Tell me, don't you want to go
So it turns out that while trimmje was watching Chicago at a theatre in Birmingham, I was in Chicago at a theatre festival. Specifically, I just got back from a weekend at the Chicago Improv Festival. It was a pretty good weekend for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that Chicago's a great city (at least the "Park West" area where the various festival theatres were located, and thus where I spent much of my time). Saw a handful of really stand-out shows, including Entropy's, the one that I was actually there for. Lots of walking around exploring, since I did my usual stranger-in-a-big-city thing of parking my car someplace free & then forgetting about it until I was leaving.
The festival's interesting because improv theatre is still coming into its own as an art form; that is, it's not widely known or accepted or whatever that improv's good for something other than pure entertainment. The various major festivals around -- in Miami, Toronto, and especially Chicago -- tend to be a little avant garde in this respect, since they're where the various serious improvists can gather and intelligently disucss their various approaches. I haven't done a whole lot of improvisational theatre since high school, and so spending the weekend among serious improv types I occasionally felt a little left out: in a very real sense, the festival isn't for me as an audience member.
The festival's interesting because improv theatre is still coming into its own as an art form; that is, it's not widely known or accepted or whatever that improv's good for something other than pure entertainment. The various major festivals around -- in Miami, Toronto, and especially Chicago -- tend to be a little avant garde in this respect, since they're where the various serious improvists can gather and intelligently disucss their various approaches. I haven't done a whole lot of improvisational theatre since high school, and so spending the weekend among serious improv types I occasionally felt a little left out: in a very real sense, the festival isn't for me as an audience member.