The sun came back to California on Sunday after several days of rain. “It’s a clean, beautiful, green morning,” Ethan Sandler said during a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. But the Northwestern alumnus is not bothered by the inconstant weather. After all, he’s recently experienced more severe changes in his own life.
For almost 10 years now, Sandler, an RTVF graduate, has been writing and performing onstage along with his partner Adrian Wenner, an NU theater graduate. The dynamic duo’s most recent collaboration, a tragicomic two-man sketch, has garnered them nominations for national and international comedy awards. Wenner and Sandler recently were honored by the british Perrier Comedy Awards and won Best Sketch at the HBO-sponsored U.S. Comedy Arts Festival for their work writing and performing “Epitaph.”
A strong foundation
The road to success wasn’t a straight path for these 30-something playwrights, however. It was plastered with broken stop lights and drastic turns. “We would perform a show to a crowd, get drunk and then go home,” Sandler said. “And we kept doing that for a fucking long time.”
The two met in at NU 1992 while writing for the Mee-Ow show. “The year we started was a turn-over year so we had a lot of first-timers,” Wenner said “We formed a bond and continued to work together.”
Sandler also directed the Niteskool video his senior year. Niteskool, a production organization that provides an outlet for local musical acts, produces a music video each year for one of its acts. President Saira Khan, a Weinberg junior, said Niteskool gives students the opportunity to experience the struggles and rewards inherent in the entertainment business.
“Members have a working knowledge of how to work with talent agencies, show budgets and the various production needs of a concert or music video, and from this have a definite advantage when competing in the job market verses those who don’t,” she said.
Sandler said his acting classes at NU also prepared him for his later forays into the entertainment business. “I still use what I learned there. Professor David Downs and H.D. Moeyl really give confidence to the young actor,” Sandler said.
Wenner also looks back fondly at the NU faculty, especially Downs and Prof. Anne Woodward, who he still speaks with occasionally. “She encouraged the writing aspect and how to pull from that when acting, which was obviously very influential,” he said.
Woodward remembered one of her encounters with Wenner, who lived in New York after graduation: “He has a running gag with another of my former students, Eric Gilliland, who graduated in the ’80s. Once Wenner left me a dollar bill on which he had written, ‘Ann — Lost another one to L.A. Eric’s taking care of me. Love, Wenner.'”
Downs, in turn, remembers Sandler as a compassionate person as well as an accomplished actor. “Along with a keen sense of others, Sandler has an intellect and an imagination that always gave him significant insights into characters and classic drama,” he said. “Add to that a flexible responsive physicality and great performing courage and you have a terrific actor.”
The theater professor described Wenner as having “a wry and sly sense of irony and humor that always grabbed his audience by its unexpectedness and then by its unexpected insight.”
“What keeps people coming back, I think, is the sense that the humor is rooted in a dark and wide awareness of people,” Downs said. “It’s the quiet Wenner within that I think makes the extrovert performer Wenner so engaging.” And that’s not even touching on what they can do and have done together.
Diverging paths
After graduation the duo parted ways temporarily. Wenner moved to L.A. and Sandler moved to New York with his wife and “started the grand old tradition of starving.” While there Sandler wrote and performed a one-man play until he finally had exhausted the seemingly endless opportunities of the city that never sleeps. He compares the foggy experience right after graduation to his first year at NU. “It was hell. I couldn’t even get into a play, but after four years, you build creative teams and you just keep performing,” he said. “That’s kind of how it works in real life, it all takes time.”
Seeing experienced actors flood in from the west coast, Sandler decided to retrace their steps and form a foundation of experience and fans in L.A. — where, conveniently, his old comrade in comedy already was living.
“The first thing I did when I got to L.A. was call Adrian to try to get something on the works,” Sandler said. “We had built a common sensibility and humor, it felt authentic.”
When coming up with a concept for “Epitaph,” Sandler and Wenner both were drawn to the aesthetics of a two-person sketch. They had the form, all they needed was a main idea and structure.
“We were playing with the idea of writing about this amazing person who we get to know only through bits and pieces told by a series of sketches,” Wenner said. “Then we turned the idea around and made it so the story begins with the main character’s death and how that affected these two guys.”
The result: “Epitaph,” a story about two men coping with regret and obsession at a woman’s funeral. “These characters are tragically pursuing something when it’s too late,” Sandler explained. When co-writing, Sandler and Wenner drew from their own life experiences and can identify with the characters. “It’s impossible not to,” Sandler said. “When writing, your brain is your palette. Nothing’s completely fictional.” The duo even included a secondary story dealing with the struggle to quit smoking (something they were both dealing with at the time) and the elements of addiction and withdrawal that accompanies it.
Continuing to ramble
Despite their recent critical success, Sandler and Wenner have learned to keep their cool.
“I was doing a one-man show in New York, and a reviewer mentioned that a great comedy act has something interesting to say and it says it with style and intelligence,” Sandler said. “He was then kind enough to mention that I had none of that.”
Experiences like this taught Sandler to take every critic’s word with a grain of salt. “If you put any weight in the positive reviews, then you must put an equal amount to the horrible reviews,” he said. “And that’s just not good for your work.”
Heading
