Show #4: Protagonist Again!

My last show was the Saturday Matinee. We had a great crowd and got the lovely town of Suffield, CT as our suggestion. As the first scene developed, Trish was setting up Scott to be the protagonist. He hadn’t been the protagonist yet in the show and had expressed a desire to. Trish kept saying “You look blue. What’s bothering you?” A clear opportunity for Scott to open up about his feelings, sing a need song, and be the protagonist. But he didn’t bite. He later said “I had nothing,” a not uncommon occurrence in improv.

The scene ended without a song and without a clear protagonist. Throughout the scene, however, Scott and Trish spoke about their son, a character named Ricky, who was coming home soon for the holidays. Tara and I went out in the second scene and she immediately endowed me as being Ricky. She was my girlfriend. I didn’t want to go home. She was forcing me to.

Ah, I slipped into that scene like a nice warm bath. It was one of those moments when I could really revel in the fact that I’ve been improvising with Tara for 7 years or so. We knew how to play-off each other and delight each other and anticipate each other’s offers. I sang a need song, that turned into a nice playful duet with her, and whamo, I was the protagonist for the second time in the run!

Every now and then a couple other people entered the scene. Our characters found ways to send them away because they really weren’t needed. I think they were trying to raise the stakes, but the stakes were raised enough and didn’t really need the superfluous characters. Mostly they got in the way of the scene. That’s something I think we could have worked on more in this run: knowing when not to enter a scene. Not going on can be just as helpful as going on, sometimes.

Interestingly enough, I felt like Christian, who can often times be a pestering stage hog, did a much better job of staying out of scenes that didn’t need him than he did in say The Great Puppet Musical where his omnipresence onstage bordered on the ridiculous. I speak of this honestly mostly because I’m reasonably certain he’ll never read this, and if he did, I can trust him not to take it personally.

The show went rather smoothly from that point on. I did a better job of getting into trouble, and it was really the first show of the run where the protagonist didn’t like the town. This was something that happened frequently in previous years doing this show. One thing that it does, is make everyone else love the town to raise the stakes. Tara did an especially great job of this. Her character came with me and had never visited the town before. She delighted in everything.

Which brings me back to another interesting moment: In the first scene between Tara and I, when her character was convincing me to go home for the holidays, we set that scene in one of the towns we hadn’t taken as our suggestion. We often find ways to mention the runner-up towns in the show, but this was the first time we’d ever set a scene in one of the other towns. So Massapequa Park, NY has now appeared in a Let It Snow, even if it’s not been featured.