Risk is the Mother of Improvisation
PDX Pipeline, the Portland-centric music/arts/events online magazine gave Super Project Lab a great review following our February 21st show.
Here’s an excerpt of the review:
Risk is the Mother of Improvisation
by Arthur Smid
I really believe improv is the most exciting form of theater. I don’t know what is going to happen. The actors don’t know either. Anything that happens is a shared moment. As an audience member you are in on the joke. The laughs are more genuine than anything that happens in the context of scripted comedy.
Super Project Lab at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts in the Winningstad Theater brings actors and audience together in a moment of highest form. The venue is a palace of aesthetic pleasures. The moment you enter the lobby you are in a resort anywhere in the world. You have just stepped away from it all. You can relax a few hours in a superreal theater where anything can happen.
The proscenium perfectly places the actors in view. The lighting casts the action in high contrast. The players mutate into shipmates, gingerbread, mafia, and animal whisperers. The piano player onstage underscores the drama in each scene– and when the moment strikes, he sets the ground for the characters to rise in song.
The risks the actors take give meaning to the old theater salvo: break a leg! Mistakes are the field of mutation and invention. No matter what happens you will fall. Since falling is inevitable, what counts is how you catch yourself – or how you avail yourself of the saving grace of your partners when you are on stage with a trusted group of comedians. Knowing the tragedy, watching the comedians, there’s a sense that life will go on. It is comedy that saves us. Comedy to laugh at ourselves in moments of crisis.
A ship can sail from England. A donut can talk. The Queen can run off with her “Man-in-waiting”. The actors joined together as Super Project Lab represent the best group of improvisors in Portland. They don’t resort to tricks or games. They rely on their imaginations. Each player presents a character through a brief monologue to kick off the act. The players then enact scenes to build and thread the characters through a crazy quilt of cross-cutting quick edits. The multiple storylines allow the audiences minds to meld in a complex puzzle of intersecting thoughts. Ah, the love of life, it exerts itself so.
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Arthur Smid writes about events and people in Portland. You can contact him at smidarthur (at) gmail.com.
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