Life as one long improvisation? Loosen up

Here’s the nightmare scene: You’re on a stage, spotlight glaring in your face. A large audience sits there in the dark, silently waiting. Suddenly, an awful realization: You have no script, no idea what comes next. Not a clue.

That’s no midnight scream dream. That’s improv comedy, that unpredictable brand of comedic theater that plays so strongly off audience suggestions and the actors’ creative reactions. And nearly 200 practitioners, with no dreams of stardom in their head, have been in town this week for an improvised improv competition.

On the surface these people can appear fairly normal. They’re therapists, bakers, engineers, students, teachers, a blacksmith, even a mom and her teenage son.

Getting up in front of complete strangers with no plans is not some kind of primal punishment. This is what they do, by choice, to relax -- repeat, relax. They do this almost weekly back home in Indiana and Iowa, Oregon and Virginia. They love it and show no signs of torture or overmedication.

“It’s the best stress reliever ever,” says Monta Ponsetto, a real estate agent.

“Improv lifted 30 years of engineering inhibitions off my shoulders,” says Jeff Adamson.

“Improv is a very natural thing,” claims college student Jeff Hardwick. “People do it in their everyday lives.”

Adds Ruth Jenkins, a speech therapist: “The day’s events evaporate in an instant. Everything is suddenly focused on the here and the very now.”

The “here” is Hollywood’s Ivar Theatre and the “now” is tonight with the annual “world championship” of amateur improv run by ComedySportz, a loose network of some 30 comedy clubs where participants joyously spread the gospel of invigorating improv between shifts on their day jobs.

Jerilyn Dufresne is a licensed clinical social worker in Milwaukee who “only recently” turned 58. She’s always been quick with the wisecracks. You may not remember her from the movie “Norma Rae,” where Dufresne played one of hundreds of extras in a 10-second factory gate scene. But in one moment of unrehearsed boredom a few years ago she enrolled in an improv class and fell instantly in love with the freedom and energy she felt.

“Improv erases that governor in your brain handing down all those ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ decrees,” she says. “It lets you try anything, to feel freer and encouraged. It’s so affirming. Now doesn’t that sound like social work too?”

Indeed, many of the amateur improv practitioners cite professional advantages in such a spur-of-the-moment hobby. Jenkins uses improv games in speech therapy for victims of stroke and Parkinson’s disease in Portland, Ore. That also helps overcome her residual childhood shyness.

Steven Catterall, who is “single but courting,” uses improv in hospital work as well. He’s studying to become a nurse in a locked psychiatric intensive care unit in Chorley, England. “You need to keep on the soles of your feet there,” he says. “I think of the improv audience as my patients.

“Improv is all about doing what you feel,” he adds, “There’s no time for thinking. It’s taught me how to break the ice, how to keep a conversation going, think ahead while listening and help me gauge people’s reactions.”

For 30 years Jeff Adamson asked and answered the same formal questions while designing farm combines for John Deere. As you might imagine, the rollicking moments designing farm machinery are well-scattered.

“Improv changed my life,” says the 52-year-old, whose wife sometimes has her doubts. “Improv erased the regimen, opened me to other humans. I’m 10 times happier. I could never not do improv.”

Adamson now runs his own health food store in Rock Island, Ill., and during store hours uses his comfort in the presence of strangers to launch impromptu monologues or heavily accented humorous exchanges with his son Patrick, who’s 25 and also afflicted with improv. “The customers love the spontaneous entertainment,” Jeff reports.

Probably very few people could understand how Rick Randjelovic of Indianapolis could ever be bored in his profession: statistician. With all those different numbers and averages, medians, multicolored graphs, variation tables and probability charts, who could be anything but riveted? Still, on a day of weakness Randjelovic took an improv class. He found he could think while standing up -- and without a calculator.

Though he’s nervous anticipating an improv performance, Randjelovic relishes the unpredictable spontaneity of actually performing before a good-natured audience ready for a good time by suggesting impossible scenarios for the accommodating actors. If some audience member shouts “film noir” and another “musical,” the actors must do one.

“Improv is not so much what you do,” he explains. “Improv becomes who you are. It’s part of your life, your identity, being spontaneous and reading your audience. I use it all the time now when teaching statistics, gauging student comprehension and reactions.”

Hardwick, a 20-year-old student from Buffalo, N.Y., learned much about self-confidence and teamwork from his improv team. “The audience suggests something,” he says. “You do something. They roar in laughter. Just like that. It’s like scoring a touchdown.”

Such audience connections minus, probably, the laughter are important in real estate too. “Life is a lot like improvisational comedy,” Ponsetto writes on her Illinois realty website. “There’s no dress rehearsal.”

Ponsetto was always drawn to the theater but found stand-up comedy recitation way too scary. Plus she liked improv’s team aspect, like charades without the cards. “Business isn’t always predictable,” she adds. “You meet so many different people. You must be able to respond, think on your feet, expect the unexpected. It’s not a bad way to look at life either.”

Darlene Wheeler of Richmond, Va., uses improv to stay connected to the everyday lives of her teens, Michael and Matthew. “In improv,” says Matthew, 18, “sometimes you fail in devastating ways. But you do it for the many more times you succeed and connect with the audience.”

Wheeler helped her sons practice. “And then I got the improv bug,” she says. By day, Wheeler’s job is hounding insurers and patients late in paying their medical bills. At night, she relaxes by saying and doing whatever enters her motherly mind.

“I love to throw the boys a curve,” she says. “If they’re on another team, we’re competing all the way. There are no gimmes with me.”

Wheeler even got some rap music CDs for her car to practice concocting rhymes while on errands. Her sons admit when they’re competing in improv they’re no longer sons and she is no longer Mom. But they have demanded one private concession from her: No matter how strong the temptation nor wide the spontaneous opening onstage or off, their mother will never, ever, start telling their baby stories.

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ComedySportz

Where: Ivar Theatre, 1605 Ivar Ave., Hollywood

When: Today

Price: $20 in advance, $22 at the door

Contact: (323) 856-4796, www.ComedySportzLA.com