Student Comedy On the Rise

Love Seat: Improv troupe Primitive Streak poses a moment for a rowdy portrait. (photo by Areca Treon)

In little over a year, Oberlin has seen student comedy grow from the stronghold of one improv group, Primitive Streak, to a rich community, featuring two new ensembles and various comedy methodologies. The campus can enjoy a taste of this versatility Friday, Dec. 1, when the Sunshine Scouts, Piscapo's Arm, and Primitive Streak share the Cat 'n the Cream for "Friday Night Live," a collaborative comedy extravaganza.

The Sunshine Scouts launched a competitive improv format in spring 1999, pitting one half of the ensemble against another and awarding points to those who elicited the rowdiest applause. Founded by senior Yvonne Piper, junior Pete O'Leary, and alumni Kevin McShane ('00) and Ariadne Votava ('00), the Scouts are now exploring new strategies. This year senior, Mike Leibovitz said, "it's a little less WWF, a little more bare bones theater."

The Scouts now use "long form," taking one suggestion from the audience and developing it extensively. A few actors work with a given theme and new actors step in to build off of it. Rather than cutting performances short, this strategy, Leibovitz said, "encourages the momentum of the piece."

Primitive Streak continues to use short form, crafting brief skits out of various games, such as "Nightmares and Dreamscapes," in which one actor describes his/her day and another enacts a dream out of it. "We work very hard on basic scene skills in rehearsals," first-year Leah Christie said. Essentially unprepared for any form a piece might take, the actors depend on this trained sense of dramatic action. "There has to be a conflict, raising of stakes and conclusion," junior director Sarah Bendix said. "The structure ends up giving you a lot of freedom."

The newest ensemble on campus is Piscapo's Arm, founded last winter by seniors Keith Friedlander and Jeff Harvey. Oberlin's only sketch comedy group, they write all their own pieces. Their latest set, "Sophomore Jinx: More Fun than a Barrel of Angel Dust," will be performed tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. in the 'Sco.

All three groups denied any rivalry existing among the ensembles. "This year particularly," said Leibovitz, "there seems to be an open discourse between the comedy groups, fostering an improv/sketch comedy community on campus."

The Dec. 1 collaboration, Leibovitz and Christie believe, should put to bed any suspicions of antagonism among ensembles. "There is going to be intergroup mingling. Our energy dynamic is really different. Working together with the groups is going to be a big learning experience. I do think it's going to be a milestone in where our groups are going," said Christie.

Sophomore Duncan Gale performs in both Sunshine Scouts and Piscapo's Arm. "It's pretty satisfying to do both," he said. "A lot of my sketch writing is influenced by the improv. I don't labor over the sketches I'm writing."

Gale wrote two pieces for this weekend's performance. One is a sitcom in which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin share a bachelor pad. The other is an infomercial that crushes viewers' self-esteem in order to make them less sensitive to insults. With this performance, Piscapo's Arm hopes to recapture the energy of their debut last April. "The challenge is to live up to what we did the first time," Harvey said.

Despite the sense of control and security that comes with writing one's own sketches, Leibovitz and Bendix feel much more at home with improv. "Improv makes dialogue more believable, because it's real, on some level," said Leibovitz.

According to Bendix, actors experience moments of uncanny synchronicity. In one piece she recounted, the entire ensemble managed to freeze in perfect unison when an actor raised his hand. Discoveries are made that cannot be pre-written.

"With these three ensembles comes three ways of approaching comedy, an interchange of ideas and strategies that promises a more dynamic comedy community this year," she said.