Improv Review ...Because Improv is Art, Dammit

LA TheatreSports brought their Triple Play format into town and wowed the crowd with their styles acumen. Performing three plays at once, a Shakespeare piece set in a castle in Gibraltar, a “Dungeons & Dragons type movie” involving a quest for a magic robot, and a Sondheim musical replete with cannibalism atop Mount Everest, they displayed a cleverness and sense of fun that was easy to applaud with every well-turned phrase.

The Shakespeare play was easily the best of the three and involved a lonesome prince (Brad Sherwood) who drooled floods each time Clarissa, his love, entered the room. The plot was complicated by Clarissa’s love of avocados and their tendency to make her randy. Although the troupe occasionally got tied up in the language, their acceptance of each other’s choices made the play flow smoothly and endeared the audience well to the characters, even the minor ones like the cross-dressing king.

The Dungeons & Dragons format seemed to serve less as a theatrical style than a chance for the four players to cut loose a bit, and have some real fun. They included the audience in that fun. When Dan O’Connor (as the hero Gregor) met the two-headed Circe, he was quick to point out that the creature spoke “with both heads at the same time, and always in rhyme.” The gift was quickly embraced by Kari Coleman and Edi Patterson, and they proceeded to earn the high applause they received.

The music in the Sondheim piece was relevant to the style, and very enjoyable to listen to, but the play suffered for the absence of Mr. O’Connor. However, despite the lack of a strong story, the players were well committed to the characters and incorporated the songs into the story very well, spouting love songs about killing and eating, and rousing marches about the welcomed death of a loved one.

In the end it was a little hard to understand why the three acts of each play were intertwined, and, in fact, some language idioms and body language of each did start to spill over into the others, but LA TheatreSports again and again proves itself a bastion of strong, intelligent improvisation, giving as much import to the presentation of their ideas as the ideas themselves. In their capable hands even the most base humor becomes an exhibit of improvisational skill and cunning.

Click here to read our interview with Dan O'Connor.

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