Forest Brakeman

Forrest Brakeman is a Los Angeles-based comedian, improviser, and production sound mixer who co-founded LA Theatresports in 1988 with Dan O'Connor and Ellen Idelson, establishing the first Keith Johnstone-format Theatresports company in the Los Angeles market. Trained at The Groundlings, he built an earlier career as a stand-up comedian in San Francisco alongside Greg Proops and performed at major Los Angeles clubs including The Comedy Store and The Laugh Factory. LA Theatresports subsequently evolved into Impro Theatre, which continues as a producing and teaching institution in Los Angeles.

Forrest Brakeman began his performance career in the early 1980s in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he attended the College of San Mateo. In 1982 he performed his first stand-up routine with Greg Proops at the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco, one of the city's primary comedy venues in the early 1980s. The two formed the comedy duo Proops and Brakeman, performing at clubs throughout San Francisco and Los Angeles during the first half of the decade. Proops would later become internationally known as a regular performer on the British and American versions of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while Brakeman's career moved into improv and subsequently sound production.

Brakeman trained at The Groundlings in Los Angeles, the institution founded in 1974 by Gary Austin that trained performers in character-based improvisational comedy and sketch work. The Groundlings' training in character development and scene work, which had launched performers including Paul Reubens, Jon Lovitz, and Phil Hartman, complemented the stand-up skills he had developed in the San Francisco club scene and gave him a grounding in structured improvisational methodology.

In 1988, Brakeman co-founded LA Theatresports with Dan O'Connor and Ellen Idelson, establishing Los Angeles's first company dedicated to the Keith Johnstone-developed Theatresports format. He served as Co-Artistic Director of the company, which applied the competitive improvisational format Johnstone had developed in Calgary to the Los Angeles context. LA Theatresports subsequently evolved into Impro Theatre, which continues to perform and teach long-form improvisational work in Los Angeles, producing genre-based long-form shows and operating an active school.

As a stand-up comedian, Brakeman performed at The Comedy Store and The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles and at The Punch Line and Cobb's Pub in San Francisco. Television credits include appearances on The Tonight Show and The Sunday Comics. He has contributed comedy writing to HumorOutcasts.com and published essays in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, NPR, Boomer Cafe, and the Chicago Cubs Yearbook.

Brakeman subsequently built a career as a production sound mixer and has been a member of the Cinema Audio Society (CAS), the professional organization for production sound professionals in the American film and television industry.

Historical Context

LA Theatresports' 1988 founding by Brakeman, O'Connor, and Idelson established the first Theatresports institution in the Los Angeles market, extending Keith Johnstone's competitive improvisational format from its Canadian and San Francisco Bay Area origins into Southern California. The three co-founders brought distinct training backgrounds: Brakeman from The Groundlings and the San Francisco stand-up scene, Idelson from BATS Improv in San Francisco and the Harvard ART Advanced Training Institute, and O'Connor from the Theatresports network. Their collective experience gave LA Theatresports a grounding in both the Johnstone improvisational methodology and the practical performance sensibility of working comedy venues.

The 1988 founding placed Theatresports-format improvisation in Los Angeles before the Upright Citizens Brigade's arrival in New York in 1999 and during the same period when iO was consolidating long-form Harold-based improvisation in Chicago. The Los Angeles comedy landscape in 1988 was dominated by stand-up clubs and the Groundlings sketch-and-improv hybrid model, and LA Theatresports introduced the Johnstone competitive format as a distinct approach that differed from both the club stand-up scene and the character-based work the Groundlings were known for.

Johnstone's Theatresports model, in which two improv teams compete in scenes judged by audience referees, required performers trained in his specific approach to listening, status, and narrative commitment, and LA Theatresports brought that approach to a city that would become one of the largest markets for improvisational comedy training and performance over the following decades.

The company's evolution into Impro Theatre, which produces ongoing genre-based long-form improvisational work and operates an active school in Los Angeles, represents the institutional persistence of Brakeman's co-founding act well beyond the original Theatresports context. Impro Theatre's genre-based format, applying improvisational methods to the conventions of film and literary genres, extended the Johnstone-lineage approach into a distinct performance model that has sustained Los Angeles audiences for decades.

Legacy

As a co-founder of LA Theatresports, Forrest Brakeman participated in establishing the institution that became Impro Theatre, one of the ongoing centers of Theatresports-lineage improvisation in Los Angeles. The school and performance program that Impro Theatre operates continues the improvisational work that Brakeman, Idelson, and O'Connor initiated in 1988, training performers in Johnstone-lineage methods and producing genre-based long-form improvisation for Los Angeles audiences.

His early comedy partnership with Greg Proops at the Holy City Zoo documents the San Francisco Bay Area club scene of the early 1980s as a generative environment for performers who would later build significant careers in both improvisational and stand-up comedy. Proops's subsequent prominence on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and as a touring stand-up comedian brought retrospective attention to the duo's origins, connecting Brakeman's early work to one of the most recognized improv-adjacent comedy careers of the 1990s and 2000s and documenting the generative capacity of the San Francisco comedy scene of that period.

Brakeman's path from San Francisco stand-up to Groundlings training to Theatresports co-founding illustrates the cross-institutional career trajectories that characterized the Los Angeles comedy ecosystem in the 1980s, where performers moved between the stand-up club circuit, character-based training programs, and improvisational formats as those institutions developed simultaneously in the same city.