101 Student Showcase
Boomerang Comedy Theater
Baton Rouge
Oct. 23
“What do we do if someone messes up?” Angi Noote said ahead of an improv showcase.
The audience clapped and cheered.
The Boomerang Comedy Theater is a school and venue for learning improv and comedy. Their courses, which run for six weeks, are designed to teach students to perform and set them up with teams to work with and grow in as they progress through the curriculum.
Last night, the levels 101, 401 and 601 clasess performed. The 101 class was taught by Angi Noote, who also hosted the show, fielding audience suggestions and inviting different groups of students to the stage to perform.
The show consisted of a variety of games like sit, stand, lean (in which three people do a scene but only one can be sitting, standing or leaning at a time, and they have to seamlessly incorporate the changes into the scene); questions only (where all dialogue must be posed as a question); and two-line scenes (three people are in a scene but two of the people can only say one of two lines such as “I’m on it” or “Absolutely not” in response to everything).
For people who started improv only six weeks ago, the students in the class were confident on stage and supportive of each other. When someone came up with a particularly good line, their classmates snapped or highfived them as they came off stage. When they messed up, they were met with the same enthusiastic applause that started the show.
“When I teach an intro class, I’m not trying to teach people to be funny,” Noote said in an interview after the show. “I’m trying to teach people how to be there for each other.”
Skill and community follow, she explained. When there’s no gatekeeping, no fear of failure, people are able to open up and really bond over the shared experiences of laughter and develop as performers.
During the show, there were still guardrails for the students: Noote called the performers out onto the stage to play games, picked and combined the audience suggestions to create interesting scenes and stopped the scenes to move toward other games. She herself has been performing for 11 years, teaching for four. She looked at home on the stage and expertly set her students up to land punchlines, and her students, from age 16 to the age where it’s no longer polite to disclose someone else’s age to a stranger, did.
In one game of sit, stand, lean the prompt for the audience was “What is a horrible first date?” Suggestions were combined into “bowling at a shooting range.” (Full disclosure: Bowling was my suggestion; it is truly a terrible first date to go on, and it just flew out of my mouth reflexively.) The scene ended up being about prepping for the first date and not knowing how to dress or how a bowling alley/shooting range would even work.
There was ample audience participation throughout the show, so even though you were watching other people play games, you still felt like you were a part of it. In one game, three students posed as "experts" on a panel and fielded audience members' questions about life from "What is the color purple?" to "Are we alone in the universe?" People wrote suggestions that ended up in scenes, others shouted things out, and four brave members of the audience joined the performers onstage to assist in a game.
One game asked audience members for suggestions of famous people or characters for two people (assisted by another person posing as a server) to act as if they are at dinner. Each of the people at dinner know who the other is but not who they are, and they have to organically ask and answer questions to figure it out. One person was Doctor House and the other, Captain Kangaroo. I didn't know either reference, and it seems like the person unknowingly playing Captain Kangaroo didn't know about their character either.
"I'm a captain of ... what exactly?" she said.
".... Marsupials," her scene partner Doctor House responded.
The Boomerang Comedy Theater hosts seasoned comics and beginners alike, but it all starts in moments like this: The first time people step on stage and watch their hard work pay off.
Contrary to what one might think, that hard work isn’t about the mechanics of being onstage. Travis Noote, the owner of Boomerang Comedy Theater, Angi Noote’s husband and developer of the curriculum noted that he’s never had anyone point out that any student at any show “projected well” or had good stage presence or anything technical about performing that one learns in class.
“I’ve never heard that, and I never will,” he said. “What I have heard is that those guys look like they were having fun together. They were laughing. They looked like a family.”
