What a Review!!

FST Improv 2011 cast members (l. to r.) Adam Ratner, Rebecca Langford, Catey Brannan, Jim Prosser, and Christine Alexander play around in the Sarasota sunshine. Photo By Amy Steinmetz

It’s FST Immmmprovvv

By | March 2, 2011 |

Improv, short for improvisation: to make do with what you have, to make it up as you go along, to play it as it lays, to wing it. It’s what we love about “Robinson Crusoe,” reinventing civilized life marooned in the wilderness. It’s the thrill of navigating the unexpected bounces coming at you at breakneck speed in downhill skiing. The brain and the body, responding together, doing what they were built to do to survive in the face of unexpected danger. And watching people do it? That’s entertainment.

Before there were scripts, there was improvisational theatre. Commedia Dell’Arte, a popular European form of theater throughout the medieval period, consisted of traveling actors performing improvised dialog within a story framework.

Modern improv was reinvented by Keith Johnstone and Viola Spolin, separately. Johnstone, who grew up in England and later taught at the University of Calgary, wrote a book called “Improv,” which expounded his belief that average people no longer attended theater because they felt it pretentious. He came up with the idea of “theatresports,” combining the disciplines of theatre and sports. The actors form two teams which compete with each other in acting out scenes based on suggestions from the audience, and are then awarded points from a panel of judges. The audience boos and cheers. TheatreSports is still performed, largely on the West Coast and in Canada.

Spolin’s “theatre games” were a teaching method she developed in the 1920s to induce children to enjoy learning how to act, and it’s still being used in acting classes around the world. Her son, Paul Sills, later reintroduced the method to the University of Chicago area in the mid-50s.

Sills, Del Close and David Shepherd assembled a group of actors into a “modern Commedia” which morphed into Second City, and became the core group out of which sprang Saturday Night Live.

Rebecca Langford, Florida Studio Theatre’s managing director and head writer for their “Laughing Matters” series, among many other things, created and directs the improv program. On the night I was there, I spoke with her co-director and performer Adam Ratner. Ratner practically grew up on the floor boards of FST. He was with the Kid Komedy Klub for over 25 years and has been doing “FST Improv” for four years. He was also fortunate enough to learn his skills at the feet of Del Close and Paul Sills. Sounds kind of ancient, doesn’t he? But he’s a whippersnapper of 34.

The enthusiastic audience contained many regulars as the show is naturally different every single night but always a hoot, and theatregoers do a lot of hollerin’ to express their approval and provide suggestions.

The ensemble members, consisting that night of Christine Alexander, Chris Friday, Darryl Knapp, Steve Turrisi and Angel M. Parker were on their tippy toes making us laugh at their take on sketches such as “Day in the Life,” “Conducted Story,” “Thank the Academy” and “Job Interview.”

Jim Prosser is the accompanying pianist and his talented musicianship greatly abetted “One Word Song,” which was performed hilariously using my suggested word, “innocuous.” The stand-out, raw, comic talent of that particular evening, to my mind, was Christine Alexander, whose quick-witted, goofy, committed and utterly unself-conscious performance lets it all hang out, which is what it takes to do great improv, ultimately.

~I’m blushing….. THANK YOU, Pelican Press!

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