On Saturday evening, Casual Thursday stepped out of the Greek houses they typically perform in and into the Hopkins Center. The 45-minute performance in the Hop’s Bentley Theater featured informal improvisation scenes, sketch comedy and audience involvement.
Skits included traditional improv comedy routines, where the audience chooses a word like a non-geographical location to prompt a scene, as well as more specific routines developed by Casual Thursday like “The Flashlight Game” and “Telephone.”
Patrick Lewis ’16 said the group practiced for the show by working through the specific games to better understand their structure and familiarizing themselves with each other’s styles.
“It’s all about getting in sync and working together,” Lewis said. “We have to create that chemistry that it takes to create the best scenes.”
In “Flashlight,” the theater’s main lights were turned off, with the stage lit only by flashlights performers held. Lewis and Andrew Kingsley ’16 acted as two firemen who must urgently respond to a fire. However, they struggled to locate the fireman’s pole in the dark and to get down the pole without falling on top of each other. They also mistook a snake for a fire hose. The dynamic between Lewis’s “chief fireman” character and his understudy, played by Kingsley, brought the sketch to life.
While the game is relatively new to the group’s routine, Lewis said he thinks it has potential to grow and expand.
The best-received act was “Telephone,” a skit in which one improvisor receives a voicemail from other performers, who build a scene around their shared involvement with the voicemail recipient. For the scene, the answering machine belonged to a fictitious Bob’s Meat Factory, and callers included a New York Times investigative reporter, an overweight customer, an overeager employee and a cow mascot.
Casual Thursday performer Charlie Laud’14 called the game “a toss-up sometimes,” because it is a relatively long scene. If the humor does not gain traction, he said, it may fizzle.
On Saturday, however, this proved no problem at all. As the four storylines unfolded through messages left for Bob (played by James Staley Th’14), they humorously intersected with one another. The cow mascot (Laud), for example, was nearly eaten by the customer (Kingsley), who became hungry when the reporter (Lewis) shut the factory down upon discovering that it was processing human meat. All the while, the faithful employee (Packer) remained steadfastly loyal to his corrupt boss.
The performers impressively picked up small cues or gestures from one another with ease. Show attendee Sarah Watson, an exchange student from Trinity College, described these elements as often the funniest part of the scenes.
Paying close attention to this verbal and non-verbal communication, the actors seamlessly built scenes and moved between acts with dexterity, Watson said.
“Part of improv comedy is simply working with un-ideal moments,” she said.
This ease clearly reflected the performers’ familiarity with one another, the games and comedy itself.
Gavin Duarte ’14, who also attended the show, said each performer had his own strengths and weaknesses, which the group strategically used to garner the most laughs. Throughout the fast-paced show, the scenes were dramatically diverse and engaging, he said.
The show was the group’s second performance in Bentley. Deby Guzman-Buchness ’15, who performed in the show this weekend, said that the space, a black box theater, offered advantages to the group’s usual fraternity venues.
“Not to say that you can’t do improv in other places, but what’s really great is that it is a theater space, and you can hear,” Guzman-Buchness said. “I think one of the biggest problems is that often you can’t really hear anything in the fraternities.”
Adapting to the more formal setting, the group focused on making their performance look “clean,” according to Guzman-Buchness. They made use of the theater’s light board for the “Flashlight” sketch, an element not available to them in other spaces on campus.
“We can control what the audience sees, which is really cool,” Guzman-Buchness said.
Guzman-Buchness said that Casual Thursday is expanding to other forms of comedy, incorporating different improvisational styles and experimentation. The group’s performance at the Bentley this winter featured sketch comedy, standup comedy, singing games and monologues, she said.
“Traditionally our ‘thing’ when we first started was that we were short-form improv, which is a specific type of improv comedy like the one you see on ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’” Guzman-Buchness said. “But there’s so much more to improvisation, so we’ve branched out quite a bit from that.”
