Stage: Grown-ups at Play
The Usual Suspects is an impish improvisational trio that revels in the joy of making it up as it goes along
By Erin Auerbach, Las Vegas Weekly
Does art influence society or does society inspire art? This chicken-and-egg question has been beaten (pun intended) to death throughout the ages, but there has never been a definitive answer. So it's easy to see why improvisation is such a valuable and thoroughly entertaining art form. The actors and audience both feed off each other's energy. The Usual Suspects improvisation troupe makes an exceptional transformation as they turn a small, quiet audience into a raucous crowd that cheers them on and feeds off of their tremendous talent.
One of the reasons that children tend to be such good actors is because they know how to play and be completely vulnerable. Inhibition and fear probably starts early in puberty when you're afraid of doing anything that'll make others perceive you as being lame. The expression "class clown" is usually reserved for the one unique person who kids will laugh with rather than laugh at. People build walls around themselves, and this is considered mature and socially acceptable behavior, yet we all improvise everyday. Most of our conversations and actions are only premeditated to a limited extent. One of the joys of improvisational comedy is that it's all about loose play.
There are few parameters that control a scene, yet there are connections that are more elaborate than any rehearsed act. This agreement between the actors is key to the success of a given scene, and it goes beyond themselves because they must also get a feel for the audience. The references to popular society have to be universal and current. They have to gauge just how culturally savvy the audience is. It's no fun if they make obscure references that no one gets.
Like most improv groups, The Usual Suspects (Finley Bolton, Rick Ginn and Jeff Granstrom) does a good job of involving the audience in what they're doing. They ask the audience to establish items that are used as major plot points for their scene. For example, they play an alphabet handle (a.k.a. a game) where two of them (Bolton and Granstrom) are going to have an argument and each one must start their sentence with a letter of the alphabet and continue in chronological order. They have the audience give the starting letter (we chose L) and a topic to fight over (we chose religion). We're kept involved by shouting at an actor if they screw up the sequence.
Set in The Magic Emporium, they have a wonderful space to work with. The stage is small and the chairs are comfortable. The ceiling is high and the yellow, green, red and blue walls make the room warm rather than busy. The actors come out, dressed in street clothes and work to get the audience revved up. This proved to be a challenge last Friday as the audience was smaller than usual, and at the beginning it did seem as though the actors were working too hard to make up for a somewhat empty room.
But somewhere along the line, something somewhat extraordinary happened. The synergy of the actors came together. As soon as they really started to play with one another, the audience began playing with them. That's pretty impressive--most of the time an evening that starts slowly is doomed, especially when it's a scripted play. But as soon as the actors let their insecure walls come tumbling down, the real fun began.
The climax of the evening is the talk show skit, where Granstrom does a "hearing impaired" translation. At some point, the invention of a "cock cozy" was brought up and you can just imagine how Granstrom signed it. The nicest thing about im-provisation, however, is that no matter how many times actors play the same game over and over, it's never the same. How successful it will be is a gamble, but you can put your money on The Usual Suspects being a winner each time.