Theater

Improv Thunderdome The rules of this make-it-up-as-you-go cage match haven’t changed: Three teams compete for 30 minutes apiece, with the audience’s favorite advancing to the finals this spring. In Round 1 last month, the funniest, most ambitious team rightly advanced after reducing the sell-out crowd to sinus-clearing laughter. Round 2 features what might be the three most ambitious improv formats to share a bill in recent history. Scriptease will improvise the final half-hour of a widescreen disaster movie, with audience help; Babel Fish promises to mine Beckett-style theater of the absurd for what it’s calling “lowbrow, mass-consumption, entertainment history”; and Antiprov threatens a conceptual pantsing of the short-form games and scenes that have for decades been improv’s mainstay. (Added attraction: Trip Fives Jared Brustad and Ed Doris do a two-man show at 7 p.m.) Friday, Feb. 8 at 9 p.m. at Westport Coffeehouse, 4010 Pennsylvania, 816-678-8886. (Alan Scherstuhl)

Quindaro Here’s something interesting. With a script commissioned from playwright Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, UMKC’s top-notch theater department sets its young artists on one of the most remarkable — and hopeful — moments in local or American history: the story of Quindaro, Kansas, a river town turned Underground Railroad safehouse. McGhee-Anderson examines how, for five years starting in 1856, whites, blacks and American Indians united to accomplish dangerous, indisputable goods — all just miles from downtown KC. This production, directed by Ricardo Khan and featuring I’ll Fly Away regular Bill Cobbs, previews through Feb. 12 and premieres on Wed., Feb. 13. All performances at Union Station’s City Stage, 18 W. Pershing, 816-460-2020. (Alan Scherstuhl)