IMPROVISATION THEATRE
Produced by Pulp Playhouse hosted by BATS Improv
Date: 7 Nov 2020 via ZOOM
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars: ***1/2
This review published only on this blog. KH
Top L-R: Regina Saisi, Rafe Chase, Joshua Raoul Brody; Lower L-R: O-lan Jones, Mike McShane, Brian Lohmann
On 7 November 2020, BAT Improv hosted a reunion show by members of Pulp Playhouse, an inspired and inspiring company of improvisers who explore genres in their storytelling.
The company’s first show was 23 April 1988 in San Francisco. and the members changed over the years. The shows I saw in the 90s featured Paul Killam, Diane Rachel, Barbara Scott, Regina Saisi and others.
This online show boasts improvisers from San Francisco and Los Angeles: Regina Saisi (director of the show), Rafe Chase, O-lan Jones, Brian Lohmann and Mike McShane, with music by the incomparable Joshua Raoul Brody.
On the Zoom screen, we see the improvisers narrate stories and play characters alone in their homes, some against virtual backgrounds, as they tell crime fiction stories in the style of pulp novels. Each is a discrete narrative introduced by a pre-determined character who asks for a story title from the audience who post their title ideas in the Zoom Chat.
In Story One, Regina Saisi, as narrator, Eleanor Hillary Shackleton III, is in a snowstorm surrounded by her huskies. She tells the story of The Wild River in which Cynthia meets Ralph, a gentleman who slips into a river. She saves him with her poetry and, perhaps more practically, with a makeshift canoe that tumbles over a waterfall.
The narrator of Story Two is Brian Lohmann playing Arlo Fisk, former – or is failed – FBI agent, now FBI archivist, who welcomes us to FBI: Inside! from the FBI Archives library (a black and white, virtual background). Fisk, a character Lohmann created for early Pulp shows, narrates the story One Bullet, an exciting story told by a dull man. Lohmann’s characterisation of the dour FBI officer, Fisk, is awkward, rigid and hilariously earnest.
‘Crime is bad. Nobody likes it!’, says Fisk dryly.
In One Bullet, Mike McShane as Herman Kitter, a man of influence, is confronted outside his barber shop by a man and woman with nude photographs that could ruin him. Lohmann, as Fisk, says about Kitter, ‘He had a susceptible kidney’.
Story Three is narrated by Rafe on his character’s 30th anniversary with his ventriloquist dummy bride. He tells his bride a story about a woman (Regina Saisi) alone in a cabin who meet and befriends Sasquatch (McShane) outside her lonely cabin. This becomes a love story as eccentric as that of the narrator and his dummy bride.
O-lan Jones as Roliimpsia Queen of the World, the laid back and petulant warrior princess, narrates The Swedish Fish, a story about Princess Volartua (Regina) whose herald finds in Sweden a poetic Fish (Brian) that can sing a beautiful, Swedish Fish song.
The final story is by Mike McShane as elderly Peepers Keeperbaum, a former child star living in a retirement home. In his crusty aged voice, McShane narrates the clever and witty Clara Bow and the Model T, about a meeting between Clara Bow, pert, silent movie actress with a squeaky piping voice, and Henry Ford, inventor and captain of industry.
The expertise and ease of these versatile and masterly improvisers creates narratives and characters that inspire and entertain. Let’s hope for more reunions shows.
by Kate Herbert
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