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Ham solo
An iO vet attempts a fully improvised, multicharacter musical…alone.
For Thanksgiving 2007, a tight-knit troupe of Chicago-based improvisers headed home for the holidays. That Saturday, the day of their show, they found themselves either stranded at various airports or still slumming with the fam. A single performer made it to the theater that night and faced a full house, disaster looming. What to do? The improviser and his piano player bravely performed a one-man musical, devised on the spot. The crowd went bonkers.
The improviser was Blaine Swen, an ensemble member in iO’s long-running musical-improv troupe the Del Tones. Traditionally, Thanksgiving weekend, when locals want their visiting relatives out of the house, is a busy time for iO. “The house was packed to the gills,” Swen says. “I went up and said, ‘We’ve got some people stuck at airports, and I am the Del Tone tonight. If you will indulge me, I’m going to perform a musical for you.’?” With the help of accompanist David Asher, Swen staged a 25-minute improvised musical in which the actor performed his own opening, played multiple characters, interwove scenes, delivered monologues and tied the entire story together neatly at the end—all to a standing ovation.
“If it were anyone else, I would’ve said, ‘Absolutely not, are you out of your mind?’?” says iO founder Charna Halpern. “But Blaine—I can watch him forever.”
Over Labor Day weekend last year, lightning struck a second time: Swen found himself in the same situation, with the rest of the cast either delayed or on vacation. And again his improv musical received a standing ovation. That’s when Halpern decided to give him his own stage. “I said, ‘Blaine, we have to run this.’?”
BASH! The One-Man Musical, opens April 3 at iO. Yet questions loom large—namely, doesn’t a one-man show break all the improvisation rules set forth in Halpern and Del Close’s influential book Truth in Comedy? After all, Swen, 30, a Bakersfield, California, native who studied philosophy in Los Angeles (and moved to Chicago in ’01 to pursue his doctorate at Loyola), has built an acting career on supporting, trusting and agreeing (or yes and–ing) with his fellow ensemble members. He played first at the now-defunct ComedySportz in Bakersfield and later at iO West in L.A., where he formed the Backstreet Bards, a Shakespeare parody. In Chicago, he founded Improvised Shakespeare Company at Donny’s Skybox in 2005; it attracted the attention of Halpern, who remembered Swen from iO West. In addition to ISC and Del Tones, Swen performs with an iO troupe called Bullet Lounge.
Swen says that, in BASH!, the bedrock rules of improv still apply. “As cheesy as it sounds, often one of the hardest performers to trust is yourself,” he says. “So there’s this sense of recognizing that my own ideas have value and supporting my own ideas.” Halpern agrees: “He has to trust himself because he has no time to think. When you’re in a show with other people, you can stand off to the side for a few minutes and see what’s going on. He’s got to react with his judgment right away, and he’s got to say yes to his ideas, and that’s hard.”
So hard, in fact, that iO legend Close himself, according to Halpern, always wondered if a one-man Harold could ever be performed successfully. Every attempt resulted in failure, Halpern says: “No one really ever pulled it off. They didn’t get laughs, [and] Del would pull them halfway through. But Blaine gets laughs. Del would be so happy, he’d be kicking his heels.”
While the musical element makes the feat all the more astonishing, it also means that Swen isn’t technically improvising alone. The title BASH! comes from a mash-up of the names Blaine and Asher; the pianist improvises musically alongside Swen. “The one-man show is really an illusion,” he says. “Dave and I are definitely collaborating. He has the ability to make me look good and sound good. Without him, I’d be left out to dry.” Like any good improviser, we’re in agreement.
Bash! The One-Man Musical opens April 3.
