Jun

14

A Night At The Improv.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 14, 2008 |

For a couple of weeks my wife has been talking about a “surprise”, something she had planned but was keeping a secret. It turned out to be going to a performance by Improv Nashville, a local acting troupe that performs on Friday nights. Their show is completely improvised comedy, and the funny thing is that, watching a show like Who’s Line Is It Anyway? on television, it’s impossible to get a sense of how radically different a live performance is, how much funnier and how much more fun it is when the audience and actors are providing real, instantaneous feedback to each other. This is especially true when you’ve got more than sixty people crammed into an upstairs venue about the size of a minivan…with no air conditioning. In the summer. The discomfort is minor, though, and the show really is great, with all members riffing off each other like a group of musicians. And I’m not just saying that because they got me up on stage to play a game with them called Location, Occupation, Weapon. Three of us were sent outside–we were the “murderers” while a fourth actor got up on stage and got the audience to provide a location, an occupation, and a weapon. Then we were brought in individually to play a version of the whisper game, with the person ahead of us miming the three specifics. It was sort of a variation of the whisper game. I was the last to go in, and the guy ahead of me mimed what looked like filling up a flat tire, getting sprayed in the face by a capuccino machine, and shooting a duck. Once I figured it out I was supposed to use the weapon to kill him–which I did, cocking an imaginary barrel and giving it to him between the eyes. I guessed that the occupation was mechanic (actually he was a chef), that the location was the side of the road (it was a restaurant kitchen), and then threw the host for a complete loop. “Did you guess the weapon?” he asked. I said, “Yeah, it was a knife. That’s why I shot him!” He caught on quick, though. They are an improv group, after all.


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