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Philadelphia’s 1812 Productions began in 1997 with two long-time friends, Jennifer Childs and Peter Pryor, essentially getting together to make people laugh. Still cracking up audiences at Plays and Players mainstage, the sixteen-year-old company is the only production company in the region dedicated exclusively to comedy. 1812 offers a four-show season with at least one production being an original work.

While Pryor has moved on to become a Member Artist at Peoples Light & Theatre in Media, his co-founder Jennifer Childs remains at 1812, augmenting each season with a new piece from her pen or from a fellow Philadelphia artist. Childs’ original pieces began to percolate in the repertoire during the 2000 season and since then, at least one new work has been showcased each year.

Though Childs still sees herself as an actress and artistic director, she has definitively morphed into 1812’s chief writer. So, trying to pin her down is difficult.

“I’m a jack-of-all trades, yes. But 1812 is all about blowing up the boxes that categorize us. Frankly, I think it’s a Philadelphia thing. The true Philadelphia artist has many hyphens in the job description. I can’t think of another place where I’ve worked that had so many actors-improvisers-choreographers-writers-stage designers and so forth.”

Childs has a serious approach to writing funny. Particularly for the original and less sketch-ey work, she researches the material – sometimes exhaustively. Childs’ most recent comedy, It’s My Party, debuted in 2012 and began as a two-year project that involved hundreds of interviews.

“The point of the project was less about famous women and more about how women are funny in everyday life. As I asked all of these people to tell me the funny stories of their lives, what emerged was a very dark or very sad tale, but told with great humor. The punchline gave over to an attitude of ‘I’m saving my soul by laughing.’”

Childs’ affinity for humor comes directly from her great-grandfather, Bill Childs, who was a vaudeville performer during the golden age before moving into radio. The vaudeville forms permeate her plays and performances and often lead to significant collaborations.

Tony Braithwaite, the Artistic Director of Act 2 in Ambler, PA, co-wrote Let’s Pretend We’re Married with Childs and then after some success, created a “sequel” Let’s Pretend We’re Famous. The plays have been performed by 1812 Productions, Act 2, and the Montgomery Theatre.

Tony: “Jen and I had acted together in several plays before we found our material. But my great grand-dad was a vaudeville man too, so we just clicked. She’s the most fun I’ve had on stage.”

Let’s Pretend We’re Married is a comedic cabaret that explores the experience of marriage ties; the ones that bind and the ones that gag. Ba-dum-bum. The show includes the audience as a character and culminates in a Newlywed Game that uses involuntary members of the audience. 

Tony: “We landed on celebrity for the next one. Let’s Pretend We’re Famous riffs on Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes. While we do the show, we choose an ‘involunteer’ from the audience and put them through a cycle of stardom – obscurity, fame, overexposure, addiction, rock bottom. And the inevitable comeback.”

The next time Tony and Jen are together will be for 1812’s November/December show, a reprise of Childs’ first play, Big Time, a paean to vaudeville style.

Childs: “I have all of [Bill’s] sheet music and old joke books and that led me to write. So I sat in the Library of Congress for months, exhuming all these vintage bits to make the show. It was a little a bit of hubris that led me to first write, really. You set yourself a deadline and then you are forced to do it.” 

ttirney@dramatistsguild.com

Why I’m Scared of Dance, by Jennifer Childs, at 1812 Productions. Photo by Mark Garvin.