There comes a time in one’s life when one must recognize the value of improvised comedy. That time, for me, was last weekend during my viewing of Jet City Improv’s The Emerald City Slasher.
With a cast of 8 actors and a venue (West of Lenin) fitting what I imagined must be less than 40 audience members, the production was unassuming at first. As the lights went down and an ad for an upcoming drama played, I thought myself in for a night of note-taking alongside the occasional chuckle. Instead, I found myself struggling to sketch the actors in between bouts of boisterous laughter and chilling suspense.
In the lobby of the venue, there was a poster-sized QR code that took you to a google form where one could suggest characters for the actors to play. I thought this was a great way to streamline the audience suggestion mechanic of improv. It gave audience members a sense of agency in the production, as all good improv does, but it also did not allow us any control to foresee or manipulate scenarios, which can be demotivating.
The actors themselves were wonderful. While there is always that hesitation between line deliveries where you can see the gears turning in performers’ heads that comes with any improv, the witty punchlines that came after were always successful in shocking a chuckle out of me. Actors with weaker comedic instincts made up for it with charisma and quick thinking. They consistently bailed each other out when someone talked themselves into a corner. One of my favorite parts of improv comedy is seeing performers’ relationships with each other filtered through the lens of stories, and Jet City Improv pulled it off without breaking a sweat.
A mechanic I found slightly disappointing was the Cup Of Destiny. This, a plastic chalice full of slips of paper, was what gave the actors their murder mystery roles. On each slip was written one of three roles: Murderer, Victim and Survivor. While initially I thought this a great idea to randomize characters’ roles to get an interesting and perhaps unexpected story every time, I found it posed the most problems for the structure of the storyline.
From what I could tell as an audience member, actors did not inform one another of their roles prior to the reveal scenes at the very end. This made for a disjointed story that at points did not seem like it went anywhere. It also prevented actors from working together to seed hints about who the killer may be, and what their motivation for killing is. It also meant that the means, motives and opportunities were either cobbled together last-minute or nonexistent entirely.
While these are some hefty complaints, I want to stress that they didn’t take away from my night in any way. I went into the improv show knowing that it wasn’t going to be a Broadway-level performance, and I went out happy I’d spent my night supporting my community’s theatrical productions.
Improv troupes (and theater like this in general) play an important role in community ecosystems like ours. They allow inexperienced actors to get a footing in the industry, crew members a creative outlet and audiences an inexpensive night out full of entertainment and laughter. As the months get cold and the Seattle freeze gets colder, consider taking your friends to pay your local improv troupe a visit. You’d be in for a great night.
You can find out more about Jet City Improv and see their upcoming shows on their website.
