Building a community, laugh by laugh

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This article was published 08/07/2023 (1193 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alan Kliffer knows when the vibes are off.

When the former Winnipegger-turned-New York City comedy impresario took over operations at what was then known as Improv Asylum, the NYC outpost of a Boston-based company, back in 2019, no one was going.

“It was open maybe two nights a week, with five or 10 people in the audience,” Kliffer says via Zoom. “It had no vibe.”

And so, Kliffer, 37, started to work his magic. First, he knocked the “Improv” off the name, rebranding it as Asylum NYC.

Then, he started knocking out some walls. Kliffer had picked up carpentry during the pandemic and, when the world was shut down, used that time to build new dressing rooms and box office, and convert the old box office into a bar.

When the venue could reopen, Kliffer shifted gears from renovations to programming. And surely, Asylum became a bona fide comedy hotspot in Chelsea, featuring standup, sketch and yes, improv.

Although Asylum NYC no longer has the word in its name, improv is still a big part of its DNA, with the likes of Janeane Garofalo and Colin Mochrie joining Asylum’s mainstage comedy troupe as guest artists.

“Improv is a bit of a dirty word here,” Kliffer says. “I don’t know when it became that, but I do remember, especially pre-pandemic, almost every TV show making fun of improv — like you’re going to your cousin’s improv show.

“It was really in the cultural zeitgeist that improv is bad. And it absolutely can be. But if you have the right formula and the right people behind it, it can be really, really good.”

Kliffer knows that’s true of more than just improv. Asylum NYC finally had a vibe. More than that, it had a community. All thanks to a tenacious guy from Winnipeg.

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To understand Asylum NYC’s transformation, we must go back to 2017, when Kliffer first moved to New York City from Toronto. He was workshopping an American production of an improvised musical called One Night Only: The Greatest Musical Never Written with his mentor, producer Robin Goodman (Avenue Q).

“And was also just pounding the pavement trying to get a job,” he adds.

At the same time, the Upright Citizens Brigade — the storied troupe co-founded by Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts, that launched the career of many comedians — was moving out of its theatre in Chelsea.

“I used to go there all the time and bring my friends and I was enamoured,” Kliffer says. By 2018, a Massachusetts-based company called Improv Asylum had moved into the old UCB space.

Meanwhile, Kliffer was still trying to find a home for One Night Only. “I don’t give up easily on things,” he says. He approached the owner of the Improv Asylum about possibly putting the musical up there.

“As we were talking, I was like, ‘So, who runs this space?’ and he was like, ‘Well, we do — from Boston,’” Kliffer says. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s stupid. I should run it.’”

OK, so he didn’t say it like that, exactly. But he did end up running the place.

Then, in 2021, Kliffer got the call from his boss in Boston telling him Asylum NYC was his and he could do whatever he wanted with it. “Eventually, it really just rocketed into space.”

Saturday Night Live came calling, looking for a venue to hold its auditions. “Suddenly I was like starting to pick people to audition for Saturday Night Live,” Kliffer says.

But it was the 2022 opening of the jukebox musical Titanique, a sendup of James Cameron’s 1997 epic Titanic — complete with the songs of Céline Dion — that secured Asylum’s place on the New York comedy landscape.

Kliffer had seen Titanique in workshops and knew he had to be a part of it (vibes good). And if he couldn’t produce it himself, he could offer it a home off Broadway.

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Kliffer’s love of comedy began as a kid growing up in Garden City. He started taking classes at Manitoba Theatre for Young People when he was five or six.

He remembers a class in which the tiny would-be actors were tasked with doing monologues.

“And this guy, Tim, got on stage right before me to do his monologue, and froze up and cried and ran off the stage,” Kliffer recalls. “And then the teacher was like, ‘And here’s Alan!’”

Kliffer went up and did his monologue — and it killed. “Everyone was laughing, and that was it, I think,” he says. “There’s really nothing like that, hearing everybody just go nuts.”

MTYP was a refuge from school, which Kliffer hated.

“School was kind of a scary place for me,” he says. “This is what I felt all the way through. It’s like, when I go (to MTYP), the kids are nice. And the adults are cool. When I went to school, I experienced the opposite.”

His summers at Camp Massad were also formative. “Even though I probably didn’t love the first three years that I was there, I learned to really love burning the midnight oil, writing a show and making a set.”

After graduating from the University of Winnipeg Collegiate, Kliffer left for Toronto to study at the Randolph College for the Performing Arts, and worked as an actor before turning his attention to producing, which was a better fit for his dog-with-a-bone drive and knack for spotting talent.

“I really did like making everything come together, and I liked being a little more in control of my own career.”

These days, Kliffer is a free agent. After an incredible few years in Chelsea, Asylum NYC will be moving to a new theatre in New York City’s Flatiron District, so while Asylum is between theatres, Kliffer is working on building a national high school improv program, as well as producing several shows — including three that will be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. He’s running the SNL auditions again this year, albeit at a different venue. He has a thousand irons in a thousand fires, which is exactly as he likes it.

“I don’t really let any grass grow under my feet,” Kliffer says. “And even if it doesn’t work out, I let myself be angry or sad for a second and then it’s like, ‘All right, what’s next?’”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com