Correction Appended
An imaginary banner stretches across the stage reading "Dubuque Go-Kart Place."
Next week, this musical could potentially unfold in the office of an insurance company about to be foreclosed or the ape feeding room at the National Zoo.
Tonight, however, it takes place in Dubuque, Iowa, at the Go-Kart Place.
iMusical, directed by Travis Ploeger, an arts management graduate student at AU, and performed by a seven-member cast from the Washington Improv Theater, is aptly named: It is a musical entirely improvised, shaped only by audience suggestions for a setting pulled from a fish bowl. Accordingly, each show is unique. The cast members must come up with the nuts and bolts of the show as they sing along to music they are hearing for the first time with the audience. The result is nothing short of hilarious.
The awe-inspiring quality of the show stems from how immediately the actors develop believable and quirky characters and how they work off of each other's emotions and the audience's reaction to organically create a true and funny show.
"We keep characters reacting honestly in strange situations," Ploeger said.
He said maintaining this honesty is the true challenge of creating a successful improvised show.
The plot of Friday night's musical shows how true and vivid the improvised characters can be and how their believability shapes the arc of the plot.
The show opened with Jason, an affable and dorky employee of the Dubuque Go-Kart Place, confessing that he is afraid of driving because he doesn't want to hurt anyone. Being an employee at the Go-Kart Place, this poses immediate challenges: He is pressured and mocked by his coworkers, including the uptight track timer who refuses to do anything but clutch the stopwatch and the hot-rod Mitch who aspires to be a Go-Kart Place legend and have his name on the Go-Kart Place wall of fame.
Besides being laugh-until-you-give-yourself-a-hernia funny, the story shared the emotional resonance of other art forms usually written ahead of time. You want Jason to find happiness, and you want Shelley to find love. The quality of the acting makes it possible to forget how immediate the show unfolding before you really is.
"The characters don't set out to be funny - they set out to find the truth in some moment," Ploeger said. "If you do that, people are going to eventually laugh."
With a decade of improvisational work in New York City, Ploeger created iMusical with WIT when he moved to D.C. in 2006. He finds his new hometown endlessly amusing, from its acronym craze to how everyone is convinced he is going to change the world.
He once wanted to be a Broadway star, but found himself doing sketch comedy and composing on the side.
"I never thought that 10 to 15 years later, this would be what I'd really end up doing," he said.
Unique from traditional improv, music greatly shapes the performance of iMusical and stretches the intensity of the comedy. Music becomes a prop of sorts, giving an emotional context to the show as it develops with the plot.
As musical director, it is Ploeger's role to shape the mood through music and also challenge and inspire the actors. He uses his improvised composing to work with the actors' emotions and provoke new ones.
"It would be very easy to accompany these actors, but then I wouldn't be doing my job," he said. "I have to keep pushing the story and the heightened reality on the stage."
The intense nature of the show, however, cannot be conveyed by simply describing the acting and the music. What is remarkable about iMusical is how its pieces interact. The music pushes the acting, and the audience encourages the music to create a hilarious show that ultimately stumbles upon something true, be it in Dubuque, Iowa, or another location yet to be drawn from the fish bowl.
iMusical is performed Fridays at 8 p.m. through April 13. Performances take place at Flashpoint's Mead Theatre Lab located at 916 G St. N.W. More information can be obtained at www.iMusical.org.
Correction: In the photo accompanying "iMusical inspires hilarity, spontaneity," Liz Demery's name was incorrectly spelled in the cutline.
