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The Daily Texan - (Austin, Texas) Entertainment Issue: 9/12/05

Sewing up the split sides

By V. Marc Fort

Six different comedy and improv troupes from Austin and Dallas kicked off the opening night of the Out of Bounds Improv Festival and Mini Golf Tournament at the Hideout's upstairs and downstairs theaters with the audacity and aplomb of seasoned professionals. Like all of the best improv comedy, nothing was sacred, and all of the most inspired moments were unconventional and totally off-the-cuff.

Their timing couldn't have been more perfect.

Judging from the volume and immediacy of the laugh-track-like guffaws, it was obvious that the audience really wanted, really needed, to let loose with some side-splitting laughter. During these darkened days after the horror and madness of hurricane Katrina's aftermath - and with the solemn anniversary of September 11 looming only days around the corner - it's easy to be serious, but it's terribly difficult to be funny.

Festival executive producers Shannon McCormick and Mike D'Alonzo beamed like proud papas looking on through the theatre proscenium at their figurative toddlers taking their first big steps during the festival's fourth year.

It takes a brave actor to get on stage with nothing planned out to say. It's akin to jumping out of a plane and having someone throw a parachute down after you. It's not unlike freestyle rapping. But even most freestyle hip-hop artists have recurring one-liners and ready-set couplets about your mother, or your stank-ass breath, that they can pull-out whenever an opportunity for rhyming presents itself.

Dallas' The French Club Dropouts had no problem coming up with comic bravery. The Dropouts headlined the small and cozy improv theater on the Hideout's upstairs stage. Founded in January of 2005, the Dropouts are an improv troupe assembled by Toronto Second City alum Brandon Enriquez. Veterans of the Dallas improv and sketch-comedy scene Angie Epley, John Rawley, Victoria Hines and Brad McEntire complete the Dropouts line-up.

"We try to come up with interesting and new formats to improvise," McEntire said during an interview following the performance. "Hyperlinks is one we came up with - the scenes are interrelated in a roundabout way and will connect most of the time. Characters will pop-up again (and again)."

Just as writers use the repetition of soft-sounding words to yield a poetic effect, the Dropout's actors listened closely to each other in order to repeat successful comic beats later in their improvised routines.

"She's laughing like the sound of ... water falling on her naked body," Enriquez said during a skit in which he portrayed a perverted, and highly inappropriate, waiter with an accent so amalgamated that it was just ridiculous. Someone in the audience yelled "click," then the actors switched characters and improvised an entirely new scenario. Hines and Epley switched to portraying a rutty-skinned, four-arm-flailing "sentient being," looking to carry on the existence of their species by mating with a sad-sac internet dater portrayed by McEntire.

"Click," yelled another audience member minutes later, and now Enriquez was a spitting, flatulent, Elmer Fudd-ish, elderly man hunting the two-bodied sentient alien being.

"Click," shouted a different audience member, and now Hines and Epley were portraying pot-smoking friends that rushed to a hospital after eating week-old dim sum.

"You know I'll eat anything when I'm high," Epley said making the audience burst into a knowing laugh.

"Most of the troupe are (cigarette) smokers, so we still rehearse, try things out and just have fun in Victoria's back yard," McEntire said. "As improvisers, we look for connections, and we listen as close as we can and try to bring something interesting on stage ... we end up cracking each other up. Things happen unintentionally."

While the Dropouts induced belly-ache laughter upstairs, Polite Society Presents..., worked their improv comedy magic downstairs. "We're gonna jam improv right up your orifices," Andy Crouch said as his Austin-based improv troupe, Polite Society Presents... headlined the downstairs stage. Crouch is also the theatre manager of The Hideout.

Crouch solicited two "safe words" from the audience. While one audience member yelled "shrimp," another person in the audience shouted-out "teeth." From there, the troupe went into a Dada-esque, improvised riff about making "nocturnal emissions" and Greek Gods popping out of the teeth of baby shrimp.

"Not all improv comedy is funny, but some of it is ... not," Crouch said as his tongue inflated his cheek. That statement lead into their next routine entitled, "Not Funny." One actor would rotate out of the skit every time they said something that made the audience laugh. When an audience member shouted the safe-word, "bookstore," being the demented, sick and twisted comics that they are, the Polite Society Presents... troupe returned, "bookstore ... OK ... (to us) that means 'porn shop'."

Austin troupe Gag Reflex - including Dale Roe, Joe Stafford, Jed "Dino" Duesler, Dena Taylor, Carrie Sapp, Robin Kauffman, Kelly Winn-Frink and James Cooper - appeared to utilize rehearsed routines, a la Saturday Night Live or Mad TV, as opposed to straight-up improv during their downstairs, middle-slot performance. One of their funniest skits was a commercial for a subdivision named Roiling Hills. While Winn-Frink spoke in a plaintive voice-over about the quaint and beautiful things the fictional suburban community had to offer, Roe and Stafford portrayed neighbors that passively-aggressively spat back and forth sentences about their disintegrating relationship.

"I'll allow my dog to run loose in your yard," Roe said as the first angry neighbor ever-so calmly. "I'll spy on your family with binoculars ... particularly your wife," Stafford returned as the second angry neighbor. "Come to Roiling Hills," intoned Winn-Frink with the monotone seduction of a late-night infomercial.

Before McEntire performed with the French Club Dropouts, he opened the festival by performing solo in the downstairs theatre with his troupe Mild Dementia. After 6 years, Wednesday night was Mild Dementia's last performance as McEntire is the last remaining player in the troupe. One of his funniest bits was a hip-hop rap about Smokey The Bear complete with rhymes about Smokey's low-dangling testicles. "He's got jaws and claws that be comin' out his paws. He's on call and saw you breaking all the laws," McEntire continued. "He's here and there, he's got hair and no underware. He just let's his balls hang, in case he wants to bang, any bare female bear poontang."

In equal parts, McEntire's schizophrenic comedy and his riotous rhymes made hip-hop artists, improv comedians and the United States' National Park Service quite proud, if not disturbed. At the same time, McEntire relieved a little of the post-Katrina stress from the audience's collective-consciousness.

photos of the above-mentioned Mild Dementia performance click here.

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