IMPROVISATIONAL LEAP OF FAITH FOR COMEDY
Here’s hoping hilarity ensues at GCTC performance of Blind Date
Over the past decade, Rebecca Northan has been on hundreds of blind dates. Each time, she’s had rooms filled with onlookers watching as those dates bloomed from coffee to flirtation to more.
If Northan did her job right, there would be lots of laughs too.
After all, the Calgary native and actor is a five-time Canadian Comedy Award nominee for best female improviser, and these interactions have taken place in theatres, with willing male audience members invited on stage to create “spontaneous theatre.”
It’s all part of the process for Northan’s one-of-a-kind production called Blind Date.
The unscripted, in-the-moment creation comes to the Great Canadian Theatre Company next week for a nearly three-week run, but with Tess Degenstein, a seasoned improviser who has been trained by Northan, playing the role of Mimi. At the GCTC, there will also be two “Queer Blind Dates” — Mimi will select a female presenting audience member on Dec. 9, and a male actor, Mathieu, will chose a male presenting audience member on Dec. 16.
Blind Date’s premise is that Mimi is a sexy French clown — complete with a red dress and red nose — who has been stood up by her scheduled date and must replace him with a man from the audience. From that point, what happens, happens, and hopefully hilarity ensues.
Between Northan and three other actors who have played Mimi, there have been nearly 700 Blind Dates staged, with productions off-Broadway and in London’s West End. “They’re all different,” Northan says. “All the preparation in the world is not going to prepare you for the stranger that sits across from you. That person is unique unto themselves.”
Northan’s first Blind Date took place, less ambitiously, but extremely successfully, as a stretch of 10-minute performance pieces a decade ago at Harbourfront Centre’s Spiegel Show in Toronto.
She says she practically stumbled across the premise that has made her career: “I don’t really take responsibility for thinking up a good idea. It kind of showed up on its own.”
But developing Blind Date to its full 90-minute length required a little more deliberation and planning. “I thought through what a rough outline might be. I worked with a director. We had a couple of planning conversations, and he said, ‘Enough discussion, I think you have to just go on stage.’
“I was extremely nervous the first time I tried it. I thought, ‘Am I crazy? Can I really do this?’ At some point you have to feel the fear and do it any way. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? I’m not going to end up dead from 90 minutes of improv. I can dial the fear down.”
Northan explains at length that Blind Date’s modus operandi has very little in common with a standup comedian putting audience members on the spot or even belittling them.
She says potential dates are screened in the theatre lobby before the production begins. Not only must participants be willing. If a spouse or a girlfriend is present, she has to be OK with her partner becoming a performer.
“We really want to make sure there’s consent, comfort, care. Those are the three Cs,” Northan says. “And you can probably throw in celebration. We really want to highlight what’s awesome and lovable about the person that we bring up on stage.”
The philosophy of Northan’s spontaneous theatre is to treat the participant from the audience as a “guest,” she says. And a guest, Northan adds, would never be the butt of the clown’s jokes.
“I don’t think our show would have longevity if we practised a mean-spirited type of comedy.”
The show has been successful enough to tour in North America and play in New York and London, and Northan has noted some cultural differences between her various dates.
“In North American culture, one of your standard early questions is, ‘What do you do for a living?’ People in Great Britain are quite uncomfortable with that question. It’s considered rude,” she says.
“The Americans had a much greater sense of bravado. Canadian men ... usually 10 to 15 minutes in, were more comfortable saying, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m totally nervous.’ “
Being nervous, of course, is “super-normal,” Northan says.
“A great night is when we see that person go from nervous to comfortable to playful. A harder night is one where for whatever reason, the person playing Mimi, if they can’t figure out what that person needs to be comfortable. But really, one of rules is whatever that person does inside of the show is right for them, and we will adapt the show around them.”
As an example, Northan says that if a date suggests that they go to a casino or take a boat ride, then the production goes into overdrive to make that happen.
“We don’t have those sets readily available, but we say yes,” Northan says. It’s then up to the show’s backstage crew to scour through prop trunks to find elements for the new, on-the-fly setting.
Northan was trained in a particular style of improv that seeks to go beyond sketch comedy and quick jokes. “We’re looking for dramatic action, we’re looking for a long over-arching narrative,” she says.
“We want something more than just trivial laughs. We’re looking for universal truths and moments of honest human connection. Then the comedy comes from that. Then the people in the audience can laugh because they recognize themselves in the moment.” phum@postmedia.com twitter.com/peterhum