Free Association

Shawn Westfall was a few seats away. Rodriguez had never taken the improv class Westfall teaches here, but if she had, she would have heard him say, relax, "improv is very easy. You're already a gifted improviser. It's what you do from birth to death."

The students Westfall teaches are lawyers, lots of them. And techies and teachers and bureaucrats. Once there was a woman he's sure was homeless, and, man, did she have some surprising things to say onstage.

Westfall's point is this: Anyone can do improv. And to be good at it, he says, all you need is the ability to listen and a willingness to agree.

There either are or aren't a bunch of rules that matter in improv, but the premise at the core of the endeavor is agreement. If one player points to the ground and says, "Look at those flowers," it's the basic job of his partner to accept that she can see flowers. And then, probably, to respond in a way that adds context, propelling the scene forward: "Wow, I guess we're not the only ones to visit Grandma's grave today."

Or whatever.

"You're not up there telling one-liners," Westfall says. "So people who otherwise wouldn't get onstage find themselves getting onstage and getting laughs."

Rodriguez sat, rapt and giggling, as one improviser's name after another was called to take to the stage. Two hours in, she heard her own.

"I was a little nervous, because I was like, 'Oh, no. What am I going to say?' " she recalled later.

What she thought she was going to say wouldn't have mattered much. She could never have predicted that, following the lead of two randomly chosen partners, she'd find herself somehow playing the role of an African tribal woman, hugging her husband's leg and begging not to be sold off to a British-sounding colonialist trader.

Her friends never showed, but Rodriguez would say she "had a really good high."

"It was something I hadn't felt in a really long time."

"What you're going to see tonight is competitive improv," announces a whistle-wielding woman in a referee uniform.