Butterr, Just in the Femur, Two Friends
Butterr & Friends an Improv Collider Show
Hartley/Vey Studio Theatre
Baton Rouge
Sept. 19, 2025
Lucky shoes that turn your calves good luck charms, a bull-riding cult and doctor-nurse drama in an operating room: These were among the scenes from "Butterr and Friends," the most recent collider improv show at the Hartley/Vey Studio, in which individual troupes perform and then come together for a joint final act.
Friday night's performance featured Baton Rouge groups Butterr and Just in the Femur as well as New Orleans-based Two Friends.
Watching improv feels like watching someone else’s TikTok feed over their shoulder. The content is not necessarily tailored to you. It can feel absurd at times, and you have no control over when the scene changes. In the case of Butterr, changes in scene were marked with three claps when someone had a new idea. With the other two, the situation was more fluid. The person who played a baby in one scene could seamlessly become someone’s grown partner in another.
Just in the Femur took the stage and asked for an object that could fit into a medium sized box. Someone in the audience immediately blurted out, “a baby,” and they were off to the races.
The first scene featured a baby who didn’t want to grow up. The next featured a grown man talking with his buddy over Modelos and a tube of animal crackers about whether or not he should cheat on his wife who’s been weird since she had a baby.
The set took old-school sitcom tropes like unhappy married life, bratty teenager and perhaps deliberately obtuse wife and remixed them with some absurd elements. The teenager personality was inhabited by a baby. The husband went to what was heavily implied to be a strip club, but the performer there was literally just mopping floors. In another scene, the wife asked her friends if it’s normal that her husband doesn’t come home most days of the week and smells like pot and other things when he does get back.
“I think he’s just going to midnight mass,” she said.
“That’s a really liberal Church he goes to,” her friend said back.
With that, the scene transformed into a religious gathering, which felt at once Southern evangelical coded in language and vibe but completely divorced from any actual religion. The charismatic leader explained that at “Bullriders for Christ Church,” they believe that a multitude of sins including cheating on your wife and giving drugs to your whiny baby (both call backs) can be redeemed through eight seconds of riding on a mechanical bull. Longer than eight seconds means “VIP treatment” in heaven.
Clip from Just in the Femur's performance on September 19, 2025.
Tropes gave people something to hang onto plot-wise as they were whisked from scene to scene in this hour and a half long show. But the performers' creativity gave it life. In this collider show, the groups were intentionally building a shared language and universe through every scene. While some jokes awere just funny for a moment and fell off, others got reborn into something new. Like the new character that mounts another bull in the finale, the audience was along for the ride.
