Improv Review ...Because Improv is Art, Dammit

Wedged between the shows of shortform masters Boom Chicago and Whose Line Is It Anyway on opening night, the producers of the Chicago Improv Festival chose to slip in a little Canadian longform to give the audience a taste of something a bit more sophisticated than your standard game-prov fare. And a wise choice it was as this Toronto based trio weaved a wonderfully comic science fiction melodrama in their 45 minute set.

Slap Happy uses a structure they call “Character Slap” in which one character from a scene remains in the ensuing one. This format helps to move the story forward quickly, and makes scene changes that are more easily digested by the audience, as the first three minutes of each scene doesn’t need to be spent reminding the audience who the characters are.

The creation of the play presented on this night reminded me of watching children playing with blocks – each scene carefully balanced on the scene before, and resulting in a big, funny-looking structure that could fall down with one wayward gust, but doesn’t. From only the suggestion of “Aerobar”, they fashioned a story where Dave Pearce’s character suffers from a rare skin loss disease that is treated with massive doses of chocolate. This cure turns into a curse, as Mr. Pearce’s character becomes a chocolate consuming, zombie-making monster, leaving Tabetha Wells and Kerry Griffin to battle him in true Buck Rogers fashion.

The players are very comfortable with each other, and their format, making for smooth transitions, and allowing for a lot of creativity within the structure (at one point, we were treated to Mr. Pearce’s song “Would You Love a Chocolate Man”). At one point, Ms. Wells character made a reference to the number of pickup lines she’d heard in the past, and Mr. Pearce and Mr. Griffin picked up on the game right away and did a quick fire series of flashback scenes showing those occasions.

Comparisons to Slotnick, Katz & Lehr <<<<<link here>>>>>> may be inevitable as this group has a similar composition and format to that trio. I’m looking forward to seeing Slap Happy at CIF 7 in three years (Slotnik, Katz & Lehr have been together 3 years longer) to see where they take their work.

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