Review: THE IMPROVISED SHAKESPEARE COMPANY at Theater Lab/Kennedy Center

Likest thou to laugh? Then get thee to the Theater Lab at the Kennedy Center through December 19 for The Improvised Shakespeare Company who returneth with 90 minutes of gallimaufry for mature groundlings only. The lads invent what viewers dealt/in Shakespeare's words, so timely felt/clad but in sword and in dance belt. In other words, five gentlemen are going to make you laugh for an hour and a half with no sets, no costumes, no props, no sound cues, no microphones, no play--just one suggestion from the audience plus every situation, complication, characterization, and implication in every play that Shakespeare ever wrote. See these players well bestowed, because they don't know whose line it is anyway.

Using the English language in general and Shakespeare's language in particular as the tennis ball it was meant to be, the Five Guys toss and serve enough Elizabethan word salad to fill, nay sate an audience hungry for a post-prandial (and post-pandemical) laugh. (Hey, the RSC says that Shakespeare added 1700 words to the English language, plus which the Improvised Shakespeare Company's stock in trade, in sum to please, be puns, mixed metaphors, mime, and physical comedies. Um, yeah, and also random rhyming.) And when they somehow can't make it sound like a Bard wrote it, they break out into 2021-speak just to keep the lines moving.

In lieu of a script, the youths create the sort of unconsidered trifles as Shakespeare has sent, including:

• falling in love

• falling in love with someone from the wrong tribe

• falling in love with someone who's actually in disguise

• falling in love with a tree (don't ask)

• mistaken identity

• mistaken juggling

• mistaken locations from a galaxy far, far away from Shakespeare's great Globe itself

• scaring up a clergyman of some sort to wed some couples in time for the tag line.

And while ever-dropping recognizably Shakespearean bread crumbs, the troupe of players break out into break dance, DIY couplets, soliloquies, love scenes, fight scenes, sights seen, à Capella singin' and dancin', iambic pentameter, whatever the hell we're talkin' in these days, and at least one patented theatre game straight outta Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater. This 5-man team hails from Chicago, the Mother Ship of American improv. (The box office phone is 202.467.4600.)

By now to you indeed it must be clear

That this fine show is really very dear.

The actors listen as each other speak,

And (desperate) oft make sense of every tweak.

They use asides, and gymnasts some be too;

And they keep talking 'til the sketch be true.

They must have safe words as a recompense,

For, 'struth, I've heard them almost not make sense.

It is not the fashion to see the lady write the review; what a case am I in then to tell you that a good play needs no review. So hie thee hence, away, and mock the time. The Improvised Shakespeare Company performs less than a fortnite's time. To learn of Covid protocols and to attend, visit https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/explore-by-genre/comedy/2021-2022/the-improvised-shakespeare-company/ When I make curtsey, bid me farewell.

Photograph by Koury Angelo

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