Night Life - Improv

When most people think of improv they think of the television show Whose Line Is It Anyway or maybe the stand-up comedy show An Evening At The Improv. Then there's a whole group of people who have seen an improv comedy show live: With its theater games and sketch comedy style scenes. Well my friend I'm hear to tell you, there's improv here in San Francisco that may be completely new and different for you!

First of all, most performances here are longer. The standard night out here involves an improv show 2-hours in length with an intermission in the middle. Kinda like what you would expect at a regular night at the theater. In Chicago, where they have more improvisors than any other city in the United States, venues will often have 4 shows a night in order to supply the demand for performance space. As a result, most of their shows have about 30 to 45 minutes of stage time per performance. So what the heck are we doing here with all our extra time on stage? Sometimes we just have longer improv comedy shows, but this extra amount of stage time has also fostered a special kind of longform improvisation that feels much more like normal scripted theater. In most of the rest of the world anything longer than 5-minutes in length is considered longform improv. Yet here, it's not uncommon to see one story told over the length of a full 2-hour show. San Francisco is apparently full of actors wanting to improvise 2-hour single set plays or full length completely improvised musicals. Standard longform formats like The Herold, with their many storylines performed over a 45-minute time period, feel much more like mediumform to me now that I've been exposed to longform improv in San Francisco.

And our improv is not all about the comedy anymore: With a full length show, comes full range acting!  We've got improvised Shakespeare and improvised horror, improvised Dickens and improvised Bollywood. There's a lot of great unique improv here in San Francisco. The stuff performed as straight theater (not for laughs but rather as new works of theater) is my personal favorite. That's one of the reasons I specialize in San Francisco style longform as an actor. If the timing works out while you're here, I would totally recommend coming to see one of our shows at the Un-Scripted Theater Company. The work is very stereotypical of "high quality" San Francisco improv theater, and if you've only got a few nights in town, seeing something that's really well done is a must.

The Un-Scripted Theater Company
http://un-scripted.com

If there's nothing going on at the Un-Scripted Theater Company while you're in town you could always check and see if BATS Improv or 3 for All has anything on sale at the Half Priced Ticket Booth.
Half Priced Ticket Booth
http://www.tixbayarea.com