Spur of the Moment (4 page)

7

Shakespeare on the Moon

S
pur of the Moment Improv Theater was located on the second floor of a restaurant/bar called aMuse (it was decorated with paintings and decorations of the seven muses from Greek mythology). Steve Cuddy, the founder and director of Spur of the Moment, had teamed up with a friend to create a perfect date-night destination: Get dinner at aMuse, go see a show at Spur, then go back down to the bar for more drinks afterward. Steve ran the theater upstairs, and John ran the restaurant downstairs. Spur had its own smaller bar in the back of the theater to help people along with their two-drink minimum, and that was the usual watering hole for the comedians after the shows. While the restaurant was decorated with rich maplewood floors and tables and elegant furnishings, Spur was dimly lit and stark, decorated only with pictures of the comedians who'd performed there over the last ten years.

aMuse was already filled with happy-hour office workers as Chelsey McGuiness, Marin Kennesaw, Jason Hess, Scott Winn, and Ramiro Martinez began their aural warm ups upstairs, standing in a circle on the small, scuffed stage.

“Lo-leeeee-ta. Light of my life. Fire of my loins. Lo-leeeee-ta,” they all over-enunciated wildly and repeated the phrase several times.

“Balcony,” Ramiro called, indicating that they should move on to a different exercise.

“She stood on the balcony inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping and amicably welcoming him in,” they said in unison. “She stood on the balcony inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping and amicably welcoming him in. She stood on the balcony inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping and amicably welcoming him in.”

When they finished warming up their voices, they did their physical warm-ups, which included lots of mock karate chopping and the like.

As Chelsey balanced on one foot, her arms raised up à la The Karate Kid, she asked, “Where's Ana?”

“She had to work late,” Scott said as he boxed an invisible opponent. “She's trying to finish something up. She'll be here soon.”

“Fuck!” They all turned to see Ana race through to the dressing room. “I wanted to be the first one here and instead I'm the last one and we go on in fifteen minutes. Fuckedy fuckedy fuck fuck!”

“Fifteen minutes? Shit,” Ramiro said. He, Jason, Chelsey, and Marin walked backstage. Only five people performed each night, ostensibly to give one person the night off, but almost without fail, whoever wasn't performing sat in the audience to watch the show. Because really, where else do you want to spend your Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights other than with your best friends? Also, no one wanted to miss out on a single laugh.

Scott walked into the audience to sit next to Nick just as Darren, the host, unlocked the door to start seating audience members.

Ana slammed the dressing room door behind her and threw off her work clothes to change into her Spur of the Moment uniform of black shoes, black jeans, and a black polo shirt with the Spur of the Moment logo on the left side. She retouched her lipstick—her trademark red that, she was convinced, lit up her amber-colored eyes. She threw her long, dark brown hair into a haphazard bun.

Then she ran out of the dressing room to the handful of audience members who'd been seated. Ana was sweating from her sprint from the parking lot to the dressing room. Great. Sweaty and smelly was exactly how she wanted to meet the event planner from Qwest. And how had she become the delegate on this deal anyway? Steve Cuddy was the director, he was the one who should be handling this, but he didn't have a day job, he could live off what Spur of the Moment made without getting them a whole bunch of extra corporate performances, so he wasn't nearly as driven to get the group more paying gigs as they were.

Ana addressed the audience with a big smile, covertly wiping the sweat from her forehead with the side of her hand. “Hi, are any of you Guy Moran from Qwest Communications?”

“Yeah, hi, are you Ana?” A man at a table close to the stage stood and offered a hand for her to shake.

“I am. I'm so glad you could make it tonight. Let me introduce you to Steve Cuddy, the founder and director of Spur of the Moment.”

Guy followed her backstage to the office where Steve worked. Steve had founded Spur of the Moment ten years ago, when he was in his early thirties. He'd stopped performing when he'd had to begin putting more of his time and energy into running the business side of things. He was the only person at Spur of the Moment who was over thirty, the only married person, and the only one with a kid. The rest of the Spur gang regarded him with reverence and more than a little awe. Someone who was raising a kid? Someone who had real, actual responsibilities? Such a life seemed so abstract and weird to them.

“Steve, this is Guy Moran from Qwest. Guy, this is Steve Cuddy,” Ana said. “He handles all the bookings and all that kind of stuff. We can do sketch comedy, improv, a mix of the two, whatever you want. The show will be starting in just a few minutes, but maybe you can join us afterwards for a couple of drinks. Enjoy the show, and thanks again for coming!”

Chelsey was the emcee for the night, the one who explained how the skits worked and took suggestions from the audience. She peered out from backstage. No, there was no gorgeous Native American named Rob in the audience. Damn!

The five performers got on stage and waited for the lights to go on and for Tom to introduce them. Tom Taylor was the muscular sound-and-light guy who kept the lights shining and enhanced the humor with perfectly timed strange noises using just his voice (when one of the actors would open a door, for example, he would make the sound of a door creaking open). Tom had a bright smile that contrasted impressively against his black skin. He'd had a promising career in football until a knee injury on the field in his senior year at the University of Northern Colorado cut his aspirations short. Now he worked as a radio DJ during the day and the Spur of the Moment sound-and-light guy on weekends.

The five players stood with their backs to the audience. Tom turned on Kylie Minogue's “Can't Get You Out of My Head” and as the performers danced around the stage, Tom boomed in his best mock white-guy announcer voice, “Gooooooood evening ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Spur of the Moment. I'd like to introduce the actors for the evening.” At this point, four of the actors would stand still and then Tom would put the spotlight on just one of them, and he or she would dance around goofily for about fifteen seconds while Tom introduced him or her, then Tom would shine the spotlight on the next person until they'd all been introduced. When he got to Chelsey, she did her Irish jig moves, wearing a mock-serious expression on her face, all big eyes and pursed lips. Chelsey loved that the years she'd spent as a kid learning Irish dancing had an applicable skill now that she was an adult. That was the thing about improv—absolutely anything you'd ever done, read, or heard could become fodder for material on stage. When you had to act on the very first thought that popped into your head, reacting to whatever the other actors said, things from the darkest recesses of memory had a way of jumping out. Being a successful improv comedian required an extensive ability to remember pop culture trivia, geography, film, and history. If the emcee asked the audience to yell out a person or a place or an event and they yelled out “Justin Timberlake” or “Bora Bora” or “WorldCom's troubles” and you didn't know what they were talking about, you were quite screwed on stage. This had happened to Ana once when she'd asked the audience for a movie genre, and the first thing someone yelled out was “film noir.” Ana had heard of film noir, but she wasn't sure what it was or how to go about acting in the film noir genre. She thought maybe film noir was something that had taken place in the 1940s involving men in trench coats and bowler hats. But she also thought film noir might still exist today. So she just went through her scene acting moody and dark and hoping to hell she wasn't making a total ass of herself.

Chelsey took the microphone. “Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Spur of the Moment. Thanks for coming down tonight. By a show of hands, how many of you have never been to Spur of the Moment before?” About half the audience raised their hands. “Well, we are thrilled to have you—maybe almost as thrilled as you are to be here for the funniest show in town. For those of you who are new, this is how it works. Nothing you're going to see on stage tonight has been rehearsed. You will see scenes never before performed because they are created based on suggestions that you, the audience, provide. The actors act on their impulses, they think on their feet. Are we ready to get started?” Hoots, hollers, and applause indicated that the audience was indeed ready. “To get us going, I need a style of literature.”

“Shakespeare!” an audience member screamed out, followed by suggestions for romance and horror.

“Shakespeare was the first thing I heard. Okay, now I need an emotion.”

“Anger!”

“Anger it is. One last thing I need is a location.”

“The moon!”

“All right, you will now see the actors perform a Shakespearean tale on the moon involving the emotion anger. Actors begin!”

Chelsey ran off the stage and Jason and Marin walked on. Jason had grabbed a red velvet, puffy-sleeved blazer and a blue velvet cap with an enormous blue feather from the large store of wigs and partial costumes they kept in the wings. Marin was wearing a red velvet cape over her Spur of the Moment uniform.

“I knew I shouldst hath divorced ye when we were still on earth,” Marin hissed. “Nowest that ye hath sentenced me to a life on this barren rock, I shall never find a lawyer of divorce to sue thine ass off!”

“Alack, my bonnie lass, I knoweth that mine actions hath filled ye with a great fiery rage like that of a thousand poisoned serpents scorned. But judge me not for transporting our cattle operations to this crater-laden orb that doth monthly our earthly home encircle. Our bovineious creatures hath gorged themselves of all the hearty grains of planet earth and only here could we find enough room to raise the synthetic grain and raiseth our cows in peace.” Jason rubbed his hands together and arched his eyebrow, making an expression like a cartoon villain. The audience loved it and roared with laughter. “Aye, with mine secret chemicals, I will be able to create super cows.”

“Super cows?”

“Super cows! Then, we can returnest to earth and sell more beef to McDonald's than anyone else in the universe!”

“Aye?” Marin showed interest now.

“Fear not my shrewish wife—shrewder than the shrewest shrew—by mine honor, I do vow that we shall soon have riches greater than royalty, greater than Sir Jordon of Michael or Sir Gates of Bill,” Jason said.

“Rich? Aye? I darest not suspect that mine ears could e'er hear words more glorious than those which thee have cast into this black, oxygenless night.” Marin looked lovingly at Jason and said in a gentle voice, “Oh my dear, you are the rose of mine eye indeed. My heart doth flutter for you like the wings of a butterfly. Well should'st I say an earth-bound butterfly, for surely any such winged creature on this zero-gravity sphere would have the life force sucked clear out of its bodily home, its fragile softness imploding like the skin of Sir Arnold Schwarzenegger in Recall of Total.” Marin and Jason smiled romantically and embraced, Marin resting her head on his chest as the lights dimmed.

Ana stood on the sidelines, feeling a sharp pang of jealousy. Of course she'd seen Jason and Marin embrace in dozens of scenes before. She even knew that Marin and Jason slept together occasionally—Jason because he loved her, and Marin because Jason was a convenient fuck buddy when there wasn't another guy around to do the job. But still, every time Ana saw them together, a splinter of resentment ran through her.

Ramiro and Ana went out on stage for the next skit, which was a game called “Forward, Reverse.” The way it worked was that they started a scene (in this case located in a mechanic's garage), and at any point in the scene, Chelsey could call out “reverse” or “forward,” and they'd go back through the scene backwards or move forward again from whatever point in the scene she yelled out the command. No matter what the basic story line was, the scene inevitably invoked laughter, mostly because the actors tended to forget what came when, and seeing them fail was often more fun than seeing them succeed. (Unlike stand-up comedy, where the audience sat there, arms crossed, with an attitude of “yeah, we'll just see if you can make me laugh,” with improv, the audience was rooting for the actors. When the actors messed up, the audience thought it was pant-wettingly hilarious.) She could also yell out “fast forward,” and seeing someone race around on stage was also somehow intrinsically funny.

Ana ran offstage, straining to catch her breath. She poured herself a large glass of water from the pitcher they always brought from the bar downstairs. Improv could be sweaty work, and all that talking, singing, and shouting took its toll on performers' vocal cords. Everyone, except Chelsey, drank gallons of water between skits. Chelsey was addicted to Diet Red Stallion and inhaled it by the case, a fact her Spur buddies teased her about it relentlessly. They called her Bullsy, after the alleged fact that one of the ingredients in Red Stallion was synthetic bull piss or some such notion.

Ana had done well, and the audience had loved the scene, but she felt unsatisfied. This was getting too easy. She needed new challenges.

Ever since she, Marin, and Chelsey had flown for a weeklong training at Second City in Chicago a few months earlier over the summer, they'd learned about the other things they could do with improv—like long-form improv instead of the short-form they did night after night—she'd become restless. They'd tried several times to talk to Steve about letting them try a few new things, but all he said, over and over again, was that what they were doing now worked, it paid the bills, and you don't fix what's not broken. Ana spent her days at the office getting her ideas shot down, and even here, in her creative space, she was being boxed in. It made her crazy.
Shake it off, shake it off,
she admonished herself. Moments later, she ran on stage as a smiley three-year-old girl accompanying her mother to the zoo.