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Improv Class, The Boards, Thursday Evening

Lizzie was waiting at the front of class with a very large coffee mug. Coffee had, at this point, completely replaced blood in her bloodstream. Hey, you try throwing together an independent study proposal on short notice.

"Today, I get to be evil," she announced, holding up a stack of handouts. "These are little two-person scenes, just two or three pages long. Pair up. One of you gets a script. The other gets nothing."

See? See the evil grin?

"This exercise is called 'Actor's Nightmare.' The rules are simple. Whoever has the script can't deviate from it -- you can act out your part however you'd like, with inflections and gestures, but your next line is right there in black and white. The other person never gets to see the script. It's your job to make the scene up as you go along, and try to make some kind of sense out of the impending car wreck.

"So if Person A asks 'Why are you here?' maybe Person B can go 'I had a flat tire. Can I use your phone?' Person A's next line is 'You know my husband wouldn't like this' which leads Person B to throw out something like, 'Oh, is he against flat tires? I'm not fond of them, either.'"

She brandished the handouts with an evil grin. "Once you finish the scene -- or once the scene has crashed and can't be recovered, but we'll be optimistic and say that won't happen -- then you switch off. Person B grabs a different script, and now Person A is the one on the hotseat. Got it?"

Lizzie was going to be in the audience, drinking more coffee and plotting out which companies she might potentially shadow. It was either that, or pack up and go home, and she kind of liked it here. (Or not graduate, but her mother would kill her for getting to her last semester and dropping out.)

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The pastries! The coffee! Do not get between Lizzie and the coffee. Never push a grad student who is low on caffeine.

Karina ignored the pastries and coffee in favor of toying with her phone because that was better than playing with her call bracelet since she had zero faith whatsoever that timing for the next two days was going to work in her favor.

It would be just her luck. Not that she was going to tell Jono that, unless it happened.

In deference to Jono's outburst yesterday, Porthos hadn't brought any wine this evening. Instead, he'd only brought his beautiful self and his engaging personality. And a Saucepan, who pouted when she kissed him good-bye at the door and turned to go back to Café Fina.

There is a printed (http://www.mocksides.com/1-Man-1-Woman.html) pile (http://www.mocksides.com/2-men.html) of handouts (http://www.mocksides.com/2-Women.html). Grab a handout at random, find a partner, and one of you gets to fly totally blind. Have fun!

(This website breaks up scenes by participant gender, i.e. "one man one woman" vs "two men" vs "two woman." That's why there are three links. Feel free to disregard the matter entirely and just snag a script that looks cool.)

Porthos picked a handout completely at random and folded it so that he wouldn't be tempted to read it before it was ready. He waved the paper in the air and looked around for a partner.

"Okay," Lizzie announced, walking up to Porthos. "I'm overcaffeinated, underslept, and completely not in the moment. Let's do this."

"Indeed!" Porthos agreed heartily. He unfolded his handout (http://www.mocksides.com/The_Plan_-_2_women.pdf) and perused it thoughtfully while stroking his moustaches.

"Hmm," he announced, before tapping a few particular spots on the page. "There are two entrances to the building. If I go in the front, and you go in the back, we can flank them and meet up in the middle."

Right! Going with it. Lizzie leaned over to inspect the sheet that was now a fake-map, while also trying her hardest to not actually look at it, for fear of catching some of the lines. That would be cheating.

She straightened up quickly, pleased with herself for not having spotted anything.

"Okay," she said, cocking an imaginary revolver so the safety was off. "What if they ring the alarm before we get to them? We won't be able to take out reinforcements with just two of us."

Porthos thought about the alarm, and the reinforcements -- and suppressed a chuckle at the idea of him not being able to take out reinforcements -- and then gave Lizzie a quizzical look. "If we did, what kind of mask were you thinking?"

Because clearly that was the important thing.

Okay, that was -- exactly the sort of thing that was supposed to happen in this exercise, so Lizzie screwed up her face in concentration.

"Oh, right, right," she said with a nod. "You think maybe we can convince them there are more of us, if we have the right masks? In that case I'd imagine we need, like, masks of crowd scenes. A mask of me plus several other people, with heads out here and here and here in a row, and maybe a big cape so it looks like several bank robbers are just crowding together under it. That might help."

Hey, she didn't say it had to be perfect. Just that you had to make it up on your feet.

One of whom is developing the serious shakes.

Both of whom were developing the serious shakes, really. Show night was tomorrow, and Jono had no idea what had become of his props girl and coffee minion. He needed one of those.

So tonight's class was going to mostly be spent sitting in the audience, going over the checklist of things he was going to need to wrangle and occasionally thumping his head against his clipboard.

"I need a less stressful job," he grumbled to himself. "Like lion-taming."

"If you need something to lessen the stress, my cellar is well-stocked," Porthos reminded him with a pointed "I told you so"-type look.

Jono managed to refrain from replying to that with an obscene gesture, mostly just wrinkling his nose and giving Porthos a slightly sour look, instead.

"I've got lager upstairs," he replied, because, so help him, he was going to out-stubborn this production if it killed him. "And I'm saving it for th'cast party, if I can at all manage to."

... He... hadn't done any planning for the cast party yet, either. And that realization had him smacking himself in the forehead with one hand.

"Bloody hell."

"...There is something wrong with the cast party?" Porthos asked carefully. If the plans had fallen through, he had the perfect solution -- but he didn't want their recent conflict over the wine to sully the matter. It would be simple noblesse oblige, nothing more.

"Or something wrong with your..." -- he grimaced -- "lager?"

"Lager's just fine, mate, thanks for th'concern." That was maybe a touch dry. He noticed that grimace, yes, and met it with a raised eyebrow. "I've been out of town for th'past week and some change, helping rally the troops for an impending civil war."

... Not to be mistaken for the one going on in his own reality right then, no.

"The cast party... might've fallen through th'cracks a little."

"War is rarely civil, if you'll excuse the pun," Porthos commented dryly. "It can be quite exhilarating, however. You must remind me to tell you the story, some time, of how a mere four men defended a bastion from an entire army of attacking Huguenots!!!" He sighed. "Ah, I was younger, then, and less thick across the middle! These days, I wouldn't count myself worth more than... twenty, maybe thirty soldiers, and it will only decline as I age. I shall be receiving no more commendations from the King of France, I suppose."

...Oh, wait -- he had meant to be exhibiting his grandiosity at the moment, not merely bragging about it.

"But -- we are getting off-topic. We were discussing how just the other day, the servants at the restaurant I own were telling me they missed putting on fêtes... No, no, that wasn't it. It was... something about a cast party?"

Jono raised an eyebrow slightly at that, giving Porthos a not-so-convinced sort of look. But then... he was willing to roll with it, at this point. Why the hell not?

"The restaurant staff was saying that, you say?"

Well, technically, it was five men -- the servant who sat there frantically reloading the single-shot muskets tended to get forgotten in the telling. And technically, the "army" was a squadron of only thirty or so, and technically they had only held the fort for two hours before leaving, and technically Louis XIII had never issued an official commendation for it. It was still an impressive feat.

As for holding his own against twenty or thirty soldiers? Depending on the soldiers and how thew were armed, that wasn't too much of an exaggeration.

And the staff? "Some of them, anyway. Well, one or two -- but that's hardly the point. I have a restaurant which is well-suited to parties and staff who are adept at the planning and executing of such matters. You have need of a party, one that I shall attend and that I do not want to be disappointed by. It seems to me that our interests, here, are aligned."

"So it would seem," Jono agreed, looking... somewhere between disgruntled, and unbelievably relieved. "I'm going to have my hands full as it is, trying to figure out where the naffin' hell our props girl got off to. If I were to be able to stop worrying about the cast party, that would be..."

Look at Jono, about to swallow his pride like a grownup.

"... Very appreciated."

"I need an IV drip of coffee," Lizzie said, dropping into the seat next to Jono's. "Do you think lion-tamers ever dope up the lions? Get them on tranquilizers, just to be sure?"

The ASPCA wouldn't be happy about it, but it'd certainly make lion-taming less life-threatening.

"Most likely," Jono replied, shrugging his shoulders and looking at his clipboard as though maybe if he tried hard enough, he's spontaneously manifest his old powers and be able to light it on fire with his face again. "Circuses aren't exactly known for their humane treatment of animals, after all."

"In that case, I'll take that over being a grad student," she announced. "Hey, um, I'm sorry that I haven't been the most helpful of assistant directors."

Her free time had shriveled up to a pale raisin of its former luscious grape-like self. Sad that assistant directing didn't count as independent study experience, or she'd be so much better at this.

"That's fine, luv. I've been scattered, myself, and that's while I'm supposed to be directing this bloody thing."

Preparing for civil war had a funny way of doing that.

"I don't suppose you have any idea where our wayward props girl has gotten off to? I didn't see her at dress last night."

Lizzie screwed up her face, glancing through the crowd around them. And then she sighed.

"Which one's the props girl?" she asked. "Sorry, they're starting to blur together."

The coffee was not helping her focus. Sorry, Jono.

"Do we need props? I can throw together some, if you don't mind them being minimalist."

"My coffee minion," Jono clarified. "She wasn't at rehearsal yesterday."

Which was kind of a big deal for dress rehearsal.

"I think I can pull props together in time. If I get good and desperate, I'll just spend the entire show in the sound booth humming to myself."

That made way more sense if you understood how Jono's hard-light tech worked.

"Have we lost any cast?" Lizzie asked. "It's easier to fake along without props than without one of our leads. And I'm willing to take on coffee duties."

Read: make sure there was a fresh pot on, at all times. It just meant pouring him a cup when she refilled her own.

"So far as I can tell, our cast is still all accounted for, and you've all picked costumes."

Please, please let nothing happen to the costumes before tomorrow night. Please.

"Appropriate ones, for that matter. Not a single chicken suit to be had."

"I ... don't want to know, do I?"

No. She really, really didn't.

"If it helps, I'm not even onstage until Act II. I can run around behind the stage making sure things work up until my cue."

"And that would make you my favourite assistant director." See how proud and noble that position was, Lizzie? "I've got the props list divvied up by act. If you can take care of the first," he shoved a sheet of paper at her, "that'll take some of the pressure off of Billy and myself. He needs to be back there dealing with whatever other chaos arises, I can't expect him to play props wrangler, too."

Stage managers had to deal with so much shit already.

"As of the curtain call, we switch coffee for vodka," she announced. "But I think we've got this. If all else fails, we smile brightly and fake the best we can. No one in the audience is going to know how it was supposed to go. Maybe they think we're being post-modern in refusing to use props."

When in doubt, hide behind the label 'post-modern.'

"... If nothing else, I suppose the set that Kenzi prepared supports that theory."

Glittery space bordello. Yep.

"Okay, you have to tell me," Lizzie said. "Why red glitter? Was that an act of rebellion by the coffee minion, or are we going for the Paris dancing girl mystique?"

Lizzie was not going to wear a corset, Jono.

"I'm leaning rebellion," Jono admitted. "She also suggested I replace all the theatre seating with sofas, but I managed to veto that before she started undoing renovations that came about all of a year and a half ago."

Thank god.

"It's her last semester here, so I think she figured that meant she deserved a little more freedom than usual."

1) Sorry I've been so lurky lately -- there's a whole mess of RL going on, in a good way. This is why Lizzie's working on her independent study proposal.

2) This probably goes without saying, but I'm erring on the side of caution! While you should feel totally free to pick anything that catches your eye, comedy OR drama, please try to avoid scenes that might be triggering / messy either IC or OOC? As in, one of the scenes is described as follows:

When Natalia, a rape victim, visits Assistant District Attorney Samantha Burns to discuss her testimony, a horrible reality is exposed about her rapist.

Yeah, Lizzie probably doesn't think that makes good fodder for a light improv exercise.

3) In canon news, WTF LIZZIE TALK ABOUT DARCY ALREADY, ANY TIME NOW. Or just get on that. I AM IMPATIENT.

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Improv Class, The Boards, Thursday Evening

Arrive/Mingle!

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The Stage!

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Talk to Your Instructors

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OOC