Gavin Hawk is about to take improvisation to a new level.
The talented actor, who together with the equally skillful Ricky Wayne has been delighting audiences with the improv hit The Dumb Show over the last year, will present, again with Wayne, 321 this Sunday at American Stage. If it works, it should be stunning.
The concept is provocative – and hard to pull off. Hawk and Wayne will start by asking their audience for three sets of relationships – say, doctor/patient, mother/son, and captain/shipmate. Then they’ll ask for a venue – for example, a submarine – and they’ll section off the performance space into three separate rooms, and put each relationship into its own room. Then the improv begins “and somehow we have to make that all makes sense,” says Hawk. “So it ends up being more like a one-act play than the Dumb Show was.”
The improv lasts about an hour, and moves from scene to scene just like a scripted play might. “And sometimes characters from one room can enter another room, that’s entirely possible, or if somebody fires a gun, for instance, perhaps the person in the next room gets shot through the wall. So anything can happen.” The show has never been presented before a live audience, so this Sunday’s performance should be telling in lots of ways.
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2010.
