By: Catherine Wasilko
On Friday, Sept. 17 at 9 p.m., Take One! Improv Club hosted their first in-person improv show. The cast and audience wore masks during the entire performance for everyone’s safety. Senior Maggie Malia, President of Improv Club, introduced the event as well as herself to the crowd. When asked about her first in-person experience with an improv show since the pandemic, Malia said “I was really nervous, but also really excited. I had to engage with the audience in a way that keeps it engaging for everyone.” Malia’s previous experiences with improv were online. Malia explained, “We previously did a show over a recording [Zoom], so it was different since everyone was online.”
The other cast members introduced themselves, along with their favorite activity to do on a sick day. The first game they played was called “Doubling Downment,” in which audience members got to choose two words, such as adjectives or nouns, that would describe senior Connor Heveron and junior Timothy Wells’ character. The two seemed to act like a tennis match, going back and forth with each line given. The game ended rather intimately, while scoring some laughs and applause from the audience.
The next game was called “Channel Changers,” where audience members chose wacky television shows for the whole cast to act in, as well as the type of person they were playing in each show. Names or personalities of the characters, as well as the television shows were chosen by the audience members. To transition each skit, cast members moved clockwise on the stage. For extra laughs, some of the members threw in some plot twists.
The third game was called “News Team,” where cast members acted as a part of a news team. Each member, such as the anchor, co-anchor, meteorologist and sports anchor, got a quirk chosen by audience members. Due to the audience members’ answers, props were used. A few members even broke the fourth wall by breaking out into laughter during the performance.
The final game they played was called “Ad Campaign,” where audience members choose a “product” to be pitched to a fake company. As the final skit for the night, this gained the most applause from the audience. Freshman Sena Weaver is a part of Take One! Improve Club, although she was in the audience for this show. Weaver said, “I was sitting next to someone who couldn’t stop laughing, which was really funny, and [it] had me laughing.”
Weaver will be a part of the next improv show on Oct. 1, which will be “Dad-themed.” When asking about future improv events, Weaver explained, “This will be my first time doing improv comedy.” In Weaver’s experience, “I was just so happy it went so well.” If you would like to be a part of Take One! Improv Club, practices are Sundays from 6-8 p.m. and Wednesdays from 8:30-10:30 p.m. Take One! Improv Club will do different themed shows every two weeks on Friday, from 9-10 p.m.
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