Saturday night I went down to the Pike Place Market (Seattle's major tourist attraction, for those of you unfamiliar) because I had bought a ticket earlier in the week to see TheatreSports (short-form improv developed by the legendary Keith Johnstone) at Unexpected Productions (Seattle's biggest improv theater). The last sentence used a lot of parentheses (punctuation marks used for the purpose of adding supplementary information to a sentence).
First impressions: I was not crazy about the location of the theater. Especially not since they have a "Public Market" sign over the stage - you get the sense that they're pandering to tourists who for some reason decided to take their vacation in Seattle and then realized that after the market and the Space Needle they're pretty much out of options. The audience was predominantly frat boys with backwards baseball caps and the kinds of girls that hang out with those kinds of guys. They were all pretty loud, which I guess is fine for TheatreSports because TheatreSports encourages the audience to be loud.
So if you don't know what TheatreSports is, it's a lot like Whose Line Is It Anyway? Two teams "compete" by challenging each other to improv games, using audience suggestions appopriate to the game. There are three "judges" who dress in black robes and give scores to each performance by holding up cards. The judges are supposed to be the bad guys, starting out with very low scores, and the audience is supposed to boo them as much as possible. (Side note: I found it hard to boo the judges for giving low scores, mostly because they were giving the same scores I would have given.)
Ok, the show. Fuck, where do I begin. I happened to show up on a weekend where they had some special guests in town - a group of improvisers from Japan. I can't think of any reason this wouldn't be a good idea, can you? A group of Japanese improvisers, playing to an American audience? Wait, what did you say? Oh that's right, THEY SPEAK FUCKING JAPANESE! No joke, there were four of them and two didn't speak any english. One spoke broken english, and one spoke decent english. They mixed it up so that each team had two Japanese people on it, and throughout the whole show the girl who spoke broken english was translating for the two who didn't speak any english. Picture this: for the first game, someone from each team approached a podium, and they took turns naming things that would be found in a certain location. The first location was "auto junkyard". The game went something like this:
American woman: Old tire!
Japanese girl: ::making pictures with her hands::
American woman: Cracked muffler!
Japanese girl: ::more hand pictures::
American woman: Broken mirror!
Japanese girl: Old....shoe!
and mercifully they called it there. The audience still had the nerve to boo the judges.
The rest of the show was really not that good. The first three scenes all ended up resorting to sex to get a laugh. They played a lot of games that involved the Japanese language. The whole thing was very jokey. I checked my watch a lot.
But, all is not lost. The theater does have long-form shows, which I plan to check out this week. The guy who runs the place studied with Del Close, so I still have someplace to take classes out here. A girl I took Matching Energies with at the Magnet was actually a company member at this theater, and she had a lot of good things to say about it. So, all's well that ends well.
This weekend they're having a 54 hour improv marathon, where the performers aren't allowed to sleep between 6PM Friday and midnight Sunday. Anyone who stays for the whole thing gets a free lifetime pass to the theater. I think I'll probably go toward the end of it, cause I'm really interested to see how well these fuckers improvise after an unhealthy lack of sleep.
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