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Review: Tipple Effect Tested

Troupes serve laughs without the liquor in 'Splitting the Bill'

01/04/2003

By TOM SIME / The Dallas Morning News

Talk about your dry humor. What is improvisational comedy without a bustling waitstaff fostering a steadily rising blood-alcohol level? Not as funny, that's what. And that's the special challenge faced by troupes that choose to, as Well Hung Jury's statement puts it, "elevate improv to a more theatrical place." Next thing you know, they'll be staring out at a blue-haired Sunday matinee crowd, thinking, "Did we really want this?"

Austin's Well Hung Jury and Dallas' Mild Dementia Continuous-Play Variety Hour collaborate on Splitting the Bill, an aptly named program that opened at the Bath House Cultural Center on Friday. The companies took turns in approximately hourlong sets that asked the question, Would the crowd laugh and offer amusing suggestions without lubrication? Generally, the answer was yes.

Mild Dementia members Vikas Adam, Brad McEntire, Audra Oakley and Jeff Swearingen led the charge. Each had at least one shining moment. Ms. Oakley delivered a hilarious man-hating rant about "the oh-so-masculine scale of one to 10" for rating women's looks, all in defense of Mr. Adam in drag. Mr. Swearingen did an amusingly intense bit as a "monologist, someone who speaks abundantly and never really says much." But he couldn't get off the subject of love and other "feelings that resemble longing and melancholy ... the fear and trembling that eat away at us without appeasement." Hey, you had to be there.

Mr. Adam gave patrons a chance to choose his colleagues' fates by pulling a slip of paper from the "Happy Doom Box," which decreed that Mr. McEntire would "sing a happy song about being mugged," and that Ms. Oakley had to give "a rousing message of hope and/or faith in humanity." Mr. McEntire recruited four audience members, acted out four roles in a mimed skit for them, and then put them through the paces to act it out themselves.

But as most playwrights will tell you, it sometimes pays to write ahead of time, and the most accomplished bit was a song sung by the men, "Christmas in My Underwear," performed in same. One patron, clearly impressed, gave a curious response, overheard from the risers: "That should be a song."

Music is even more integral to Well Hung Jury, which calls its long-form improvs "DooWops." The company took an audience suggestion, "memory loss," as the jumping-off point for a 45-minute sketch about Mortimer (Bill Stern), who got a job at a medical school pretending to be an amnesiac, then got mugged and clobbered on the head so he really did lose his memory. Jordan T. Maxwell stood out as a suave dentist, as did John Benner as an actor specializing in portraying "chronic death ... it's very rare."

Not in improv, which is all about survival. And these folks endured, persevered and did not die. They nailed the gags, not their own coffins. And we in the audience deserve a hand, too. When you're not drinking, it's like watching without a net.

Splitting the Bill, presented by Mild Dementia Continuous Play Variety Hour and Well Hung Jury at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther at Northcliff, Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets $7 general, $5 students. For mature audiences; includes adult language. Call 214-731-8650.

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