The
Chicago Reader says :
Critics Choice: Paso Doble
Sirens, the all-women improv troupe, just keeps getting better.
Now six years old, the group shapes its creative, rich comedy
well, skewering the everyday grandiosity, quirks, foibles,
and self-delusions of ordinary people. In their newest long-form
improv show every scene ends on a laugh: they've thoroughly
mastered timing. Paso Doble begins from the seed of an audience
suggestion, which gets turned into a monologue, which becomes
a scene. By the end of the show I saw, the performers had
somehow woven together Reno, TiVo, cats, the Messiah, dream
catchers, and Catherine T. and John D. MacArthur into an interesting,
multilayered story. This is comedy for the NPR set: smart,
sexy, engaging, and very, very funny.
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Spontaneous Combustion: All-female troupe Sirens proves
improv is more than theater's bastard child
ON THE FLY The women of Sirens make
it up as they go along.
Last fall, I saw a comedy called Clutch that had me laughing
for weeks whenever I remembered the offbeat, often hilarious
slice-of-life writing. It wasn't until months later that I
learned the script I so admired didn't exist; everything I
saw had been improvised.
Clutch's creators, Sirens, a six-year-old all-female improv
comedy group, perform long-form, narrative-driven sketches,
as opposed to short-form improv games in which some rule (like
starting each word with the next letter of the alphabet) structures
each sketch. But why did I think the entire show was scripted?
Lillie Frances, Sirens' director, says my impression is a
typical one with long-form improv. "People say, 'Those
characters were so awesome. How do you memorize all those
lines?' And you're like, 'That was made up.'" Frances
attributes that reaction to the character-based realism of
their brand of improv. "Long-form is like an improvised
play," Frances says.
And that's what was striking about Clutch: As in a scripted
play, characters had goals to achieve and conflicts to resolve.
Though considered a distant barefoot relation to single-author
drama, improvisation involves an interactive give-and-take
that, as many playwrights attest, is central to writing plays,
too. Not simply about putting pen to paper, playwriting often
uses the spontaneity of bodies in real time and space. So
then why is improv considered the bastard child theater never
deigns to claim as its own?
Frances hints at an answer when she explains her role as director.
Directing improv is "like a basketball coach working
with a basketball team," Frances says. "The coach
can't plan out the entire game, but [he or she] can definitely
run that team through drills and exercises that make them
stronger players and focus them as an ensemble."
That team-player, collective-writing quality of improv points
out how all theater involves the back-and-forth of many players.
So acknowledging improv as an integral member of the theater
family might rock the playwright's (already rocky) status
as the family's only child, or primary artistic voice. In
an art form that still places the text above all else, it's
tough to value a genre that doesn't have a text.
Clearly, scripted theater isn't the same as improv, where
nothing that's said can be taken back. During rehearsal for
Sirens' latest show, Paso Doble, one improviser delivers a
monologue in which she's the butt of an office prank, getting
slapped in the face with shaving cream, only the words accidentally
come out "shaving can”leading to a broken nose
and other unexpectedly comic mishaps.
But while the ten Sirens talk about that one-off, unpredictable
quality of improv, any theatergoer knows that serendipity
takes place in traditional theater, too, where no two performances
of the same script are identical, and where the language can
seem so fresh and true-to-life that the actors appear to think
up the words as they go. As playwright Bruce Norris puts it,
writing for the stage is "like improvising...just like
sitting in a room and improvising by yourself." One Siren,
Erin McEvoy, flips that analogy: "Improvising is writing.
It's just that it's only going to be done that one time."
In both cases, creating a free-flowing environment for creativity
is the key.
After rehearsal, the Sirens head out for margaritas and Tex-Mex,
and dish about everything from men to taxes. It's clear these
more casual interactions are an extension of their rehearsals.
They listen, then talk to and over one another--like in improv
and in real-world relationships.
By the third round of margaritas, one Siren mentions the group's
"confluence of personalities," then stops herself:
'"Confluence.' And I'm drunk." Another says, "And
I had to struggle for 'complacency.'" To which the first
deadpans, "Who doesn't?" Both then turn to me and
joke, "Write that down! Write that down! "
Really, someone should.
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