This week, justArts interviewed Yael Platt ’17, a vice president of Boris’ Kitchen and the director of BK’s section in this week’s 17th Annual Sketch Comedy Festival.

justArts: Can you tell me what some of the differences are between directing a sketch show and directing a more traditional piece of theater?

Yael Platt: First of all, there’s the writer’s process. We have members of Boris’ Kitchen, and other folks on campus — a lot of people from other comedy groups, but also anyone who wants to write for us. So our writing coordinators direct that whole process and are more involved, then we choose sketches. So you really don’t know what your show’s going to look like until the cusp of the show itself. We’re kind of rehearsing in little pockets for each sketch, so a lot of times if you’re not in a certain sketch you won’t even get to see what your peers have been working on until tech week, which is kind of exciting because we’re always surprising each other. When you’re rehearsing a sketch for a while and one of your troupe members sees it and starts laughing at it, it kind of gives that boost of extra confidence. A lot of times in BK we’ll be trying new things a day before the show. Sometimes that will end up making it into the show, because while our sketches are prewritten and we pretty much stick to them, there’s still a lot of room in there to find humorous moments and really work on our interactions with each other as characters within the sketches.

JA: Do you feel like the dynamics within the group and the people that are within the group end up affecting the show and its sense of humor?

YA: Definitely. I mean, every show with us is different depending on who’s directing and the sketches we’ve gotten. But in this rehearsal process in particular, I made an effort as a director to really listen to the folks in the scene. If they were having trouble with a certain part or we were trying to decide “What’s the motivation here? What’s going on here?” I’ll often have suggestions in my head, but I’ll usually ask the actors “What do you think is going on here?” before I make my suggestion. I try to make it as collaborative as possible...But obviously, because we’re a troupe, because the cast doesn’t break up after the show, we definitely get to build those long-term relationships, and I think that definitely helps our comedy. We start every rehearsal by doing check-ins and really listening to each other talking about whatever we want to talk about, whatever is going on in our lives. That’s really important to me to set the tone for the rehearsal process.

JA: Can you give me an example of something which came up in the rehearsal process that ended up in the show?

YP: Zephry [Wright ’17] [is a good]example. There’s a sketch that was making fun of blessing someone after they sneeze, and I could never quite see what was happening because I was in the sketch and was looking away, but I know that Zephry tried something new, like, every single rehearsal. Because we were just sitting there until the actual thing in the sketch started. So I know that one time he took a pair of my gloves and was doing sock puppets, and he would be dancing with his fingers on his legs, and I know that in one of the rehearsals...and before the show he did something with this little doll that he had. And the people in the tech booth started laughing, and so he said “Great, I’ll do that.”

—Max Moran