Free Association

By Ellen McCarthy
Friday, January 12, 2007

It's the first viciously cold day in December, and Debbie Tate is standing in a circle with 11 strangers. Across the street, drivers are crawling over the parking lot of White Flint mall. They honk and snarl as the unlucky wait for buses, separate and silent against the wind.

Meanwhile, Tate and her strangers, swaddled in the beige-on-beige of an apartment-building community room, will spend the next two hours playing make-believe. She'll twirl like the ballerina she once was, sweep back her mane of big, blond curls and run as if she's being chased. She'll pretend to be a teenager consoling a wounded friend through an imaginary bathroom door.

The 53-year-old -- who was born in 1953, and isn't that a hoot? -- will feel a little silly, a little ridiculous. Also, she'll look a little silly, a little ridiculous.

Washington is a white-marble town. The buildings are proud but staid, except when they're shabby. It's a working place filled with workers who talk a lot about how hard they work. They jog, and then they finish marathons. They check that off the list. They have important neighbors, but not so important as the neighbors in the next neighborhood over. At parties they say, "N ice to meet you, we should connect. Let me put you in my BlackBerry."

When Tate leaves the community room, she'll get in her car and sit in traffic. She'll throw away junk mail and wait in line. She'll answer her clients, appease her bosses. She'll go on being a mother, a sister, a daughter, mostly via cellphone, sometimes through e-mail.

First, though, she'll twirl.

" Improvisation is getting on a stage and making stuff up as you go along."-- Mick Napier, "Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out."

Every so often, Mark Chalfant starts to sound like Deepak Chopra.

Lots of them do, actually, which isn't something you expect of improvisers. You expect them to be funny. Ha-ha-Second City-"Kids in the Hall"-"Best in Show"-Steve Carell funny.

And they are, except when they're talking about improv. Then they are poet-psychologist-philosophers.

Once they get past the part about why it's fun and full of laughs and a really good time, they'll get to the part about how it's transcendent and magical, how it has changed them or saved them, how improv is like life and if only life were a little more like improv, the world would be a richer, brighter place.

But mostly it's just fun, and they get self-conscious when they start to sound too New Age-y because, really, it's not like that, and, anyway, what they really want you to know is that you should come and hang out and just try it.

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.

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.

If improv were a country, it would be a divided one. But not so divided that its citizens can't go back and forth. And not so divided that its rulers say bad things about each other. At least not in public. At least not to newspaper reporters.

One faction can be found here, at the Comedy Spot in Arlington, where players practice a style of improv called short-form.

They wear jerseys and sing the national anthem and break into teams to compete in a series of five-, six-, seven-minute games. They dance and mime and talk in gibberish and sometimes look like the most enthusiastic Pictionary players ever.

Audience participation is heavy, and down moments don't exist; it's improv for the instant gratification set.

"Some people are improvisers first and comic performers second. Most of our people are comic performers first, and improv is just their venue -- they're just goofy," explains Liz Demery, the club's owner.

The question people always ask Topher Bellavia is "How can you teach people to be funny?"

His answer is that he "absolutely cannot."

Bellavia used to be employed by a nonprofit group that took money from other nonprofits to give to a nonprofit that studied nonprofits. He was miserable and alienated, and one day he quit. Now he works in a consignment shop, but what he really does is improv and what he really loves is teaching other people improv.

But there are some people he can never seem to reach: "The ones who are like, 'Oh, I'm gonna be really good at this. I'm hilarious.' "

On the first night of every class he teaches at WIT, Bellavia has his new students conduct normal conversations. That's it. Just talk to one another. Talk honestly. "As soon as they reveal something about themselves, it's like, 'I can't believe this person said that on the first day,' " he says. "And the amount of laughter that happens is incredible."

Later he'll ask that they do more of the same when they take on characters -- be genuine and authentic, say what the character would really say, not what they think might come off as funny.

"It gets at what we call 'earned laughs,' not just falling-down humor. If you really show an honest relationship, it ratchets up the tension so that by the end . . . there's this point where there's this release, and the audience just roars," Bellavia says. "We want it to be funny, but we're willing to be patient to be funny."

Close inspection of human behavior, the theory goes, will almost always result in comedy. And when it doesn't, it results in something tender or dark or warm or raw. All of it, ideally, affecting.

Of course, Bellavia adds, "this only works if you tell us what you're really thinking, and that's scary."

"But it's exhilarating when you do it."

Cut to the scene of an empty kindergarten classroom.

Five guys in their 20s and 30s enter, turn on the lights and begin to clear away the tables. We see that they are casually dressed -- cool sneakers and button-down shirts, the types who would look at home perched on stools at any given sports bar.

"Wait, are you having a baby in April?" one asks, stretching his elbow over his head.

"Who knows," another responds, fast and deadpan. They're not improvising yet, not officially, but they also never really stop.

Meet the boys from Jackie, one of WIT's permanent troupes. Usually it's the boys and girl from Jackie, but their sole female player, Molly Woods, couldn't make it to rehearsal tonight.

"People love those times when you're hanging out with your friends, just messing around, having fun," says Zack Phillips, a 28-year-old journalist and Jackie player. "We're just doing that in a more physical way, sometimes in front of a paying audience."

More physical, and because they never know where their stories will go, also more surprising.

"When you explore, going through a cave or on a hiking trail, you don't know what's coming and don't have any expectations, so everything you encounter is awesome," explains Ken Hays, a 31-year-old engineer with bright eyes and closely cropped hair. "It's the same thing with improv."

Hays remembers being worried about the people. He was an athlete in high school and a member of a fraternity in college, and he was worried, when he signed up for that first WIT class, that he'd be surrounded by artsy theater types.

"Five years later, these are my best friends here," he says. And thus when they're on, when they really start to sparkle, "it's the joy of winning with a team."

But right now what they need to do is "lose more."

"Lose faster," instructs Patrick Gantz, the Jackie player directing tonight's activities from a too-small lacquered chair. Probably that's not something guys on basketball courts or football fields say to one another an awful lot. In improv, though, losing is as good as anything else, because it's something real.

And so in pairs, the guys stand up, walk to the center of the room and proceed to turn themselves into losers. They are a misunderstood teenager and his feckless, cow-milking dad; a little boy in love and a lemonade-selling girl who can't be bothered; a devoted cat owner and the friend who backed over Mothball in the driveway.

They are a computer-game-obsessed husband and his ever-neglected wife, who finally, finally erupts: "Pay attention to me! There's liquor in my underwear!"

There are moments of magic. And after 2 1/2 hours, the Jackie boys have one another in red-faced hysterics.

Then they go out for beers.

Off the main drag in Chinatown, on a stretch of hulking concrete and steel sewer grates, is a tiny little art gallery. In the rear of the tiny little art gallery is a tiny little theater, all painted in black.

Some of the most exciting live entertainment in Washington happens here.

Exciting in part because at any given moment it could go completely off the rails. We give one suggestion and expect our players to run, to tell us a story, to put on a play, to write and act in real time.

And sometimes what happens inside the Mead Theatre Lab is spectacular. Sometimes it's flat. Often it oscillates between the two, and then it's gone, and whatever was done there will never be done again.

So we come as spectators, to see what forces of imagination our mercenary players can bring. And we come as voyeurs. Because it's a rare thing, in this time and place of press releases and polish, to catch a glimpse of a naked mind.

The words are their words; the topics, their topics. And inevitably they turn to the pressure points of the human condition: love and loss and longing and fear, self-perception and family dynamics and personal demons, the quest for acceptance, redemption.

The lights go down, and seven women run onstage. They are an all-female WIT troupe called the Shower, and they want to know about a disappointing Christmas present someone received.

"A scarf, a hat and some gloves," offers a lady in the audience. Will she return them? "I can't," she says. "My husband gave them to me."

All the players but one rush to the sides of the stage. Alone there, she starts to fuss, arranging trinkets on an imaginary table. One by one, the others come back, offering hugs like guests arriving for a party.

"We're here to celebrate Jessica's last Christmas," says the first player, now clearly seen as a host. "She's getting married! Converting!"

The player who has become Jessica slumps with annoyance as the others cheer. "L'chaim!"

"Here, I brought you a cross," one guest says. "But I'm taking it back later."

"You can tell your kids you used to love Christ!" another suggests.

There are maybe 40 people in the theater tonight -- all of them, at this moment, laughing.

A coffee shop. Mark Chalfant is about to go into full Deepak mode, but right now he can't get comfortable so he's shifting around in a big leather chair like Chuck Woolery.

"Tell me about your date," he says, offering his hand as a microphone. Playing.

In the beginning and the end, Chalfant will say that's what this is about: the playing, the fun.

In the middle, he'll detour. He'll talk about what improv gives people, how it changes them. How for him "it was like somebody was poking my personality, saying, 'Are you who you think you are?' "

And how for him, "the answer was no."

"I was very boxed in in a lot of ways," the 36-year-old will recall, pale blue eyes blazing as he shifts again, closer. "And D.C. was only gonna box me in more."

He'll say that sometimes, after people do it for a while, the principles that are important in improv -- being truthful; making bold decisions; trusting others; really, really listening; and paying attention to the moment at hand -- assume amplified importance away from improv.

Chalfant will say it made him see parts of himself he "hadn't been looking at before . . . like being adventurous, connecting with people, taking risks and pursuing fun."

He'll talk about how it has nourished a community, roused a bit of creativity, pushed some people in Washington to take themselves a shade less seriously.

Then he'll lean in one more time and say that maybe what improv comes down to is what it's not.

"The counterbalance to playful comedy," he'll say, "is despair.

"And that's there any time you want it."

Ellen McCarthy is a Weekend staff writer. Her e-mail address ismccarthye@washpost.com.