Chaos Attraction

Improv 301 3.0 Performance: Just Farting On Stage

2016-09-17, 4:53 p.m.

Previous week here.

So I didn’t go to my second 301 performance because of already bought $50 season theater tickets (plus various drama about how we couldn’t switch the tickets, go another night, or get someone else to take mine that I’ll spare you), but I didn’t 100% mind because I suspected it wasn’t going to go well.

Well, sometimes karma will get you, because this performance was about the worst I’ve seen this group do and it kinda came out of nowhere. We only had about seven people show up on time for the performance (one rolled in too late to get in), and somehow things were Not Gelling and some freezing up was going on and...argh. I think I did fairly well under the circumstances, but I also didn’t get a lot of what was going on.

Monologue A: afraid of eating foreign food in France
Monologue B: Grandfather swearing in a foreign language.
Monologue C: Not speaking Chinese in a restaurant after learning it in school.

Beat 1a: Chef Boyardee wants kids’ food when he’s doing his restaurant review. This was hard to follow and needed walk-ons and a base reality, Brian said later.
Beat 1b: I was in this one-- teenager wants to be an artist and hasn’t had a troubled enough childhood, so can her parents start abusing her? (I was one of the parents.) This was actually a pretty damn good idea and went along with a book I’d read recently, so I had some ideas. Three of us were in it from the get-go, which is a slight no-no, but I didn’t have any better ideas to initiate, so I came in anyway. (A fourth walk-in was...I dunno, an obnoxious little brother or something? Afterwards Brian said to watch the walk-ons (one guy did something weird), just go with things. But this went pretty well. Be shitty, but say you’re uncomfortable doing it.
Beat 1c: ordering in a German restaurant, Trump as the Fuhrer walked on. I...don’t know why, it went weird.

Group A: I don’t think anyone had a decent idea, so it turned into eating live animals in sandwiches. This went about as well as it sounds.

Beat 2a: art auction of kids works? I was confused, but got an idea for another group scene out if it at least, even if that didn’t go well (see below).
Beat 2b: Same idea, but now we’re getting her drugs and a bad boyfriend. Brian thought we should have had more insults. The guy who walked on as a brother walked on as a tattoo and got the commentary, “Why is he humping (bad boyfriend)?”
Beat 2c: watching a horror movie to learn sound effects.

Group B: I initiated a negative auction as a ticked off schoolteacher who’s annoyed that the auction isn’t going well, so I brought in these awful dogs as class pets and I will send them home with the lowest bidder. This was apparently too complicated to understand, and most people just stood there doing nothing. Or as one of the people playing dogs put it, “(redacted) and I are just farting on stage.” One guy bid, nobody else bid. Hell, I edited it myself, which is also a no-no, but there was NOTHING ELSE TO DO. Brian didn’t give me crap for doing it, but did tell people, “You were supposed to bid! Bid!”

Beat 3a: Jimmy Dean designs kids’ vehicles.
Beat 3B: now she’s pregnant with 2 kids.
Beat 3c: I can’t remember what they did.

Anyway...that was weird. They all went out to dinner afterwards and I wished I could have joined them, but I had Mom with me and she wanted to go home “early,” which translated into “I want to bum around the Rite-Aid until I decide to leave at 9 p.m. Sigh.

(Oh, and for the record, two of my classmates did get onto teams.)


previous entry - next entry
archives - current entry
hosted by DiaryLand.com