Some people have faces for radio, some have voices made for the page, and some are funny on the fly.
The last group should be hanging out in the awesome space in the Reed Opera House where Capitol City Theater opened up shop last summer. There, veteran improvisational comedian and new Salemite Chip Conrad has been putting on comedy shows on Friday and Saturday nights that are delightfully random, endearingly awkward and very funny.
Yes, it’s pretty clear that the theater is the most exciting thing to happen to Salem nightlife since The Big Lebowski live.
Chip even got me on stage on a recent Saturday night to try to play puppet master to a bunch of stoic actor/comedians. I’ll tell you how that worked (or didn’t work) in a minute.
Improv is a tricky and not always even business. It requires audience participation, making every show unpredictable and singular. It works kind of like this: the improv troupe explains how an act will be set up, but the actors have to make up the characters, setting, plot and scene on the spot.
As you can imagine, this sounds like something of a nightmare for a mucho meditator like me who tends to linger long and hard over her scenes. But it’s actually not that complicated and it often makes for hilarious results.
Here are a few examples of how this might happen. Four actors (and perhaps an audience member) might stand on stage and tell a story one person, one word at a time. I like to think of it as a kind of crowdsourced short story told word-by-word.
Tolstoy? No. Funny? Yes!
My favorite bit the troupe put on was an interrogation where we the audience got to choose what Chip had been arrested for: walking down the street in a leotard with asparagus on it on his way to gymnastics. Chip, for his part, was out of the room and had to get grilled by his troupe members, not having known what he did to get arrested. He was supposed to determine from his interrogators’ questions what he was arrested for.
When I reread that, it sounds kind of silly and weird and awkward and improbable.
That’s improv!
For one of the last scenes, I offered to go on stage to play puppet master. Don’t think I’m brave or anything. We caught the theater on an off night when there were a lot of other things happening in town and there were only a dozen people in the audience. My job was to make the characters move around, thus creating some kind of scene with drama and conflict.
This is pretty much like trying to make dead bodies do ballet. I did a pretty crappy job and the lights were very hot on stage. I think I’ll stick to pounding on my keyboard thank you very much. Or just volunteer myself for the random story instead.
But my friend Rachel is hooked. She’s going to sign up for the theater’s improv classes, which, coincidentally, just showed up on Groupon today at half-off for the holidays.
Give the gift of random!
Weeks ago I threated to stay out until 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday night in Salem.
