Improvised Shakespeare Company
Zounds! Wouldst thou likest to see some improv?
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More than a schmaltzy piece of clichéd dreck with Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, and Sean Hayes, the bucket list is a giant to-do list of things we all vow to do someday, maybe, or at least when friends from out of town stop by and crash on our air mattress. Sensing our own mortality, The A.V. Club gets the jump on death and vows to check out every “you’ve never seen ____?!” in town, determining whether it was worth the wait or worth dying having not experienced it. This outing is a visit to an Improvised Shakespeare show, an iO group resurrecting the Bard's words on the fly.
Like certain species of sharks, improv comedy dies if it isn't in constant motion. This is difficult enough when the only rules are 1) be funny, and 2) exude constant onstage agreement, but Improvised Shakespeare Company adds Elizabethan diction, classical allusion, and occasional blank verse to the mix. It sounds like a recipe for awkward conversational lulls and enough "forsooth" and "merrily" to satisfy any budding middle-school poet, but Improvised Shakespeare Company successfully straddles the profound and the profane, alongside rapidfire punchlines and silly accents.
Play #1: "The Chairmaker's Daughter"
Out of what I assumed was respect for Globe Theatre tradition, only men took the stage in breeches and festively colored knee-high socks. After a short introduction, the five players asked for a suggestion: the name of a play that sounded suitably Shakespearean. And thus "The Chairmaker's Daughter" was born.
A cast of reliable comic characters soon emerged, including a Monty Python-esque mother everyone presumed to be dead despite her protests, a group of marauding Scots unencumbered by ethics or 17th-century dialogue, and an ambiguously accented nobleman who clarified his heritage with the line, “You can tell I am Swedish because of my very accurate accent.”
Thankfully, the show didn't lean too heavily on meta-gags and anachronistic expletives; despite "Shakespearean" simply translating sometimes as "wordiness," the cast wove familiar story beats like mistaken identity, ghostly apparitions, and Hamlet-esque teenage angst into the surprisingly cohesive tale of a girl killing her father, having him stuffed, and then turning him into a throne/conversation-piece. (That conversation being, of course, “When did you kill your dad and turn him into a throne?”)
The violence didn't feel out of place next to the bloodiest of the history plays, though, and Shakespeare suits improv well: Both in improv and in the largely stage-direction-free plays, props are verbally announced, neologisms like "sidekickery" are pulled from the ether, and the semi-opacity of the language allows the cast some room to spin its wheels and gather its thoughts before actually moving the story forward. Case in point: After an army of four Scotsmen successfully raided England for the umpteenth time (one of the night's most successful recurring jokes) they stood around hemming and hawing, obviously at a loss, until their commander pointed out that, “It's just like a Scotsman to ramble on in order to keep important things from happening."
Play #2: "Shakespeare: The Musical"
The old crowd filed out, a new one filed in, but the audience's bashfulness remained. The lone suggestion this time around, "Shakespeare: The Musical," was met with palpable discomfort—from both the cast and its audience. The question implied by the exchanged glances and foot-shuffling was, “Can it be done?” After a few abortive attempts at improvised comedic a cappella, the answer seemed to be "no." One of the cast members foresaw impending doom and put the kibosh on further singing, even suggesting they “throw out everything that's happened so far” in as delicate and in-character a way as possible. I'd never seen a long-form performance scrap and start fresh, but unorthodox or not, it was the right call. The players soon found their footing, and singing was largely relegated to running-gag status: A character would break into song and immediately be shouted down. Broad, maybe, but it got the job done.
"Shakespeare: The Musical" turned into more of an improv show about Shakespeare than a highly stylized Improvised Shakespeare shindig, but as long as the carnage level matched the previous performance, I wouldn't demand my admission back. I had no reason to worry: The king, as kings often do, was plotting the murder of his bride-to-be and had commissioned a young William Shakespeare to provide him with the theatrical backdrop for his crime. After William pulled some couplets from his surroundings, a la Shakespeare In Love, he returned to his childhood home for inspiration, only to be harangued by his father—a transplanted 17th-century Woody Allen with the bad habit of slipping the names of his movies into every other sentence.
If improv benefits from the decreased expectations that come from spontaneously spinning jokes and plot out of thin air, it's all the more impressive when a brilliant troupe like Improvised Shakespeare Company manages coherent narrative arcs over verbal duels, literal duels, and plenty of Castilian lisping. I'll admit the concept sounds like an uncomfortable marriage: ephemeral improv and timeless Shakespeare, but in this case, it's not a failure of the show—it's a recommendation.
