OTTAWA —
The room lights are dim. One spotlight beams from
the back. The audience waits expectantly as a
single performer approaches the stage. Clad in
a plain black T-shirt and khakis, the ultimate
in unassuming attire, Dan Beirne steps up to the
microphone.
“This is something we
couldn’t fit into the show,” he says,
reaching into his pocket and pulling out a silver,
model passenger plane. “So, I’ll just
do it anyway,”
Holding the mike close, he
makes sputtering engine noises.
“This is your captain
speaking,” he says, waving the plane about.
“I hate you, you will all die! I’m
going to crash the plane!”
The miniature jet plummets
towards the floor in a chaotic zigzag. He changes
to a high pitch falsetto: “No! No!”
“You will all die,”
he says in the captain’s deep voice.
His hand opens. The plane
crashes to the floor. Beirne calmly places the
mike back on the stand and pauses for the briefest
of moments. He looks out at the crowd, then violently
stomps on the plane. Pieces crunch. “Ahh,”
the passengers cry as they are crushed. A minute
later, with the plane an unrecognizable mess,
he stops.
“Thank you.”
He turns and walks off stage.
Beirne is part of Better Than
Shakespeare, a sketch comedy troupe that performs
in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto. His performance
style has roots stretching back to the improv
he learned as a teen in Ottawa.
Reserved and soft spoken offstage,
Beirne started improv as a shy Grade 10 student
at Holy Trinity Catholic High School in the Ottawa
district of Kanata.
“Improv is such a good
confidence builder,” he says.
In his last year of high school,
Beirne took his newfound confidence to the stage
and competed in the Canadian Improv Games, held
annually at the National Arts Centre. More than
300 teams across Canada compete for the chance
to be one of the 15 that face off at the NAC in
the spring. Beirne’s team won second place
in 2001 with an unusual performance.
“The scene we got was
‘Order,’ ” he says, explaining
it had to be done without actually saying the
word. The team decided to try something strange.
They turned to the audience and stared at them.
Mood set, the team unleashed
what Beirne calls his best moment of improv.
“In about 10 seconds,
we got in three instances of order,” he
says. “It’s rare to get so many mentions
in one scene. It’s a moment I’m proud
of.” The team managed to work in a judge
calling, “Order in the court,” a plaintiff
being asked to follow an order and Beirne arriving
with a pizza trying to find out who ordered it
— all without saying the word.
The 2001 team included three
other Better Than Shakespeare members, Joe Gallagher,
Kevin Murphy and Roger Bainbridge, who competed
with Beirne. Jon Booren, the remaining member,
was competing there, too, but with a different
high school.
***
As Jane Moore will tell you,
high school improv is huge in Ottawa. With 18
years of coaching experience at the arts-oriented
Canterbury High School (one of many local schools
with a team), she’s seen the splash it can
make, and the skills it can teach.
With help from Moore, Canterbury’s
team, BOFA, has won six golds, four silvers and
a bronze medal at the Canadian Improv Games. Students
change yearly but the core skills don’t,
Moore says.
“A person who’s
extremely arrogant will have trouble. The first
thing you need to learn is to empty your mind
and be willing to do what others suggest. You
need to listen, be real. It’s about being
naked, being brave.
“Real humour comes from
the heart, the mind, and sometimes the groin,
but not from, ‘Look at me.’ ”
Moore’s coaching incorporates
a slew of styles. Clowning, mime, dance, music,
storytelling, character building, staging and
delivery, enunciation and such traditional styles
as Shakespearian acting all go into becoming an
improv actor.
“We read the news every
day so we can do political satire,” she
says, eyes glinting mischievously. “The
important thing though, is the team. Everyone
is there to support you at any moment, if you
fall on your face. That’s what makes it
safe. Everything is spontaneous, but you’re
listening to your team or you won’t have
a whole, just a lot of holes!”
The Canadian Improv Games
— with national finals at the NAC in April
— shows how wound up Ottawa audiences can
get.
Moore has seen some electric
audience support year after year.
“You need to imagine
people stamping their feet,” she says with
zeal. “You need to imagine huge banners,
people with bare chests painted for the team.
That’s what the games are like. Ottawa is
proud of their stomping cheer.”
***
In 2002, Beirne and his four
buddies decided to move on from high school improv,
and Better Than Shakespeare was born.
The group wanted to get away
from the “kitschy stigma” sometimes
associated with improv, he says. Sketch comedy
is different because there’s a chance to
rehearse and perfect. Beirne says this creates
a higher challenge, since audiences tend to be
more critical when they know the actors have practised.
“You’re not a
slave to audience suggestion,” he explains.
A scene gets run through about six times, without
actually learning a script. The jokes are firmed
up and the ideas honed. But, he says, “the
nature of sketch comedy is you want to keep it
fresh.”
So, they don’t memorize
lines.
“One of our goals is
to push the boundaries of what’s funny,”
Beirne says.
Picture Joe Gallagher, a serious-looking
group member, walking onstage during a sketch
about visiting home after the first year of university.
Out comes a ventriloquist’s dummy, which
bluntly relates the deep insecurities Gallagher
has been harbouring at school. Each one, Beirne
reveals, is something a group member has felt
in his life.
“We made Joe look as
awful as possible. So awful it was funny. We wanted
the audience to think, ‘Wait ... this guy
is cutting himself in the bathroom,’ but
to have them laugh before they realize it.”
Beirne says being on stage
is exhilarating, but nerve racking. He can often
see the faces of people in the front row, and
at some venues, can hear everything they say.
Group member Kevin Murphy complains that he often
can’t see at all because the stage lights
are so glaring.
Visible or not, audience reactions
to the group can be stunning. Audience members
have “propositioned” Murphy and proposed
to Roger Bainbridge.
“You really can’t
explain what it’s like on stage,”
Beirne says. “That’s why improv is
good. It lets people who wouldn’t normally
try it give it a go. It’s the same feeling,
just heightened.”
***
Joel Guénette, a Winnipeg
native turned University of Ottawa improv performer,
proves it doesn’t always have to end in
high school. A member of LIEU, the university’s
French improv league, he has no intentions of
stopping a nine-year tradition of performing.
“When I moved here,
it was, ‘Where can I live? Where can I buy
groceries? And where can I do improv?’ ”
he says.
Performing weekly, Guénette
takes part in traditional French improv that’s
based on a hockey game. He says Ottawa has audience
traditions you don’t get elsewhere. To start
a French improv game, a puck is dropped to determine
which team performs a scene first. Locally, the
audience provides sound effects as it’s
flipped and when it lands. Heckling the “referee”
is also a local phenomenon.
Guénette says he’s
used improv to be a better public speaker, to
think on his feet and to stay mentally sharp.
“Improv has so many
applications in life I fear that if I ever stopped,
I’d go deaf and dumb,” he says.
***
In his second year at Montreal’s
McGill University, Beirne joined an improv group
— the only member of Better Than Shakespeare
member to do so.
“I have a guilty confession,”
Beirne offers. “I still love improv.”
“People grow out of
it, but it’s great when you’re young,
it’s quite beneficial,” he says. It
gave him the confidence to get on stage to crush
toy planes and the intuition to know it would
be funny.
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