Brandy Sullivan

Brandy Sullivan is an American improv performer, director, teacher, and co-founder of Theatre 99, Charleston, South Carolina's premier improvisational comedy venue. Together with co-artistic director Greg Tavares, Sullivan co-founded The Have Nots! Comedy Improv Company in 1995 and Theatre 99 in 2000, building the foundational institutions of Charleston's comedy and improv community over three decades.

Sullivan grew up with an early interest in comedy, captivated in middle school by Saturday Night Live and performers including Gilda Radner and Robin Williams. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Speech from the University of South Carolina.

In 1995 Sullivan and Greg Tavares, along with three other friends, formed The Have Nots! Comedy Improv Company during the Piccolo Spoleto festival in Charleston. The group's name came from Tavares's difficulty securing performance spaces during the festival, giving the founding ensemble an outsider identity. They performed sixteen shows during that initial Piccolo Spoleto season. Nine months later Timmy Finch joined the group, completing the core trio that would perform together for decades.

The Have Nots! performed in over eighty Charleston venues including bars, churches, schools, hotel ballrooms, movie theatres, and traditional stage spaces. They also took their show on the road, renting a van and touring 225 colleges across 26 states over six years, averaging approximately 100 shows per year. At peak activity the ensemble performed 72 shows in 67 days. The Have Nots! is the longest-running theatrical production in Charleston.

In 2000 Sullivan and Tavares rented a 99-seat space on Cumberland Street and opened Theatre 99, a dedicated improv theatre and training center. Sullivan co-founded the Charleston Comedy Festival in 2004 and established Piccolo Fringe in 2001, extending The Have Nots! festival presence into a broader curated improv showcase. Theatre 99 relocated to a 130-seat space at 280 Meeting Street in 2005 while retaining its original name.

The theatre grew to support over 45 active performers with four weekly shows, a multi-level educational program, and a training faculty that Sullivan and Tavares lead as co-artistic directors. Sullivan has taught improv at Theatre 99 throughout its existence. She has also performed in special collaborative productions with visiting performers including Dan O'Connor and Edi Patterson.

Historical Context

Sullivan's co-founding of The Have Nots! and subsequently Theatre 99 represents one of the more fully documented cases of grassroots improv institution-building in the American South. The trajectory, from an ad hoc festival ensemble in 1995 to a dedicated 130-seat venue with a full educational program, follows a path across two decades of consistent work in a city without prior permanent improv infrastructure.

Theatre 99's development also reflects the founding-generation pattern in regional improv theatre: Sullivan and Tavares built The Have Nots! as a touring performing entity before establishing a fixed home, using college touring as both revenue and audience-building in the years before the theatre existed. The transition from touring to resident theatre paralleled similar organizational developments at other regional improv institutions during the same period.

The Charleston Comedy Festival and Piccolo Fringe gave Theatre 99 festival programming that connected the local scene to visiting performers and created recurring public occasions that reinforced Charleston's identity as a comedy market with professional-level programming.

Teaching Philosophy

Sullivan's teaching at Theatre 99 reflects the institution-building philosophy she has pursued since co-founding the Charleston company in 2000: that long-form improv can sustain a serious performing and training culture outside the major comedy markets of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Her pedagogy is shaped by this regional context, in which the challenges of building an audience and a performer pipeline in a smaller market have required consistent attention to fundamentals and to the cultivation of a local improv community with its own identity.

Her approach emphasizes the foundational skills of long-form scene work: honest character behavior, commitment to established reality, mutual support between performers, and the ensemble coherence that allows group long-form to feel unified rather than episodic. Theatre 99's curriculum pipeline, which she has developed alongside her co-founder Greg Tavares, gives students a structured path from beginning improv training through ensemble performance, using long-form structures as the primary performance context.

Sullivan's work as co-founder of the Charleston Comedy Festival (2004) and her Piccolo Fringe programming demonstrate a teaching philosophy that extends beyond individual classes to the construction of a regional comedy ecosystem: one that gives performers, students, and audiences the sustained institutional context in which long-form improv can develop at the level it has reached in larger markets. Her festival and programming work are expressions of the same conviction that drives her classroom teaching: that improv at its best requires both individual skill and institutional investment.

Legacy

Sullivan is the primary architect of Charleston's improv infrastructure. Theatre 99 has operated continuously since 2000 and remains the city's only dedicated improv venue, providing both performance opportunities for established performers and structured training for new students. The Have Nots! continues as a monthly production and has been performed at Piccolo Spoleto annually since 1995, making it one of the longest-running original ensembles in American improv.

The Charleston Comedy Festival, which Sullivan co-founded in 2004, established a recurring national comedy event in Charleston. Her work has shaped the training and performance culture of the city's comedy community across a generation of performers and teachers.