Room Report: ColdTowne, the Austin Improv Theater UCB Bought Before the Condos Did

In September 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina, three improvisers named Michael Jastroch, Arthur Simone and Justin York left New Orleans for Austin, where they decided the city's most urgent need was long-form improv. The owner of I Luv Video let them open a Chicago-style training center next door, which may be the most Austin sentence ever printed: a video store taking in improvisers. Today both are endangered species.

The theater itself opened October 28, 2006, to a packed house, with help from the troupe The Frank Mills: Rachel Madorsky, Dave Buckman, Erika May McNichol and Bob McNichol. Madorsky and Buckman, a married couple, have co-owned it since 2015. They got it through rising rents and a pandemic, and in 2020 they lost the lease on the black box off Airport Boulevard that had been home for 15 years. That's three plagues, which in improv counts as a callback.

The current home is 1700 E. Second St., and the theater's own About page says, with the calm of people who have read a lease, that when it runs out the building is set to become condominiums. In Austin that isn't news, it's weather. Every beloved room in this town is just a condo that hasn't been told yet.

Then the cavalry came, wearing a New York lanyard. The Upright Citizens Brigade, the school Amy Poehler and Matt Besser helped start, bought ColdTowne in 2025. Austin Monthly reported the deal closed in March after six months of lawyers. Madorsky told the magazine the theater was close to needing an angel investor or closing. Buckman's new title is UCB Head of Operations in Austin, which is what happens when you own a theater for a decade and work hard enough to become its employee. He pitched the place as the opposite of Kill Tony, out to punch up, not down. In a city whose hottest ticket draws names from a bucket and then insults them, that's either courage or a gap in the market.

A night there means one of two rooms, the Main Stage or the Cabaret. Face value runs $8 to $15, which comes to $10 to $19 once the fees find you, and there's a free gated parking lot, which in Austin is worth more than the ticket. Every Thursday at 7 is Harold Night, where UCB's house teams do the Harold, the long-form format UCB built its name on. All sales are final, and if you aren't there five minutes before showtime your seat can go to the waitlist. Most of us have been fired for less.

Stage time comes two ways. Every new student starts with UCB 101: eight weeks of three-hour classes for $450. The theater points out that's $18.75 an hour, the same rate ColdTowne charged before, and alumni get discounts of 50 to 78 percent. Harold teams need UCB 401 and audition in January. You don't need UCB classes at all to perform, though: indie improv teams can submit for 20-minute slots or pitch an hour-long show. The January-February 2027 window closed November 1, and the theater says it books months ahead, so submit often. Open mics, student troupes and workshops get no cut of the door, while resident shows get a percentage. That's the honest economics of improv: you pay $450 to learn to make things up, then you make things up for free until you're good enough to do it for a percentage.

A video store took them in, a pandemic threw them out and a New York institution bought them before the condos could. Improvisers are trained to say yes to everything, which is a fine rule onstage and the main reason they never own the building.