STAGE REVIEW : OFF THE CUFF OF ‘SILLS & COMPANY’

“Sills & Company” have brought their on-the-spot theater games to the Westwood Playhouse for three weeks. It’s a more prestigious venue than the group’s performance space on Heliotrope Avenue, but a less friendly one, and their work Wednesday night was a touch wary, like a pianist feeling out a strange instrument.

No matter. Paul Sills and his players remain the class of the field when it comes to theater improvisation--the art of the possible. Tell them who they’re supposed to be, where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to be doing, and they’ll run you up a usable comic sketch in the time it would take the average writer to scratch his head and make his first visit to the water cooler.

To make the game more interesting, they add restrictions. Such as: The people in the scene must come to realize something without anybody’s putting the issue into words. Or, the characters must make as many exits as possible, keeping the reasons credible and making the exit in full view of everybody. No sneaking off.

Sills’ mother, Viola Spolin, invented most of these exercises 30 years ago as a way of teaching actors to be awake and alive on stage, not just “real.” They also make audiences feel alive. It’s fun to throw the actors an improbable suggestion and watch them make something coherent out of it--like watching an infield working a dribbling grounder into a slick double play. Or, on a great night, a triple play.

Wednesday wasn’t a great night for “Sills & Company,” but they certainly played heads-up ball. First, there was the amusement of watching Sills, who does not perform, but who does oversee from the sidelines, with the vexed look of the coach who knows his boys are better than this. This had nothing to do with the quality of Wednesday’s performance. Sills always looks irked.

Second, there were those deft individual plays. Garry Goodrow--remembered from his work with the Committee, one of the finest improv groups of the 1960s--worked one. The game here was a variation of “Who Am I?” Hamilton Camp went out of the room and on his return had to guess his job-identity from the way the others treated him.

Who he was, was a choreographer. The cleverest hint was Ann Ryerson’s “I really need this job,” a quote from “A Chorus Line.” But Goodrow went beyond giving a clue. He gave us an image that was telling enough to have been in “A Chorus Line.” A self-pitying fellow puts down his invisible dance bag. “I’m limping, but it’s really nothing.” There’s one at every rehearsal.

In a later bit, it wasn’t particularly inspired of Richard Schaal and Avery Schreiber to drop into a duel from “Cyrano de Bergerac.” But it did take genius for them to end up stuck on the same sword, like two adjoining tomatoes on a shish kebab. And I will not soon forget Mina Kolb’s remark, in a funeral parlor number, when asked if she believed in reincarnation. After considering the question a bit (good improv doesn’t have to be rushed), Kolb issued this judgment: “There are really an awful lot of people around as it is.”

But the strength of this number--and all Sills’ work--was the reality of the subtext. This was the game in which the characters had to realize something without admitting it in so many words. In this case, the fatal secret was that Kolb and Richard Libertini’s unmarried daughter, played by Rachel MacKinnon Sills, was pregnant.

Try to get that said in a funny way, in the context of a funeral parlor. We know how they would do it on “Saturday Night Live,” but I preferred the delicate and non-outrageous way that these three did it, without going to the other extreme of soft-core family togetherness, the sitcom approach.

These are civilized performers, a bit too much on their best behavior Wednesday night to be as free as they needed to be; but providing a funny and alert show nevertheless. “Sills & Company,” an old established firm, gives satisfaction.

‘SILLS & COMPANY’ An evening of theater games, at the Westwood Playhouse. Director Paul Sills. Designer Carol B. Sills. Lighting designer Fedjwick Sylvanus. With Lewis Arquette, John Brent, Hamilton Camp, Severn Darden, Miriam Flynn, Garry Goodrow, Mina Kolb, Rachel MacKinnon Sills, Ann Ryerson, Richard Schaal, Avery Schreiber and Sills. Plays at 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat., at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sun., through May 12. Tickets $15-$20. 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. 208-5454.