Late Night with Satan
Wing-It Productions at Historic University Theater
Through March 31.
I haven't stayed up to watch talk shows since I was in high school, when life past 11:00 p.m. still had that alluring grown-up tingle. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was also the last time I remember being really, really excited about improv. The two aren't so different, really: hasty jokes, forced wit, flashes of brilliance, awkward doldrums. I had more energy then, and more patience, to wait for the good parts and forgive the rest. But now I'd just rather be sleeping.
Late Night with Satan is a great idea: an improvised nighttime talk show with sidekick (a very funny Dale Earnhardt), musical director (Janis Joplin), and celebrity guests (Nostradamus, Ted Kaczynski, Helen Keller). And hosted, obviously, by the Morning Star himself (a horned and hammy Ryan Miller).
Satan says mean stuff to the audience and then is all: "I'm Satan!" Satan reads news headlines and takes credit for them: "I'm Satan!" There are some weird, unfocused behind-the-scenes interludes. Nostradamus delivers a funny, squeaky quatrain about the 2008 election, and the Unabomber is all rage and mopey pathos.
But it just doesn't quite work. The silences are too long, the gags too recycled, the hour too late. The only great part was the musical guest, a fussy Helen Keller performing "The Greatest Love of All" (which comes out something like "Da Nadeth Nub Uh Daw"). It was wicked and wrong and downright devilish. And, for the record, no way was it improvised.
Late Night with Satan mimics the talk-show format so perfectly—the cadence, the artificial banter—that I almost felt like I was watching, well, a talk show. Only I wasn't in my bed and I couldn't turn it off. How cruel. Curse you, Satan! LINDY WEST
5 x Tenn
Stone Soup Theatre
Through March 17.
The title 5 x Tenn refers to the number of short, recently unearthed Tennessee Williams plays it contains—but it could also roughly describe the dimensions of the stage at Stone Soup, which is trying to raise funds for a larger theater. The actors constantly trip over one another and the borrowed antique furniture, and it isn't always easy to conjure the settings, which range from dilapidated opera houses to gracious New York flats. Since the plays are Williams's juvenilia from the late 1930s—and just plain juvenile writings Williams never saw fit to publish—the production depends entirely on its fine performances.
There are two, either of which is worth the price of a ticket: Brandon Whitehead as D. H. Lawrence and Brandon Whitehead as the pederast owner of a movie theater/lover's lane. (He isn't any good as "the fat man" in The Fat Man's Wife, but I'm pretty sure that's because the play is a piece of crap.) There's something wonderful about Whitehead squinting through his little spectacles and drawling puns—he pinches Williams's immature earnestness until it looks sly and even playful. Others have a harder time with the thin material. Heather Gautschi is funny (playing against Whitehead) as a young lady in need of amateur psychoanalysis, but as an aging debutante in Why Do You Smoke So Much, Lily, she's awful—all fake hysteria and superficial frustration. In the melodrama And Tell Sad Stories of the Deaths of Queens, Tony Villa is expert at his drag queen's querulous bravado, but the terror that goes with being a practicing homosexual in 1950s New Orleans remains oddly abstract. ANNIE WAGNER
Return to Camp Death: The Returnining
Blood Squad at Odd Duck Studio
Through March 17.
The premise is ridiculously simple: Somebody shouts out a made-up teen-slasher movie title and the three members of Blood Squad spend an hour acting it out. Improv lives and dies by the ingenuity of its performers—happily, Brandon Felker, Michael White, and Elicia Wickstead are fast, funny, and confident. (It also helps that the show starts at 10:30 p.m., with a mostly tipsy audience and the actors visibly stealing sips from cans of beer stashed backstage.)
The night I attended, the only title shouted was Return of the Bloody Titty II. Once the Squad decided that Return of the Bloody Titty II was, in fact, the third installment in the Bloody Titty franchise, they charged through an hour-long horror movie with over a dozen characters and not a single pause. The 1980s slasher genre—with its buckets of clichés—is a clever choice for an improv show: There was the haunted manor, the misty moors, the crazy mother in the attic, the innocent new nanny, the scientist who accidentally created the killer breast: "I was playing God... trying to end world hunger."
The Squad doesn't use stage blood or props and talks through the special effects as flat asides, which is smart—fringe theater can't summon anything more disgusting than the gore in our imaginations. During one of its massacres, the titular teat forced her victim to nurse until he exploded. The screams rose in crescendo, then the slain actor pantomimed his stomach bursting and deadpanned: "Blood and gristle and milk fly everywhere." Gristle? Hearing it was almost grosser than seeing it. BRENDAN KILEY