Hi. Been a while.
Just performed with Horse Apples – Me, David, Nick, Matt, and Barry.
We want to keep doing this because it’s fun for us – we’re all dads and at least 40, so really this is the fun for us. But we’re very sensitive to holding up a space in a community we’re so glad to see growing. We want to deserve our spot, not just get to ride out our wake.
Solution 1 – Get the Young Hungrys to open the show. They’ll bring friends and family. An audience is often more family and friends than random entertainment seekers. Even in the bigger cities if you consider “students and hobbiests” who are “there to see their friends,” “there to see their friends.” Our families and friends are asleep in our/their children’s beds. The Young Hungrys’ friends and family would show up, not yet exhausted by either the invites or the improv.
Solution 2 – Cultivate Opener with TLC. Leveraging “The Lottery” approach, marry outstanding students with establishment players/teachers in a group committed to multiple rehearsals and shows. Barry coached. Casts have been great.
Solution 3 – Do better improv. Can’t coast. Gotta step up. We needed to rehearse. We needed coaching – one voice that could matter more than our opinions and align us. At The Second City, star players were going to First Cities for sitcoms they could think of you for. Think of times when you just laughed at something funny and those times you wanted the person eliciting laughter to know you were laughing so you laughed a little harder. Horse Apples are the guys who moved to Third City, Richmond VA, for family. No one in our audience is motivated to show up or laugh for us; we gotta make’em laugh.
Solution 4 – Gimmick? Tenure in improv is immaterial when a child is infinitely better at improvising than an adult. But, maybe one benefit of our beens-around-the-block is owning being a museum. We’ll fill a wheel with named improv formats written on each pie piece. An audience member would spin the wheel to determine our form for the night and give us our suggestion and the show would start.
Tonight we spun the wheel for the first time…
I was nervous.
My favorite Horse Apples shows were all Found Formats – repeating time, ascending into the Heavens, multi-casting mono scene. We were never transcendent, People of Earth style. To deserve our spot we have to be more than “did you have fun?”
A wheel of formats put me in headspace I’d inhabited less since knighting a new Dean of Students at the Coalition. Emeritus status had eased the pressure off my anal analytics. As is self evident, tonight I’m clearly back in that headspace, writing my first post in years.
Forms on the Wheel were: Harold, AssssCat, WeirDass, Beer Shark Mice, Follow the Leaver, and Ruin It. We’d agreed we’d only explain the format picked, but that it’d be important to explain the format for the value, er, gimmick. We’re setting ourselves to put our money where our mouth is.
I haven’t done a Harold in forever. Solution 4 stood to undermine Solution 3. To earn our spot we had to hit it out of the park, fine, hard enough, but then here we are pre-defining the arc of our shot.
Wheel spun…
“Ruin it.” “Well, to explain this form would .. ruin it.” (Okay, not verbatim, but essentially.)
We also need a suggestion. “Step sisters.”
Step sisters celebrating parents’ demise and resultant inheritance. Man crashes in, stabbed in the stomach. “Steve!?!”
Newly retired rich guys on a yacht they didn’t want to pilot, on a sea they didn’t want to understand. Suddenly Poseidon rears up from a typhoon. Or was it Neptune? Regardless, he’s sorry if he came on too strong.
Pilots updating passengers over the intercom. Bird hits engine! Superman saves plane? Passengers already drunk. Including Bill Gates? Of course his platinum status means he can fly the plane.
Do you agree the form explains itself?
Oh, man, Ruin It runs hard against the Tertiary Player Good Faith Mantra. The Tertiary player is running on to purposely add a discordant element into a scene that has to adapt to it.
But, oh, boy, having spun the one form designed not to “be done right,” the nerves went away and we just played with the discordant worlds we’d built.
The whole Bat Crew confronted Superman. A new Steve was stabbed by a Trident. Seaman acknowledged eurocentrism in their awareness of Gods.
Batman sang The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes at Poseidon/Neptune. Retiring Guy pontificated while his sons “Steved” with appendicitis. Bill Gates fought Elon Musk drunkenly, evoking Melinda and Elon’s exe…Charli XCX, who of course is whisked away to a recording studio to record with Batman only to lose the Grammy to Superman in a ruse arranged by Lex Luthor to bestow a Kryptonite statue.
Acknowledging chaos, the gods were convened by… Was it Jupiter…Zeus? Was I Mars…Ares? Didn’t matter. As Jupiter/Zeus explained, It’s a simple matter of Different Content / Same Form.
Which of course demanded Jupiter/Zeus explain what a “form” is…
“Well, it’s like Short Form Impr-“
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the gods of improv present the Short Form favorite, Dr. KnowItAll, who can answer all your questions…” (pointing)…”One.” “Word.” “At.” “A.” “Pizza.”
Lights.
Ruined it.
Oh, God, that was fun.
I love improvising so much. I’m so lucky to get to improvise with Horse Apples. Thank you, Coalition Theater.
We will try not to overstay our welcome.