ON LETTING GO

We performed last night. The show went well - not necessarily the best we've ever done, but certainly a strong show that had some huge laughs throughout. After we finished and headed to the bar to drink our gingered ales, another group performed.

Now, this other group performs a very different show than we do. They have audience members get up on stage with them and do improv. It's a great concept, it really is. The execution is lacking. But here's the kicker - the audience members that joined them for the first two games were plants. Two of these alleged audience members regularly attend their shows, and so regularly spend time on stage with the performers. Theoretically, I can handle that, I don't have a problem with it. But the third plant...she used to be a performer with the group...until about a month ago.

I think it was an unethical approach on the part of this other group. I would go with "despicable," but to be honest, this third plant - she was only on stage for about a minute, so it actually made little difference in the grand scheme of things. If they had been the only people in the whole audience volunteering, then yes, I could see them coming up on stage - but they weren't. I was sitting in the back, surveying the whole room and saw a whole host of hands go up before the plants'. I lost a lot of respect for that group last night.

But so it goes. After that, we headed over to see a group from Bowdoin College perform, and they were pretty good. A little unpolished, and I was definitely jealous that their crowd was much larger than ours.

The voting system is what kills me. Each group is scored by the audience on a scale of 1 to 5. The six groups with the highest average scores advance to Sunday night's semifinals; the two highest-scoring groups from the semifinals advance to the finals, immediately following the semifinals. We have no control over the outcome.

And this kills me.

It's very hard for me to not have control over the outcome of things (this is one of the reasons I don't drink). I know that we did well. Other improvisers were impressed by us, I also know that. And one audience member turned around to us and said "You guys were much better than the other group," which I appreciated. But none of that matters if another group goes up and does twenty minutes of poop jokes for an audience consisting of just their friends, who rate them highly no matter what. It's a frustrating thing, having no control over this part of the process. The thing I keep repeating to myself is that we did the best we could, and that we didn't cut any ethical corners to do so.