IMPROVOLYMPIA
A couple years ago Del Close and Charna Halpern were forced for legal reasons to change the name of their organization from the ImprovOlympic to ImprovOlympia. The change of one letter may seem trivial, but it wasn’t.
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The nightly rating of each team’s performance (often by the most capricious criteria) and declaring a winner, which suggested these victories meant something (which in a way they did, since losing teams were often broken up) ran counter to Close’s more nurturing, Zen-like message that process was more important than product, that you were more likely to hit the target if your ego wasn’t on the line. (At the time, Halpern’s message was more often: hit the target, dammit, or I’ll replace you with someone who can.)
Halpern still creates a more polished house team, but its role is closer to that of upperclassmen in a high school–something to aspire to. Of course experience is not always an asset in improvisation. Last Friday night the less-experienced team, Corky’s Callback, delivered the freshest and most spontaneous “Harold”–Close’s trademark long-form improvisation.
About halfway through the show Leggett snapped and turned on a drunk woman in the front row who kept shouting “masturbation!” whenever he asked for an audience suggestion. “What about masturbation?” he snarled at her, and then informed the rest of us, “This lady needs a mop, it’s so wet on the floor around her! Oh, she’s looking down! Don’t want to talk about it now, do you?”
