Internet Friends is a duo comprised of Charlotte Brown and Stephanie Rae. They are real-life Internet friends, based in Orlando and Miami, respectively, and will perform on Wednesday night of this year’s festival. In this spotlight interview, Brown and Rae talk about bad wigs, the joys of improvising online, and exactly how they became Internet friends.
Your duo is called Internet Friends, and you’re internet friends in real life. How did two internet friends become Internet Friends?
Stephanie Rae: I actually can’t remember exactly how we met… Maybe on one of your improv calls? It was definitely through friends somehow. We just sort of clicked and started talking about improv stuff a lot. Then I think Charlotte came to a Zoom thing I hosted, and at some point we started talking about how we were internet friends and it would be fun to use improv to play with that idea.
Charlotte Brown: Stephanie created an amazing facebook group called Quarantine Creators Club where she posts prompts to inspire people to create when things first started getting shut down because of the pandemic. It feels like a lifetime ago but Kat Kenny, who’s also performing in the festival, invited me to join the group or told me about it, I don’t remember. And then like they say. the rest was history.
SR: Oh, yeah, like that. What she said. LOL.
Tell us a little bit about your show, and what audiences can expect to see when they tune in.
SR: Viewers can expect all of their wildest dreams to come true! Besides that, they can expect multiple characters, unexpected plot twists, and bad wigs – as many bad wigs as I can find.
You two have the distinction of being one of the only internet-native shows in the festival this year. What do you love most about improvising online? What have you learned over the last few months of doing it?
CB: I have several things that I love about doing online improv:
- While online improv is its own thing and different than irl improv doing it still allows me to do improv in some form. I like to think of it as it’s own genre and I love genre inspired improv because even when I was first learning improv I have a filmmaking background so genre is the one thing that always made sense to me.
- I love coming up with new formats and one of the reasons Stephanie and I got along so quickly we were both excited about doing something that could only exist on zoom and thought it would be fun to try to translate that to the stage if the festival happened to be in person because a lot of people were doing the opposite.
- Meeting improvisers from around the world has been super fun and rewarding.
SR: Seeing all of my friends! I really love the community of the Countdown Improv Festival and look forward to seeing new content from incredible talent then getting to laugh and talk to them. Everyone is so warm and approachable. You guys know all the best people! Probably because you are the best people. *shrug emoji* The format of solos, duos, and trios also ensures that I’ll get to check out some new forms, which I love.
You do a lot of cool stuff with Zoom backgrounds and such in your show. What makes for a good Zoom background in an improv context, in your opinions?
CB: In my opinion I think a good virtual background is one that adds to the context of what is happening in the scene without being too distracting. However with that being said like all improv there are exceptions to the rules and sometimes it’s fun to just have something that while it fits the context of what is happening is just completely crazy and ridiculous.
SR: I love a good pop culture reference, but with some subtlety – i.e. I’ll play in the living rooms of famous Black sitcom families. Most of the time, I think the best Zoom backgrounds are common locations which make it easy for viewers to suspend disbelief: parks, coffee shops, etc. But if you’re doing something more niche or genre based, performing from Wakanda can be pretty cool too.
What are you looking forward to most about this year’s festival?
SR: Seeing all of my friends! I really love the community of the Countdown Improv Festival and look forward to seeing new content from incredible talent then getting to laugh and talk to them. Everyone is so warm and approachable. You guys know all the best people! Probably because you are the best people. *shrug emoji* The format of solos, duos, and trios also ensures that I’ll get to check out some new forms, which I love.
CB: This is my first time performing in a festival so I am just hyped about all of it. It’s something I’ve come to look forward to every year as an audience member and I’m looking forward to getting to experience it as a performer. And performing at a festival was a random arbitrary improv goal I made for myself when I made the choice to start taking improv a bit more seriously.
Where can we watch Internet Friends streaming on the internet? (We could Google this, but we figured we’d just ask you.)
SR: Our social media presence is still in the works, but you can find us together on the Hideout Theater’s Twitch Channel. Individually, you can find Stephanie on Facebook at facebook.com/wordnerdsteph and with the Black Improv Alliance at facebook.com/BlackImprovAlliance and www.BlackImprovAlliance.com