All About ChipandGus
The two loneliest oddballs in upstate New York…a comedy with balls
Can two lost souls save their world with humankind’s three greatest inventions: Music, Philosophy and…Table Tennis?
In a divisive world Chip and Gus are on a collision course…only they don’t know it because they are busy being the loneliest men in upstate New York. They meet once a month in the grungy back room of a rundown Schenectady, New York sports bar, to do the one thing they love…play ping pong.
John Ahlin’s Gus, a flamboyantly stoic professor, chair of the Philosophy department at middling Steinmetz College (everyone’s safety school), is a socially inept genius who delights at his own jokes and his one-upmanship pedantry. He constantly spouts about history, humor, grammar and virtually everything else, living nearly entirely inside his own estimable brain. Yet he is psychologically unable to deal with his suppressed emotions and deeply harbored secrets.
Christopher Patrick Mullen’s Chip is a frustrated adjunct music teacher and struggling composer, whose life is hanging by a thread. He endures his opponent’s endless prattle with goofball aplomb. He desperately tries to keep a lid on the volcano of passions and tensions boiling within him. He has big hopes, but has never had a dream that did not get crushed.
ChipandGus deals with the greatest question of all: How do we get along in this world? It balances a furiously fast pace, a delicately slow reveal, and blisteringly brilliant comedy as Chip and Gus, the most casual of acquaintances, discover their lives intertwine in ways they couldn’t possibly have known, prompting several hilarious and heart-breaking revelations. It makes for a gripping, unforgettable evening of theatre.
ChipandGus Origin Story
ChipandGus was written over a ping pong table, and rehearsed in basements, attics, rec rooms and garages, and premiered at Baltimore’s Center Stage as part of their site-specific 3rd Space(s) Series, bringing theatre into the community. ChipandGus, set in a rundown game-room of a rundown sports bar, first performed in a real bar turned temporary theater. Without any formal advertising, the crowds went from a smattering to standing-room-only in four days, almost entirely by word-of-mouth. It has since had workshops at People’s Light, the Arden, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, and performances at Centenary Stage Company, the Parkside Lounge, Bridge Street Theatre, Will Shortz’ Westchester Table Tennis Center, Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, NY, Princeton, NJ, Hedgerow Theater, PA, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and the Arts Center of Coastal Carolina in South Carolina. It performed along with 200 other shows in the 20th Annual New York International Fringe Festival, where it earned standing ovations from sold-out crowds and won the Best of the Fringe Ensemble Overall Excellence Award and was then the first show selected to perform Off Broadway, at the famous Soho Playhouse, in the Best of Two Fests Encore Series, where the very top shows from the FringeNYC and the Edinburgh Fringe appear. ChipandGus was originally produced by Fat Knight Theatre, a New York City base non-profit theatre company.
ChipandGus: Playwright Prompts
We asked our good friend (and fantastic playwright) Kenneth Jones to ask us some playwright-like questions, which we answered separately, without knowing what the other would say.
Kenneth Jones: Where did the idea of ChipandGus come from, and how did your collaboration begin?
John Ahlin: I remember the exact moment the idea came into my head — and it was at a ping pong table. I was playing ping pong for fun some years ago, blowing the rust off my atrophied skills, when somehow, I awakened the echoes and, like a young me, I laced a screaming backhand down the edge and in an overly theatrical way I turned to an imaginary crowd and drank in imaginary cheers. And then I stopped, mid faux-celebration and thought, “Standing here, at the end of a ping pong table feels very theatrical…I wonder if this game would work on stage?” And with that one idle thought, Ahab-like, I began chasing this leviathan of an idea. Then, one day, Chris Mullen, with whom I’ve never been on stage with, but was sharing a dressing room — this one particular Shakespeare Festival put all the actors for their various stages into the same dressing room, so that Tevye might have a dressing station next to Macbeth — was speaking of table tennis with the same impassioned reverence I speak of it. I invited myself into the conversation, and I suggested we play. Well, we were both evenly matched, and knowing him to be a superb actor I broached the idea of a ping pong play, and his mind too, Frankenstein-like, became overcome with this one thought: “Lets, somehow, someway make this play come alive.” And thus, ChipandGus was conceived.
KJ: “Playing ping pong” is a term I’ve heard actors use about chemistry and synchronicity in the back-and-forth of scene work. Did this idea feed your project?
Christopher Patrick Mullen: Ping pong became an imposed metaphor, and ultimately it has become one of the characters and one of the playwrights. That’s how influential it has been.
John Ahlin: The rhythm of the game was like a secret metronome…lines, words, even syllables would be sweated over, and like Shakespeare, it is more than hearing…you feel when it is right. It may be in some acting book somewhere that a true and honest acting choice is to both receive and give in an instant, and that is exactly what happens when you return a shot in ping pong.
KJ: How much of the 90-minute play includes the actual act of playing ping pong?
John Ahlin: There is some autobiography in that our characters like ourselves were once very good at the game, when youth and free time were in abundance, but time and neglect have turned our skills to clay. And to once again take up the racquet and relive our past, is more than a ping pong thing, it’s a life thing. A lot of ping pong is played, yet so intertwined with all that is happening it is hard to quantify how much of the play we spend playing.
Christopher Patrick Mullen: There’s a great deal of playing. I think when John was seeking a collaborator on this project, he was looking for someone with a table tennis background. I’m pretty sure he heard through the grapevine that I had played pretty seriously as a teenager.
KJ: What if you miss a ball and hit it out of bounds — is flubbing and improvisation part of the experience?
John Ahlin: I’ve been told it is a Meisner acting technique to be doing some physical activity while acting, to ground oneself. Well, I tell people I was trained “in the Method and in the Catskills,” and so I bet it works for all techniques, to have something undeniably real in the middle of a play. The reality of playing table tennis removes all artifice and staginess as you have to play, react, and crawl under the table if you have to, to retrieve the ball, all while keeping all your acting actions going. The lines aren’t improvised but the physical life is never the same thing two nights in a row.
Christopher Patrick Mullen: We have discovered that the precariousness of the ball keeps things fresh and alive. Sometimes the will of the ball makes for great comic moments.
KJ: Without giving everything away, can you share a little bit about where the play takes place, and expand a little on the relationship and history of these two guys?
John Ahlin: The play takes place in a rundown game room in the back of a rundown bar in a rundown city in upstate New York. We felt it was important that the two characters of Chip and Gus be simply casual acquaintances, who wouldn’t be drawn together at all, except for their love of one thing, ping pong. We wanted their relationship to have all the chemistry of a carpool, at the beginning, and the events of this one night, and what they find out about each other (and themselves) are what creates dramatic fireworks. It’s the details of their lives are where the play lives. We also wanted them to be somewhat smart people so we chose people who work at a small college. We tried to make them opposite in every way, but it turned out it is the things they share that create the tension.
Christopher Patrick Mullen: The tension stems from a couple different things. There is an old unsettled (or long settled) score left over from a somewhat high-profile table tennis tournament in which they faced off. And then there are the almost providential, malignant, unspoken, tensions of life that have brought them together in this particular night of destiny.
KJ: Do the personality traits of the guys reflect your own personalities or are they purely of your imagination?
John Ahlin: We kind of fell into being in charge of our own characters as writers, with the ability of course to collaborate on any aspect of the play, but each character obviously begins and remains built on all we have to offer. But then, and here is the cool part, we have total freedom to take our characters wherever the play will let us go. An example of a choice I made for Gus is I once read a casual reference to Wittgenstein, the philosopher, about how his students had to remind him what topic the last class ended with, and once prompted he would simply pour forth in unrelenting gushes, the contents of his mind, speaking extemporaneously and brilliantly on any subject. I said “yeah, I want Gus to be like that.”
Christopher Patrick Mullen: I think that Gus is a somewhat more flamboyant, savant version of John Ahlin. I think that Chip is Christopher Patrick Mullen in different (and somewhat similar) life circumstances. Chip is closer to me than Gus is to Ahlin.
KJ: Did you know from the beginning both of you would act, write and direct the play?
John Ahlin: It just seemed to fall to us to make this happen. It was such a unique project that it never really was a question of “who else can we get?” We were the sole creators, to misquote Shakespeare “By Sovereignty of Nature,” because we were the ones who thought it up. It must be said it is an intoxicating power to be both the actor and the playwright. To be able to change a line or a bit to best suit your moment, is like being a Queen in Chess who can move twice in a row; it feels all powerful.
Christopher Patrick Mullen: At least to get the project on its feet, yes, that was the understanding. Initially I told John, “Hey, you write this thing and I’ll give you some input and I’ll perform it with you.” John would respond by showing me a title page with both of us listed as playwrights. He wouldn’t take no for an answer as far as the piece being co-written.
KJ: ChipandGus has been performed in a number of regional venues, including bars. Can you share a little about its development?
John Ahlin: When the idea of actually doing this play grew too big to contain, we went out and bought a table. Well, it turns out a ping pong table is a bit of a white elephant: hard to store, hard to move and hard to have around when you feel like rehearsing, since Chris, myself and the table were often in three different places. But persistence, and a garage in Downingtown, Pennsylvania were key to birthing this play. We set up lawn chairs around the inside perimeter of the garage and performed the play for the neighbors. And that one performance answered the question that plagued the putting together of this play; would playing ping pong during the play be an annoying, noisy distraction? It turned out the ping pong drew people in, it mesmerized, it focused, it enhanced the play in ways we never could have imagined.
Christopher Patrick Mullen: Every performance is hugely informative. We are constantly using performances to help us craft the characters, the action, the laughs.
KJ: Did you laugh a lot when you were creating this, or was it deadly serious business?
Christopher Patrick Mullen: This play evolved over our light hearted ping pong get-togethers: Talking about life, love, sports, music, cosmology, philosophy, history, language, family, past jobs, past theatrical exploits… anything was fair game with a special premium on what made the other guy laugh. We’ve been having a blast. The only time we’re deadly serious is when an audience laugh is on the line. Deadly serious.
KJ: Are you still finding new things with every performance or is it frozen?
John Ahlin: It will never be frozen, particularly when there are two playwrights present. It is very easy to change a word or rewrite a line, but to seamlessly work it into the play is not so easy. Actors need to rehearse and discover and often while running through will stumble because their mind is saying “Oh, here is the new part,” instead of whatever it is actors are thinking as they play a role. It may sound odd but our actor selves wish our playwright selves would sometimes back off, but in defense of the playwright self, there are always new things and sometimes better ways to say things. The writing of the play is just like the playing of the play, it is a living, breathing, honest, ongoing thing.
Christopher Patrick Mullen: We try — with very little rehearsal time allowed — to leave nothing to chance in order that we feel free to let almost anything happen…to go anywhere. As playwrights, actors, and directors we learn more from one performance than we can possibly remember or write down. One of the alluring things about this piece is that it necessitates that each performance will take the track of the ball and lead us down very different pathways.