STAGE REVIEW : SPOLIN PLAYERS RISK TAKING A CHANCE ON FUN

“The Spolin Games Players” delivers a beautifully pristine brand of improvisation. Compared to most of the other improv groups in town, this troupe seems more intent on playing let’s-pretend, just for the fun of it, and less concerned with which casting directors might be in the audience. Even though their average age is above that of most improv groups, they take us closer to the pleasures of childlike play.

They present no prepared sketches; their only guidelines are the audience suggestions and the rules laid down by Viola Spolin in her seminal text, “Improvisation for the Theater.” Despite a modestly star-studded audience on opening night, the entire evening passed without any mention of show business--no impersonations of celebrities, no parodies of movies or TV genres.

This approach imposes a greater risk on the ticket buyer. With no material that’s tried and true and without the easy targets of movies and TV, one never knows what will happen. On the other hand, this unpredictability is one of the reasons why theater survives in an era of canned entertainment. As long as the players are skilled at this sort of thing, the experience is more of an adventure than a risk.

The Spolin gamesters are indeed skilled at this sort of thing. Hamilton Camp assembled them at the instigation of Spolin herself--who has a reserved seat on the aisle at each performance. She reportedly wanted to pick up the ball from her son, Paul Sills, who ran a troupe called Sills and Company at this same site, the Heliotrope Theater, from 1984 until he took most of his players to New York in 1986.

Only two members of Sills and Company, Camp and Lewis Arquette, are still here, though some of the others may drop in as occasional substitutes. But the newcomers have fit right in. Each of the three new men--Derek McGrath, Gary Schwartz and Randy Brenner--adds a distinctive look to the ensemble. That goes double for the two new women, Edie McClurg and Pat Musick. This gang isn’t as male-dominated as its predecessor.

Nor is Camp as visible a director as Sills. There’s a reason the show isn’t called “Camp and Company”--Camp has done his best to create the illusion that this is just a bunch of friends who gather to play Spolin’s games on a completely equal footing.

The games remain essentially the same as those played by the Sills troupe. There is an evergreen quality to a game like “Transformations”--in which a group goes through a chain of different identities, each one suggested by gestures that emerge organically from the previous one.

The show sometimes seems willfully detached from the topical. For example, while soliciting audience suggestions for an exercise that merged gibberish with English, Brenner rejected “national security advisers” as the occupation of the characters and instead settled on the later suggestion of “police officers.” The players need not accept the first suggestion if it doesn’t fit the game’s framework, but when they otherwise edit the audience contributions, the sense of spontaneity is slightly dulled.

Nevertheless, Camp and McGrath worked wonders with “police officers.” Only one game fell flat--and that was because it was a rerun of an earlier exercise, this time using an audience volunteer instead of one of the pros. Potential volunteers should realize that the Spolin Players make their games look a lot easier than they are.

Performances are at 660 N. Heliotrope Ave., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., (213) 660-2300.