Ariela Kaiser and Joe Dawson (WIT)
Summer is a great season for reminiscing about high school, that time of year when you’re most likely to fire up old John Hughes movies. In that vein, the Washington Improv Theater’s Summer School series will be hosting a variety of Yearbook shows inspired by the teen movies we all know and love, as well as the very real life experiences that inspired the genre to begin with.
But rather than an assemblage of playwrights banging out one-acts paying homage to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, each show will be a long form improvisation that toys with and explores the genre, to hopefully fascinating and entertaining results.
Teen movies may be a little rote, but improv isn’t held back by such boundaries.”It’s more of an associated world inspired by a suggestion,” Yearbook director Jaci Pulice explained. “Plays are very linear in how they work, but with long form improv, there’s more variation in where the show can go.”
At the beginning of each performance of Yearbook, audience members will be encouraged to take a slip of paper and write down their yearbook quote and any high school club activities they’d like to share with the class. Members of the cast will then choose slips at random and create characters around the audience members’ memories. Such background details as a school’s location and mascot will also be drawn from crowd suggestions.
Pulice was inspired by the kaleidoscopic view of high school in movies like Can’t Hardly Wait, where a single romantic through line pushes the narrative, but the ensemble cast rounding out the proceedings offers more depth and richness. The team behind Yearbook isn’t going to have an intricately woven screenplay to work from, though. With live music cues providing an authentic nostalgic mood throughout the show, the cast will rely on their dramatic instincts to subvert a framework we all know and love.
“We have forty minutes, so at twenty minutes we want to be at a point where we’ve developed a lot of stakes, and we have a lot of things the audience is invested in so we can wrap them up,” Pulice explained. “So, you practice format and technique.”
“It’s going to have a high school heart, but an adult brain,” Pulice clarified. “Because we do get to rewrite the story and have someone make a choice they wouldn’t have made in high school, or break the tropes and do something we might not have seen in all these teen movies. With improv, we’re all writing and directing in the moment.”
Tyler Laminack and Jamal Newman (WIT)
That freedom is particularly exciting because as much as we all love teen movies, it’s a genre often held back by rigidity and a lack of diversity. There are only so many variations of nerd/prom queen/quarterback love triangles one can stomach, especially if your own personal experiences at high school weren’t so Degrassi. One of the cast members may get a slip without a yearbook quote at all and perhaps a note that just says “I hated high school” and that will become an authentic voice represented in the ensemble.
Even if the cast does somehow end up with the expected archetypes from the paper slip sorting hat, who’s to say two of the jocks won’t end up together, or any other pairing we weren’t treated to in Varsity Blues?
“The real world is where we don’t ask questions and don’t push things because we’re afraid,” Pulice says,”When we’re on stage, let’s open the doors we wouldn’t normally open.”
Using the benefit of hindsight and drawing more closely from the experiences of the cast and the audience, this is an exploration of the teen movie form that has the potential to truly exorcise a lot of demons from a formative time in everyone’s life. Improv lives or dies on high stakes and audience engagement, and when you’re a teenager, everything is high stakes.
“The one thing I keep driving home to the cast is to make everything matter,” Pulice said. “Everything was such a big deal in high school. You look back now at things that tore you apart and made you upset and you think, if I had the life experience now, would I have done things differently?”
Yearbook gets to ask those questions in a serious way while still having a blast with a beloved, enduring genre. And every performance will be totally different.
Summer School runs for five weeks beginning July 13th at Source, 1835 14th St. NW. $12-30. Yearbook will be performed on selected dates. Buy tickets and see line-up information here.
