Actors Improv Theater troupe hosts Day of the Dead show

At the Carrboro ArtsCenter on Friday night, the Actors Improv Theater put on their annual Halloween show, this year falling on the Day of the Dead, which inspired the theme of the show. Attendees spent the evening experiencing different scenarios revolving around death, guided by actors who initiate a call and response interaction. 

“What is something someone would say about you if you were dead?” Dana Marks, one of the cast members, asked the audience. 

“Thank God!” a crowd member shouted back.  

The audience erupted with laughter, and a momentarily-stunned Marks took the suggestion and improvised a scene around it. 

Suddenly and seamlessly, most of the cast began to speak exclusively with Irish accents — one with a New Zealand accent — while performing a scene about a woman who's glad her terrible husband died.

Greg Hohn, the director of the Actors Improv Theater, said  he believes good improv looks as though it's scripted, whereas good scripted work looks as though it's improvised. 

“I think it's remarkable how they would take a topic, and the way they would meander with the topic to wherever it would go,” Clay Thorp, an audience member, said. 

Not every scene was performed by the entire cast. During a scene conducted exclusively by two cast members, Hailey Brown and Steve Scott, cast members tapped each other out to perform the prompt at different points in the scene. 

This happened multiple times throughout the night. Though the story expanded and changed with every new direction the scene took, the theme of the skit remained true to the audience’s original suggestion.

“A lot of improv tends to go straight for crude humor, but one of the things I really like about them is that they take a little while to unfold a story, and so you can appreciate it on a number of different levels,” April Errickson, Hohn's wife who attended the event, said.

The cast was accompanied by a live band that played music throughout the show. At a certain point the band would play at a low pitch, which would gradually swell. Based on the instrumentation, a cast member would then improvise a song on the spot. The song would extend into the scene, forcing the actors to sing their dialogue and figure out how to bring together both the music and skit. 

“The only music that isn't improvised is before the actors come on stage, they played some tunes. Those are existing tunes, but once the show starts, we don't know what they're doing and they don't know what we're doing, and then we wind up doing it together,” Hohn said. 

After a brief intermission, the cast returned for their final set, and the band played them out. The show lasted for about an hour and a half in total in the lively ArtsCenter. Leaving the dark theater and emerging into the bright lights of the center's lounge, there seemed to be a glow surrounding the crowd as friends and families smiled and exited into the night. 

The Actors Improv Theater will perform again in December to host their holiday musical show. 

“The reality is that local art and local artists have so much to offer, and I think that it's really important that people come out and support their local artists, support their local community, support the ArtsCenter, support the musicians, the actors and all of that,” Errickson said.

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