Thursday, November 4, 2004

Everything but the Kitsch In Sync

Comedy troupe celebrates one year in Brookline

By Ted Siefer, correspondent

When he tells people where he's going on rehearsal nights, Allan Telio can usually anticipate the response: Isn't there something oxymoronic about rehearsing for improv?

"It's one I let them have," said Telio, the marketing director for the Brookline improv troupe Kitsch In Sync. As he knows — and as audience members may discover this Friday night when KIS holds its one-year-in-Brookline anniversary show — improv is more than a bunch of people on stage saying the first thing that pops into their heads. It is a cultivated craft, a kind of alchemy that aspires to transform the mundane and routine into something hilarious and even sublime.

The performance Friday night is meant as a "thank you to Brookline," said Telio. Since the troupe settled into its home last year in the Puppet Showplace Theatre, regular performances on the first Fridays of the month have drawn increasingly large crowds from Brookline and beyond.

Telio and other troupe members give some of the credit to the Puppet Theatre, one of the oldest of its kind in the country still in operation. "Coming to the theater," Telio said, "is the biggest step we've taken toward becoming a professional troupe." One could say the troupe has come a long way. Adam Williams, the group's founding member, traces its origins to a chance encounter with a like-minded friend at the old Bread & Circus in Cambridge some five years back. The group started out meeting in a member's attic. After bouncing around Cambridge, they eventually decided to move to Brookline, then one of the few towns in the orbit of Greater Boston without an improv troupe.

In the early days, recruitment was a pretty informal process. "We would make an announcement after the performance: 'Do you know anybody who's funny?'" Williams said.

By contrast, when the troupe held its latest auditions for a female member, more than 30 women showed up.

Still, only a handful of KIS' current members have theater backgrounds and they all have day jobs. Telio's resume includes a stint as the operator of the world's largest static electricity generator at the Boston Museum of Science (he now works for an environmental research firm). Williams owns several laundromats.

Explained Ken Grout, KIS' artistic director (by day, an IT manager), "We're all people who were told by friends and family both A, 'you're very funny,' and B, 'please be quiet and go somewhere else.' And so we did."

Which brings us back to rehearsal. The troupe practices "structures," which serve as departure points for the improvisations. Some might be familiar to anyone who has seen "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" In "Questions," every line must be interrogative in some way or other. "Doo Run Run" has the troupe ad-libbing lyrics, taking the rhyming potential of names like Shirley to new frontiers. In all, Friday's performance will feature 18 structures, which are set in motion and in some cases fueled by audience input.

Watching the troupe perform, one realizes that this is not just a bunch of grown-ups acting goofy. The hope is that in the course of a bit, narratives and characters will emerge. As Williams said, "A little humor and a good story are a lot more satisfying than a little story and a lot of slapstick."

Grout recalls how during one performance a troupe member, in a classic pantomime of the loves-me-loves-me-not routine with a flower, made a pinch and pull motion with his fingers. Another actor asked, "Why are you pulling the hair off my ferret?" And they took it from there.

The purpose of rehearsals is really to allow performers to fail in a safe environment. "It gives them a chance to get out there and do what they're afraid of, becauase that's really what improv is all about: Diving off the board and simply trusting that there is enough water to keep you floating," said Grout.

Kitsch In Sync will be making this leap this Friday night. Another performance — "Laugh it Off" — will be held Nov. 12, a charity benefit for the Parental Stress Line.