For the griff
Fjellsa Malm glares angrily at her ex-husband, Olaf Abread, from across the stage.
“You look dirty,” she snarls through her teeth.
Olaf looks back at her and rolls his eyes, barely visible above his massive, greyish beard.
“You are dirty,” he barks back.
The crowd erupts in howls of laughter. Fjellsa (played by Sheri Somerville) winces back, and then raises her sword at him.
“I will castrate you.”
Olaf (Donovan Workun) snorts. “You did.”
The lights drop, the crowd erupts in laughter again, and Die-Nasty’s 24th season is underway.
Die-Nasty! is a live improvised soap
opera operating out of the New Varscona theatre, playing every Monday at
7:30 p.m. from Oct. 20 to June 1, 2015.
“What makes Die-Nasty a little bit
different from other improv shows is we’re long-form improv –— in that
we start the season and continue the storyline with the same characters
until the end of May,” explains Davina Stewart, who plays Ruvita
Neddrickson in the show.
“For a season, we pick a genre, like the
Vikings. [In the past] we’ve done Tennessee Williams, Medieval England,
1920s gangsters, the Old West, a 1970s hockey team called the Die-Hards.
We did a bike gang roaming across North America.”
The show differs from your standard
improv show in that most improv shows rely on audience participation,
either a word or series of words to put together a base to work with.
Using the theme and a base set of
characters, Die-Nasty takes things in a totally different direction,
completing a compelling episode in the lives and deaths of characters
completely on the fly.
The results are an absolute riot.
From Fartsak Meatballs (Dana Anderson)
and his deep Newfoundlander accent to Bjorn Wulfgarrson (Matt Alden)
combining the fine arts of wordsmithing, river dancing, sword fighting
and talking like Luigi from Super Mario Bros., there wasn’t a moment
where I was not in pain from laughing so hard.
“It’s a lot of fun. Storylines continue
through episodes, but people shouldn’t feel that they’ll be lost if they
haven’t seen all the episodes coming up,” says Paul Morgan Donald, who
produces the music for the show — in this case as a Viking playing a
mandolin in the background.
“We always make clear what the story situations are so it’s easy to jump right in and get caught up on what’s happening.”
The beauty of improv is the fact it can
go just about anywhere. At one point, we were witnesses to a debate
between Neddrick the Plate (Jeff Haslam) and his wife Jysk (Stephanie
Wolfe) over whether they should be teaching their children about the
gods. Neddrick, you see, is an atheist and is worried that introducing
his kids to the ways of Thor, Odin, Loki and the nefarious Parsnip could
harm them in the long run.
By the end of the show, we have learned of the Norse gods Parsnip, Dopey, Sleepy and Happy.
The brilliant madness of this seems to have no end.
“I wonder how many gods will be in the
Norse pantheon in a few months?” asks Jarl Wulfgar Stormbringer (Mark
Meer) aloud to his wife, Freya Thordottir (Shannon Blanchet) as the
first act comes to a close.
Good question, Wulfgar. We can’t wait to find out.
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