BATS Improv Online, 5 June 2021 ****

IMPROVISED THEATRE

Canadian Horror Story by BATS Improv Online (San Francisco) BATS Online

On Facebook and Zoom, 5 June 2021 (Sun 6 June AET)

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Stars: ****

Regina Saisi -Rafe Chase  BATS Canadian Horror Story, pic from Zoom show

Canadian Horror Story, the brainchild of Canadian improviser, Karen Brelsford, is the latest online improvised show from BATS Improv Online in San Francisco.

 

Brelsford, appearing in black and white, introduces the show in the persona of a late-night, horror movie host. From the audience suggestions – posted in the Zoom Chat – Brelsford decides that the story will be set in Doug Hollow, a small, bucolic, Canadian town that is visited by two cousins on a car trip.

 

This improvised horror show is variously hilarious, spooky, demented and gory. The story takes us, via virtual backgrounds, to a car interior, a rustic log cabin / gas station, the town bar, the interior and exterior of an isolated motel and a creepy forest at night. Joshua Raoul Brody’s music has echoes of the original Twin Peaks score.

 

The show begins with a short vignette of a gruesome, double murder in the Doug Hollow hairdresser’s, called the Beautiful You Salon. It is now the 10^th anniversary of said murder and the townspeople are anxious. Well, to be precise, they’re freaking out, because every year on the anniversary of the murders, things go awry, and this year is no exception.

 

Cousins, Pete (Rafe Chase) and Terry (Regina Saisi), are innocents abroad, Canadian tourists babbling in their car about their mothers who were sisters. Terry is writing a novel, or beginning it, and boy, does she have some material by the end of their trip!

 

This story is peppered with eccentric, rustic Canadians who punctuate their sentences with a Canadian, ’Eh?’ and try valiantly to hide their group hysteria.

 

We meet the murder victims, bartender, band members, a Mountie, a motel manager, Suzette the hairdresser and Marissa, the painter. Finally, we meet Mickey Romsberg, the young man who murdered the hairdresser and his fiancée after a humiliatingly bad haircut.

 

The most hilariously rustic scene occurs outside an isolated, wood cabin-style gas station, between

Pat Gary (Brelsford), the bowser woman, who banters with dopey, wide-eyed Wayne, played by Rebecca Stockley sporting mad, facial hair. Her superimposed, virtual brows, ‘tache and beard transform her face.

 

Bodies are chopped and dropped apace, all being scalped right down to the scull in the same mode as those murders 10 years ago and on every anniversary since. The denouement is that paint-splattered Marissa is Mickey’s dead fiancée who Mickey makes relive the murders every anniversary.

 

Remember the tourists, Pete and Terry? Well, Mickey kills Pete, then Terry kills Mickey ending his murderous reign. Mickey and Marissa, now both dead, are no longer trapped in their murderous cycle and Terry now has plenty of material for her horror story novel to be written in Pete’s honour.

 

‘The moral’, says Brelsford glibly at the end, ‘is to say “Sorry”.’

 

By Kate Herbert 7 June 2021

 

 

NB: I can tell you the story and its ending of this show as it is improvised so there can be no spoilers as it will never be seen again.