The term “improvised theater” may connote short comedy games, the sort you’d see on Whose Line is it Anyway? But members of the Improvised Shakespeare Company bring a spin on inventive performance: with a goal of creating a hilarious and fully realized play, off the top of their heads, in the style of the Bard himself.
“We ask the audience to provide the title of a play that’s never been written, and then we make that play up on the spot,” said Blaine Swen, creator and director of the Improvised Shakespeare Company. “So, all the dialogue is said for the first time, we’ve not memorized any lines, all the characters, the whole plot, storyline– everything is created while you watch.”
Liberation from diginity
As part of the Toledo Museum of Art’s celebration of the Bard– “Shakespeare’s Characters: Playing the Part”– the touring Improvised Shakespeare Company will be putting on a performance at the TMA’s Peristyle at 6pm October 8.
Swen founded the group in 2005 in Chicago, after working for years with improv groups since back to his high school days in Bakersfield, CA. The idea for the group sprang from the fun Swen and his fellow actors had playing a short-form game called simply “Shakespeare,” where performers make up a scene using the tropes of the Bard’s plays. Since expanding the idea to a full evening of comedic theater, Improvised Shakespeare has become a mainstay in Chicago, as well as with a national touring company.
“The first key, I think, to doing a show like ours is liberating yourself from a sense of shame and dignity,” Swen said with a laugh. “After you do that, the way that we’ve discovered to sustain plays for over an hour is by investing in emotional wants with the characters.
“Much like with Shakespeare’s characters, they have deep emotional reactions, deep emotional wants, sometimes deep emotional overreactions. And we’re watching them pursue their wants for the course of the play. And so that’s really the key in what we do.”
A different kind of rehearsal
The mental gymnastics required to invent and perform a full comedy show with a narrative arc presented in Shakespeare’s distinctive style require a very specific skill set– one that can’t necessarily be “rehearsed” so much as refined through training. Swen says his actors end up learning a wide variety of techniques that both heighten their creativity and deepen their appreciation for Shakespeare’s work.
“We don’t rehearse like a traditional play. We more practice like a sports team. We don’t have lines of dialogue or choreography that we’re getting down– instead we go about training skills that we’ll use on the spot. So we practice things like building our vocabulary, through vocabulary quizzes, or practicing rhyming. We practice emotionally reacting in the moment. We study Shakespeare together, so we see the kind of tropes and themes he uses in plays.”
Swen said that despite the fact that the show every night is different, the goals of the show remain the same. “We hope they laugh until they’re in pain. In that way, it’s kind of sadistic. We really hope people leave hurting,” he said with a chuckle. “But we also hope they have a really satisfying evening of theater, too. That they’ve watched a whole journey of characters, and a story develop before their eyes.”
Tickets to the Peristyle performance cost $20 and can be purchased at: improvshakespeare.eventbrite.com.
For more information on the Improvised Shakespeare Company,
visit: improvisedshakespeare.com.