From left, Jenny Keto as Sylvia, Erin Treadway as Clara, Braden Hunt as Vic and Alex Cogburn as Derek have a typical family dinner in the recent award-winning production of “The Dudleys!: a Family Game” at the Blue Theatre, directed by Gary Jaffe.

Life is a lot like an improvisational comedy sketch, and theater director Gary Jaffe follows the old improv rule of “say yes, and…”

At 23, this young Yale graduate and theater studies major is living the dream: He’s making theater and getting paid to do it.

“In improv games, you take the premise you’re given, and you say ‘yes,’ but you also say ‘and,’ ” Jaffe said. “You take what you’re given, and you add something to it.”

That attitude has served him very well, so far. While many of his peers are waiting tables in New York to pay the bills and snatching a few hours a week to work on their love of theater, Jaffe decided to take a more unconventional path to theater success.

By day, he is a theater teacher at Westlake High School, where he graduated in 2006, and by night he is the artistic director for Tutto Theatre Company in Austin.

Jaffe, a fast-talking and exuberant man with wit and wisdom that belies his age, realized that he belonged in the director’s chair early in his theater career.

“When I was in high school, I had dreams of being the world’s greatest actor,” Jaffe said. “Full disclosure, I’m not. But what I realized was that I always had my eye on the big picture. In some ways, it got in the way of my acting. That tipped me off that maybe I wanted to be the person putting it all together.”

Yale’s theater program offered Jaffe the opportunity to step into the director role, and he flourished. Yale is a place that throws students into the deep end and likes to watch them swim, Jaffe said. Students are handed the resources, the keys to performance spaces and told to make theater.

During his time at Yale, Jaffe headed eight productions, ranging from Henrik Ibsen’s 130-year-old play “Ghosts” to an actress/playwright’s senior thesis that had never been performed before. That play, “Beautiful Little Fools,” based on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, awakened a love of new work in Jaffe.

“There was something so tremendous about how it felt to carve into the air things that hadn’t been carved before,” Jaffe said. “That’s what I think theater is, carving words and movement into the air like a sculpture that then vanishes.”

After graduation, he took a job as the tutor to an 18-year-old millionaire heiress who lived alone in the Monarch building in New York with her Chihuahuas.

“That was really good money for a really bad job,” he said. “That’s going in a novel someday, maybe a play.”

Rather than follow the herd of other theater majors to New York, Jaffe decided to come to Austin, where the experimental theater scene offered more opportunities for young directors.

“I said, to quote Davy Crocket, ‘You can go to hell, and I will go to Texas,’” Jaffe said.

But the offers didn’t come pouring in, at least not right away. A few months after moving back home, Jaffe applied for the New Directions program with Capital T Theater, which hands over the reins of its submission to FronteraFest every year to a new director.

His production of “Sprits to Enforce” by Mickle Maher won a Critic’s Table Award and helped launch his career here in Austin. Next, he was offered the director’s chair for a production of “The Dudleys!: a Family Game,” by Leegrid Stevens. The play focuses on a young boy that deals with the death of his father by imagining his life as a video game where he can try to achieve a different outcome, but the 8-bit game keeps glitching. That production was nominated for eight B. Iden Payne awards, the Austin version of the Tony Award. It won in all eight categories, including a directing award for Jaffe.

The company offered him the artistic director’s chair, and he began teaching at Westlake High School in August. He now spends his days juggling the beginning theater classes and helping with student productions. By night, he is preparing for a spring production of “The Alien Baby Play,” with Tutto Theatre Company.

“In Judaism, we have a saying, ‘Dayenu,’ ” Jaffe said. “It means, ‘It would have been enough.’ It would have been enough to be working in theater. It would have been enough to work on a production. It would have been enough to be nominated for the awards. It would have been enough to win. But it just keeps coming.”

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