03/02/2017
We're very grateful to Deborah Martin for working so hard on this wonderfully written review and for seeing the show twice to experience first hand how the show is different every single time.
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[ The only thing certain is death in Alamo City Improv show ]
By Deborah Martin for San Antonio Express-News
Scott Leibowitz knew one thing about his recent stint at the center of the play “After Life” He would be dying.
He didn’t know how. He didn’t know what kind of impact his character’s death might have on his loved ones. Heck, he didn’t even know what his character’s name was, much less anything else about him.
That’s how Alamo City Improv's improvised dramas work. The cast creates every moment of the show in front of the audience. In the case of “After Life,” the only thing the actors know when they step onto the narrow stage is which cast member will be dying. At the start of the show, they find out the “how,” selected from audience suggestions. Everything else evolves on the spot over the course of 50 minutes.
“It’s downhill skiing where you’re not choosing the course that you’re on,” said cast member LC Wilks, 57, who is fairly new to improv. “You may be on the bunny slope, and then all of the sudden, lights go down and you’re on the expert ski jump.”
“And all of the sudden, you’re in a bobsled, and who knows what’s going to happen,” chimed in Tina Jaxling, 32, who first got into improv in high school.
Improvised drama is part of a full slate of improvised programming by Alamo City Improv. The company does sketch comedy and also offers classes, and work is beginning on its next improvised drama, a relationship piece tentatively titled “Familiar,” slated to open March 24. Everything the company does is rooted in a desire to use improv to illuminate truthful moments rather than just to draw belly laughs, said Cary Farrow IV, who heads the company.
That approach was inspired by “Austin Secrets,” an improvised show staged by the Hideout Theatre in Austin. Farrow auditioned for it last year.
“I found myself surrounded by dozens of talented improvising actors all honoring the moments and fleshing out beautiful, moving scenes. I was immediately hooked,” Farrow said. “I took this approach back to Alamo City Improv, and we got to work developing a tool set that could empower us to bravely make dramatic choices in an art form often considered exclusively comedy.”
The company performs in a small performance space in the basement of The Magic Time Machine restaurant. For “After Life,” audience members are handed slips of paper when they arrive. They are asked to list suggestions for the way the “designated departed,” as Wilks puts it, will meet his or her maker. The slips are curated by Farrow, who also serves as a one-man tech crew for “After Life” performances.
“Sometimes it’s ‘getting disemboweled with a spork,’” Farrow said of the suggestions. “That’s just not the type of show we’re doing.
Farrow puts the cause of death into an envelope, which he hands to the soon-to-be-deceased onstage at the start of the show. He or she then passes the slip around so all of the actors share the same starting point. The lights go down, and when they come back up a few seconds later, the story begins. The guiding idea is to look at how one person’s death impacts those around him.
Recent plays sprang from a skydiving accident, after which the survivors told funny stories and reflected on the fact that the deceased had, at the very least, died doing something that he loved; a heart attack that a woman suffered during a confrontation with her husband over his decision to leave her; and a bear attack that left the victim’s sister, who had been hiking with him, consumed by guilt. In each story, the dead person hangs around as a spirit, sometimes finding a way to interact with those he or she left behind.
“We sometimes have benevolent ghosts who are just trying to make everything right after they’ve left, and we have malevolent ghosts who are trying to get some kind of revenge for something that happened in their lives,” Jackson said.
Every development onstage springs from the imaginations of the actors involved. When someone introduces something that takes the story down a different path than it appeared to be traveling, the entire company has to get on board immediately.
“Scott and I were parents of children (one) week, and mid-scene, we found out that our daughter had been abused by a neighbor and that Dad had let it happen,” Jackson said. “That kind of discovery that happens onstage now informs Scott’s character the next time he comes on.”
The playing space is small, and backstage is even smaller. The audience is close, too. So even if the actors were inclined to verbally communicate with each other during a show, they couldn’t easily do it. And taking their focus off of whatever is unfolding onstage is a bad idea.
“Part of doing a piece like this is, you’re not just acting, you’re also writing the piece,” said Farrow, who also has acted in a number of scripted plays and who trained with the famed Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre - Los Angeles. “You’re also collaboratively writing. In a scripted piece, often you might find actors alone in a corner prepping for their scene, but there’s no luxury for that in this. You have to be connected to the cast 100 percent of the time. We are writing this together. If I go stand in the corner and get in the zone, I’ve lost everything that just happened onstage, and I’m going to destroy an idea that just happened.”
An actor with an idea that involves someone else will gesture to invite that person onstage for a scene. An actor also might indicate that he has something to work out on his own. During one recent outing, Leibowitz sent Jackson onstage by herself for a bit before he joined her.
The bedrock of every moment of the show is trust.
“You throw yourself out there, and you’re like ‘Catch me!,’” said Casey Lynn, 24. “There’s a lot of us, and we love each other, so we’re like ‘Dude, yeah!’”
The company spent weeks before the show began building trust and forming a tight ensemble. They practiced scenes for each other, mastering how to create a 50-minute story arc. The process took roughly the same amount of time as a rehearsal period for a scripted work, Leibowitz said.
They also created shows during that time that no one saw. In one, they put on an impromptu rock concert for a piece in which the lead singer died of an overdose. In another, the jumping-off point was a person who died from a snakebite, and the storyline they created left the cast in tears.
“We explored so many different things, so many different scenes, so many different locations, so many different characters and relationships, it’s just been like a master class all in a very short period of time,” Leibowitz said. “By the time we started doing full runs, we all had already reached that level of trust that the runs almost from the start were performance quality or very, very close to.”
The actors’ experience varies. Some are more versed in working in scripted theater, some are more comfortable with improv, and some move easily back and forth. All are willing to go where the story takes them or — more to the point — where their castmates take them. Sometimes, the story goes someplace scary.
“If you’re nervous about something in a scripted show, you get time to own up to that fear and overcome it and warm up to it,” said Gina Hughes, 24, who said she had been “terrified” of improv until she tried it. “Somehow, in improv, you get to ride the fear and it steers you in just the right direction.”
It helps, the actors said, that Farrow runs tech, watching each scene carefully so he can bring down the lights at just the right moment to end one scene so the story can progress to the next beat.
The plays run for about 50 minutes. They can’t run much longer than that because the company has an improv comedy show right afterward. A clock is visible to the actors, but they also go by feel. They have enough shows under their collective belt to know how much time they have.
The amount of time each actor has in each show varies. Sometimes a cast member might take a backseat; when that happens, the troupe tries to make sure he or she has more to do the next time.
No matter how the evening works out for them — whether they have a starring role or are in a supporting position — they’re all having a good time.
“The fun isn’t in the stage time,” Lynn said. “The fun is in seeing the story come together.”
At the start of each show, Farrow encourages audiences to come back, because each show is completely new. That’s part of the appeal of improv, Jackson said.
“The only audience that gets to see this show is the one that’s in the room because it’ll never be performed again,” she said. “So every moment that happens on an improv stage is unique unto that moment and that audience. No cast will ever experience that moment, no audience will ever experience that moment. I think my favorite thing about improv is how unique it is every single time."
In the case of “After Life,” the only thing the actors know when they step onto the narrow stage is which cast member will be dying.
