Leadership
The people who lead Bethesda Improv Theater all came to improvisation as adults — through classes, performance, or both — and stayed. Several have performed together for years; the rest joined the work through Bethesda Improv Theater’s classes. Together they guide the organization’s artistic direction, finances, governance, and outreach.
Artistic Leadership
Gary Jacobs — Founding Artistic Director
In 1979, no one had ever staged a local, commercial improv performance in Washington, DC. Then a teacher named Sylvia Toone turned her class into a company and asked a young Gary Jacobs to produce the city's first improv show. He found the venue, stage-managed the performance, and never left. Over the next decade, he went from student to actor to director — the beginning of a forty-seven-year career in the art form.
By the late 1980s, he had grown dissatisfied with what improv was settling for. The short-form games and Harolds he taught rarely produced work with the depth and power of a great scripted play. Few troupes were even trying. The reason, he came to believe: no one had drawn the road map for improvising a full play.
So he set out to draw it. He found a rare ally in Second City's Michael Gellman — one of the few improv directors interested in improvising plays. Gellman was the only one Gary had met who shared his deeper ambition: creating improvised work that could hold its own against the best scripted plays. For a decade, he brought Gellman to DC to teach his company and students, flew north to study his directing, and absorbed everything he could about Michael's approach.
In 1995, he founded Precipice Improv Theater, a company devoted entirely to improvising full-length comic plays. What made Precipice unique was what it made possible: a permanent ensemble that became a laboratory for the work.
Precipice allowed Gary to experiment with new techniques over years, not weeks, refining them with the same group of improvisers until the work deepened in ways no short-term project could achieve. The company marks its 31st year in 2026.
That commitment to craft has carried his teaching well beyond Bethesda — to Boston, to San Francisco, and as far as the Court Jesters of Christchurch, New Zealand.
In 1989, he launched another first: the DC area's first weekly, year-round drop-in improv class. He still leads it every Sunday.
Forty-seven years in, he is still refining, still inventing, and now writing a book on improvisation as an art form.
Read a 2008 interview with Gary on Precipice's origins and method.
His classes and companies have trained hundreds of improvisers and, by his count, produced six marriages.
By day, he is an intellectual property attorney.
Board of Directors
Gary Jacobs
Outside the theater, Gary has practiced intellectual property law for nearly five decades. He is of counsel at Greenblum and Bernstein, P.L.C., an intellectual property firm, where he specializes in procuring patents for corporate clients in fields including consumer electronics, semiconductor fabrication, medical devices, encryption and authentication, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, cloud networks, voice recognition, financial technology, and telecommunications. Before joining Greenblum & Bernstein, he spent twenty-nine years at Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto, then one of the nation's largest intellectual property law firms.
Gary holds a J.D. and a B.A. in physics (with special honors) from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is admitted to practice in Virginia and the District of Columbia and is an Emeritus member of the State Bar of Texas. Earlier in his career, he served as a staff attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Sheila Thibodeau
Sheila is Senior Property Manager at Lowe (Lowe Enterprises), a national commercial real estate investment, development, and management firm, where she oversees properties in the East region covering DC and Northern Virginia. She is also a musician and composer, and a longtime improviser who has performed with Precipice Improv Theater for years.
Debbie Weinberger, MSW, LCSW-C
Debbie is a clinical social worker focusing on early childhood emotional development, family systems, and social-emotional learning. She has been a student at Bethesda Improv Theater for several years.
Bob Adler
Bob is a founding member of Precipice Improv Theater and has performed and trained with Gary Jacobs since 1987. He spent his career as a statistician at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he served as Team Leader for the Manufacturing and Transportation Team, Office of Energy Consumption and Efficiency Statistics, before retiring two years ago.
Daniel Mont, Ph.D.
Dan is CEO and Co-Founder of the Center for Inclusive Policy, which works with governments, international agencies, and NGOs to design and implement disability-inclusive public policies in low- and middle-income countries. He chairs analytical working groups for the UN Statistical Commission’s Washington Group on Disability Statistics and is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London’s Disability and Development Centre.
Before founding CIP, Dan served as a Senior Economist at the World Bank, including a posting in Vietnam on poverty reduction and statistical capacity building, where he oversaw the 2011 Vietnam Country Gender Assessment. Earlier in his career, he was a principal analyst at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and an assistant professor at Cornell University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a B.A. from Swarthmore College.
Dan is the author of A Different Kind of Boy: A Father’s Memoir About Raising a Gifted Child with Autism. He is also a produced playwright whose plays have been staged in New York City, the DC area, and Baltimore. Dan performs with Precipice Improv Theater and at Silver Spring Stage.
Michael Zhuang
Michael is Founder and Principal of MZ Capital Management, a fee-only fiduciary wealth management firm serving primarily physicians and business owners. He holds dual master’s degrees in mathematics and quantitative finance from Carnegie Mellon University and is the author of Physician Wealth Management Made Easy: How to Build and Protect Your Wealth in Uncertain Times. Michael has done improv on and off for a decade with Gary Jacobs. He travels to China, where he now teaches improv to Chinese improvisers — bringing the techniques he has learned from Gary Jacobs and Precipice Improv to a new community of players.