8 p.m. SHARP. The houselights dim. Over the theater’s public-address system, a voice with no visible owner struggles to sound simultaneously forceful and friendly, laying down a framework of house rules that will, the audience is assured, "make the performance more enjoyable": cell phones and beepers should be muted, try to wait until intermission to empty your bladder, playing musical chairs at a sold-out performance isn’t cool, and — yikes! — the bar will be shuttered until intermission. A dude holding a bucket of beer bottles boos.
It is the last Friday night in March at the Improv Asylum, a 180-person theater-in-the-round squeezed into a Hanover Street basement in Boston’s North End. This is the first of two sold-out shows; the next will be at 10 p.m. This is also a place where people fork over $10 to $20 hoping to bust a gut, since the Asylum describes itself as an amalgam of comedy TV shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Saturday Night Live.
8:01 p.m. The opening to Kool & the Gang’s "Celebration" crackles through the room, and six people — three men and three women — filter onto the stage, whistling, clapping, and woo-hooing like a bridal party storming the dance floor at a wedding reception. Though the cast’s entrance is markedly cheesy, Improv Asylum has good reason to bust out the cloying party anthems: on Saturday, April 13, the improvisational-theater company is expanding. The Hanover Street space will be renamed the Improv Asylum N.E.T. (North End Theater); it will feature a new 11-person cast. Meanwhile, the original players will shuffle over to the Theater District and set up shop at the Roxy.
Aiming to make 500 to 600 patrons’ bellies jiggle each weekend night, Improv Asylum’s new show will include video and a four-piece band called the Sexy Sexaholics. Not only will the company’s staff (actors, ushers, bartenders, and musicians) increase from 50 to 70, but ticket prices will jump five bucks a pop. All of which is pretty darn impressive for a group that began only four years ago in the cellar of the Hard Rock CafŽ, capacity 40.
8:20 p.m. Ryan Gaul, a striking young Stonehill College graduate with spiky, tousled locks, stumbles into a make-believe eyeglass store, tries on a pair of imaginary specs, and then decides that they make him look bug-eyed. "Do you have anything that could help my eyesight that’s not glasses?" Gaul asks Marty Johnson, a blond actress assuming the role of storekeeper.
"Freeze!" shouts Norm Laviolette, co-owner of Improv Asylum, springing out from behind a pole. The two characters in the on-stage store stop moving. "She does have some remarkable new product that will help his eyes. What is this fascinating new product?" From the audience, someone hollers, "Clay!" The conversation resumes. The clerk courteously suggests that she does have a vision-enhancing substance on hand — but it’s an experimental remedy. Would he like to try it?
"Bring it on," Gaul yowls like a frat boy facing a keg. "I’m all for tests."
In less than a minute, Laviolette interrupts again. "Freeze! This clay is going to work, but it’s also going to have some side effects that nobody really expected. What are those side effects going to be, folks?" The words "gas," "diarrhea," and "dancing" ricochet around the room. Laviolette, a Grafton native with a Bruce Willis Moonlighting-era hairline and the on-stage presence of Survivor host Jeff Probst, warns, "I heard gas. I’ll take it if I don’t hear anything else."
A lone voice caws, "Gas spasms!"
"Gas spasms. I’ll take it," Laviolette shouts.
Soon after, a chorus of flatulence detonates from the speakers on stage. The gaseous man looks down at himself, his chin dropping as his rubbery legs flail uncontrollably in the air.
"Please! Please!" the clerk begs. "It’s a small store!"
SOMETIMES I HEAR, ‘Improv: is that when you make it up all the time?’ " says Don Schuerman, director of programming at ImprovBoston, the only other full-time improv theater in the area. Improv is, indeed, a form of comedic theater in which the players invent dialogue, characters, and stage directions on the fly. Dismissed in much the same way as cartooning is in the art world, improv occupies an unenviable position in the arts community: it is the runny-nosed, atomic-wedgie-receiving outcast of the performance realm. Although the roots of improv stretch back to the 16th century — to Italy’s commedia dell’arte, a style of improvised theater resembling slapstick, with stock characters, songs, and pantomimes — the genre tends to get shoved somewhere between stand-up comedy and theater, with neither camp wanting to assume ownership.
It’s true that improv can seem pretty immature, like Dungeons & Dragons for Alfred E. Neuman–loving drama-club kids. The characters at four improv shows — two at Improv Asylum, two at ImprovBoston — include invading Smurfs, two Kenneth Cole–wearing robbers, bickering bingo biddies, a malicious mobster, a fast-food French-fry slinger, a physical therapist, a corpse with rigor mortis, a butcher with a flair for tenderized kielbasa, a Velveeta-cheese-flavored snow-cone vendor, Robin Hood, Charles Manson, Neil Diamond, and Satan.
Improv, then, is a lot like watching adults pretend they’re at recess. "We were all 10 years old, and we all played in the back yard," says Matt Chapuran, a slight, bespectacled man who’s worked with both ImprovBoston and Improv Asylum troupes. "If someone said, ‘Let’s be superheroes,’ you said, ‘Great, I’m Superman,’ and your playmate said, ‘Great, I’m the Flash.’ Then you’d say, ‘Let’s see who’s faster: Superman or the Flash.’ You’d both run around the house, and there was no negotiation about it, no concern about it, you were just doing whatever your mind allowed you to conjure up. Improv is the most effective way I’ve ever found to allow you to behave like a 10-year-old again."
Chapuran realizes that improv isn’t for everybody. "It’s definitely a love/hate thing. People are either like, ‘Oh, [it’s] charades,’ and they totally don’t care at all. Or they’re like ‘Oh, Jesus Christ came back to life, and it’s called improv.’ And they fall in love with it forever."
Love it or hate it, the audience is complicit in the success of an improvised performance. Improv Asylum actors appeal for "creative suggestions" with a spiel that goes something like, "We’ve done over 1100 shows and we hear ‘porn,’ ‘gynecology,’ ‘proctology,’ and ‘diarrhea’ all the time. So we actually ask you to challenge us. The more creative your suggestions, the more creative our show." Nonetheless, the audience has a knack for steering scenes toward the scatological (e.g., gas spasms). In the course of four improv shows, "sexual harassment," "orgasm," "vibrator," "sex," and "whoopee cushion" are all loudly proffered. (Of them all, by the way, "orgasm" was the only one accepted.)
"Bathroom comes up every single night," notes Kristen D’Amato, an Improv Asylum cast member for nearly four years. "How many different things can you do in a bathroom? We’re so done with bathroom."
"Almost invariably, we get some variation of porn, like kiddie-porn," observes Leah Gotcsik, a Swarthmore graduate who’s been involved with Improv Asylum since its May 1998 opening. "We also get a lot of ‘prostitute,’ ‘lesbian,’ or suggestions like, ‘She’s actually a man,’ and ‘He’s actually a woman.’ We had a huge rash of ‘Osama bin Laden’; we had ‘Bill Clinton and Monica’ for at least six months."
But sometimes even clever riffs on ruttish subjects won’t get the crowd rolling in the aisles. "The other night," recalls Schuerman, who was twice named Most Valuable Player at the Canadian Comedy Network’s World Improv Championships, "there was a scene where a guy was walking around [pretending to be] a business executive, but he was only wearing pasties and a feather stuck between his butt cheeks — which to me is hysterically funny. But the audience just wasn’t into it. And I remember there was this moment of terror when I walked off stage and was like, ‘If this audience isn’t going to laugh at a CEO asking a secretary to stick a feather between his ass cheeks, we’re done.’ "
