Jenn Bartels, Aubrey Plaza, & Casey Wilson Featured in the NY Daily News
April 20, 2008, 9:43 pm - [ Category: NY Shows ]
BY PATRICK HUGUENIN
Saturday, April 19th 2008, 4:00 AM
Only a week after her prime-time hit "30 Rock" returns to TV, Tina Fey will hit the big screen in "Baby Mama," alongside fellow star comedian Amy Poehler. Count in one recent Vanity Fair cover and it's safe to say Fey is the reigning queen of comedy - and has at least temporarily stolen the spotlight from the Wilson/Stiller/Rogen fraternity that has dominated the form. New York's up-and-coming female comics can find plenty of inspiration in the resurgence heralded by Fey, Poehler, Kristen Wiig and Sarah Silverman, and for five women in the five boroughs, the stock character of the funny girl will never be relegated to the wings.
JENN BARTELS
Jennifer Bartels, 26, was born in North Carolina, but spent part of her childhood in Staten Island. After college, she moved back. "Staten Island has really played a part in the characters I pick to play," she says. "I'm big on playing, like, a Duane Reade employee that wants to get a pregnancy test or somebody that has a fight with Vinnie because he took her Honda."
Bartels performs long-form improv comedy with her team, Twelve Thousand Dollars, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the place that launched the careers of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and other contemporary comic bigwigs.
Bartels calls Fey, and others such as Poehler and Kristen Wiig, "new age," women who are both successful and attractive. "I think that stereotype of [the female comic in] the vest with the tie and the water has died down a bit," she says.
Beauty and funniness haven't always gone hand in hand in pop culture, Bartels points out. She grew up aspiring to the princessy leading roles.
"I always wanted to be the pretty girl," she says, "the one who's, like, 'Come, save me, please.' And I never got that. I was, like, 'Why am I playing the fat sister?' And I'm not fat at all."
When she started reading for the comic parts, she began getting more work.
These days, she can be found taking the Staten Island ferry in time for a late-night improv show.
"At first, I envisioned 'Working Girl,'" she says, "where Carly Simon plays and I'm on the ferry in my tan tights and my Reeboks and I'm, like, 'I'm going to make a difference and be someone.' I literally played the song on my iPod to rev myself up. That worked for, like, one month."
CASEY WILSON
If Tina Fey set the standard for power-house comedian-slash-writers, Casey Wilson is ready to step up to the plate.
The 27-year-old is the newest member of the "Saturday Night Live" cast, the show's first hire after the end of the writers strike.
Her first feature film, "Bride Wars," co-written with frequent collaborator June Raphael, is in production, with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson as friends who plan their weddings for the same day.
"June and I are writing a little something for ourselves," Wilson says of other projects on the slate. "It's crass and kind of darker."
Growing up in a boisterous family in Alexandria, Va., humor was almost genetic for Wilson.
"My dad's in politics, and my mom was too, so we were a very funny family," she says. "I have a younger brother who would raise his hand at the dinner table to get a word in because he was more shy. He was looked down upon in my family. 'If you want to talk, you better come up with something!'"
Studying theater at NYU, Wilson met Raphael and the two created a two-woman show. "We called it 'Rode Hard and Put Away Wet' after this phrase my mom used to call women who were, like, in an airport bar before 1 p.m.," says Wilson. "We wanted to do a show about those types of gals who've got too many miles on 'em but keep going."
The show went from NYU to Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre - already a hot spot for comics. "I went to see a show and Amy [Poehler] and Rachel Dratch were in it, and I just thought, 'This is for me,'" says Wilson.
After about a year, the show moved to Los Angeles, where Wilson performed for two years. It wasn't until she had nabbed her spot at "SNL" and moved back to Manhattan that she realized how much she missed New York.
"I feel like my L.A. experience was listening to musical theater in my car and crying. ... I'm so glad to be back."
Her audition for "SNL," she says, was one of the toughest performances of her life. "You've got five minutes and you basically have to do - in Studio 8H - as many characters as you can think of. You just do them one after another, rapid-fire. I brought in a friend to help me do this bit about a quadriplegic stripper. He was gracious enough to carry my dead weight around."
Being on the show, though, has been pure enjoyment - even starting her weekly performance at 11:30 p.m. is no trouble.
"I used to get this huge thing of coffee and before the first show Kristen Wiig was like, 'You know, I don't think you're going to need that coffee out there.' That adrenaline kicks in in such big way that it's like I've had my seven cups of crackalatta at Dunkin' Donuts."
AUBREY PLAZA
Even if you haven't been to a comedy club in a while, you may have spotted Aubrey Plaza dressed as an NBC page, giving a studio tour in prime time on the sitcom "30 Rock."
It's an experience she knows well. The 23-year-old comedian once worked as an NBC page.
"When they were casting that episode they were looking for someone who could improvise what a page would say. Ideally, they wanted a former page who was also an actress and that was me," she says. "I even had my own page uniform I brought to the set."
Plaza moved from her native Delaware to attend New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She was in the perfect place to get behind the scenes at her dream gigs, interning at "Saturday Night Live" and working various other jobs at NBC.
"I think ultimately I want to be in a position where I can write my own movie and star in it," she says. "Or have my own TV show and be head writer - Tina Fey style."
When interviewed on the phone, she was in Los Angeles for a series of auditions. In New York, she performs with Upright Citizens Brigade, on the same long-form improv team as Jenn Bartels, and has carved out a niche in Long Island City, where some 20 of her high-school friends ended up, leading her to christen the area "Little Delaware."
Like many young comics, her biggest break yet came from the Internet. She exchanges verbal jabs with comic Liz Cackowski in the online series "The Jeannie Tate Show." Cackowski plays a suburban mom who hosts a talk show from behind the wheel of her minivan; Plaza plays her badass, substance-loving daughter. The series of videos, most under five minutes, have tallied more than half a million views on YouTube.
"After 'Jeannie Tate' I'm constantly being cast as a mean, bad teenager," says Plaza, who insists she was sweet growing up. "I just think I have a really angry looking face. I don't smile that much, so people automatically assume I have dark secrets."