Free Association

Because it's fun. (And a little bit like life.)

Back in 1998, when Chalfant and his friends started putting on shows under the name Washington Improv Theater (WIT), he had to spend a lot of time explaining what improv was.

Not so much anymore. Not now that there are more improvisers around town than there are opportunities to perform. Now that WIT is training more than 100 students a semester. Now that a first-ever open-mike improv night at the DC Improv can attract a standing-room-only crowd the week before Christmas. Now that a troupe at George Washington University will rehearse until midnight four nights a week, and its counterparts at the University of Maryland will stand in front of the library for two hours on an arctic day during finals, doing scene after scene after scene for a few dozen shivering passersby.

Compared with those in New York or Chicago, where improv long ago made its mark as a cool-kid thing to do, Washington's community of improvisers is scrappy and small.

And different.

Different because here it's mostly an end; there it's often a means. A means by which to get noticed by a sitcom casting agent or the director of a Second City touring group, or to get in good with writers from "Conan" and "Letterman."

In Washington, though, improv exists almost entirely as a pursuit of happiness.

"A lot of people, I think, are trying to balance out what their life in D.C. is, and maybe their life in D.C. isn't extremely creative and isn't extremely fun in the 'day job' sense of things," says Chalfant, now the artistic director of WIT, a group at the forefront of Washington's swelling improv scene. "So they're just looking for an outlet where they can explore some new ideas, meet some fun people and just literally -- for two or three hours a week -- play."

Joelle Rodriguez really wasn't sure what she was getting into when she wandered into the DC Improv near Dupont Circle one Wednesday night last month. The 21-year-old computer science student had seen something on the Internet about an open-mike night but "was expecting pure stand-up."

"I wasn't ready for pure improv," she said.

But there she was, so she put her name on the list, just like everyone else. Rodriguez had never even seen live improv, much less performed it. But she does like "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" and totally loves "Wild 'N Out," an MTV show combining hip-hop and improv.

The friends Rodriguez was supposed to meet were nowhere in sight, so the smiley, sable-haired young woman walked to the front of the room and slid into a table by herself.