Trust Us, This Is All Made Up

It wouldn’t seem possible to rob TJ & Dave, iO’s long-running cult phenom, of its essential Chicagoness, yet Karpovsky’s new doc does just that. Trust Us, This Is All Made Up films a live version of the roughly six-year-old weekly show, in which local legends Jagodowski and Pasquesi improvise a 50-minute one-act play, along with 20 minutes behind the scenes. Strangely, this otherwise compelling doc has been shot not in the duo’s hometown but at the Barrow Street Theatre in the West Village (admittedly for financial reasons), where Jagodowski and Pasquesi perform TJ & Dave monthly. But this is frustrating given that the duo choose to make Chicago their home base. Trust Us manages to make TJ & Dave seem like a hip New York thing.

During the improvised portion of the doc, the pair are in especially fine form playing multiple characters to tell the complex tale of a company baseball team and the inevitable office politics. But since we have access to the live version each Wednesday at iO, the meat here is the back story. Karpovsky artfully shoots the duo as they wander city streets gleaning inspiration. We learn how they met (six years ago over coffee), and we hear them wax philosophical on the art of long-form improv: “There’s nothing worked out about it beforehand, we don’t know anything. And then we look at each other and we start to know everything.” For improv lovers, such cryptic lines come across as mystical advice from the gurus themselves. If only we could see them dispensing these nuggets on home turf.

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