Jessica St. Clair is an improviser who writes her own shows with Lennon Parham and, in other people's, plays the sensible woman standing next to the fool. On Review that is the whole job, and the show's sadness comes in through her.
Fi1m perspective
A woman at home, listening to her husband explain that a viewer has written in to ask him to do something, and waiting to find out whether he means it. On Review (2014) Jessica St. Clair plays Suzanne MacNeil, wife of Andrew Daly's Forrest, a critic who reviews life itself and takes every assignment seriously. Suzanne has the misfortune of being married to a man whose job it is to do what strangers tell him, and across three seasons St. Clair plays her not as a nag or a punchline but as the one person in the show who understood from the start what the rules would cost. The second episode asks Forrest about divorce. We will not say more than that, except that we were surprised how much it hurt, and most of the hurt is in St. Clair's face: she plays a woman who has heard her husband's rules before and never believed he would keep them.
She came up through improv, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and Los Angeles, and it shows in how quickly she can turn a line around. The early work was small: supporting film parts and recurring television roles from the mid-2000s, Debbie Kettner in She's Out of My League (2010), Whitney in Bridesmaids (2011). Then she and Lennon Parham, her real-life best friend, wrote themselves a show. Best Friends Forever (2012) was the first, on NBC; Playing House (2014–2017) ran for three seasons on USA Network, with St. Clair as Emma Crawford and also as writer and executive producer.
The Parham partnership is the centre of the career and the thing critics keep coming back to. The two write by improvising the whole script aloud, and St. Clair has described the method plainly: "We improvise every script and we play all the parts with our writers watching and we tape record ourselves and that becomes the transcript for the script." It produces talk that overlaps and doubles back the way real friends' talk does. It also produces the fair complaint that the two of them sound too alike to play off each other, and that some of the set pieces are broad where the dialogue is fine. We think that is right, and we think it explains why the wife parts suit her: opposite Daly, she has someone to be different from.
The parts she is offered are narrow: the career woman, the rival, the friend with the sharper tongue. It is not a small thing to do well, and on Review it is part of what turns a sketch idea into a slow tragedy. If Suzanne is all you know of her, try Playing House, where the steadiness is the same but this time she wrote it herself.
Biography
Jessica St. Clair is an American actress and improvisational comedian. She graduated from Middlebury College and performed with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and Los Angeles, initially as part of the improv team Mother.
With frequent collaborator Lennon Parham, she co-created and co-starred in the NBC series Best Friends Forever (2012) and the USA Network series Playing House (2014–2017). She played the recurring role of Suzanne MacNeil on the Comedy Central series Review (2014–2017). St. Clair has appeared in supporting roles in films such as She's Out of My League (2010), Bridesmaids (2011), Life As We Know It (2010), The Dictator (2012) and Wanderlust (2012). She has also had recurring television roles on series including Veep, Weeds and American Housewife.
St. Clair has been married to playwright and poet Dan O'Brien since 2006.
