By Nevaeh Porter, Arts Editor
Thursday, Oct. 22, Aquinas’ improv group Mission Improvable held their first improv show of the year. They named it Mission Improvable: Oops All Spooks. This was their halloween version of their games and segments that they normally put on. Each cast member wore a different Halloween costume, some of the prompts given by the audience followed the theme and each game had its own twist. The games they played were “Three-Headed Expert,” “Slideshow,” “Late to Work,” “Alphabet Game,” “Two and Five Words,” “New Choice,” “GABAWA,” “Tap-In” and “Freeze.” The cast members for this show were Michaela Faith, CJ Guillermo, Rhodey Matzke, Kyle Devine, Delaney Pochevich, Axel Kwiatkowski, Niko Patterson and Matthew Sloan.
This opening game was “Three-Headed Expert. ” In this game, four people were on stage. One person is the interviewer, and the other three people act as the expert. They have to give their knowledge and opinions on a prompt given by the audience, but each expert can only say one word at a time. One could say “I.”, the next would say “Want.” and the final one would say “Sleep.” Patterson was the interviewer and Pocevich, Devine and Matzke were the expert named Dragonfly two (the first one died). They had to be experts on dragonfly mating and they were asked questions about how dragonfly mating was important to the world, as well as to describe their experiences with it.
“Is there anything you want to say to our audience?” Patterson said.
“Poisoning. Is. Very. Key. To. Mating. And. That. Is. Very. True,” Matzke, Pocevich and Devine said.
The next game was “Slideshow.” In this game, a story is being told through actors acting out the photos in the slideshow. The prompt from the audience was a trip to Galway, Ireland, so Pocevich and Faith were reminiscing about their trip while Sloan, Guillermo and Kwiatkowski acted as the pictures. Faith and Pocevich had to look at what they were doing and come up with a storyline based on whatever they were doing. They changed slides whenever Faith said click, meaning the actors changed what they were doing, continuing the story. In one slide, Faith got turned into a sheep because Pocevich asked someone to turn her into one.
Faith, Pocevich, Guillermo, Kwiatkowski and Sloan during “Slideshow” – Photo by Nevaeh Porter
The third game was “Late to Work.” This is a game where one actor (Guillermo) is late to work and has to figure out why he was late to work based on his coworkers’ (Faith and Patterson) actions behind their boss’ (Devine) back. Guillermo had to leave the room while the audience gave them three reasons for why he was late. The reasons were he ran over a cat, he got stuck in a volcano and he had explosive diarrhea.
“You’re driving down I-96,” Guillermo said. “You dodge a cat but you might’ve hit the cat, you have explosive diarrhea and I walked out of my house and got stuck in a volcano.”
The game after that was the “Alphabet game.” In this game, the audience gives the actors (Patterson and Matzke) a scenario and they have to act it out, but each of their sentences have to start with a new letter of the alphabet, going in order from a to z. The scenario they got was one cheated on the other.
“Obviously I can see that now because you crashed my car into a brick wall,” Patterson said.
“Please tell me why that’s wrong,” Matzke said.
The next game is called “Two and Five Words.” In this game, there are three actors (Faith, Kwiatkowski and Pocevich). One actor can only use two words in a conversation, another can only use five words and the third is standing off to the side, ready to switch out with whichever actor messes up their word count. To begin, Kwiatkowski was able to use five words, while Pocevich could only use two. The scenario they had was that Pocevich stole Kwiatkowski’s beans. When Faith swapped in for Kwiatkowski, she had to continue the scene with the same scenario. Whoever was out, swapped in with whoever missed their count, they didn’t have a specific person that they could only switch out with.
Kwiatkowski during “Two and Five Words” – Photo by Cristian Zacharias
The sixth game was “New Choice.” For this game, Guillermo and Sloan acted out a scenario where they were car salesmen. Sloan was attempting to sell Guillermo a used car. Every time someone off stage hit a bell, they had to change what they were saying.
“The one they played that sticks in my mind was new choice,” Matthew Busch, a student who came to watch the show, said.
The next game was “GABAWA.” GABAWA stands for Good Advice, Bad Advice, Worse Advice. In this game, Matzke was hosting a show where Sloan, Kwiatkowski and Devine were all giving advice to audience questions. Sloan was giving the good advice, Kwiatkowski was giving the bad advice and Devine gave the worse advice. The first question they were asked was “How do you get a car out of a tree?”
“Ask yourself how the car got into the tree,” Sloan’s character Steve, a professor at Harvard said. “That’s often how you get it out of a tree. I’d recommend a crane.”
“They don’t want you to know this,” Kwiatkowski’s character Scrooge McGooge said. “But there’s a really big magnet in the heart of Harvard, and you can take it and use that.”
“Just give up,” Devine’s character Personification of English said.
“How do I take my pet fish for a walk?” Matzke said.
“Not every fish can go for a walk,” Sloan said. “Literally not every fish can go for a walk, beautiful you really want to take them, I’d take the water with you.”
“They can teach your fish how to walk at Harvard,” Kwiatkowski said. “They put little fish on a walk, you can take them from the lab and they are free.”
“Can I ask what type of fish you have?” Devine said.
“Gold fish,” an audience member said.
“Get the little guy harnessed, take him to the park, get him some friends, take him home, start frying up dinner, throw him in, boil him,” Devine said.
They also answered how to get fake blood for a halloween costume and about what to do as a first day hotline worker.
The eighth game was “Tap In.” In this game, Guillermo and Devine each chose an audience member to perform with them. The prompt they were given by the audience was that they ran out of quesadillas at The Corner. When acting out the scene, any time Devine or Guillermo held out their hands to the audience member they chose, that member had to give them the first word that came to their mind and they had to use that as their next word in the scene.
The final game of the night was “Freeze.” In this game, Matzke and Kwiatkowski started. They had to act out a scene and when another cast member clapped and yelled freeze, they both had to stop and whoever called out freeze came out and swapped places with one of them, then they continued in a different scene.
The first scene change resulted in Kwiatkowski and Devine acting together, Devine and Sloan acting with a scene involving a dead glitter rat and then Sloan and Guillermo having a scene where an Ulta perfume turned Sloan’s hands invisible. After that, the next scene involved Guillermo and Patterson in a scene with a clown family. Next change, Patterson and Matzke acted out a scene, then Matzke and Sloan, followed by Sloan and Matzke, then Sloan and Kwiatkowski, next was Pocevich and Kwiatkowski, then Pocevich and Patterson, followed by Pocevich and Faith, then Faith and Devine, finally ending with Devine and Sloan acting out interpretive dance.
Picture of Mission Improvable Cast (left to right- Patterson, Pocevich, Kwiatkowski, Matzke, Guillermo, Faith, Devine and Sloan) after show – Photo by Cristian Zacharias
Mission Improvable does not have a set date for their next performance, but they are looking to do one more before the end of the semester.
