Review: Improv Gladiators (The Cornservatory)

Improv Gladiators

at The Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln (map)
thru Dec 3 | tickets: $12 | more info

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No two nights are the same at “Improv Gladiators”

The Original Improv Gladiators – Season 14)

Review by J.H. Palmer

Last weekend kicked off season 14 of Improv Gladiators at The Cornservatory, the improv contest where troupes from around Chicago compete against each other and against the Gladiators in a tournament that lasts through the first weekend in December, when the semi-finals and grand finale take place. Competing last Saturday was: Right Hand Red; J.J. Dart (Steve Svec, Dan Wright, Jonah Jurkens, Marc Lowe); Pizza Party; and Vegetable Demon. There are two acts to the show; in Act 1 each troupe has the chance to perform freeform for 8 minutes, and after each set a panel of judges gives feedback, American Idol style. After a short break the troupes reconvene for Act II where they compete against the Gladiators themselves in a series of improv games. Points are accumulated and a winning team is announced at the end of the night.

The emcee started off at last Saturday’s show by reading an “unpublished Andy Rooney essay” on the subject of improv comedy that included pearls of wisdom like: “you’re not as good as you think you are, nobody cares, and Lorne Michaels isn’t going to discover you on the Cornservatory stage.” A cross-dressed scorekeeper named Pussy Huxtable kept time and score, eliminating players as necessary in her deep, husky voice. The Cornservatory is a small space, the audience sits a few feet from the action onstage, and it seemed most of the audience were either improv actors themselves or friends of the actors onstage; combined with the BYOB policy of the theater, this made for a lighthearted party atmosphere. Improv actors don’t get much cred in the theater world, but there’s no denying when they’re good. Each of the four troupes that performed last Saturday was different in makeup, style, and tone, and the 8 minutes that each troupe was allotted flew by – always a sign of a good set. The feedback from the judges is as informative to the audience as it is to the actors; unless you’re an improv actor yourself, it’s impossible to know how much work goes into it.

Act II ratcheted up the energy with improv games like “No P”, where a specified letter of the alphabet is forbidden from use, and anyone who accidentally uses it gets eliminated. Another word game involved two actors forced to use the last letter of their counterpart’s sentence to begin the first word of their own, and third restricted speech between the actors to questions only (and as one of the judges explained, raising the inflection of your voice at the end of a sentence doesn’t automatically make it a question in this game). Other games included “party quirks”, in which one actor leaves the room while the rest are designated a particular quirk that the absent actor must guess upon returning while playing host of a “party”, winning points every time they guess correctly what their guests’ quirks are. In possibly the funniest game of the night, the actors were forbidden from smiling, and had to act very seriously while discussing serious subjects as moody, dramatic music played in the background. (The music from Shindler’s List played during that set, and I won’t even begin to try explaining what was happening onstage except to say that it involved astronauts, the space shuttle, and something called “space AIDS”.)

While the judges tallied the final scores, the actors entertained the audience by playing a one-line improv game called “sex with me is like…” where the actors have to fill in the rest of the sentence accordingly. The first round began with “sex with me is like Cap’n Crunch”, and possibly the best completed sentence to come out of it was “sex with me is like Cap’n Crunch because the best part is the berries.” A second round involved Mitt Romney, and my favorite line to come out of that round was “sex with me is like Mitt Romney because a year from now you won’t remember who I am.”

Once the scores had been tallied, Right Hand Red was declared the winning troupe of the evening. I’m not quite sure how the bracketing works, but I’m pretty sure this means they’ll be back sometime in the run for more freeform improv and games with Gladiators.

Rating: ★★★

The Original Improv Gladiators – Season Fourteen continues through December 3rd at The Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln (map), with performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm. Tickets are $12 (and don forget, the show’s BYOB!), and are available by phone (312-409-6435 x1) or online at cornservatory.org. (Running time: 2 hours, which includes one 10-minute intermission)

Graphical design by Kristi McKay

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