Comedy
Alternative Medicine
Alternative Medicine is an absurdist sketch comedy group featuring Marty Chandler, Colleen Granberg, Brian Martin, Sofia Pastena, Katie Redden and Patrick Walsh. In 2025, they held a sold-out eight-month residency at NYC’s The PIT, and made their off-Broadway debut at The Theater Center. You can find them at major comedy clubs in NYC such as: Caveat, The PIT and Brooklyn Comedy Collective. Mr. Show meets Monty Python meets a secret third thing. Alternative Medicine is written with, and produced by, Spencer Giles and directed by Jason Tyus Smith.
Some of my favorite sketches I've written for the group include: a song sketch called "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Chicken Carcass," a performance art piece called "Five Guys," a sketch called "Dawn Dish."
Absurd chaos
Experimental Improv Shows & Devised Theater
Will Gonzalez and Marty Chandler present...experimental improv! Our most recent production, Quarter Life Crisis, featured eight improvisers a night and audience members flipped coins in order to determine rules for our improv set. Will we have chairs or no chairs, and if we get chairs, are we allowed to move them? Will we be allowed to use words, or not? How many improvisers must be onstage at all times?
More productions in the works!
Will & Marty Present...
Solo improv
A variety of my solo long-form, single-story improv experiments!
About
I like to think that actually I have just been improvising my whole life, saying "yes and" to whatever's thrown my way.
After I spontaneously tagged along to college improv auditions in my first-year at Yale, I wound up in the Lux Improvitas ensemble, known for their single-story, long-form plays ranging from 20-60 mins. Serving as our director, I devised new themes, forms, structures, and more with the group, while honing my storytelling skills.
Through devising the theatre piece "Do Your Happy Dance, Jericho!," I developed my signature long-form, single-story, single-performer improv style. Adapted from Andy Eninger's "Sybil" and Netflix's Middleditch and Schwartz, my version of solo improv brings wacky characters with emotional depth, balanced plots, and physical comedy all together through one body and one space. Each new show, improv structure, or theme is created with deliberate artistic choices in mind: the improv itself is fully spontaneous and unique on the night it's performed, but the theater behind it is intentional!
In this scene, our protagonists, ‘the sisters who go horse-race watching,’ wait in anticipation for the arrival of ‘the unicorn pony,’ on whom they’ve bet all their money after finding a scroll/prophecy suggesting that it would win the race.
In "Do Your Happy Dance, Jericho!", I'd receive one suggestion from the audience, and then plays all the characters in a long-form, fully improvised story. Physically diverse characters, high-energy hijinks, and unexpected plots spill out in stories like the one seen here.
just improvising my way through life
An experimental improv structure
About
"just improvising my way through life" beyond being my motto in life, was the title of a new piece developed and performed in the spring of 2022.
In this show, I juggled two different, completely improvised stories based on audience suggestions, swapping back and forth between them by the flip of a coin.
In this scene to the right, I conclude the second storyline after spending 25 minutes improvising the other story.
In between scenes, I also read parts of a monologue I'd written about becoming a young adult, then subsequently hung the pages on the windows behind me. I am drawn to dramaturgically embed elements of personal story and relevant themes into the work that I do: it's not just about improv, but about the experience and takeaways of the show overall as well.
Performed at Gather East Rock in New Haven, CT & livestreamed to Zoom (forgive the choppy recording!)
The Game of Telephone
Another experimental solo improv structure
About
Telephones can bring anyone from anywhere into the comfort of your own home.
Performing from my own living room, I have the potential to become anyone and everyone, as I am wont to with this style of solo improv.
Here, I perform a story prompted by the audience's suggestion of something you'd tell someone on the telephone (in the video above, it's: "I'm pregnant") while weaving real text messages from audience members into the dialogue. Inspired by themes of (mis)communication in the game of telephone, this show naturally is filled with wordplay and wit.
Performed in my house in New Haven, CT
& livestreamed to Zoom
