Brian Slattery Photos
Ortiz and Elliott.
The members of the Regicides, the improv comedy arm of A Broken Umbrella theater, were lined up like a firing squad on the stage of the State House on Wednesday evening. De facto MC Ruben Ortiz rubbed his hands together and smiled at the audience.
“We’re going to start off hot and fast,” he said. “What’s your favorite candy?”
Shouts rang out from the packed house. Snickers! Almond Joy! Twix! Ortiz grinned. “Twix it is!” he confirmed. Whereupon each member of the comedy troupe — Ortiz, Isaac Bloodworth, Frankie Douglas, Andrew Elliott, Matt Gaffney, Lou Mangini, Michelle Ortiz, and Charlie Owens — made up on the spot how sex with them was like a Twix bar. They did it again with a beer brand, and then with a musical genre. Someone in the audience threw out ska. Ortiz took it.
“Sex with me is like ska,” Bloodworth offered. “No one ever touches it.”
“Sex with me is like ska,” Elliott countered. “It was awesome 20 years ago.”
And just like that, the Regicides were off and running, racing through a set for the State House’s happy hour (6 p.m. to 7 p.m.) that brought in a big enough crowd to feel like later in the evening. In the process, the troupe showed the chemistry that can develop in a company with a few years under its belt (the Regicides’ first performance was in 2015) and the fun that can be had when the audience is made a part of it.
It happened when Mangini and Michelle Ortiz were paired to do an improvised skit involving a prompt: “the best reason to leave work early,” Ruben Ortiz said.
“Second vasectomy!” someone called from the back.
“The runs,” said someone else.
“Having a baby,” said a third.
They settled on the second one. Another element: Ortiz and Mangini had to incorporate written prompts that had been collected from the audience before the show on slips of paper. Ortiz and Mangini quickly fleshed out a skit in which Ortiz came onto him, hot and comically heavy, interpreting Mangini’s gastrointestinal distress as just first-date jitters. These were interspersed with random lines pulled from the slips of paper. In some ways, the more random they felt, the better, as in a moment when Mangini said, “you know what we can do instead?” — pulled out a slip of paper, read the word “anomaly” helplessly, and then just gave the crowd an accusing look. The audience burst out laughing.
Bloodworth and Mangini.
Another “game,” as Ruben Ortiz gamely called them, involved two members of the troupe assuming various strange and slightly compromising positions, and other troupe members could tap in to change the pose and the context. So the story moved rapidly from kayakers to pirates to a three-legged race, culminating in two of the members — Gaffney and Owens — lying on the floor and one saying to the other, “so happy Yale finally reopened this opium den.”
Other highlights: an assault on Area 51 that eventually involved someone’s mother with a walker; also, with the troupe providing spontaneous tableaux, Owens walked the crowd through the Ryan Seacrest Museum in Philadelphia, including a stop in the year 2005, “the beginning of internet culture. We …” he paused meaningfully, “we were different people then” — before explaining that Seacrest would inevitably become president in several years, inheriting the position from a Trump who’d stayed long past a second term.
The set ended with all troupe members working their way through a convoluted story based on the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that hopped from film noir to Western to science fiction and ended Shakespearean. Gaffney went for the gold and found it: before our very eyes, he improvised lines that were not only in iambic pentameter, but rhymed.
The Regicides perform again on Sept. 14 at the Eli Whitney Barn on Whitney Avenue at 8 p.m. Visit the troupe’s website for more details.