Kelly Nichols is going to be one of our opening acts!

I’m seriously super-psyched about this. Kelly is so charming, brilliant, and hysterical. She doesn’t just warm up the crowd, she bakes them in a cozy oven at 350 degrees for twenty minutes until the whole theater smells like pumpkin pie. With her getting things started, the hilarity is ours to lose.

And now, the important, but not personal, info:

This is it folks! The big show! This Monday! 9:30 PM! At the PIT! $5!

For one frakked up night, members of Vorpal emerge from their parents’ basement to bring you the geekiest nerd-fest since Stephen Hawking and Gary Gygax discovered the universe was encapsulated entirely within an enormous twenty sided die. By the power of Grayskull, WE ARE VORPAL! Up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-Select-START!

VORPAL is Kathryn Dunn, Colin Longstaff, Jason Specland, Than Bryan, Daniel Operman, and Mary Guiteras.

With Extraordinarily Special Guests:

Erin Lennox, stand-up comedian, freelance writer, and freelance judger of others, featured in the PIT’s “Smart Women.”

Kelly Nichols, stand-up comedian, writer, and star of the musical romp about lack-of-romping “Ten Reasons I Won’t Go Home With You.”

BAY-SIDE, The deliciously dynamic improv duo of AJ Ortiz and Patrick Cucuta.

Together we will rock you so hard that geologists will have to recalibrate the Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness to account for this new hard rocking! We will raise the roof so high that architects and civil engineers in the audience may become concerned for the structural integrity of the building! Be there! Please?

Tickets can be reserved here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/124605

We started with an opening called “The Conversation” which is pretty much what it is. We get a suggestion from the audience, and proceed to have a five-minute group conversation about it. I was wary of this, because who wants to watch people sit around and talk for five minutes, but it worked surprisingly well. It was entertaining and generated a boatload of specific information and themes. And since the players aren’t worried about participating in some sort of theatrical game, it’s much easier to process that information. Also, as I mentioned before, having a talented group of folks you trust all on the same page makes a world of difference.

As far as my own scenework goes, I was a tad disappointed. In my main scene, I played a Rabbi who was marking all kinds of wildly inappropriate food as Kosher. My partner and I played the “what funny things can we make kosher” game for a few minutes, but it wasn’t as much about the relationship as I’d like and so it required excessive invention and didn’t have legs beyond that initial scene.

We were told in advance that we’d get 20 minutes, and we kind of built our form around that time, but we were cut off around 10-15 minutes into our set. That’s disappointing, not because we crave more stage time, but because our form didn’t have the opportunity to wrap up and make the connections that make longform improv so satisfying.

Major thanks to Don and Alex for coming to our show, and unbelievably major thanks go to Chris, who has come to just about every improv show I’ve ever done.

We are Jabberwocky, and we are part of the Dream NYC show.

Jabberwocky is:

Kathryn Dunn
Daniel Operman
Mary Guiteras
Colin Longstaff
Nathaniel Bryan
Shayne Newton Grier
Jason Specland

We are performing at:

The People’s Improv Theater
154 W 29th St.
NYC

Doors open at 9:20, Show starts at 9:30!!

$5 (Free for any improv student with a student ID from any improv-teaching institution!)

Be there, or get eaten.

“The things that make good theater make good improv.” This is a phrase I’ve uttered from the moment I first directed a troupe, but I never really examined it in more than a cursory way. When I say that, I’m usually referring to mundane things like physically cheating out or taking your character seriously even in the face of extreme weirdness.

But what else makes good theater?

A well-scripted plot makes good theater, but trying to plot in your head while performing improv is surely a trap. Effective props, sets, and costumes are part of theatricality, but are totally absent in improv. Direction and blocking are also vital ingredients in theater, but not to be found on the improv stage beyond instinctual movements.

So what does that leave us? People. If you have one person, you have character. But if you have more than one person, you have relationships. Improv is about relationships.

Improv is about relationships because theater is about relationships.

I often fall into the trap of forgetting that improv is about relationships, and thinking that improv is about saying funny stuff on the spur of the moment. I’m doubly “handicapped” because, for better or for worse, I have the uncanny ability to say funny stuff at the spur of the moment. Or, barring funny stuff, I can at least drop references smart enough for people to laugh at their own satisfaction of getting it.

For example: In last night’s show, we started a group game where we just found each other catching one another in a series of trust falls. This lasted for a few seconds, until I felt the urge to name it. I said:

“This meeting of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is going nowhere! We can’t rebuild confidence in the American dollar just by doing trust falls!”

Funny? Meh. But you try coming up with better on the spur of the moment. Was it the best move given the circumstances? Perhaps. Was it about dropping a smart and funny reference, or building relationships? Welcome to “Hey! Look how smart I am!” theater.

The problem with smart-funny-reference theater is the question, “Where does my partner go from there?” And the related question, “Where do I go from there?” Maybe, if my scene partners could drop enough references to the Fed, we could pull a minute or two out of this. But, the only way we even could get more than a few seconds of jokiness out of this scene would be if I’d made it about a relationship.

From now on, I will try and make my mantra, “It’s about the relationship.” I normally do okay with that in situations where I trust my fellow players to support me and give scenes a little while to breathe. But in situations with unfamiliar players, I tend to fall back to, “MUST… GET… JOKE… OUT… QUICKLY!” Thus it was at the Creek last week, and thus it was last night.

I must serenely accept that I will make my scenes about relationships no matter what. I will trust my fellow players, no matter if I’ve never met them, or even if I know them to indulge in joke-telling over substance. And if I am pimped into being a giant sentient marshmallow, I will still know in my heart that I did my best. I will embue my giant sentient marshmallow with human emotion, and make the scene about my marshmallowy relationship.

Scott (our teacher) gave notes and hung out with us afterwards. I asked him about my ritual post-show self-flagellation. His reply: “First, don’t. Second… don’t.” So perhaps I shouldn’t. Or perhaps he was drunk. Or perhaps both.

If you missed the Sunday show, you can still see our final class show next Thursday. Specifically:
Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 7:00 PM

The PIT
154 W. 29th St. (between 6th and 7th Ave.)

And it will set you back:
$5.

My teacher for this level, Scott Eckert, deserves special mention. I must admit that I’ve had a man-crush on him from class one. Not only is he a spectacular performer (as all the PIT teachers have been) but he is wonderfully enthusiastic about teaching, and shares a lot of my philosophy. I’ve always said, “The things that make good theater make good improv.” It’s delightfully satisfying to have a teacher who not only understands that, but is passionate about it. He gave me another pithy insight that I’ll file away into my box of performance truisms: “Comedy is the failure of drama.”

Please come and see us so we don’t perform to a room full of empty, soulless, unlaughing chairs.

Performance dates and times:
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 8:00 PM
Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 7:00 PM

As always, the performances are at:
The PIT
154 W. 29th St. (between 6th and 7th Ave.)

And they cost:
$5.

Yesterday evening was my fourth improv class, and my third attempt at performance on the stage of the PIT during their Wednesday night Improdome free-for-all.  To recap: My first performance was a miserable failure.  My second was an encouraging success.   Last night, my third performance, has turned out to be an instructive failure.

It’s interesting to discover that the primary problem that ended my improv “career” before it could really start is the same primary problem I’m experiencing now:  Not trusting my partners leads me to jump headlong into huge initiations and I kind of “take over” the scene, which never actually goes well.

Sometimes I think the solution to that problem is to hang back a bit, and wait for my partner’s initiation.  That’s somewhat useful, but not entirely so, especially when you do have a strong initiation in mind, and your partner does not.  And if your partner does not have a strong initiation, the panic sets in, and there goes the trust, and then… things don’t go well.

After analyzing my performance both in class and on stage last night, I think that it’s not strong initiations I should fear.  It’s initiations that are not grounded in emotional honesty.  My mind conjures the situation so fast that it doesn’t take the time to put any flesh on the bones of the character, which comes out as a broad stereotype at best.  Taking just a brief moment to imbue the character with some emotional truth will probably help a lot.

There’s a reason that the bible of the craft is called “Truth in Comedy.”  When I got home last night, I pulled the book from my shelf.  I haven’t read it in years.  It’s time to crack it open, before I set foot on the improv stage again.

I haven’t performed improv in a very, very long time.  It used to be my life.  I performed with Comics Anonymous and Comedysportz in Florida.  I directed the No Parking Players at Carnegie Mellon University.  Then I came to New York City, and after working my way up through the system, I accomplished the ultimate:  I was on a Harold team at UCB.  We were called “Pole Position.”  We were… not the best team in the house, and after a while, we were broken up.  A few members of the team were reassigned to other teams to continue performing.  I was not.

I took this as the ultimate rejection.  People who I respect and admire essentially told me I just couldn’t hack it.  I haven’t performed improv on a public stage since.  That was… I’m tempted to say five years ago, but it’s more than that because I wasn’t married then.  In fact, I think it was before I’d even met Paula, which would make it at least eight years ago.  (Gah!  I hadn’t done the calculation until I just had to type that!)

Seeing Alex perform woke something up within me.  I knew right then and there that I had to get back on that stage and perform no matter what!  I immediately signed up for a Level 1 class at the PIT.  (Partially because I know more people there from “back in the day,” but mostly because they had a class open and UCB didn’t…)

At first, I stumbled a bit.  In fact, I was kind of shocked and angry with myself at how rusty I’d gotten.  But, like riding a bicycle I got my bearings and now I feel… well, not quite ready for performing at the upper echelon like back in the day but confident that my faculties are still with me.

After class on Wednesday nights, the PIT has something called “Improdome,” which is pretty much a “make your own team on the spot” kind of free-for-all.  It’s an excellent way to shake the dust off in a totally non-judgmental atmosphere.  I’ve performed there the last two Wednesdays, and by golly, I’m going to get on that stage again and again as long as they let me.

I’ve missed it more than I could ever have imagined.  It feels really, really good to have a purpose again.