On Friday March 2 and Saturday March 3, the Ventura High School “What?” Improv Troupe performed at their semi-annual Backstage Cafe, having another successful set of shows according to the howling and roaring audience members that filled the VHS auditorium.
The show kicked off with the troupe’s two captains, seniors Courtney Caldwell and Cassidy Craig, who went over the performances schedule and was followed by a game of Park Bench.
Park Bench is a game involving two troupe members; one troupe member acts as a normal bystander sitting on a park bench, while the other member must make the person leave the park bench without touching them. This is usually achieved through awkward flirting, sudden screaming and/or anything else that a “normal” person would find strange.
Throughout the night, it seemed like the troupe didn’t go 30 seconds without at least a few chuckles amongst the cafe goers.
The largest uproar of laughter came during a game of Soap Opera, which was played by seniors Aspen Leavitt and Riley Conrad, as well as juniors Aiden White and Louis Santia. The game Soap Opera consists of four people; two that are acting out the soap opera, and two other members that act as their “teleprompters” and mouth the words for the actors on stage. In this game, White and Santia were the two teleprompters.
Leavitt portrayed a dentist who explained to his patient, portrayed by Conrad, that “What we’re going to do is lay you down in a bath…actually I like to that with all my patients.” Conrad quickly responded with “My mom used to tell me about baths, she used to say…” and turned to her teleprompter, White, for a continuation to her response.
Now what happened between Conrad and White is unknown; one can assume there was a miscommunication between the two, because Conrad continued her line saying, “I get all the fingers in the bathtub.”
This caused the audience, as well as the entirety of the improv troupe both on and offstage, to have their mouths agape and faces red with embarrassment, as everyone laughed uncontrollably at the accidental naughty nature of this joke. The audience of course held nothing against Conrad as the laughter was soon followed by clapping and the show went on.
Throughout the night, there were many other memorable and funny moments for the audience such as; seniors Trevi Fuhring and Drue Wigton dealing with maternal struggles, senior Talia Belgian not knowing that badmitten isn’t played with an actual bird and Juniors Ren Tallent and Bridget Bolland singing a Gregorian chant version of the non-existent song, “Serious Man.”
According to Boland, Gregorian chants are “…as boring as it gets,” however despite the apparent lameness of the Roman Catholic Church’s musical preferences, the two still didn’t fail to get the audience to howl and laugh.
