Anything Can Happen

It's dark upstairs at Satch's, and the audience of 20 or so is looking around, trying to figure out what's going on up on the small stage. Gradually, the lights come up and the booming theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard.

The six members of The Collaboration creep and crawl and slither onto the stage, swinging their arms around and shrieking like monkeys. One of them spots the microphone in the center of the stage reaches up, touches it, and screams. Then he straightens up, grabs the mike, scans the audience, and then, eyes directed up toward the heavens, says: "I've discovered comedy." And in the following two hours of skits and songs and improvisational routines. Boston's newest comedy group livens up the stage and introduces its audience to a pleasure most people outside Chicago have never previously discovered--live comedy.

If you've ever seen a live comedy act before, it was probably a standup act before a big concert or at a place like "Catch a Rising Star" in New York and the comic was the kind of guy who walks around the stage and insults the audience ("Hey, will ya look at this guy? Where'd ya get that tie?") until they are forced to laugh.

The three men and three women who make up the Collaboration are hardly standup comics. Ellen Holbrook, the founder of the group, has modeled the Collaboration on a completely different brand of comedy. They don't work against the audience--they work with it. A native of Chicago and a long-time employee of the Second City Theater there, Holbrook has taken her cue from that city's improve tradition.

So instead of just sitting and watching the show, the audience must help in the creative process on stage. "Okay," someone occasionally says to the audience, "now we're gonna play a game." ; And then something like: "I need you to name for me three household appliances."

"A trash compactor!"

"A blender?"

"A straw."

And then you get to watch the troupe blend these various suggestions into the lyrics of blues numbers ("I wanna be your trash compactor baby...") or TV talk shows or real life situations ("Okay, what do we have? A cheerleader and a hairdresser riding the T? All right, now...")

But the show is more than improve. More than half the material, in fact, is made up of original skills and songs written by members of the group--most of them by Holbrook and George Melrod '82, a former Lampoon editor, who gave the humorous Ivy oration at Class Day last spring. These include takeoffs on TV commercials and news shows and new wave songs.

The Collaboration's performance is something of a homespun version of Saturday Night Live. Much of the material seems fit for such a show, but this revue has such a "hey-kids-lot's-put-on-a-show-I've got-a-barn-we-can-use" spirit to it that it can hardly be seen as a direct takeoff on the SNL prototype. And besides, this show has something going for it that SNL and Second City TV will never have, and something that the audiences who eat up this brand of humor will rarely experience. It's live. Anything can happen. And though the show is pretty clean on the whole, there are no censors to stop the occasional expletive that comes out.

The improvisations do frequently fall flat and occasionally a skit is lost before it ever gets off the ground, but that's the beauty--and the risk--of a live performance, And the infrequent bumbles are more than made up for by the group's strongest pieces. One standout is the Melrod-penned Shakespearean soap opera called "Most Grievous Hospital," which is rendered in Elizabethan rhyming couplets from the introduction by a character named Gossip ("Enjoy the play, friends, Gossip now be gone. I'll change my costume quickly and return anon.") It continues through a brief and purposefully confusing ploy of divorces and jealousy--regular General Hospital fare--("Oh, woe, that I should unaraesthetized bear such pain") and through to the end ("...and o'er the martinis that our good pay makes possible, We'll mourn the sorry state of this... most grievous hospital."). It's hardly Hamlet, but it sounds like it.

And the Collaboration is just as good at imitating the other targets of its satire. The group shows its prowess in a couple of musical numbers--one called "Anne Burford and the EPAettes," in which the group's three women sing a takeoff on a rather overplayed tune ("Oh Ronnie You're so fine, increase spending one more time, hey hey!"), and a very funny Dylan imitation.

It's a sad fact that we get most of our humorous entertainment these days from television, and occasionally movies. Live comedy is a rare pleasure most people have seldom experienced. The Collaboration's combination of improv and skits is--if not the highest quality entertainment around--certainly an evening you won't find anywhere else in Boston.