Shana Merlin

Shana Merlin is an American improvisational theatre performer, director, author, and teacher based in Austin, Texas. Her work has combined performance, theatre and festival development, improvisation training, and applied improvisation. In 1999, she co-founded The Hideout Theatre with Sean Hill and later established Merlin Works, an improvisation training organization.

Merlin later extended improvisational training into workplaces and medical and science communication. She has worked with students at Dell Medical School, served as a professor of improvisation at St. Edward's University, and became an associate at the Center for Health Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Early career

A 2021 KVUE feature traced Merlin's introduction to improvisational theatre to Atlanta in 1995. She recalled arriving with friends for an improv performance that had been canceled because the Atlanta Braves were playing in the 1995 World Series. The theatre gave them free passes, and Merlin began returning to performances regularly.

In 1998, Merlin joined her first Austin improvisational theatre and sketch comedy troupe, Los Paranoias, with a cast that included Jeremy Sweetlamb. The troupe was directed by Pamela Ribon of Monks' Night Out and performed Gun at Big Stinkin' International Improv & Sketch Comedy Festival 3.

The Hideout Theatre

Merlin and Hill founded the Hideout in 1999 to create a home for improvisational theatre in Austin and to add performance space downtown. They were also principals of We Could Be Heroes, an Austin troupe that emphasized narrative improvisation and all-women performances. Merlin and Hill converted 617 Congress Avenue into a multilevel performance venue with a coffeehouse and cabaret, a black-box theatre, an upstairs cabaret, and a workshop room. Merlin handled bookings, and the Hideout rented its spaces to other theatre companies at relatively low rates.

Performances

Merlin was the original co-director of the Hideout's house troupe, Heroes of Comedy. The troupe included a monthly all-women show and women-only training sessions. Merlin told the Chronicle that women could hesitate and edit themselves in mixed-gender scenes, while the all-women format gave them room to initiate scenes and play every kind of role; she viewed that work as a way to strengthen the troupe's co-ed performances.

In 2000, Merlin performed the one-woman show Today's Special: I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It … at the Hideout as her undergraduate senior thesis at the University of Texas, staged by Austin theatre director Louis Wells. The autobiographical show centered on Merlin's anxiety that she was not interesting enough to sustain a solo performance; she turned that premise into a theatrical device by offering audience members their $5 admission back if they became bored. The production combined personal stories, character impressions, songs, audience participation, and a comic retrospective of Merlin's stage career, including material about her history of being cast in masculine roles.

Calhoun's assessment was mixed. She described Merlin as charming and gutsy, with a youthful adorability, and praised the wry, well-timed, and endearing side of her performance. At the same time, she considered the show's central question slight and found that Merlin sometimes pushed the cute persona too far, particularly in a closing song she characterized as naïve and syrupy; Calhoun nevertheless suggested that Merlin's sharper comic qualities were likely to become more prominent as she developed as a performer.

Girls Girls Girls

Merlin's work in all-women improvisation continued when she became a founding member of Girls Girls Girls, an Austin-based all-female improv troupe. The troupe debuted in 2002. It was one of the few Austin improv groups to use a long-form musical format for all of its shows.

Beginning in 2006, Girls Girls Girls produced its Boys of Summer series, created to give the troupe opportunities to perform with men from Austin's improv community. Merlin said adding an outside performer changed the group dynamic: rather than competing among themselves for stage time and songs, the women focused on supporting the guest and making him shine, which she saw as an opportunity for the troupe to stretch, grow, and try new things. She also noted that guest performers varied in their comfort with improvised singing, with each bringing a different approach to the musical format.

Girls Girls Girls received two Rudy Kloptic Awards for Outstanding Improvisational Theatre Ensemble from the B. Iden Payne Theatre Awards.

Ladies Are Funny Festival

Girls Girls Girls created the Ladies Are Funny Festival (LAFF) in 2007. Merlin and fellow troupe member Julie Lucas told the Austin American-Statesman that the idea grew from plans to invite women comedians and improv troupes from Austin and other cities to the Hideout Theatre for a weekend of performances. Merlin said that all-women improv gave performers more space to contribute and play a broader range of roles; in mixed-gender groups, she said, women could be pushed toward stereotyped roles such as wives, mothers, and girlfriends. The first festival ran for two days and also included a free improv and body-mechanics class and a Women in Comedy panel.

By 2010, Merlin was one of the festival's three executive producers. The American-Statesman reported that the name LAFF had come to her during a Girls Girls Girls run at ColdTowne Theater. After two years at the Hideout, the festival moved to Salvage Vanguard Theatre for its third year, which sold out. The fourth festival expanded to four days and 29 acts, with performers from the United States and Canada working in improv, stand-up, one-woman shows, sketch comedy, and musical theatre.

In 2011, Girls Girls Girls was unable to host the fifth festival, but LAFF continued under new producers. By then, LAFF had broadened from its largely improvisational beginnings to include stand-up, sketch comedy, and short films. Later that year, The Austin Chronicle named LAFF a 2011 Best of Austin critics' pick, "Best Comedy Strong Enough for a (Wo)Man".

LAFF returned for a sixth edition in 2012. In February 2013, the festival's website announced that LAFF would be on hiatus that year.

Dusk

In 2009, Merlin conceived and directed Dusk: Improvised Tween Erotica, an improvised parody of Twilight. Rather than reproducing the saga's characters, the cast improvised new stories in its world and style from audience suggestions, with the lead, narrator, and sound roles rotating between performances. Merlin told New York Press that she had initially planned only to direct the production but joined the cast after rehearsals began. She said the project appealed to her because the sexual tension, melodrama, and violence of Twilight were qualities she rarely saw explored in improvisation.

Merlin described Dusk as part of her broader practice of narrative longform, in which a genre, style, or particular film supplies the structure for an improvised story; she cited earlier formats including Star Trekkin', inspired by Star Trek, and Lola, structured after Run Lola Run. Dusk was selected for the 2010 Chicago Improv Festival and drew notice in two Chicago newspapers: the Chicago Sun-Times singled it out in coverage of the festival's 65-act lineup, while in the Chicago Tribune's festival picks, festival co-founder Jonathan Pitts praised Dusk for “ripping into and embracing the genre,” saying that made it “so brilliant.” The production later played at The Tank in New York City, where Dread Central recommended the run and noted that the Austin opening had sold out.

Merlin Works

Merlin Works grew out of an improv workshop Merlin began offering in 1996. As interest in the training grew, she opened the Merlin Works Institute for Improvisation in 2008, offering classes in short-form games, long-form narrative improvisation, and musical improv. The American-Statesman reported that participants also found the training useful outside performance, including in personal communication and workplace meetings.

In early 2012, Merlin considered closing Merlin Works after her business partner, Shannon McCormick, decided to stop producing the organization's improv shows and focus his company, Gnap! Theater Projects, on scripted productions. Instead, Merlin began looking for a new institutional home and producing partner. By the end of the year, Merlin Works was preparing to move its adult classes from Salvage Vanguard Theater to ZACH Theatre, where classes and monthly improv performances were to begin in 2013. ZACH education director Nat Miller said the theater's expansion made it an appropriate time to add adult improv classes.

Merlin described the training as changing how students approached risk beyond the stage. She said students often applied improv to work meetings, relationships, and periods of personal transition, seeing the practice as a way to become more comfortable taking risks and moving into the next part of their lives.

Medical communication

Merlin later adapted applied improvisation to medical communication and scientific research settings. In 2019, the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Health Communication reported that she and retired physician Rob Milman co-led an applied-improv session for its Health Communication Leadership Institute, using exercises focused on nonverbal communication, finding common ground, and approaching failure with a growth mindset. In a 2021 TEDxUTAustin talk, Why Your Doctor Should Be an Improviser, she argued that improvisational skills could improve physician–patient communication and described using improv exercises with students at Dell Medical School. A KVUE feature the same year followed her using improvisational exercises to teach listening, resilience, and teamwork.

The Texas Medical Liability Trust featured Merlin in a podcast series on medical improvisation. She described applied improv as using theatrical improvisation techniques outside performance to help people remain present, listen fully, respond in the moment, and focus on what another person needs and understands. In one exercise, participants had to begin each response with the final letter of the previous speaker's sentence, a constraint designed to interrupt advance planning and force closer listening. In a companion segment on signposting, Merlin described structuring medical conversations through shared agendas, explanations of each person's role, sequencing, cues that emphasize important information, and closing recaps intended to help patients follow the conversation.

In March 2022, the Brownwood Area Chamber of Commerce announced Merlin as the keynote speaker for its fourth annual Professional Women's Summit in Brownwood, Texas, identifying her as a professor of improvisation at St. Edward's University.

In 2022, the Texas Medical Liability Trust published a three-part educational video series presented by Merlin on de-escalating disruptive patients in healthcare settings. The series covered preparing for potentially disruptive encounters, verbal and nonverbal de-escalation techniques, and post-incident response and documentation.

Her applied-improvisation work also extended into scientific research settings. Merlin is the director of training for Research Theory, a nonprofit focused on creativity in science. Its five-part Scientific Odyssey program uses improvisational-theatre pedagogy in exercises aimed at helping scientists develop their creative process, and the organization says it is developing a multimodal evaluation program to assess researchers' creative state and the workshop's effects.