Posted on Sat, Jul. 13, 2002

Improv company's talent is newsworthy
By Pat Craig

There is nothing more delightfully soaring as well-done improvisational theater. This idea of starting with a notion, then mining it on the spot for all its dramatic potential is about as pure as theater can get.

The improvisational form is taken steps beyond the just-for-laughs sort of show typically associated with improv by True Fiction, a veteran group that has built a narrative style into its presentation.

While this may sound a little like English major talk on paper, what True Fiction does is thoroughly theatrical pure fun done under the extreme pressure of making it all up on the spot.

For its latest show, which just opened at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, the group is performing "Ripped From the News," a title that essentially describes the evening's plan.

Audiences filing into the theater lobby pass a table piled with current newspapers, and are invited to tear stories out and toss them in a box. Shortly before curtain time, someone from the group gathers up the box full of stories and takes it onstage, where the torn pieces of newsprint are tacked to poles at the four corners of the stage (the show is done in the round). Then the actors take turns reading the first several lines of a story, and the improvisation begins.

At Thursday night's preview performance, only three stories were read -- a tale of sexual abuse in Pakistan done in the name of justice, England's new position on decriminalizing marijuana use, and a piece about a long-haul trucker fearing terrorist attack.

Actually, the subject matter isn't that important, since the stories will change each night, depending on what the five-member cast takes off the wall.

What will, thankfully, remain the same is the form used to explore each of these stories. Instead of simply ripping the tale from the wall, and riffing on the most obvious points, True Fiction explores multiple possibilities, returning to the story several times to look at it from a variety of angles.

You get three or four different stories, playing like chapters in a book, and allowing the cast -- Paul Killam, Craig Neibaur, Diane Rachel, Regina Saisi and Barbara Scott, accompanied by Joshua Raoul Brody -- to develop characters with a surprising amount of depth. Most fascinating, though, is seeing these characterizations develop before your eyes, springing directly from the minds of the actors to the Magic stage.

Obviously, there is a lot of engine revving and spinning of wheels as the cast struggles to get a handle on the story they want to tell. But that, too, is part of the charm of improvisation. You see the bad with the good; you see the players fall on their faces a time or two; but you also see them eventually triumph and present an astoundingly complete and dramatically satisfying show.

What makes the show so entertaining is watching a group of improvisers at the top of their form. True Fiction has been around as a company for a long time, and has established a reputation and knack for performing long-form improvs, rather then sketches. The result is a very natural flow to the improvisations that takes them well beyond the idea of setups and punchlines, and makes them into more complete theatrical presentations.

It is a long distance beyond "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

What True Fiction also does is bring a somewhat less regarded art form into a legitimate theater. At the same time, it underlines the Magic's goal of presenting new work. This is about as new as it gets, with a gestation period that runs from the time the story enters the brain to when it comes out the mouth, an astounding feat.