Improv Review ...Because Improv is Art, Dammit

Dinner for Six (which inscrutably has eight players) is a delightful romantic comedy that explores the lives of four couples. The cast of this play work together beautifully, never sacrificing their character’s reality to get a laugh, exploring and trusting silence on stage and shaping a story that easily allows the audience to suspend their disbelief.

The play opens with the couples finishing a Chinese dinner and reading fortune cookies. Subsequent scenes explore the conflicts and relationships introduced. The four couples quickly establish different, believable relationships. For example the first couple, played by Nicky Margolis and Jeff Griggs showed that Ms. Margolis character had a drinking problem, something cued only with a raised eyebrow from Mr. Griggs. Ms. Margolis proceeded to create a believably pathetic alcoholic that the audience empathized with throughout.

The second couple (Justin O’Connor and Lauren Glass) created an uncomfortable Svengali-like relationship, with Ms. Glass apparently following a long list of rules. We then start to see the cause of this need for control by Mr. O’Connor as it is established he’s having some marital performance problems. Chris Gelbach and Julia Wolfe’s hapless couple, one aspiring to being an astronaut at a late age and the other a country western singer, avoided the potential pitfall to just play it goofy and instead made their parts of the piece about supporting one another’s dreams. The final couple, Stacy Meyer and Dennis O’Toole, was a warm, intimate pair of homebodies, locking themselves in their house, living by the Internet, and having sex and playing video games all day.

The play made use of dark and subtle irony; something rarely seen in improvised theater. In one scene, Mr. Griggs tries to convince Mr. O’Connor that he should be less controlling of his mate, to be followed by a scene where Mr. Griggs uses Ms. Margolis addiction, turning her into a marionette more completely than Ms. Glass’s character ever had been. And when Mr. O’Connor sees the error of his ways and tries to break the cycle of domination, he discovers it’s too late, his wife has already been brainwashed.

Dinner for Six surpasses much scripted fare, and I hope to see it get wide exposure. It shows what improvisational performers can do, when the players know their craft and trust their script.

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