Victor Continental spinoff Under the Table rings the Bell Saturday for Jessie’s Song

• John Clayton
• Averill and Grunau onstage

Lawrence’s Under the Table Theater has, for the past several years, been primarily devoted to producing the Victor Continental Show, an annual production lampooning Lawrence institutions and culture. But now that Mr. Continental has retired, Card Table’s members have moved on to other projects, spun off as Under the Table.

After several productions, including a variety show and “You’re a Winner,” the interactive tale of a game show’s final episode, Under the Table has embarked on its most ambitious project yet: a live re-creation of the seminal Saved by the Bell episode “Jessie’s Song,” complete with commercial breaks. Under the Table’s Jessie’s Song plays in the basement of the North Lawrence watering hole Frank’s North Star Tavern on Saturday, January 18.

Over drinks at Frank’s one recent evening, The Pitch spoke with Under the Table members and Jessie’s Song co-directors Will Averill and Jacqueline Grunau about the history of Card Table Theater, the genesis of Under the Table, and what led them to Saved by the Bell.

The Pitch: How has Under the Table Theater come out of Card Table Theater?

Averill: Card Table had been focusing exclusively on producing the Victor Continental Show, and this last year was the last year of the Victor show, so we kind of found ourselves in a place where we needed some new projects. We wanted to take the experience that we had doing the Victor show – in terms of sketch comedy and that sort of audience that we’d built up – and build on that and also give it a kind of different, fun edge. Make it very much not the Victor Continental Show.

Grunau: Yeah, in fact, sketch comedy doesn’t seem to work as well downstairs as we’d initially thought, so we have learned something on every show and applied it to the next show, I feel like.

• John Clayton
• Averill performing “You’re a Winner”

Averill: The idea was to create something that was purposefully smaller and experimental. And also, there were all of these other great acts … we wanted to incorporate and work with, and we hadn’t gotten a chance to. So the idea behind this was to give us the opportunity to have somebody come in and do seven minutes of burlesque or seven minutes of music or seven minutes of stand-up – just sort of infuse some of this talent in town, in hopes of sort of networking a group to do other projects.

Why Saved by the Bell?

Grunau: The one episode that we’re doing, it’s the one episode everybody knows. If you say, Saved by the Bell, they’re like, “Oh, the one with, ‘I’m so excited, so excited, SO SCARED!’?” [Mimes crying.] So that’s fun. People want to go see that again, and it’s fun and it’s kind of a silly little thing.

Averill: We didn’t intend for it to be a Saved by the Bell episode, but we were chatting with Andy Morton, who’s been in a lot of the shows, and he’d mentioned the idea of doing something that was of pop-culture significance – kind of a ’90s idea – and we all kind of hit upon the idea of Saved by the Bell being something that lots of people ended up watching. For example: I was too old for it, but my sister was eight years younger than I was, and she had the TV on, and it was her turn, so I had to watch, so I got exposed to it that way.

Grunau: And I feel like nostalgia is something that’s rolling around for our generation now. I feel like generations before us have gotten their nostalgia out of the way, so now it’s our turn. Going back to that feeling of being a kid in the late ’80s, early ’90s – we were looking at some commercials to maybe try and do some live-action commercials, and just watching those commercials on YouTube made me so happy! It just put me right back in that place of the warmth and easiness of childhood.

Averill: I think we’re trying to take that Saturday morning, 10 a.m. feeling and put it in the Saturday night, 10 p.m. slot.

Did you guys find a script, or did you have to go to the trouble of transcribing an entire episode?

Averill: We found it on Netflix, and we transcribed the whole thing in one of the longest three-hour periods of my life. [Laughs.] We’d be sitting there, and it would be the two us – somebody would hit pause, then say what the person had said. Yeah, we transcribed it all out. It was three hours of watching Saved by the Bell for one 20-minute episode.

Grunau: They say “all right!” and “yeah!” a lot.

Averill: In this episode, they say them a lot, so we decided there’s probably a drinking-game element to it. Jessie mentions going to Stanford so many times, they say “all right!” so many times. And there are some lines that, when you write ’em out – when you go back and look at it, once you’ve let a little time pass – you’re like, “Wow. That’s really bad.” But our hope is not to play it as a comedic take or a piss-take but to play it earnestly. An earnest interpretation will end up being far funnier than making fun of it. It would be easy to make fun of, but it’s far more hilarious to take it seriously.

Grunau: But that’s not to say that we won’t be doing some tongue-in-cheek stuff because we have commercials, obviously – because that’s what you have in a television program. We have some PSAs and commercials that we’re planning on doing.

Averill: Yeah, we’ll need some breaks because there are some very strange cuts in that Saved by the Bell episode, so we’re going to need a little time for actors to change costumes and locations and stuff.

How often do you want to do these Under the Table shows?

Grunau: We’ve been doing them about once every three months.

Averill: I want to continue hitting that schedule, to build a bit of a name and a reputation. I think people are starting to get an idea of what’s going on. That’s the intentional thing about this show: We want to keep it bouncing and fresh, and hopefully people will discover, “Oh, it’s always going to take me to a new place, but that place is always going to be something interesting.” Like, “This show might not be quite my cup of tea, but there’ll be some interesting stuff in it.”

Under the Table’s A Very Special Episode ’90s Nostalgia Night takes place at Frank’s North Star Tavern in Lawrence on Saturday, January 18. Admission is $5 ($4 with a canned-food donation). Details here.