Into the '90s

Jonathan Winters turns the mundane act of leaving an answering machine message into an improvised playground. Into the ‘90s abandons a traditional stage entirely, instead presenting a series of unscripted, one-sided phone calls. Winters cycles through a dozen distinct personas, adopting the voices of an antiques dealer named Andre, a Western film actor named Tabby Hayes, and his longtime staple, the octogenarian Maude Frickert. The premise operates simply: a man alone in a room, riffing into a receiver.

Released as a thirty-minute cassette by Dove Audio in 1990, the project caught the performer decades into a career defined by character work. Stripped of a live audience or a visual component, the short audio format isolates the mechanics of his voice acting. It functions as a focused exercise in constructing odd scenarios out of thin air, relying entirely on whatever tangents cross his mind next.