For some reason, today I decided to bust out the tape of my 2001 grad show from Players Workshop. It’s kind of interesting to watch. The show really isn’t that great (it’s about three hours and WAY too long, but that’s another story), and I’m supremely unhappy with how I performed. Although I haven’t gotten to the end yet, which is where the scene is that I am the most proud of.
But anyway, I was reading Fuzzy’s blog just now, and there’s a neat post about a piece he and Shaun did out at the Phoenix Improv Festival called Actual Theatre.
Actual Theatre was a show we developed two years ago with director Don Hall. It was an improvised show that centered around the real relationship between Shaun and me. We used personal monologues and (long) scenes that were usually half-a-step from reality to explore our often-contentious relationship and build to an exaggerated argument which would end when one of would get so angry that we’d storm out of the theatre. And that’d be the end of the show. We did a run at WNEP Theatre and really felt like we accomplished our goals for the show. Good friends of ours would leave the show asking Don if he thought we could do the show the next week since this week “ended so badly.”
If you dig on improv beyond “Whose Line”, I recommend giving that post a read. It’s a neat concept. Fuzzy rocks my world.