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My Mother's Fleabag performed three shows this weekend: one Friday night and two on Saturday. I cannot speak to the other two, but the early show on Saturday evening started and ended with laughs.
The show featured two rehearsed skits. The introductory sketch featured one Fleabag member as another's stereotypical mother, saying things like "Isn't that the girl you had a crush on in the beginning of the year?" The group ended the show with its second rehearsed skit - a parody of The Sound of Music. The group took the songs from the musical and reworked them to be about Boston College, such as the scale "Fa, a long way to the Plex, Ti, the B-line takes too long" among others.
As custom, the rest of the show was completely ad-libbed on the spot. For most improvs the group took suggestions on what roles the characters should play. "It all depends on the audience. Audience participation is key," said Riley Madincea, A&S '11.
The group enacted eight improvs, not including the skits to introduce and conclude. Some involved acting out a strange audience suggestion of a scene or physical position; others required miming situations for other members to guess. Intermittently added were episodes of "Ambiguous English Directions," which were directions to places in England full of British phrases that made just about no sense, but sounded hilarious.
The first improv was "Freeze," which consisted of an audience member putting two Fleabag members in any physical position from which they had to come up with a scene. At any time the audience could yell "freeze," and new members would assume the position of the old ones and start a new scene. The situations that arose were hysterical, including a friend puking in the bushes and being dragged back to Co Ro, a marriage proposal, and roommate bonding.
Then there was the robot, Dr. Know-It-All, which had three heads and could answer any question, each head giving a word at a time. It answered questions about breakfast cereals. The audience learned that cereals are made in a machine under the ocean and that you should not eat random brown things found outside for breakfast.
The running joke was 185 blanks walk into a bar, the bartender won't serve them, and they have a witty comeback. The audience filled in the blanks with umbrellas, cats, psychiatrists, mothers, and lips. The bartender rained on the umbrella's parade, the cats told nine lies, the psychiatrists needed a couch, and the lips could not get into the cowboy bar even with their chaps.
Possibly the most impressive of the improvs was "Five Things in Four Minutes." The audience came up with five crazy situations including wetting the bed with your boyfriend, eating bananas with Michael Jackson, and riding an elephant in Alaska. Two Fleabag members then had to tell another group member the scenes through mime and gibberish in four minutes. They completed the task with time to spare.
"'Five Things in Four Minutes'" is my favorite. It's so high energy; the audience gets into gear and it's against the clock," Madincea said.
The show was a big hit and the audience loved it. Retelling the jokes in print now kills them. At the time, they had the audience laughing from beginning to end. "We practice by ourselves, so it's always a pleasant surprise when people laugh," Madincea said.
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