Imagine a play where the audience knows the plot before the actors do.
That’s the premise of a new show premiering at the Fundy Fringe Festival in Saint John starting this week.
“We thought it would be cool to make a show that kind of used … both physical theatre and improv and kind of jammed them together to see what third thing can be created when you’re using tools from both art forms,” said Jean-Michel Cliche, the Fredericton-based co-creator of the show, who is also acting in the two-person production.
Tilt, by Solo Chicken Productions, begins like a normal play, which has been scripted and rehearsed. It follows a married couple who are going through a rough patch. The play takes a turn halfway through, when a huge secret is revealed.
The twist? The actors don’t know the secret. And from there, the show turns into an improvised performance led by the audience.
Before it begins each night, the stage manager will go into the audience to solicit prompts for the actors with the phrase, “I am (blank).”
“So the audience could pitch, ‘I am a vampire [or] I am going to the moon tomorrow,’ and then once the stage manager has that prompt, the show begins,” said Cliche.
The scripted portion of the play will remain the same each night, until that halfway mark when a projection will appear, revealing to the actors that evening’s prompt.
“Our job is then to make the story make sense,” said Cliche. “How is this relationship still true if we find out that one of the characters has been a vampire this whole time? So yeah, it’s a bit of a ride … an exciting challenge to try to make it all work, to try to keep it on the rails, even if we get something that’s totally oddball or unexpected.”
Alex Rioux, the other creator and actor in the show, said while the first part of the show is scripted, it was still created through an improvisation process.
It started, they said, by writing some prompts to establish the characters and how they would work as a couple.
The next step was improvising short scenes with the established characters, pulling pieces from those scenes and putting them into a script.
“We’ve just sort of been layering in, bit by bit, the different elements — the writing and then the improv, the scene work, the more theatrical elements,” said Rioux.
Both Cliche and Rioux are seasoned improvisers, so the feeling of getting on stage and not knowing what is going to happen isn’t a new one.
But Cliche said the added challenge with Tilt is the transition from a scripted play into improv.
“You’ve got your theatre brain on, you’re thinking about your lines, you’re blocking the motivation of the characters, and then all of a sudden you have to basically switch art forms on the fly and try to make that feel seamless,” he said.
“That is definitely a challenge and it’s a little bit scary, but we, Alex and I, really felt like we were ready for a new kind of challenge, a new way of approaching improv in a way that is going to give us those jitters again.”
Tilt is on from Aug. 20-24 at the BMO Studio Theatre on Princess Street in Saint John.
This story was originally published in CBC News on Aug. 18, 2024.
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