Meow House Theatre

Last Sunday was my regular improv workshop. We spent most of this week and last week doing scene work and “layups,” which are similar to basketball layups in that you make quick shots one after the other, go go go, don’t think don’t plan just speak. Sometimes the instructor would give a phrase we had to start with or a some other slight direction, and the rest was left up to us. This doesn’t mean that we just do whatever we want for the whole time; the instructor provides guidance about other directions in which to take the scene, or how a different choice of response would have opened up more possibilities. Improv truly must be one of the most self-satisfying least-negative of all the performance art forms because nobody ever says, “NO you’re doing it WRONG! That’s not what the script says! That’s not what the score says! That’s not where the character’s motivation comes from! You’re supposed to do this / say this / play this / act like this, not THAT!!!” It’s very freeing to never be “wrong.”

As usual, we do a round of warmups first to get loose, both mentally and physically. We did one where we all formed a circle and one person goes into the center and starts singing. He/she can sing whatever comes to mind: nursery songs, pop, opera, whatever. The “it” person has to stay in the center until someone taps him out and jumps in to start a new song. Although it’s not “required” to do it this way, what often ends up happening and what did end up happening for us is that people tend to feed off of and build from the song before, so they become inter-connected in some way. (This is rather similar to the way longform improv develops.) Someone sang a song about sunshine and I jumped in with “Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,” and then someone came in with “I Can See Clearly Now.” We just kept going, the songs turning on themselves (while we’re all laughing hysterically while singing–yes, such a thing is possible), until our instructor did the “Stray Cat Strut,” to which I bounced into the “Meow Mix” theme. You know, “meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow.” That was clearly the place to call “Scene!” and we all laughed and laughed. No bad moods in improv. Or if you’re in one, you’ll get out of it pretty damn quick.

After the class, three of us and the teacher went to dinner and then to the Sgt. Culpepper Show at the ImprovBoston theater in Cambridge. The Culpepper show is different every week and it turned out that this week happened to all sketch and not improv but it was quite entertaining nonetheless. There was a group from Gordon College there doing “Barack Bowls 300,” some of whose members I had seen back in February at the Improv Beanpot. Also appearing was Hard Left Productions, a 2-man sketch group that did a few very funny scenes including one that was a combination of their reacting (on stage) to a videotape of themselves. It was rather surreal. They’ve got a funny but oogy video getting a lot of hits on YouTube right now called “Wii Accident.” Don’t watch if you have squeamish eye issues. (Oh now you just HAVE to look, don’t you. Admit it.)

At the end of the night, as usual there is an open jam (and this is all improv, not sketch) where anyone who wants to participate can go up on stage and you build games based on what the host tells you. (Similar to what happens on Whose Line Is It Anyway, or any improv performance where they’re playing games as opposed to doing straight longform.) This was a little nerve-wracking because aside from my two classmates I did not know anyone there, and plus, it was so obvious they were all SO much more experienced and seasoned at doing this. But participating in the jam forces you to think quickly and it’s not like someone is judging you, so it’s all fun. There was one game we played called “185,” where the goal is to make bad jokes about the subject that that host dictates, which for this game was first “doctors” and then later on, “tanks.” The format is, roughly (people can change around things a bit) that you step out and do a standup joke: “185 doctors walk into a bar. Bartender says, We don’t serve doctors here.” Doctors say: _________ [this is where you fill in the punch line you just came up with]. This totally threw me at first because I was not expecting it, for one; and second, I am a terrible joke-teller. I can’t think of them and can’t repeat them well upon hearing them. For the first 5 minutes, I just thought, “I will have nothing to say and I feel like an idiot standing here and everyone is staring at me knowing that I am a big giant stupid fool” but then ideas started coming to me. Two that I told that I can remember are:

(N.B. Remember, these are supposed to be BAD jokes):

185 doctors walk into a bar. Bartender says, “We don’t serve doctors here.” Doctors say, “That’s okay, we were all planning to order cheeseburgers!”

185 tanks walk into a bar. Without even being served anything, they each give the bartender a $10 tip. Bartender says, “Tanks a lot!”

See, I told you they were baaaaadddd.

The trick on this is to think up your punch line first and then figure out how to get there. You work backwards. It was loads of fun. We also played “Questions Only,” which is a scene where two people can only converse in questions. I was mildly bad, getting “out” after only a few rounds. Some people did really well; and not just by asking easy questions like, “Why is that?” over and over.

The last thing we did was something designed to get everyone on stage, with the guest host (John Serpico, no relation although he said the name is very handy for getting him out of traffic tickets) and Marcelo Illarmo creating this entire “slide show” (acted out in freeze-frame by the other participants) documenting their Mother’s Day adventures as two nebbish moms, complete with the appropriate slightly Noo-Yawkish voices. There were only a very few women playing (me and one or two others, but about 12 or 15 men–I’ve noticed before that improv is very male-dominated for some reason)–and they “picked” me, by virtue of my coincidentally raised hand, to be the one talking person in the scene … for which I became slightly confused, forgetting that they were two ladies of a certain age shopping in the grocery store on Mother’s Day, although I wasn’t completely off track. (Not to me anyway.) It was amazing though how they took what I offered and completely worked it back around, in the space of a sentence, to having direct relevance to the entire scene. Like I said, those people were clearly experienced.

It was loads of fun. We plan to do it again at least once more before the workshop is over. I know that when I take my class this summer in New York at UCB they do the same thing; in fact part of the class requirements are that you attend a certain number of improv shows. I am really looking forward to it.

Oh, about Mother’s Day: well I had seen my mother twice in the past week–in three days actually (driving to Connecticut each time) so I left this one for her to spend by herself. Yes, I called her. First one, of all of us kids, I might add. So there.