Making It Up As We Go
Improvisers from The Upfront Theatre, share the sense of community and support they receive from their costars.
STORY BY MARINA PRICE | PHOTOS BY CHRISTINA BECKER
More than a hundred people watch Jane Mitchell open her mouth to speak. She knows they’re there, but she can’t see them behind the brightness of the stage lights. Before she can make a sound, the music begins, a slow, plodding number.
Her eyes dart involuntarily, first to the man at the piano, then to somewhere in the distance above the audience’s heads. She has three seconds to think of what to sing.
Mitchell is a mainstage improviser at the Upfront Theatre, and for her, this is just another weekend in July. This evening she plays a disgruntled “Jacuzzi’s for Nerds” store employee, planning to sabotage a computer store across the street by stealing their cables.
“I really get high off the discovery of it, just figuring out where it’s going,” she says. “We’re figuring it out together because we know that we can.”
Mitchell has been on the mainstage team at the Upfront for two years. Her performance is energetic and full of charisma, even when she lowers her voice and hunches her shoulders to impersonate cranky, growly old men. She says she’s drawn to improv for the adventure of it, the rush of not knowing where the next scene will take the show. Being on stage with the Upfront team is an environment in which she feels safe to take risks.
“You’re not worrying that they’re not going to say anything back to you,” she says. “It’s that collaboration, it gets me pumped. I definitely have a boner for collaboration.”
Mitchell’s team is made up of 25 improvisers, all of whom have been vetted through a long-term audition process. To make the team, they must first be accepted into a preliminary group, called the satellite team, before they’re ever considered for the mainstage ensemble. It can take anywhere between one to eight months.
Kris Erickson, the Upfront’s artistic and education director, runs the groups and performs with the teams as often as he can. Erickson is great at imitating stereotypical musical characters, like the cranky, pompous mayor who won’t allow anyone in the town to have a good time, or the shady figure on a street corner selling goods (this time, computer cords) out of his long overcoat. His characters give the performances a hilarious kind of familiarity.
Some jokes are so fast they seem almost like telepathy.
When the group is about to break into the third round of a chorus about the Jacuzzi store being a “Nerd Paradise,” the group stops singing and lets Kevin Hoogerwerf step forward to roll an imaginary “nerd pair-of-dice,” a reference to the game Dungeons and Dragons. A lot of audience members have a hard time keeping it together.
The team is quick to develop any plot line a member introduces. It’s something that Jacob Foerg, another member, likes about the group.
“The people at the Upfront are really supportive, you know they’ll be there for you,” he says. “Before we go on stage, we go up to each other and just say, ‘Hey, I’ve got your back.’ It’s a nice little reminder. It’s like, ‘Whatever you do, I won’t leave you high and dry.’”
Improv is a unique art form. It relies on laughter from the audience to dictate what jokes to keep running, what kind of humor is working for a show and where the plot goes. It’s a constant, continuous feedback loop, and the course of a show all depends if the audience is into it or not.
“It’s one of the few things that works really well for people to be so different. You get all these different styles, but we’re all here trying to make this thing look really good,” he says.
The stage members aren’t up there singing alone either. Evan Ingalls provides piano accompaniment for some of the Upfront’s shows. A piano composer for 15 years, Ingalls has provided piano accompaniment for Western’s Dead Parrots Society’s musical shows, too. His role in the performances is just as crucial as any of the members on stage.
“I’m improvising too, it’s just I’m doing it through my fingers, and they’re doing it through their voices. We really play off each other,” he says. He rehearses with the team to make sure they understand traditional song structures, and to make sure he knows when to start playing.
“If they’re getting to a point in a scene and think a song needs to start, they might give me a kind of cue like, ‘Let me tell you about that,’ then I need to figure out how fast, what key, if it’s major or minor, what style, things like that,” he says.
The collective thought that goes into creating a plot, introducing characters, singing songs, keeping time and making the audience laugh are what that the Upfront improv team strives to be better at every show. It is the key element that brings a performance from good to great.
For Kevin Hoogerwerf, who joined the mainstage team in March, improv is just another art form; a means of self-expression. As a musician, a stage actor and a videographer, Hoogerwerf likes improv because it allows him to create completely outside of himself. He describes the joy he gets from improv as unlike any other feeling.
“There’s this weird feeling, I guess I would call it groupmind, where you jump on the stage and you just know what to do. You know how to connect with your scene partners. It just feels so good, so effortless,” he says. “It’s what we strive for, to be on the same page.”
After one musical rehearsal in July, Foerg and Hoogerwerf walked up the hill to sit on the patio at Goat Mountain Pizza. Both were called up to the mainstage team at the same time, and will be roommates come August.
Foerg does stage theatre, as well as composes folk music outside of his improv work. Hoogerwerf does video editing, runs a podcast called The Process with satellite team member John Lee, and writes acoustic music as well. Both are Western grads, and they support each other in their separate art forms, pitching in to help whenever they can.
Foerg summed up what it is about improve that appeals to him.
“It’s really nice to play pretend with a group of people who know how to play pretend really, really well. And then you get good enough at playing pretend that people want to come pay money to watch,” he says. “That’s never stopped being fun for me.”
The final number of the “Nerd Paradise” show ends with the whole team on stage, singing together. The Jacuzzi and computer stores have come to a truce. The team ends the song, holds hands, and finally, takes a bow.