Unexpected Shaxpere!

Expect the unexpected…
Wit and spontaneity are the hallmarks of improvisational theatre. In Unexpected Shaxpere!, you’ll recognize the lilt of the language, but you’ll hold your breath as actors, using a few suggestions from the audience, create an entirely original play in the style of the Bard. Unexpected Shaxpere! is directed by Ron Hippe and features a cast of players from Seattle’s internationally renowned Unexpected Productions.
—Mell McDonnell, CSF PR/Marketing Director
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Improv: A Brief History
By Tristan Devin

As a performance genre, improvisation came to the stage rather late. Musicians, painters, and poets had free-associated and splattered their way into the canon decades before improvised theatre began popping up in London and Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s. This was an anomaly, considering that theatre had long led the charge where innovation was concerned. Combining the written word, speech, design, music, and dance, theatre mixed media centuries before that term had been uttered. So why was theatre a latecomer to improvisation? Perhaps it was the god-like status of playwright and director. Or perhaps it was the Stanislavskian stranglehold that made improv, when it came along, seem to many like clowning.
In fact, clowning was just what Keith Johnstone had in mind when he began pushing students to improvise in workshops. Johnstone, a reader for Royal Court Theatre, was frustrated with the wooden, pretentious quality of English theatre in the 1950s. So he encouraged actors to use funny faces and accents, to be silly, to stop being imaginative and just be obvious. Everyone laughed so hard that they decided to invite an audience. Later, Johnstone moved to Calgary, Alberta, where he founded the Loose Moose Theatre Company and created Theatresports, a type of competitive improv. He also wrote Impro, the seminal book on improvised theatre.
Improvisation, as Johnstone was aware, had been common in Italian theatre since the sixteenth century. Commedia dell'arte involved juggling, acrobatics, and satirical plays that used established characters, but no set dialog. In this sense, improv was clowning, and satirical clowning at that. This satirical bent, perhaps more than anything, suggests why improv came late to the theater: improv was so in and of the moment, so suited to satire, and so ill-suited to pretension, that it naturally gravitated toward the popular rather than the avant-garde. Until the satire boom of the sixties, the theatrical soil just wasn't suitable for improv.
In 1955, David Shepard and Paul Sills (son of Viola Spolin, another early improv innovator) formed The Compass Theater, later to become The Second City. They wanted to use some of the Commedia methods to improvise plays. One of the earliest Second City performers was Del Close. Close created an unstructured long-form improvisation known as the Harold, which explores a single word through scenes, games, and monologues. Working separately, Close and Johnstone created what we now know as improv.
The most powerful element of Close's teaching was the "group mind." Improv is a naturally collaborative art. Together, performers write, direct, and perform the show, feeding off the audience's suggestions and energy. Close believed that, at its best, when performers are able to turn off their self-conscious minds, allowing words and symbols to erupt from within, all of the minds in the performance space meld together in a profound, though ephemeral, moment of connection. Close died in 1999.
Today thousands of improv groups all over the world perform variations of Close's and Johnstone's forms. Their work has had a pervasive effect on television and film as well as theatre.

Artistic Staff
Director	Ron Hippe
Scenic Designer	David M. Barber
Lighting Designer	Richard M. Devin
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Setting
A surprise every night!
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Cast
Ron Hippe
Gabe Denning
Jeremy Richards
Randy Dixon
Elicia Maria Wickstead
Trent Hines (musician)
*Jill Farris
*Michelle Hippe
*Amanda Roundtree
*Michael A. White
*These actors will rotate throughout the summer