The Bearded Company’s MJ Marsh on Theater in the Age of COVID-19

The Bearded Company has been a staple of Minneapolis improv for more than a decade. In the beforetimes, audiences could catch them at their weekly slot at HUGE Theater in Uptown or during their best-selling, award-winning Fringe runs. In the age of social distancing, the company has moved online with live performances on Zoom and Twitch, including the 2020 Minnesota Nightly Fringe Festival and, most notably, Break the Dice, an improvised podcast version of the company’s popular Dungeons & Dragons–themed show.

MJ Marsh has been with the Minneapolis branch of the company (the group expanded to Los Angeles six years ago) since 2010, around the same time he moved to the city. In anticipation of the first season finale of Break the Dice, which will be released to the general public on September 14, 2020, I met with him online to discuss improv, role-playing, sustaining an independent theater company in a world of social distancing, and making the leap to podcasting.

MJ Marsh as Phaelan Maerdock, the half-elf fighter. The Bearded Company

Ryan Sanderson (TCG): March 16 was when they shut everything down. You’re in a theater company. What were those next few days like? 

MJ Marsh: Wow, flashbacks, man. It feels like another time, but it was really just a few months ago. I think at first we all just kind of shrugged. We had no idea what to do. But a week or two set in of quarantine, and all of us started texting more and chatting more and decided to have a Zoom meeting. And we talked about “What do we do now? What translates to this medium?”

We had seen a few shows pop up on YouTube and Instagram Live and Zoom, and it was the very early days, so some of the stuff looked very bad, just internet connection bad. It’s just so hard to catch that lightning in a bottle, even when you’re in the theater, but now you have to do that in this medium that is so cold and distant—to tell a joke or have an emotional moment when you have no concept if anyone is laughing or if anyone is connecting. It felt like, do we want to perform in what could possibly be a vacuum of energy? Do we really want to do this?

Tyler Mills, Maria Bartholdi, Joe Rapp, and Siri Hellerman in Swords and Sorcery (2019) at HUGE Theater. The Bearded Company

TCG: So what was the first show you did online?

MJ: We got offered to do a show on a friend’s online showcase, and we were like, “What show would we do? What feels comfortable in Zoom?” And we realized it was Break the Dice. It was our D&D show. It already has rules. It already has mechanisms that we understand. It’s gonna be something different than most people are watching right now, than what’s being offered in the showcase lineup.

And we did it, and there were maybe 22 views. There were 22 people watching it, and that includes people here locally and people in this other market—I think it was Colorado or Arizona. But we got done, and it felt so good, man. It felt so good to have done a show with them again. And all of us were like, “You know what? I don’t care if no one watches. We need to keep doing this. We need to keep working together, because it scratched an itch that we didn’t realize was so incredibly big for ourselves.”

So that first show just stapled it to us. We are doing this. We are going to keep doing this. And we’re doing it our way. And we don’t have to be afraid of this new medium. We don’t have to be beholden to it either; we can do what we want to do our way. And then an interesting thing is, 22 views that night were watching, which is cool, but by next week there were over 300 views of that video. And we were like, that’s actually really cool, so maybe we remember we’re performing for more than just the moment right now, which is also completely different than improv on stage.

Jack Barrett, Tyler Mills, and Maria Bartholdi recording Break the Dice before the coronavirus pandemic. The Bearded Company

TCG: Let’s talk about taking the live show and doing it as a podcast. I saw the first episode of the podcast was released February 4. Are you psychic?

MJ: We have money in Big Pharma, so we knew what was coming down the pipeline, so we decided to transition digitally. No, it’s amazing when we think about where we are with it to think back then. Because we were very timid. Does anyone even want to hear this? Should we even do a podcast? But luckily we have the genius and talent of Maria Bartholdi. Maria joined the company this past year, and she is already well established and relatively famous, especially in the Magic: The Gathering community, for her podcast Good Luck, High Five [formerly Magic: The Amateuring] that she and Meghan Wolff have created. She has so much knowledge in the field of podcasting, and she has so much knowledge in the field of editing and engineering. And she was like, “You guys, it’s so simple. We sit in this room, and we just play this game. Let’s just try it.”

TCG: Did you play any Dungeons & Dragons growing up? 

MJ: I think I had only ever had a one-off, like a one-night thing with D&D. I got a character sheet someone had already created for me, and it was just a couple friends—it was a sleepover, lots of Mountain Dew. I remember the feeling of it. I remember not taking it seriously, and that not being great for some people. But that’s the thing where you’re a kid and you haven’t found your drive yet and you haven’t found your people, the people who love what you love and the comedy of it.

TCG: Do you play your own campaigns with these characters that aren’t for the show or the podcast?

MJ: It was actually one of the founders of the company, Matthew Pitner, who came to us with the idea for a D&D show, and I swear to fucking God, Ryan, it was just because he wanted to get us to play D&D together. I will say sadly it has almost been a year now since we sat together and played a proper campaign or one-off—it was right before Fringe last year when we sat down with our character sheets and dusted them off and threw the dice around. But we believe in this idea that whatever happens on stage or in the podcast, that is now canon the same way it would be at the table.

Tyler Michaels, Joe Rapp, MJ Marsh, Allen Voigt, Tyler Mills, and Maria Bartholdi recording Break the Dice. The Bearded Company

TCG: How do you adapt a role playing game like Dungeons and Dragons into an improv show?

MJ: We did a one-off at Universe Games [now Steamship Games], and being in that room and seeing some of these people who are—so many of them at least that I have met in role-playing game situations are rather introverted people. There are people who would prefer to stay quiet in a conversation. There are people who go out of their way not to be seen or to engage, and yet you put them in this game and sit them at a table and put them at a character that they understand and they love, and these people become brilliant actors. They become living portrayals of these characters they have created. They are bold and they are sassy and they are flirtatious.

Something in that one-off clicked in all of us, and we realized we needed to play this show as if we were those players playing as they play—the same dedication, the same honesty, the same commitment to the moment on stage—and remove the elements of “this is just us playing a game.” Because doing that in a D&D show just kind of revokes the authenticity of the show to the audience. 

TCG: These characters and this story have been developing for years. How do you maintain that balance between telling a story that works for people who are showing up for the first time and keeping it interesting for people who have been around for the whole series?

MJ: We always try to make sure we sum up a kind of story in each episode—and we don’t always know whose it’s going to be, obviously, ’cause we find that in the moment—but we try to make sure that the crowd who is there that night could have seen just this one episode of this show and gotten the whole picture. They’ve got the dynamic of these relationships. They’ve got the whole world that we created. They’ve got the emotion that comes with the web of these characters. And when you’ve established something so clear to yourself and to the audience, you can play in that world forever.

You can find the Bearded Company at BeardedCompany.org and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Break the Dice is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and PodMN. The finale will be released on September 14, 2020, with a Q&A episode following on September 28.