Josh Kaiser asks, "What if?"
As a question, it's a jumping off point for 26-year-old Kaiser's comedic bent.
He's a former North Battleford resident ready to enter his second year at a prestigious acting school in New York.
"I do drama, too," he says. "I have more experience in comedy."
Kaiser likes to look at real life situations and wonder, "What if you added on this?" and find the answer to be, "Oh, that would be funny."
Born in Saskatoon, he is the son of retired judge David Kaiser and local actress and theatre supporter Norma Klassen. His 28-year-old sister is a doctor in La Ronge.
The Kaisers moved here when he was eight and Josh graduated from the North Battleford Comprehensive High School in 2006.
It was probably at the Comp that he started getting into theatre, he says. He's not the first student of the drama teacher at the time, Sherron Burns, to be inspired to pursue a career in acting.
Throughout his school years he was also involved in music, playing the trombone, guitar and piano and singing.
"These days I'm going more toward piano or keyboard, that's my main instrument."
He was in the North Battleford City Kinsmen Band, took piano lessons and participated in the Battlefords Kiwanis Music Festival, even doing a speech arts entry one year. He also sang in the NBCHS choir and played in the concert and jazz bands.
"Music is a big part of my life," says Kaiser. "Lately I've been more focused on theatre, but [music] is something I can't really push away. I can't do without it."
After graduating from high school, Kaiser moved to Saskatoon, working various jobs and taking three years of occasional acting lessons privately through Tant per Tant, an international theatre company based in Saskatchewan.
For a year, he enjoyed being part of the improv comedy group, the No-Nos, and he acted with the Saskatoon Summer Players in the musical The Producers.
He also acted with the Battlefords Community Players in two different plays.
For three years, Kaiser was involved in the FLoYD. Youth Theatre (fanciful liberators of youth drama) in Saskatoon. The first two years, he acted, and in the third year wrote and directed his own play.
"Seeing the things I imagined eventually coming to life after hours and hours of work was beyond any I'd ever experienced," says Kaiser.
His comedy, Telephones, debuted as part of the 2012 FLoYD Youth Theatre Festival. It was written around the day a call centre worker decided to quit his job.
"What if?" Kaiser asked, drawing from some of his own personal experience.
"I worked at a call centre for a little bit and various times things would come up and they were funny," he says. "Then I thought of situations that would be funny - if a character like so and so calls in, what if the interviewer didn't care about his job at all. What would he say to these people ... ?"
He laughs as he describes some of the "what ifs" he devised for his characters.
It was the kind of comedy Kaiser most enjoys - intellectual and situational.
"It was fun. I got to work with some talented people."
He also met a company teacher who had gone to the Neighborhood Playhouse School, a non-profit, full-time acting conservatory in the heart of New York City. Kaiser was inspired to apply.
"The school has a good reputation for people who want to work in the industry, a reputation of people getting employment," says Kaiser, listing famous names such as Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton and Jeff Goldblum.
Just over a year ago, he applied for the six -week summer program and was accepted.
The summer program, like the two-year certificate program, is based on a technique developed by acting teacher Sanford Meisner (1905 - 1997).
The Meisner Technique, says Kaiser, is "trying to work on a genuine reality and actually getting in the moment."
Once Kaiser completed the summer program, he applied for the first-year program and was once again accepted.
It is said the cornerstone of the Meisner Technique is that the learning process takes place through the practical give and take of the classroom, not in a theoretical or abstract manner.
The classroom work at Neighborhood Playhouse is intense, says Kaiser.
"You can watch a person make a personal breakthrough," he says. "Seeing a person stand up for themselves is something I often saw in class, and it's breathtaking."
Kaiser says he likes improv, but in terms of what he experienced in New York, he found it different from his previous experience.
"This is more emotional improv, " he says. "You see people break down crying in these exercises. It's intense stuff. Political correctness never happens in this school, but that's not what you went there for."
In one improvization, a fellow student made Kaiser genuinely angry at what he was saying.
"The teacher thought we were going to fight, so he stopped the exercise."
But they shook hands afterwards.
"We're good friends."
The classes definitely made an impact on Kaiser.
"It does make you a little bit more thick skinned, I have to say. I think most people who went there went through a little bit of a personality change. I have to say that about myself," he says. "We all became more accepting of criticism, because we got a lot. There is nothing light about acting classes - the good, the bad, the hard to take, the intense, all these amazing things."
It's about the critique and the criticism.
"That's why you're there. You want to take it, and if someone isn't giving it to you eventually you get upset with them ... because how else are you going to improve if they're not being honest," says Kaiser. "And they were very honest."
He's looking forward to more honesty this coming September. He's happy to have been invited back for the second year. Admission to the second year is by unanimous approval of the faculty and administration.,
For the summer, Kaiser has been working at Fort Battleford.
When he goes back to New York, he is hoping he will be able to stay in the same residence as last year, but if he can't get in, he says there are many students looking for roommates because the rent in New York is so high.
"I thought rent was high when I moved to Saskatoon," he laughs.
During his first-year course, he stayed at International House, an independent, non-profit residence housing 700 people, mostly students, from more than 100 countries.
It's more than just a residence, says Kaiser.
"It also has a pub, gym, music practice room, auditorium, different clubs, volleyball, basketball, choir, you name it."
He had heard about it from a friend. He applied and was accepted and it became one of the main reasons he enjoyed New York as much as he did.
"It's an amazing city," he says. "It's got amazing arts scenes, music and theatre and all these legendary art galleries."
He even attended a yoga class with actress Katie Holmes, although he didn't realize it until the end of the class.
Kaiser says living at International House made it easier to make friends outside the classroom. With them he enjoyed the quintessential New York sight-seeing tour - the Manhattan skyline at night, cruising from the Statue of Liberty, with Brooklyn to the right, New Jersey to the left.
He travelled mainly by subway, where he found saw many street performers, "only underground," and, with so many lives playing themselves out around him, he found inspiration for his thoughts of "what if."
"People watching sounds a little creepy but it is what you have to do as an actor."
He was able to take in live theatre Broadway performances such as Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the classic Waiting for Godot and Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto in Tennesee Williams' famous The Glass Menagerie.
He also attended some smaller theatres featuring smaller names, including one of the people who will be teaching him in his second year at Neighborhood Playhouse, John Tyrrell.
"He stole the show, probably the best actor the whole time I was there," says Kaiser.
He is impressed with all the teachers at Neighborhood Playhouse, although he is disappointed that one of its veteran teachers, Richard Pinter, retired this year.
"An incredible man," says Kaiser of an actor who was recruited by his former teachers at the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1977.
In addition to acting teachers, the school also employs dance teachers, voice teachers and more.
Kaiser took some dance training with Christine Dakin, known for her performance of classic Martha Graham roles.
"I love dance," he says. "It's just not something I've had as much training in as other arts."
He also had Gary Gendell for jazz dance during the summer program during which he learned "some really cool dance moves."
"We got to choreograph a dance at the end of our six-week summer program - and for some people you 'get to,' for some people you 'have to.'"
He was one who "got to."
He says, "It was really fun, incorporating your own dance moves and some you learned. It was an awful lot of fun to see what these average people who didn't come to the school for dance could come up with."
He's looking forward to working with Gendell again in his second year, which promises to be intense. He won't have a much free time.
"But that's how I like it."
He plans to get as much as he can from the program and leave with a good education and a good idea of what to do entering the business.
He would love to act and star in comedies with people like Kevin Smith or Judd Apatow, or act in a drama with people like Bill Murray or Robert Deniro. That would be the ideal.
But, he says, "Even just to be employed in the acting industry would be pretty amazing. I don't have to be Robert Duvall, I don't want to be Robert Duvall. I want to be Josh Kaiser."
He's hoping he'll be able to start his career in New York, but if that isn't possible (depending on whether he obtains a visa), he says there's a lot going on in Toronto, or even Vancouver.
"But right now New York is the hopeful," says Kaiser, although he realizes it is a "make or break" city.
He would like to eventually get into film, but his first love is theatre.
"Eventually television would be great, even if it's just small parts," he says. "Just to be able to make my paycheque [acting] would be amazing, or writing or directing for that matter."
Comedy is probably where he will focus his career.
"I'd say my forté is probably comedy in general," he says.
He particularly enjoys intellectual and situational humour. He also likes it edgy. Some of his favourite comics are Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Chris Rock and Louis C.K.
"Comedy is a great way of poking fun at reality and exposing things in reality in a kind of indirect way."
Among older comics, he likes the late George Carlin and Don Rickles, and he found the late Andy Kaufman "absolutely brilliant" for his way of trying new things.
Closer to home, he says, "Brent Butt is very funny. Corner Gas is a funny show, well-written, so Saskatchewan. I love it."
While he was in New York, he came across Canadian television and radio host George Stroumboulopoulos hosting a Canada day concert in Central Park.
"He comes off as a cool guy." Stroumboulopoulos told him he liked Saskatchewan.
Kaiser found some of the people he met knew where Saskatchewan was, despite his school's population being decidedly international.
"I told them so many stories about Saskatchewan that I think some people think it's some sort of exotic place now - or maybe I just bored them to death," he laughs.
