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When sibling rivalry becomes a little too hostile. When a puppeteer’s puppet refuses to cooperate. When a threesome collides with the cheerful aesthetic of a Disney movie. These and many other wonderfully absurd scenarios were mined for laughter by The Regicides on Tuesday evening, kicking off a week of ArtWalk programming in Westville.
This year — for its 25th year — ArtWalk returns to being all in-person. May 4 will see an art exhibition and sale at Kehler Liddell Gallery. May 5 features a performance by the beloved New Haven-based Thabisa. May 6 is centered around a fashion show, dance party, and beer garden. And, as in years past, Saturday May 7 features hours upon hours of programming, from art projects in the park to a crafts market to musical performances to a rubber duck race in Edgewood Park.
But first, on Tuesday evening, the Regicides — the improv comedy arm of New Haven-based theater company A Broken Umbrella — put on a live show that gave a taste of how sweet it will be for the community to return to Westville’s streets, sharing space, and in the case of the Regicides performance, peals of laughter.
Through a feat of technical prowess, the Regicides transformed the bay of a garage on Blake Street into a stage, with comfortable seating arranged outside that quickly filled with a few dozen eager audience members, who partook of refreshments donated by Black Hog Brewery.
“I’d like to thank you all for coming out on this warm spring evening,” said troupe member Ruben Ortiz, which garnered a quick laugh from the audience on that unseasonably cold night. Troupe member Matt Gaffney then explained the first improv game, which was to break four members into four somewhat mismatched pairs: a therapist and, struggling comically for the right word, “therapee”; a mother and daughter who weren’t getting along; siblings engaged in rivalry; and a puppet and its puppeteer.
The troupe jumped in with relish. Lou Mangini created physical comedy as an unresponsive puppet. The siblings immediately took the rivalry to the next level (“Mom, Susie hit me!” “I did, and I don’t regret it”). The therapy session got hilariously weird, thanks to Frankie Douglass’s detached therapist (“it’s not that you like to play with dolls. It’s the way you play with dolls.”)
Over the next several improv games, the troupe’s chemistry only gelled further, as the actors fed off one another’s energy. One hilarious bit involved a mother, father, and daughter first driving to the daughter’s wedding (father: “Are you telling me that the $15,000 we put down on the wedding, the trip to Honolulu, and you’re not going to marry this guy?” Daughter: “yes.” Father: “I love you. He’s a schmuck”). Flashing forward 18 months later, the same trio was driving to the parents’ own divorce.
In another game, Ortiz used a bell to force the actors to take back the sentence they just said and instead say the opposite thing, a dynamic Ian Alderman and Jes Mack used to great effect as fry cooks unable to use the equipment in a kitchen despite having gone to elite private schools. This turned out to be a running theme for the evening, as in a later game Gaffney asked the crowd to shout out a word they’d used a lot in grade school.
“Ubiquitous!” someone shouted.
“Somebody went to Hopkins!” Gaffney teased. This prefaced a truly impressive game where the entire troupe, by adding and subtracting actors, turned the improvised story on a dime from a pompous man delivering a monologue, to two people scoring a deal for what turned out to be cookies, to a snail race, to life at senior center for retired Jedis, to a hapless yoga retreat (“this mindfulness thing isn’t for me, because then when I think about life, I have to think about life”).
The last improv games took the actors to outer space, as one actor read from a preexisting script while the other improvised his half of the dialogue. This led to a confrontation with possibly undead Martians that also turned into an opportunity to explore one’s sexuality; after all, “what happens on Mars, stays on Mars.” Similarly, a story about an awkward threesome in the style of a Disney ended with an all-too-clever winning line from Ortiz: “Let us galumph to the castle in the sky, you and I, and you and I, and you know why.”
The at times helpless laughter from the audience signaled not only the Regicides’ skill at improv comedy, but also the pleasure felt in experiencing neighborhood theater again. It warmed a chilly evening.
For more details about ArtWalk events now through Saturday, visit the event’s website.