Quick-Change Artists

Imagine being on stage in the dark. The lights come up, and adrenaline surges.

Then you notice the audience--row after row of strangers. Watching.

Someone yells “Keys,” lighting a fuse that snakes its way around the stage: car keys, the key to happiness, Alicia Keys, Key West, West Coast, Coast deodorant soap, soap operas, opera glasses, shot glasses, buck shot, shot put.

Everyone--there are five of us on stage--scatters. When someone sits, someone else becomes a chair. Ernest Hemingway wrestles the pope. Indiana Jones launches into an infomercial. Time collapses in on itself, and 30 minutes seem to evaporate in a single heartbeat.

It’s just a typical Wednesday night for my classmates and me at the ImprovOlympic in Los Angeles, a city that is home to dozens of schools teaching the art form to a student population that ranges from Drew Carey and Wayne Brady wannabes to lawyers and schoolteachers. I happen to be a writer.

Even if you don’t relish the idea of getting up on stage in front of strangers and letting your mind run wild, you might want to check out an improvisational comedy class or two. Life, as any aficionado would be quick to point out, is one giant improvised scene. You don’t wake up in the morning with the day’s script in hand.

So, unlike last year’s voice-over class or pottery class, the lessons of improv can help you navigate all those unexpected moments whether you’re in the boardroom or the bedroom. And should you decide to give improv a try, you won’t be alone. At any given time, three of the local schools--the Groundlings, the Second City and ImprovOlympic West--are training roughly 1,000 students combined.

But wait. If you’re making it up as you go along, what do you need classes for? Think of improv as a Jackson Pollock drip painting--the stage is a canvas splattered with the accents, mannerisms and physical characteristics from the palette of each performer. Classes are designed to show you the different tools.

Formal exercises teach you the subtle effect that each nuance, emotion and character can have on an improvised scene. They are also a way to learn the scene structure, listening and communication skills, agreement and character development that organically move scenes forward. The games range from the simple (each line of dialogue must begin with the words “yes and ... “) to the brain-crushing (an actor must listen and respond to two others who are talking nonstop; one guy could be ranting about the film “Patriot Games” while another rambles on about lawn care).

For a first-timer, this sort of 360-degree hyper-perception is like trying to tap-dance for the first time. You strain. You grasp at straws. You make mistakes. But before too long, you learn that improv is a truly optimistic art form. Each mistake, each misinterpretation, each misstep is an opportunity to be seized on.

Many improv alums describe the experience as Zen-like. “There’s sort of a whole Eastern thing going on,” said Jesse Bechtel, 29, an actor from Sherman Oaks and an ImprovOlympic student. “A whole ‘being in the now’ and going with the initial instinct and not editing yourself.” Which seems a sensible strategy since more often than not, in improv you’re dealing with the absurd.

During a recent class, the action required an Amish farmer to dig a hole in the yard with a small hand shovel. His wife entered and labeled the “shovel” a “flashlight.” Instead of correcting her, the performer went with it. The shovel became a flashlight. Suddenly he was embarrassed to be an Amish man using an “electric torch.” He began begging for her forgiveness, and the scene played out in ways neither could have imagined.

For those who return to classes week after week, there’s a turning point when everything begins to click, and for better or worse you get a sort of “improv fever.” And it’s addictive.

I should know. After taking a year’s worth of classes at Groundlings and graduating from Second City’s yearlong conservatory program, I enrolled at ImprovOlympic West to interview students for this story. My plan was to hang for a few classes and then duck out. It’s been five months, and every Wednesday night I still find myself drawn to the tiny room above Hollywood Boulevard, free-associating myself into a sweaty mess.

That first night at ImprovOlympic in March, 16 of us circled on a postage-stamp-sized stage above the theater. The class was the standard L.A. assortment of entertainment industry twentysomethings, wearing jeans, khakis, T-shirts, polo shirts and sneakers. We began the way most improvisational comedy classes do--by introducing ourselves around the circle.

One of the first classmates I met was Jack Voorhies, a wiry 25-year-old with a leprechaun grin, boundless energy and a scruffy, week-old beard.

By day, Voorhies is a purchasing agent’s assistant at Archipelago Botanicals in L.A. He spends his working hours coordinating candle and shampoo vendors, another faceless paper-pusher in the City of Angels. In class, untethered from the workplace, he morphs into everything from an energetic cross-dresser to a doddering old lady at the copy shop, an unctuous beat cop, a janitor and a singing cabby. “It’s hard to explain,” said Voorhies. “It’s like this is where I’m supposed to be. It makes me want to work at it--and I’ve never wanted to work at anything.”

And Voorhies does work at it. The instructor has barely finished explaining an exercise when he’s a blur of denim and elbows careening toward the stage. Once there, he is nimble and kinetic. He’ll sweep the floor, wax the car or hike a mountain--sometimes all three in the space of a single scene. He’ll throw anything out to see what sticks.

Sometimes Voorhies’ material turns blue, a world of lecherous men, clingy women, double-entendres and plain old dirty sex talk. But Voorhies has one of the most important qualities an improviser can have: the ability to turn on a dime. In one class, Voorhies crouched in the back of a canoe and began to paddle furiously upriver. Looking up, he realized his partner was oblivious to the scene he was trying to establish. She was right next to him but miles away, standing at home plate swinging a baseball bat and warming up for a pitch. Without skipping a beat, he transformed his canoe paddle into a catcher’s mitt. He began to taunt the pitcher. The class erupted into applause.

“You’re just in this moment,” said Voorhies, explaining the rush of the improv experience. “You’re there and you’re supposed to be there. It’s like when they say relaxation is hard work--it’s the same thing with improv.”

Voorhies moved to Los Angeles two years ago to pursue an acting career. “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a star,” he said. “I thought to myself, I don’t want to do it the way everybody else does it. I can be funny on the spot.”

So, when he won $4,000 on the game show “Smush,” he plunked down some of that money for his ImprovOlympic tuition. Voorhies spends about three nights a week at the ImprovOlympic theater--one night in class, one night as an intern and one night competing in Cage Matches as part of a group called Midseason Replacement.

Another classmate, Chris Tallman, 31, of Studio City, with tight curly hair and a slight paunch, looked like a tall version of Scott Adams’ Dilbert minus the fishhook tie. An actor who has appeared on “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment,” “Angel,” “Spin City” and “Diagnosis Murder,” Tallman is a skilled improviser who has been at it for almost half his life.

“I think the most successful improvisers are the ones who don’t have a plan,” said Tallman. “You can’t go out there with a lot of stuff because you’re going to walk out there and say, ‘I’m a giant robot scientist’ and someone’s going to say, ‘I want to go to the prom, Dad.’ ”

Tallman is a master of “space work”--the detailed fiddling with imaginary objects that helps fill in a scene. A split-second after he hits the stage, he’s silently pulling down imaginary periscopes, unwrapping imaginary gifts, kicking at imaginary wads of gum stuck to imaginary sidewalks. On stage, he speaks volumes with a simple nod of his head or dismissive wave of his hand.

In one scene, Tallman was a member of a dance troupe. When an overbearing guest choreographer began to yell, Tallman brandished his “Fosse hands”--palms out, fingers spread wide--and was soon using the dance move to exorcise him.

While Voorhies and Tallman are using their improv skills to further an entertainment industry career, Jessica Revill isn’t. The 38-year-old is a psychology and education lecturer from Pasadena and a Groundlings intermediate student. She says the classes help her lecture students at Cal State L.A. “in a more physical and spontaneous way.” Sometimes she makes her students play improv games.

“When I teach personality to my psych students, I do some of the exercises like one-word story, where we stand in a horseshoe semicircle and, like a conductor, I point to people and they have to co-construct a story. There’s no better way to tap into someone’s defense mechanism than doing one-word story. People edit themselves. They either want to control the story, take it over, or manipulate it somehow--and it’s really interesting to see how and where people trip up.”

Stephanie Barr, 33, of Burbank uses improv skills she’s learned in the Second City introductory program at her job. “It makes you a lot more spontaneous,” said the project director at a local graphic design firm. “A lot of what I have to do involves critiques, seeing what works and what doesn’t. Levity helps in those meetings; it helps deconstruct things, it helps bring people’s barriers down. It makes people want to throw in ideas.”

The atmosphere is sort of a preschool for adults, according to Revill. A way to discover your inner child. “When we’re younger, before the age of 3, we don’t tend to edit ourselves,” she says. “In improv, you’re allowed to go back to that kind of day-care, in a sense, a preschool kind of thing; finger-painting, get-paste-in-every-orifice kind of life--and it’s alarming and freeing.”

For those of us who spend our working lives as desk jockeys, inches from a computer screen, improv represents an opportunity to let our mental hair down and be in the moment with a group of like-minded people. And in a town where making dinner reservations can require industry clout, improv is an equal-opportunity art form that can help make you a player--or at least make you seem like one. The only requirements are tuition money and the willingness to leap into the unknown, trusting that someone will catch you.

You’re standing on stage. In the dark. Alone. The lights come up. Your adrenaline surges. You smile. You’ve been waiting all week for this moment. You feel like you can see through walls. You’ve got that buzz in your head and the thump in your chest. Tomorrow morning you’ll be back at the office making paper-clip chains and stapling your desk blotter out of boredom, but tonight you’re a Venetian gondolier paddling through the room. You’re a teenager proposing to your sweetheart on top of a Ferris wheel. You’re a telekinetic truck driver. You’ve got improv fever.