I love the discussion about whether or not the audience would know/believe our show was improvised. I think when you’re trying hardcore to commit to a genre, and to live in it rather than make fun of it, you’re kind of pulled in two directions. You don’t want to lose the joy of discovery and risk that improv brings you, but you also want your show to get as close to and be as respectful towards the genre as possible. So while we know the show’s fully improvised (because we’re doing it) we try and take it as a complement if the audience says “Now, how much of that was actually improvised?” at the end of the show.

You also made a great point about the struggle with staying inspired in a genre if you do it a lot, or in some cases, every week. With French Farce, especially, we’re operating in a pretty limited universe. There’s upper class French families, ambassadors, neighbors, instructors, priests, and you know, that’s more or less it. And on top of that, the shows take place in one location that never changes.

What we’ve hit upon over time is that in order to stay inspired we need to constantly layer new aspects of the genre on top of what we’ve been doing. For instance, after our inaugural run of the show, we researched the use of physicality in Farce, and integrated falls, slaps, wild gestures, and other such actions into the show. And the way we took the suggestion, with the poses/tableau start, was another deliberate move to inject new inspiration into the show. Originally we took an emotion for inspiration, but we grew tired of that. We find the tableaus jump us into action, and force us to justify our positions in a way that leads to new characters.

Also, also, most of PGraph also performs in Start Trekkin in Austin when it happens (we did a show this past Tuesday, actually), as does Topping… and we’re currently in an improvised Dickens show with Topping as well.

Oh, and there’s actually not any Western improv going on in Austin. BUT PGraph is working up a Western show for 2010.

Anyways, sorry to ramble. I love discussing this stuff, and it’s not often I get to discuss specialty/genre improv, for some reason.

Keep up the good work.