improvised street performances take root on the Seacoast

Although he left us for the Windy City some years ago, Mike Gillett was once considered one of the most gifted directors on the Seacoast. Since he was known primarily as a director, a role responsible for carefully planning everything, it’s curious that Gillett was also drawn to the art of “improv” (short for improvisation), in which performers get their butts onstage and make stuff up as they go along.

“Every actor likes to get laughs, and that’s why I started,” Gillett admitted during a recent chat with The Wire. “Gary Newton (founder of the Players’ Ring) gave me the opportunity to do Tuesday night improv with a group that was alternating weeks with Darwin’s Waiting Room (a group formed by Andy Fling.) We had Todd Hunter, who brought a young hip twist on things, and George Shea, who is one of the quickest wits I have ever worked with, and Scott Williams, who had studied at Second City and still makes me laugh with every other word he says. So I had a blast that summer watching those guys be brilliant. Then it started to snowball. The next season Todd left and Nickie Fuller and Andy Fling joined and again it was a blast. Having permission from an audience to get silly with people you love is a rush like no other.”

Eventually, the group morphed into something else altogether, and the performers renamed themselves the Stupid Broken Children.

“SBC got more and more serious about the art of improv, rather than the loose format the other groups had been,” he says. “We hired a coach from Boston, who honed us in on some of the fundamentals. The things I learned from him gave me enough confidence to audition for Second City in Chicago, and they accepted me.” While in Chicago, Gillett joined Grandma June’s Sewing Circle, an improv group that will be performing at the Players’ Ring in Portsmouth August 10-12.

A lot of people think improv began centuries ago with an Italian art form called Commedia dell’arte. At the time, artists, singers, dancers and mimes worked in the streets for coins. But Gillett believes the art of improv originated elsewhere. “Commedia wasn’t true improv, but aspects of it were improvised,” Gillett says. “Where it resembled improv was that it was about characters and their relationships, interpersonally and socio-economically. The plot was secondary. It was similar to vaudeville in that way. Stanislavski, (the father of Method Acting, when an actor actually convinces himself the scene is real), used it to help actors find truth in their characters. He broke through the artificiality of the period theatre, and created a whole new style that 20th century audiences could relate to better because it paralleled all the other vast changes that were occurring in technology, philosophy, government, education, literature and the human psyche. But Stanislavski would use exercises and assignments to his actors as a process of preparation and discovery before the rehearsal process. Once that process began, he stuck to the script. Improv was over.”

Some performers had to fight long and hard for the right to make political statements with improv. Charlie Chaplin famously paid for it with his citizenship, and Joan Littleton was successfully prosecuted twice in England for failing to get scripts approved by the Lord Chamberlain offices. Other artists, including Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, weathered a series of harsh consequences while standing up for their rights to perform what they thought on the spot.

“Censorship is a killer of all things—not just art,” Gillett says. “Censorship is the death of improv, and truth is the life of improv. Further, censorship is the death of art. Sometimes when you tell the truth it makes people uncomfortable, which is why the people with the money carve those truths out, but that’s another story. Being an artist is about taking risks, if nothing else. Sometimes telling the truth is the greatest risk of all.”

Improv has been around for hundreds of years, and Gillett believes we will continue to feel its impact. “Too many groups, like Saturday Night Live, stop taking risks for fear of killing the cash cow. But the risk-takers are coming around again,” he said.
Gillett said Grandma June’s Sewing Circle has some things to offer that other improv groups don’t. “Grandma June’s Sewing Circle is improve-based sketch comedy. We are very Second City in our approach. That’ll be new for the Portsmouth crowds,” he said. “We use improv to generate material that we then script out and rehearse. Although we have performed improv sets, unlike other groups I worked with, we don’t focus on improvisation for its own sake. What we bring to the scene that’s different is our training, of course, but also the personalities and backgrounds, resulting in a lot of comic variety.”

Grandma June’s Sewing Circle Sketch Comedy will be at the Players’ Ring at 10:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 10 and Saturday, Aug. 11, and at 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 12. Stranger Than Fiction, another improv group, will be at the Ring at the same times on the weekend of August 3-5. The Ring also hosts Tuesday Night Improv with Stranger Than Fiction every Tuesday at 8 p.m. through Aug. 21.