Meet Jeff and Andy Crocker (a.k.a. Mister & Mischief), the married creative duo who have spent nearly a quarter century building a life, and now a thriving artistic practice, together. Since launching their collaboration in 2017, the pair has carved out a singular niche in experiential and immersive theater, bringing playful, heartfelt performances to audiences across Los Angeles and beyond.
Their work lives at the intersection of imagination and community, and if you’ve ever stumbled upon one of their insanely fun experiences like Escape from Godot, 40 Watts from Nowhere or The Apple Avenue Detective Agency, you already know the kind of magic they make.
This spring, Mister & Mischief are sharing their latest show Again! Again!, a moving and witty blend of performance and personal essay about caregiving and art-making, at this year’s San Diego WOW Festival. In May, they’ll be back in L.A. for Night at the Library: A Century of Light, helping celebrate a major milestone: the 100th anniversary of the LA Public Library’s central location.
All of this, and yes… they’re also parents! And that role doesn’t exist separately from their art – it’s woven right into the heart of it. Jeff and Andy discuss their collaborations, mentorship, the myth of work-life balance and why taking your kid on the road might just be the best parenting advice they’ve ever received.
Tell us a little about Mister & Mischief. How long have you been collaborating as creative partners? How did you come up with the name?
JEFF: We’ve been together for 24 years and though we’ve supported each other’s creative endeavors all of that time, we only started working together artistically in 2017. Prior to that, our collaborations were for dinner parties, our wedding, and a wonderful kid.
We came up with the name Mister & Mischief because we had to submit an application for the very first show we produced together, Escape From Godot. We wanted something that spoke to our partnership as well as the work we like to create. We take mischief seriously.
ANDY: Also, we’re married. So there’s that.
Do you always create together, or do you each have your own artistic practice, too? How do you balance it all?
JEFF: This is a tough one because the answer is yes to all! We each have our own artistic practices and freelance careers, but seeing as we collaborate on our home, our kid and our art, even when we have an individual project, we’re always sharing with each other.
ANDY: Sometimes we describe Mister & Mischief as akin to an indie band. We are constant collaborators, but we also make solo work and are “session musicians” on other people’s tracks. Instead of albums, we’re making experiential theater.
As for balance, I think seeking balance is a fool’s errand. The world, life and creative pursuits are so naturally unstable. It is so much more about striving to build a nourishing ecosystem of money, expression, family, experimentation, joy and community. It’s ever-shifting.
Your latest work, “Again! Again!” is part performance, part personal essay on caregiving and art making. Why do you think this show resonates with parents?
JEFF: Again! Again! came from the answer to the question, “How do you do it?” In trying to answer that, we felt like there was a fun and heartfelt narrative that explored what it means to be a caregiver and an artmaker. In the abstract they are very similar – you wake up, you do the thing, sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s hard, and then you do it again and again.
ANDY: We were also interested in exploring if our values as parents were the same as our values as theatre makers. For instance, are there principles of care that remain whether we are caretaking our audiences or our kid? There really are! We want our audiences to be an active part of the show and we want our kid to be an active part of our lives. But for both of those things to happen, they need guidance, trust, freedom, encouragement and warmth.
JEFF: We set out to capture caregiving in as wide of an aperture as possible, and specific to parenting, there are a lot of real moments we wanted to make sure were highlighted: making time to play games with your kid, a quiet lullaby, or finally going on a date together, but all you can talk about is your kid.
The resonance comes from how we portray the balancing act of parenting and maintaining any career, let alone an artistic one.
ANDY: The attempted balancing act!
Did either of you have a mentor growing up? And what role did that person play in your life and your career?
ANDY: My high school drama teacher, Sarah Mayper, who let me direct a whole play when I was 15 as if it were the most normal thing in the world! What was she thinking?
Her confidence in me was so matter-of-fact and I carried that with me for the rest of my life. If she had fawned over me or labeled me as “gifted”, I’m not sure my drive would have been as stable. She simply accepted me as a director, and so I was. And I am.
JEFF: When I was working in television just out of college, I collaborated with two producers who set the bar for strong leadership. DJ Paul did whatever he could to keep everyone working in the roles they wanted and insisted on cooking us all brisket. Inman Young showed me what it meant to balance responsibility and humanity by making sure we understood that the job was fun, but it was still a job.
What’s the best parenting advice you’ve ever received?
ANDY: One of our favorite takeaways from Pamela Druckerman’s French parenting book “Bringing Up Bébé” is that when you become a parent, “The baby enters your life, you don’t enter the baby’s life.”
We’ve always tried to set the pace and priorities for our house, and so now the kiddo (relatively seamlessly) integrates into our life.
We were reminded of this when we started taking more of our shows on the road and we were struggling to figure out childcare. We have some parent friends that are very cool rock musicians that tour that urged us to “just take her with you! She’ll learn a ton, and you will all have a blast.” And so, after making a game plan with her teachers, we did.
At first it was a lot of her reading under a table somewhere. Then she was helping us reset the stage between shows, and pretty soon she became an integral part of our creative lives. She’s a playtester, a morale booster, and when it comes to playful imagination, she’s a subject matter expert. All our collaborators know that she’s part of the team, and though she often has to leave rehearsal early for bedtime, I think it has been a great experience to have an inter-generational company. We don’t make work in spite of her, we make work with and because of her. I’m not sure we would have been able to do that if we hadn’t followed that first piece of advice from the moment she was born.
How did parenting change your creative process?
ANDY: I’m not sure I remember what it feels like to create with no time parameters. I think having to make sure we adhere to bedtime and childcare helps create a sense of urgency. If we had all the time in the world I often wonder if we would finish anything.
What parenting advice and/or creative advice would you give to fellow art-making parents?
JEFF: Though I think it’s not limited to being an art-making parent, I want to emphasize how important it is for your kids to see you doing what you like to do. Preferably seeing you enjoying doing it, but expressing the whole spectrum of emotions is acceptable. Your children seeing you as a creative human being instead of just “parent” strengthens their emotional intelligence.
What’s next for Mister & Mischief?
ANDY: We’re excited to share Again! Again! in the spring in San Diego, and just after that we’ll be headed back to the Los Angeles Public Library for Night At The Library, which is always a blast [They put on The Narrative Treatment Plant in 2025, and invited us back for this year’s big celebration!] In the meantime, you can still catch The Bureau of Nooks and Crannies at six library branches across L.A.!
What are some of your favorite places and things to do in and around L.A.?
JEFF: Big shout out to the long-running Bob Baker Marionette Theatre! We love their puppet shows and everything they do around LA. Vidiots in Eagle Rock continues to be a dynamite movie-going experience and their matinees are awesome to go to as a family. We love shopping at Galco’s superb soda pop shop in Highland Park and are weekly customers of our neighborhood fruit vendors.
ANDY: Of course, as you probably have gathered, we also love visiting libraries. Central Library is having their centennial celebration this year and has some really cool stuff coming up. We also love visiting smaller branches across the city.
For anyone that can’t make it to one of your live experiences, what is the best way to engage with your work?
JEFF: Last year we self-published a zine, Infinite Right Answers, that is meant to be an introduction to our particular sensibility and how we approach the creative development of immersive experiences. The secret is that it’s really about any sort of creative development that intends to engage with an audience.
You might ask, “Why a zine?”
ANDY: Why a zine, Jeff?
JEFF: Because it took less time to write than a book, and is physical yet portable.
Ok, but surely you are too busy to cook dinner?
JEFF: Never! We love to take a moment to have family dinner, whether it’s us and our kid, or our creative community. Some weekends we’ll invite over a bunch of artist friends, make a big pot of spaghetti, and come up with a simple creative activity or game to keep things interesting. We requested soda pop reviews after a Galco’s run, or asked everyone to rate how haunted our house is.
ANDY: The results were that the sodas were mostly amazing and that our house is extremely haunted… but in a good way.
