CHICAGO IMPRO THEATER
at Holy Covenant Church
Every week the group improvises on a new theme, among them “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Go West,” and “Back to School.” The show I attended was “Baseball.” Such innocuous themes pretty much rule out hard-hitting, attention-getting social satire; it’s up to the ensemble to give the sketches enough importance and immediacy to grab the audience’s attention and keep it for two to five minutes at a stretch. They seem to have a hard time agreeing on what the scenes should be about, however. In the first sketch (located, by audience suggestion, in a bread shop and one of two sketches that had nothing to do with baseball), each ensemble member attacked the conflict in his or her own way instead of listening to one another and building the scene together. With five people straining to push the situation in five different directions, concentration became muddled and the ensemble rowed itself around in circles. The first act was full of this sort of floundering about, and while it was by no means painful to watch (Favreau and Ryan in particular managed a few one-liners worth a guffaw), it was ultimately frustrating and weak.
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The Hollywood Squares Not . . . Again! has nothing new or interesting to say about the 70s; if the game-show questions had at least made some pointed references to the decade the show claims to be lampooning, it might have been watchable. But even that’s debatable. The only thing worse than watching Rose Marie wrestle with encroaching senility is watching an actress pretending to be Rose Marie doing nothing at all.
