VHS drama department hosts their improv spring show

The VHS drama department hosted two spring improv performances with the What? Improve Troupe March 13 and 14 at 7 p.m. in the little theatre. The spring show is the last VHS performance for the improv troupe. Ticket prices were $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and $5 for students. All proceeds earned went towards the drama ASB account. 

The troupe, unscripted, would play games that require prompts provided by drama teacher Arden Smith which were created by her drama and stagecraft classes. Each game is performed with different prompts and performers. Both performances consisted of two acts with a 10-minute intermission in between. 

Troupe member Hudson Ham ‘26 said, “I think everyone just clicks really well. I think we’re all funny together but I think that my favorite part is that each person is a different type of funny. Some people are more stoic and that’s funny. Some people are louder and it’s funny. You get a little bit of everything.”

The March 14 performance, also the closing show, had eight games in the first act which were Park Bench, Oscar Nominations, Entrances and Exits, Glitch, Therapy Session, Film Critic and Scripts. The nine games in the second act were Superheroes, Helping Hands, Soap Opera, Town Hall, 3-peat, Objection, Pocket Lines and If You Know What I Mean. 

In the game Park Bench, one troupe member sits on a bench and another troupe member has to get them off the bench without touching. This was repeated until all members had sat on and left the bench.

Two rounds of Oscar Nominations. Oscar Nominations is a game where two members pretend they are acting in a movie based on a given prompt. Once Arden Smith rings a bell and says, “Oscar Nominations,” the performer who said the last line acts like they won an Oscar award for their performance. In the first round of the game, Patrick LaFave ‘28 and Jack Kleczkowski ‘29 performed with the prompt “my purpose is dumb.” In the second round, the prompt for Colbie West ‘27 and Harvey Raible ‘28 was “my pet lizard can talk.”

One round of Entrances and Exits was played with Ham, Kleczkowski, River Peña ‘28 and Henry Kantor ‘27. Each person was assigned a word that when said out loud, the person has to either leave or enter the stage while performing as a stage crew on a show with no actors. Ham’s word was “stage,” Kleczkowski’s word was “perform,” Peña’s word was “actor” and Kantor’s word was “job” and Kleczkowski’s word was “perform.”

There were two rounds of the game Glitch. Members would perform a prompt and when Arden Smith rings a bell, the member who said the last line needs to redo it differently. The first round was played with Spencer Oberle ‘29 and Teddy Todd-Maldonado ‘26. Winter Urutia ‘28 and Marlie West ‘27 played the second round.

Therapy Session was played once with Marlie West, Colbie West, Hendrix Lowder ‘27, Eliot Story ‘26, Jagger Smith ‘26 and Ham. Members had to reveal a confession they had about teachers.

The game Film Critic was also played once. Two critics, Isabel Andrade ‘26 and Oliver Henn ‘26 described a movie about a cow attorney while Todd-Maldonado, Lowder, Raible and Nicco Boccali ‘26 acted out the movie.

The last game of the first act, Scripts, had two rounds. The two troupe members had to act out a prompt and one member could only say lines from a script provided by Ella Hughes ‘27 and Autumn Feldhans ‘28. Henn and LaFave were two Boy Scouts on their first camping trip, trying to read a survival manual in the first round. Urutia and Peña played the second round where Urutia was a music teacher who knew nothing about music.

After the 10-minute intermission, the troupe played one round of superheroes. Story, Andrade, Kleczkowski and Peña were four superheroes with a specific superpower that needed to solve a problem that was given by a prompt. The problem for the March 14 show was fish controlling minds. 

In Helping Hands, four performers would act together in pairs. One person in each pair would act out the scene without their hands and the other person would act out the scene with only their hands. The two people would then switch roles. In this game, Ham and Henn acted as one pair while Marlie West and Todd-Maldonado acted as the other. Both pairs were acting as engineers trying to fix a rocket.

Afterwards, Jagger Smith and Colbie West were actors and Urutia and LaFave were teleprompters for Soap Opera. The actors would act out a scene as government pigeons and refer to teleprompters for lines. Actors and teleprompters would then switch roles and do the same thing.

In Town Hall, two sides debated over whether DC or Marvel was better. Boccali was chosen as the mediator. The Marvel team members were Jagger Smith, Peña and Lowder. The DC members were Kleczkowski, Story, Todd-Maldonado and Ham. Jagger Smith and Ham later deviated and created a separate team in favor of the Mario Brothers.

3-Peat is a game where members would act out a prompted scene and would perform it two more times in a different style. Ham, Lowder and Raible performed a scene of two parents taking their child to a Saint Patrick’s parade and repeated it in the style of a ballet and anime. In the second round, Oberle, Marlie West and Kantor performed as parents having an intervention with their child who keeps stealing their credit card. They repeated it in the style of an action movie and an opera. 

In the one round of Objection, Todd-Maldonado, the moderator, would moderate a debate between Boccali, Urutia and LaFave about whether adult napping should be mandatory and choose a winner. 

The game Pocket Lines was played twice. Each actor would receive three lines from Hughes and Feldhans and use all the lines during their prompted scene. Colbie West and Todd-Maldonado acted as florists for man-eating plants. Andrade and Henn were groundhogs on Groundhog Day, fighting over who had to go up to see their shadow. 

In the last game, If You Know What I Mean, Todd-Maldonado and Jagger Smith performed a scene as bad standup comedians trying to flirt with each other and had to end every line with “if you know what I mean.”

Raible said, “I definitely felt like this was the show where we have probably let loose the most…Everybody’s kind of a little emotional since it’s the last fully VHS show.”