Cincinnati has had a successful Fringe Festival for experimental theater and performance art since 2003, and now another indie stage festival is finding an audience in Cincinnati: the lesser-known Improv Festival of Cincinnati. Organized by OTRimprov and held at Over-the-Rhine’s Know Theatre, it is in its third year and growing.
This year’s IF Cincy event began on Tuesday and features performances through Saturday, plus workshops on Saturday and Sunday. About half of the featured improvisers are female, a result of efforts by OTRimprov.
Friday night’s headliner is Atlanta female troupe Fun Bags, which includes Amber Nash, known for her role as the voice of Pam Poovey on the hit FX show Archer. Saturday night’s headline show features Los Angeles duo Orange Tuxedo, whose Craig Cackowski is an accomplished actor as well as improviser. Cackowski’s TV resume includes appearances on HBO’s Emmy-winning political satire Veep, Comedy Central’s Drunk History and NBC’s Community. (His wife, Carla, is the other half of Orange Tuxedo.)
“I was very shy and introverted when I started improvising 25 years ago,” Cackowski says. “But it was the first thing I really found that meshed with my sense of humor. It was the kind of stuff me and my friends had done in my basement for years, but without knowing there was a name to it.”
From there, he had a foothold on the “art form that was truest to me,” he says, citing This Is Spinal Tap and comedic actor and improviser Christopher Guest as inspiration. He described working on Veep as being heavily influenced by improv. He played secretary Sue’s replacement, Cliff, in Season 2 and returned for a few episodes in the most recent season.
Veep creator Armando Iannucci and his writers would write a script and then bring the actors in to read it, Cackowski says. “Then he’d have them put it down and just start to improvise a scene with what they thought their characters might say. Then he would reincorporate those lines they improvised into the script. It was a really cool way of working.”
Cackowski will also share his tricks of the trade in two IF Cincy workshops. One, “Dr. Cacky’s Improv Cleansing,” is already sold out. The other, “Sell It!,” is recommended for both veterans and newbies.
Other national troupes appearing this week include B&B (Portland, Ore.), Bearded Men (Minneapolis), Damaged Goods (Louisville, Ky.), Devil’s Daughter (Chicago), Human Amusements (Detroit), Improvised Sondheim Project (Chicago), The League of Pointless Improvisers (Ann Arbor. Mich.) and Shade (Chicago).
Wednesday and Thursday are devoted to local troupes, including the Middle Child, Xavier University’s Don’t Tell Anna, Basement Dwellers, Coincidence Improv, Highly Improvable, Killer B’s, OTRnext, Portals to Possiblity and What It Ain’t.
“There’s been an explosion in local troupes that are consistently performing, and we wanted to make sure we had enough time for our local compatriots,” says Kat Smith, co-director of OTRimprov.
Smith says that being able to provide a platform for these organizations to come together in a setting with national improv troupes is what makes IF Cincy so special.
“It’s nice to pull everybody together and show them all the different styles that exist in Cincinnati,” she says. “It’s great for audiences to see what a variety there is of improv, what an amazing art form it is and how many different ways you can experience it.”
Improvisational comedy consists of two key types: long form and short form, both led by audience suggestions. Long form tends to be character- or event-driven. Short form includes games where audience members shout suggestions for comedians to incorporate in a short skit.
Beyond this year’s festival, Smith has high hopes for improv in Cincinnati. “We are looking forward to the future,” she says. “The end goal is that someday we can have our own theater space, running an improv theater with performances every night of the week. We’re always looking to build that up.”
For more info on the IMPROV FESTIVAL OF CINCINNATI, visit ifcincy.com.
