions and we’ll answer them. That was the beginning and over the last eight years, we have added to the cast. We’ve expanded the roster and have started incorporating more specific elements from drag performance, such as lip sync and dance, more exaggerated makeup and that kind of thing.

Now the show runs with a panel of five drag kings, plus our wonderful accompanist Jyn-Ting Ying whose persona is named Austin Otto. Each king has his own specialty, and we also moved away from exclusively positive representation so that we can have folks that we are calling out or making fun of. Something important with those sort of ​“heel” characters — the finance bros or the guy who hits on every girl he meets — is there are moments where the audience get to see that inside this is just a hurt little boy. It makes them endearing and we lower their status a little bit. We’re calling out the behaviour of these men but in the end, we’re calling out the systems that create these men in the same way.

Tell us about what makes the Fringe Festival so special to you and the city. Which shows are you involved in this year?

We are so lucky to be in Edmonton to have the largest and oldest Fringe Festival in North America. To have the opportunity to have folks from out of town and even out of country, come and perform and expose yourself to different art and different ideas and local vendors — it’s truly an experience like no other. And the idea that anyone can perform — fringe theatre is defined by the fact that entries are not juried or vetted. So, you might get something amazing that may not have otherwise gotten to see the stage. And that is what is so exciting about Fringe.

I am in All The King’s Men: Mansplaining with Drag Kings, an 18+ live unrecorded improvised advice podcast that you can catch at the Sugar Swing Ballroom (Venue 26). Every night a different drag king will do a featured lip sync that he has choreographed, mine is August 17^th at 4:00 PM. It’s going to be extremely nerdy because that is my goal in everything.

There’s also our classic yegDND, a long form fantasy improv show inspired by the mythology and rules of Dungeons & Dragons. I built a 20-sided die that the audience gets to roll to determine if our heroes succeed or fail. It’s a very fun time and that’s at the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (Venue 18 — FOH PRO Stage). I will be there for one show as part of the ensemble.

The third show that Sorry Not Sorry is doing (which I’m running tech for) is Agent Thunder: GoldFringer, an improvised spy espionage at Venue 26. It’s based on spy movies and tropes done by two fantastic improvisers: Michael Vetsch and Matt Ness. They play every single character. They wear tuxedos and get so sweaty, it’s delightful. It’s accompanied by our musical improviser, Andrew Creswick. It is so fabulously fun and maybe a little more accessible to folks who are not into all the nerdy stuff, but still like genre and film and fun.

About Glenna Schowalter

Glenna Schowalter is an Edmonton-based writer, performer, and technician. She has been performing with Sorry Not Sorry Improv for nearly a decade, interrupted only slightly by her academic studies. She defended her Master’s thesis in Media and Cultural Studies in 2021. She’s had the opportunity to run lights for some cool scripted shows this year, including After the Trojan Women (Alma Theatre) and Talk Treaty to Me (Two Families Theatre). This Fringe Glenna is splitting her time between running the tech for Venue 26: Sugar Swing Ballroom, filling out the yegDND cast as an NPC, and bringing back the King of All Things Gamer, Gaz O’Lean for All the Kings’ Men: Mansplaining With Drag Kings. When she’s not neck-deep in theatre shows, Glenna likes cosplaying, running TTRPGs, and crochet.