Serious theater for silly people

You could call it theater by the seat of your pants.

Text messages and spontaneous FM radio greetings broadcasting rave reviews of the Silly People’s Improvisational Theater (SPIT) performances–not to mention email flooding my inbox–moved me to see what the ruckus was all about.

The SPIT troupe is all for giving the audience a good show–by making it up along the way and improvising quick repartee, pitting the players’ wits against time and uncertainty.

Geraldine Tan, Jay Ignacio and Gabe Mercado of the band Da Pulis and Gabe’s wife Beepsie Mayuga-Mercado, Tommy Alvarado, Karla Pambid-Montalvo, Akong Bongcaras and Dingdong Rosales were onstage when we got to Dish at the Power Plant mall on a mercilessly rainy night, with the show just warming up and the laughter beginning in earnest.

The other players, Joel Trinidad, Rodel Mercado, Canelle Mangaliag, were not there, but there is news that Joel is one of Cosmo magazine’s 69 sexiest people. Joel did answer our questions via email.

Everybody in this troupe is a true-blue thespian, by the way, with experience in several different types of theater.

Geraldine, for instance, does traditional theater, contemporary theater, musicals and opera (she’s a soprano). Akong was a member of Tanghalang Ateneo along with Gabe, while Joel is the son of comedian Noel Trinidad and a theater actor in his own right. The rest of the troupe has trod the stages of Repertory Philippines and other theater groups.

In a sense, being at a SPIT performance is like playing. Finding the silly kid in everyone and bringing that silly kid out is the troupe’s specialty.

Their "games," as they like to call them, consist of improvisations and games between audience and players on such topics as TV infomercials, the predictions of a three-headed psychic and other matters beyond the mundane.

Was the crowd in stitches? To be sure it must have been, but, being the Rockwell, Makati kind of people and still garbed in starched suits, they were demure about their laughter, covering mouths agape with laughter with bland hands.

The show was funny, very funny, and here and there the demure demeanor of the audience was broken by cackles and bursts of gleeful cacophony. There was also a lot of hand-raising, classroom-style, when the audience was called upon to interact with the players.

It was chaos onstage, meanwhile, with the players frequently making the sign of the cross before taking the spotlight and doing their "improv games".

All in all, the actors showed quick wit and immense stage presence–and through all the silliness they were creating, they kept their poise even as they drew laughter.

This kind of theater is drawn with the help of its victims–the audience. Less structured and more interactive than traditional theater, SPIT’s brand of theater calls for–in fact, requires–frequent audience interaction.

In a sense, the audience is as much a part of the show as a witness to it. One of my favorite segments was "Torture the Actor", where the player (Beepsie in this case) is asked to go out of earshot while the rest of the troupe and the audience conspire to come up with a conjoined set of cliches he or she must guess correctly through charades played out by the troupe-mates.

The conjoined cliché for the night was: "There are no difficult examinations because the chicken crossed the road."

While the whole show is improvisational and comic and woven together on the spot, one cannot say it is without preparation or dedication.

Rather, the demands of the genre of theater SPIT does is made greater by the fact that it is a new genre without a set market and it is scary and difficult to do because there is no script to depend on.

Gabe Mercado, troupe leader and co-creator of SPIT with his wife, says the SPIT troupe rehearses their routines every Sunday at his Loyola Heights, Quezon City home, starting from nine in the morning, hanggang sawa.

Their gigs are also not strictly stand-up comedy like Saturday Night Live.

"Saturday Night Live and other stand-up comedy acts," Gabe explains, "still require scripts, though they ad lib a lot." SPIT and the kind of theater it does, Gabe emphasizes, "is different. We do not have a script."

Geraldine says their type of theater is "difficult because you have to think on your feet. Scary because you might make a mistake."

So why do they do it? "It’s rewarding when you have a good show. You have to trust the other people (in your troupe)," Karla answers.

"Ibang klase ang high when you do a good show," Gabe says, then adds, "Ibang klase din ang feeling when you do a bad one." The point of the whole exercise is to make the audience laugh and have the audience join in your comedy.

Joel says improv "is like a drug. I love comedy and everyone likes to laugh. Imagine making a roomful of people happy just by saying something that you didn’t even know you were going to say a split second ago. There’s nothing like it."

Comparing improv with the more formal theater genres, however, is a case of "apples and oranges" Tommy insists. "Formal theater entails a lot of discipline and a lot of commitment and a lot of truth and a lot of hard work. But the format is totally different. I think it’s just a matter of doing one format versus the other."

Improv requires more than just sharp wit and quick reflexes; it requires a lot of stock knowledge and the ability to retrieve information quickly. The players’ timing must also be impeccable, as well as their ability to share the stage without upstaging one another.

"You have to take what you are given," Tommy points out, "build on it and work with it. You cannot deny it or counter it."

Organized just this February, SPIT was formed after the newlyweds Beepsie and Gabe attended a workshop on improvisational theater in Wisconsin with the creator of improvisational theater, Paul Simms. Having come back with a theater concept they liked, they recruited the SPIT troupe in the age-old and most reliable way–by word of mouth.

"Most of improv is games Paul’s mother taught him and he developed them. He’s 75 years old and is a very temperamental diabetic. The first thing he said to me was: ‘If they pay you for that kind of acting, wherever you come from, consider yourself extremely lucky,’" Gabe reveals.

There were 15 other improv artists at Simms’ workshop, mostly from Canada and the US. "We were surprised that we held our own with them," Gabe admits.

When they got back, Beepsie and Gabe decided to set up an improv theater group and, in a few months, SPIT was born. "Leo Martinez heard I went to the (Wisconsin) workshop and he offered some of his actors to help start up a troupe. We started practicing at our house and so here is SPIT."

Tommy Alvarado says he knew what he was getting into when he signed up for SPIT "because I’d been in workshops at ABS-CBNwith Gabe before. There were 15 or 16 of us and we started rehearsing."

This troupe is very good at what it does and SPIT sightings are most frequent at Dish at the Power Plant Mall in Rockwell, Sanctum Unmasct in Puerta Isabel in Intramuros and around the Malate club circuit.

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Private party performances can also be arranged and fees are, true to form, improvisational and negotiable. Call Tommy Alvarado at 531-41-59 or 531-6302 or email [email protected]