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| CIF
2001 Supplement
Reviews Land of the Karaoking Improvisors Upright Citizen's Brigade's ASSSCAT Whose Chorus Line Is It Anyway?
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Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover (or a Troupe By Its Name) Mission Improvable (Chicago) Review by William McEvoy
Mission Improvable
looks like the Backstreet Boys of improv, and in some ways the
comparison goes deeper. Their
manner is polished, and often their physical work is so good it appears
choreographed. They’re
having a ball on stage while delivering some quality work.
At the same time though, the content of their work more reflects
the influence of Nietzsche and Kant than the Jackson 5 and the Bee Gees. Their format opens
with a monologue from each member, which gets cut off by succeeding
actors who start their own monologues by riffing off the prior speaker.
The players then break off into a freeform series of scenes.
This evening, the scenes centered on the afterlife, eternity, and
the identity and personality of God.
Heavy stuff, but remarkably humorous. One bit had the
denizens of Purgatory on a camping trip, roasting marshmallows over the
eternal flame, while theorizing about the infinite nature of time, and
how it stretched forever like taffy, in each direction.
In another, God was envisioned as a sort of 1950's TV Dad,
calling down to his misbehaving children in the basement.
In Mission Improvable’s “Theo-verse,” God has a wife as
well. The group, which is
directed by Liz Allen, relies heavily on vocal sound play, and physical
movement to inspire scenes and transition between them.
At one point the troupe rapped out an intricate drumbeat, at
others, they could be flying and rolling about the stage (this turned
into a scene about ninja eggs). They
take this physicality into their scene work as well, when one character
started stammering, four of the others jumped up to create a thought
bubble to reveal what he was really thinking.
While providing another character’s thoughts is nothing new,
the speed and immediacy that this group reacted was worthy of marvel. With a name like
Mission Improvable, images immediately jump to images of shortform bar-prov.
When they first appear on stage, you’re wont to dismiss them as
a bunch of young pretty boys. They turn those notions inside out, a very smart troupe,
doing very smart work.
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