WELCOME TO THE BARN RAISING
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Yet what makes this show amazing is not that director Mick Napier and his cast of six have been able to create funny sketches about a bride being fitted for a dress, or a father talking to his son, or a crowd of people getting trapped in an elevator–every improv group in the city must have explored these topics. Rather it’s the way the cast is able to create comedy that has as much in common with the postmodern self-conscious humor of Napier’s Metraform shows (Coed Prison Sluts and That Darned Antichrist) as it has with Second City’s straight-ahead satire.
In fact, the opener to Welcome to the Barn Raising, in which Jackie Hoffman self-consciously lectures the audience on the various ways a Second City show might begin, is funny for the same reasons the opening song of Coed Prison Sluts (which begins, “Hey, we’re in prison”) is funny. Both perform the difficult trick of pulling the audience into the show even as they remind the audience that they’re devices created to pull the audience into the show.
Certainly no other Second City director since Del Close has been as willing as Napier to test the limits of what’s permissible on Second City’s stage. But then what do you expect from a man who admits in his program bio that conventional theater bored him to tears? If the powers that be at Second City were smart, they would teach their staff and students to be similarly bored to tears by the usual, the shopworn, the vaguely reminiscent. Then we might never see another tedious Second City revue again.
