Also: Happy birthday, Shakespeare
Speaking of ways to celebrate National Poetry Month, on Friday ellen_fremedon, recrudescence, new friend bloodygoodgirl and I went to see The Improvised Shakespeare Company, who'd popped over from Chicago for one night/two shows. Excellent times! The all-male troupe selects a title from suggestions thrown out by the audience and then spends 60 to 75 minutes improvising a complete play in quasi-Elizabethan English, often rhyming and sometimes even in meter, without props or costumes. Plus they incorporate tropes from Shakespeare, a bonus I hadn't been expecting; our play, "Bed of Thorns," featured mistaken identity, cross-dressing, a Polonius-like lecturing father, the wooing of a lady in a garden, a murder plot, a silly party song and a misplaced turkey. Also a servant named Humble and a pair of "Frenchmen" with Spanish names and exaggerated pan-European-into-Russian accents.
They joked, they punned, they clowned, they constructed impressive couplets on the fly, they broke for anachronistic asides at appropriate moments. Some managed to play two roles in the same scene. They cracked us and occasionally one another up. (It was fun to watch the troupe members on the sides of the stage laugh when they were watching their companions perform.) They sometimes struggled to finish lines or find rhymes, and rather than feeling awkward that was often made to be funny too, especially when other troupe members jumped in or when they chose something utterly ridiculous because it was the only phrase that fit. And what began in the prologue as a binary man/woman love story ended with one guy falling for another guy posing as a woman (even after learning he was not a woman) and what looked like it was going to be a happy FMM poly marriage. Then things took a sudden turn for the tragic and everybody died. Like, everybody. (Stabbings purposeful and accidental, suicide by tryptophan allergy, and a hanging with the intestines of one of the recently dead as they'd used up all the invisible daggers and swords. All within maybe two minutes.) Except the blind seer. He survived to deliver the moral.
I'd warn for spoilers, but as the lead troupe member (who sort of looked like Joseph Morgan from The Vampire Diaries) pointed out during the intro, we were treated to the world premiere -- "assuming a linear theory of time, that is" -- and also the only performance of "Bed of Thorns" the world will ever know.
Good times had by all. Just so impressive, creative and fun. No wonder bloodygoodgirl used to see them so often when she lived in Chicago. Recommended if they're ever in a town near you!
They joked, they punned, they clowned, they constructed impressive couplets on the fly, they broke for anachronistic asides at appropriate moments. Some managed to play two roles in the same scene. They cracked us and occasionally one another up. (It was fun to watch the troupe members on the sides of the stage laugh when they were watching their companions perform.) They sometimes struggled to finish lines or find rhymes, and rather than feeling awkward that was often made to be funny too, especially when other troupe members jumped in or when they chose something utterly ridiculous because it was the only phrase that fit. And what began in the prologue as a binary man/woman love story ended with one guy falling for another guy posing as a woman (even after learning he was not a woman) and what looked like it was going to be a happy FMM poly marriage. Then things took a sudden turn for the tragic and everybody died. Like, everybody. (Stabbings purposeful and accidental, suicide by tryptophan allergy, and a hanging with the intestines of one of the recently dead as they'd used up all the invisible daggers and swords. All within maybe two minutes.) Except the blind seer. He survived to deliver the moral.
I'd warn for spoilers, but as the lead troupe member (who sort of looked like Joseph Morgan from The Vampire Diaries) pointed out during the intro, we were treated to the world premiere -- "assuming a linear theory of time, that is" -- and also the only performance of "Bed of Thorns" the world will ever know.
Good times had by all. Just so impressive, creative and fun. No wonder bloodygoodgirl used to see them so often when she lived in Chicago. Recommended if they're ever in a town near you!