This Soap’s a Scream on Purpose : When improvisational comedy enters the world of ‘Specific Hospital,’ the preposterous often happens

Soap Opera Update: Specific Hospital--Sachi St. Sinclair and Dr. Nicky Roca were married, but the wedding was a fiasco: Nicky’s suit was wrinkled; Dr. Carlos Fabricci, staff proctologist and former female impersonator and Mafioso, was supposed to be best man but was dropped when it was learned he had slept with Sachi the week before. Meanwhile, Lacy J. Spencer blackmailed Nicky, claiming he is the father of her baby. Sarah B. Fair, Specific psychiatrist, went into labor during the ceremony. She is pregnant, of course, by Dr. Dirk Stern, who is an alien.

“Specific Hospital” is hardly your average melodrama. In fact, there’s little about it that is mellow at all, and most of the drama is nothing short of preposterous. Any way you look at it, there’s something flaky about this soap. Consider:

All of the action is improvised. That’s right, every word of dialogue, every grunt, facial tic and pause--it’s all invented on the spot. And the audience gets into the act--contributing three plot suggestions per performance--including choosing which cast members wind up in bed together (two or more).

Further, all the characters are bent: They have one foot in “The Young and the Restless” and one foot in the “Twilight Zone.” To wit, the hospital staff psychiatrist, Sarah B. Fair, has a split personality, with a lusty alter-ego who is a plastic surgeon. The staff proctologist, Carlos Fabricci, in addition to being a former female impersonator and Mafioso, is a diamond smuggler and candidate for sex-change surgery. And yes, surgeon Dirk Stern is an alien who appears on Earth only as a holograph.

Perhaps weirdest of all, the price of admission for “Specific Hospital”--performed every Saturday night at 10:30 at the Zephyr Theater (7456 Melrose Ave.) and celebrating its six-month anniversary May 12--is only $3.99.

“Soap operas are very absurd,” said Fred Vicarel, “Specific Hospital” co-producer and director. “The big difference is they take themselves seriously. They ask their viewers to do just that. Otherwise, they’d be on at night at prime time, and people would be tuning in to laugh hysterically. Well, we don’t ask you to take us seriously at all.”

The inspiration of Vicarel and hospital cast regulars (and co-producers) Anna Miller, Eric Kramer and Michael Stuno, “Specific Hospital” boasts 10 (give or take two or three, depending on plot developments) very quick thinking, young (mostly in their 20s) actors who were chosen from 150 auditions and who spent months practicing and shaping their roles. In the process, an ensemble was born--one that has not been recognized by Los Angeles critics, the cast says, because of the frivolity of the show’s format.

“It’s been a real struggle,” said Miller, who portrays pouty-lipped administrator Maggie Temple. “Getting anybody to take us seriously has been hard; it’s very difficult to get reviewers to come, to get any kind of attention. Yet we usually have a full house . . . all due to word of mouth. We know we’re not doing Shakespeare, but if we had the money that’s what we would be doing. This is all we can do at the moment, and it’s really great for who we are, where we’ve come from, spending our own money.”

If critics have been slow to respect “Specific Hospital,” at least one peer improv group has not. Said Oren Michels, executive director of the Groundlings, the veteran Los Angeles ensemble that launched, among others, Pee-Wee Herman: “I think ‘Specific Hospital’ is great! I would make the same general comment about it that I would make about Second City--the more improv the better,” he said.

How does it all work?

Fairly simply. Vicarel introduces key characters before each show. One by one, they take the stage: Dr. Nicky Roca (Stuno), the whiz-kid neurosurgeon-psychic-crystal healer and ex-Mafioso; alien Dr. Dirk Stern (Kramer); proctologist Carlos Fabricci (Dale Ducko); Dr. Sarah B. Fair (Sheila Traviss), the schizophrenic plastic surgeon-psychiatrist-Holly Near fan; Lacy J. Spencer (Lynn Dee Walker), the ingenue-jailbird-parolee; Maggie Temple (Miller), stalwart chief administrator-ex-hippie-CIA agent; Beverly Devereaux (Victoria Delaney), stripper-prostitute-turned-registered nurse; Sachi St. Sinclair (Patricia Cotter), wealthy entrepreneurial woman of the ‘90s who is not afraid to be “a real woman” (she describes a trip to Chippendales as “humiliating, but curiously satisfying”); Aussie post-mortem expert Sim Bilton (Christopher Coombs), and the rest. . . .

Each of the characters recaps the previous week’s events, then Vicarel, a 29-year-old film technician with degrees in broadcasting and screen writing, selects three audience members for plot suggestions. (At a recent show, he solicited input as to which character would fall in love with a hospital attorney, who would be offered money to betray the hospital and work elsewhere, as well as who would end up in bed together.) From there, Vicarel orchestrates the first scene--and the entire show. Acting as an editor-narrator and scene-setter, he cuts scenes at key points and concocts scenarios that throw disparate characters together in what he hopes are stimulating new juxtapositions--complete with improvised musical backing by keyboardist Doug Amster. An hour and a half of improvisation later, another spellbinding episode of “Specific Hospital” is history.

“We try to keep the scenes short and end them on a high note,” explained Vicarel, reached at home after the episode. “If the scene is really funny, you try to get out of it on a big laugh. If there’s some good drama in the scene, you want to end it on a very threatening or menacing note. Just like a soap would.”

It would be wrong to think this is all just runaway silliness; that “Specific Hospital” is so ludicrous in its plot twists as to be predictable and tiresome. Parody, Vicarel and his troupe maintain, is only funny if on some wild level it manages to make sense and achieve resolution. To that end, the cast is intent on maintaining some kind of linear plot progression from week to week--and they hope to snag repeat viewers the same way real soaps do.

“I’ve had people say this is my sixth or seventh time,” said Vicarel.

Added co-producer Kramer, an actor who has guested on “Cheers,” “Roseanne” and other sitcoms: “It’s addictive in the sense that daytime soaps are. I think what happens is that people tune in to a favorite character or a favorite situation that happens to be going on. You want to come back and see what happens to these people.”

Surprisingly, Vicarel “didn’t even like” improv comedy when he took the job directing “Specific Hospital.” Trying to understand his disdain for the form, he toured other L.A. improv groups like The Groundlings, Funny You Should Ask and Second City. Although he found a lot of excellent work, he said he still wasn’t inclined to go back. Why? “Most places create characters that have a life span of 10 minutes.” The strength of “Specific Hospital,” he asserted, is that the characters recur and “grow in a continuous line.”

True enough. Characters in “Specific Hospital” grow week by week, acquiring resumes as spectacular as Mafioso-proctologist Fabricci’s or forensic pathologist Sam Bilton, who recently assumed his newly discovered heritage as an aboriginal chieftain (only to later be murdered with an orange traffic safety cone).

Miller, as hospital administrator Maggie Temple, called her role “one of the most frightening things I’ve ever done.”

“My background was training in classical theater; I went to grad school, got my master’s in acting,” said Miller, an assistant to a development executive in charge of TV series for HBO. “Acting has always been doing my research, homework. I feel very confident when I’m doing that, but improv is a completely different game.”

It was Miller and Kramer who really launched “Specific Hospital,” seeking to rekindle some of the fun they had five years earlier in Edmonton, Alberta, where they acted in another improv parody. Although they began meeting in Kramer’s living room on Sunday mornings along with Stuno and a few other actors, Miller said, “we were getting a nice workout, but we weren’t moving forward.”

Enter Miller’s friend Vicarel, who, she said, “really got the ball rolling.”

How do they afford such a cheap admission price?

“We don’t profit from the show, and we never intended to,” Vicarel said.

Miller elaborated: “All the improvs we saw, even at 10:30 at night, were at least $6, and sometimes $10 or $12. It’s appalling. I mean, I’m an actress, and I don’t go to the theater as much as I’d like because I can’t afford it. We haven’t made back the money we’ve invested initially, but we’d rather play to a full house than charge $10 and have 10 people sitting out there.”

Playing to a full house, of course, increases the embarrassment factor. Indeed, Miller said, there are times when Maggie Temple and the rest of the “Specific” characters are caught off guard and are left at a loss for words--usually to be bailed out by another cast member or Vicarel’s light switch. Stuno--Dr. Roca--perhaps has the easiest “out,” as his character can merely chuck the dialogue and begin, as he put it, to “seduce any female in the vicinity.” And no “Specific” cast member has been more surprised during a scene, probably, than Stuno was a few weeks ago:

“Sachi and I were at the bar, and all of a sudden she just started talking uncontrollably about herself,” said Stuno, a New York-trained actor and former member of The Groundlings. “I was trying to do the scene as well as I could and I didn’t know what was going on! Well, Fred had warned all the women in the show that I was going to have a nightmare. One by one, all the women in the cast came in and started trying to seduce me in front of Sachi. Climbing on my legs, licking my ears! Then they took out some surgical gauze and started wrapping all the women around me, and then Fred froze it.”

“Specific Hospital’s” greatest surprises lay ahead. Center of attention, at the moment, is the impending debut of the child of schizophrenic shrink Sarah B. Fair and alien surgeon Dirk Stern (who has returned holographically to witness the birth from another galaxy, where he is on trial for genetically meddling with the human race). The doctor, Kramer, who is co-starring in a new NBC series, “Gulf Coast,” gave a hint of things to come:

“Baby Moses,” he said, “was born with blue skin. He eats a lot of sheet metal, tinfoil, cans. And he grows at a very alarming rate.”

As has the popularity of “Specific Hospital.” Stay tuned . . .

“Specific Hospital,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., Hollywood; (213) 852-9069. 10:30 p.m. Saturdays, indefinitely. $3.99.