For funny, they rate a Ten West

By Jim Carnes - Bee Staff Writer

Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, July 20, 2007
Story appeared in TICKET section, Page TICKET34

Ten West, the comedy duo of Stephen Simon, left, and Jon Monastero, combines elements of clowning, vaudeville and commedia dell'arte. Blake Gardner

Click on photo to enlarge

It's not such a leap from teaching to clowning, from the classroom to the stage, as it might appear.

"Teaching lends itself to performance, just by its nature. You're already in front of an audience," Jon Monastero said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. "I taught United States history for seven years, five classes a day. I looked at it as five shows a day," he said.

Monastero is half of the sketch comedy duo Ten West, along with fellow comic and clown Stephen Simon. They will perform four shows, two tonight and two Saturday, at the Geery Theater.

Monastero also got encouragement from his employer.

"The school that I taught at for five of my seven years had a 'Faculty Follies' show each year. I wrote and performed in that."

That's also how he met Simon and eventually formed Ten West.

"The other half of Ten West happened to be the best 'sub' (substitute teacher) on the block. He supplemented his income as an actor by teaching, and I always asked for him to sub. Then, I asked him to be in a sketch with me, and we found a natural chemistry."

As time went on, Monastero said, "I was drawn more to performance and away from academia.

"Steve and I started writing together and formed Ten West, and I took a huge risk and left the lucrative world of teaching for that of an actor."

(Monastero, who has been named in "Who's Who Among America's Best Teachers" three times and was 2004 Teacher of the Year at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, remains connected to education.

"I blended my love of history, particularly the Civil War era, and created a Union persona and a Confederate persona that I take out to schools as a one-person history presentation," he said. Spring is when California's eighth-graders study the Civil War, "so I bring out my musket and off I go," he said.)

Originally Ten West consisted of four performers. They wrote and performed one show together, then one member -- the only female in the group -- left for other pursuits.

"Then the three guys did a show," Monastero said, "and then the third guy decided he couldn't make it as an actor, so that left the two of us."

Simon and Monastero now have a director, Bryan Coffee, who "serves as an editor," Monastero said. "He's the vital outside pair of eyes we need."

A Ten West performance is a unique blend of clowning, vaudeville and commedia dell'arte (a form of Italian comedy developed in the 16th century consisting of sketches improvised from standardized situations and stock characters).

"Commedia dell'arte may not be so popular in America, but it really is part of Western comedy," he said. "There are elements of stand-up, clowning and pantomime. For us, it really informs what we do."

"Because we do silent material (the duo's last two shows have had no spoken dialogue) and a lot of it is clowning, there is plenty of room for improvisation," Monastero said. "We have markers that we intend to hit, but there's plenty of room within those markers. There's some leeway for discovery within our shows, because if Steve is supposed to fall down, what happens around that doesn't really matter as long as it's funny -- and he falls down."

A Ten West performance is "really physical," he said. "We spend a lot of time getting it right. We have signals to let each other know if something's askew in a physical bit."

Performance demands a high level of concentration.

"Our show is exhausting. The level of fitness has to be high."

With that level of exertion in mind, Monastero said that in addition to their everyday wardrobe, "We'll both bring four T-shirts and four dress shirts and four pairs of socks."