THROUGH IMPROV ROLES, THEY CELEBRATE THE GEEK

Author(s): Nick A. Zaino III, Boston Globe Correspondent
Date: January 6, 2006
Page: E4 Section: Living

People wearing cloaks and chain mail standing in a circle holding fake weapons. Multisided dice and Tolkien books strewn about a gaming table. Overly dramatic dialogue. It all adds up to one thing: Geeks at play.

That will be the scene tonight at ImprovBoston as the role-playing improv show In the Garage begins its seven-week run, brimming with a Dungeons & Dragons setting and all other things geek. The basic story follows five high school students four players and one dungeon master as they live their fantasy lives and take out their daily frustrations through a role-playing game played, appropriately, in a garage. The show's dungeon master and first-time director, Kevin Harrington, has wanted to combine his improv background with his love for gaming for about four years. He took his inspiration, and the name of the show, from a song by Weezer that references Dungeons & Dragons. Harrington first heard the song In the Garage in high school, and he and his friends adopted it as a sort of anthem.

"It just reminds me so much of growing up," he says of the song. "The bittersweetness of just coming into your own as a teenager trying to find out where you belong. We feel like outcasts, but there's enough of us together that we can make our own clique. And that's basically the theme of this show."

ImprovBoston artistic director Will Luera sees natural similarities between improv and role-playing games. "From the few times that I played, I thought, this could easily be an improv show, especially what the dungeon masters did," he says. "They were just making up scenarios, and everybody's playing along and acting. It ends up being a really good fit."

Partly because he has never directed a show before, Harrington created loose back stories for each character, to be developed in rehearsals and fleshed out onstage by each actor. His character, for example, is captain of the football team and hiding his less-than-popular activities. Another character is searching for a wife through the game.

Harrington is careful to remind his actors that whatever conflicts they choose to motivate their characters, the stories should unfold onstage through improvisation. "It doesn't have to be solved in a particular episode," he says of the character looking for a mate. "It might never be solved during the run of the show. But that's his motivating force."

To that end, Harrington will take audience suggestions during the show and incorporate them into the game play through his role. "I'm kind of there to indicate to the audience that we're kind of seeing this through my eyes," he says. "I come in every now and again. But we realized that sometimes it works better if I'm more in the background and the audience forgets. They get pulled in and out of the game world through me."