Improv flourishes in the Crossroads — and far from it

Two women are in a fitting room, one of them all nerves. She eyes the other, starts to speak, thinks better of it. She models a wedding dress but critiques its cut, its length. She gets little response. Finally, the bride-to-be cracks: “I don’t want to look like a hooker when I marry your son!”

The other woman looks at her. With real concern, she asks, “Does that mean you’re giving up your profession?”

The crowd laughs, but this isn’t a joke. Instead, this is the roll-with-it genius of the best improvisational comedy, where a simple scene can open into something prickly and memorable.

The crowd discovers that Trish Berrong’s nervous shopper is a prostitute at pretty much the same moment when Berrong herself and her castmates (Megan Mercer and Nikki Dupont) do. The characters, though, had known it all along, and so the scene continues in the packed Fishtank Performance Studio. The women of Spite upend expectations by thinking in terms of scene and character, rather than just joke after joke, as they satirize the everyday give-and-take of friends and co-workers.

Not long ago, Kansas City improv wouldn’t have had a place for a prickly troupe such as Spite. Dinosaurs ComedyCity and Improv-Abilities dominated the scene and trained the performers. Both still offer funny, familiar shows based on quick games, short scenes and the promise of a joke — usually at a celebrity’s expense — every 30 seconds.

It wasn’t until 2008, when Jared Brustad and Ed Doris hatched the competitive showcase Improv Thunderdome, that this community broke open. Teams such as the excellent Babel Fish and Loaded Dice — often made up of ComedyCity or Improv-Abilities folks — came together for Thunderdome, then kept on. They modeled themselves on bands, with tight, inventive half-hour sets at whatever venue would have them. (Thunderdome returns to Westport Coffee House at 9 p.m. July 10.)

Over the past year, Tom Kessler has hosted Kansas City Crossroads Comedy at the Fishtank Performance Studio on Saturday nights. “If you haven’t seen Kansas City improv in the last five years, you haven’t seen it,” he told me last month before a show featuring Spite, Not a Great Gorilla, and Loaded Dice — a troupe that dares more, and often gets bigger laughs, than any other in town. (Loaded Dice also performs July 10 at the Westport Coffee House, at 6:30 p.m. with the Trip Fives.)

Kessler is right, and his weekly showcase has much to do with it. Of his regulars, I recommend the ever-evolving conundrum that is Babel Fish as well as the brash, brainy Slow Adults Playing (June 26 at the Fishtank). Also, don’t miss Tantrum, featuring the women of Spite plus a whole mess of funny fellows. Tantrum enlists a notable outsider to share stories about his or her life, which inspires scenes from the comics. (It’s up July 16 at the Westport Coffee House.)

Meanwhile, in downtown Bonner Springs, John and Julie Robinson have kept the dream alive at the Roving Imp Theater, the metro’s only house dedicated entirely to improvisation. Its Omega Directive troupe picks one idea and works it, investing in character and feeling, so that the jokes carry weight. Worth singling out are John Robinson, Nifer Honeycutt and the stellar Jeremy Danner. (Honeycutt, a sharp comic talent, is now a student of the Second City Conservatory in Chicago. But she’s commuting, so local audiences can still see her in Omega Directive and a second Imp-centered group called One.)

A recent Omega Directive show started with dog nipples, then hit its stride with a deliciously anxious dinner party, then finally blew up to a burlesque of Macbeth. It was all still a quilt of random elements stitched together, but the troupe was deeply perceptive. (Omega Directive performs at 7 and 9 p.m. June 25 at the Roving Imp.)

Good comedy is the same as sex or peanut-butter cups: the collision of unexpected elements to make up something pleasurable. That’s worth a drive to Bonner Springs.