Improvisational theater was created in the mid 1950s as a form of children’s theater and a training tool for young actors. The wildly successful Second City Theater in Chicago began training actors in improvisational theater as a form of performance in the early 1960s. To date, the alumni list of that theater reads like a Who’s Who list of modern comic actors, a few of whom include John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Mike Myers, John Candy, Chris Farley, Gilda Radner, Ryan Stiles, Tina Fey and Bill Murray. Perhaps the most familiar improv theater being done today is the Drew Carey TV show Whose Line is it Anyway? Most colleges and larger cities nowadays have an improv theater troupe. Hendersonville can finally claim the same.

Improv theater is often called improv comedy because that’s usually what happens when you make stuff up spontaneously-- people are inherently funny. We play a series of fast-paced games that have very few rules and often require audience suggestions and/or participation. An example of this is a game called Film and Theater Styles, where we perform a plain scene and then replay it three times in different styles supplied to us by the audience. Each game is 5 to 7 minutes long. Our performances are usually 60 to 90 minutes long.

The following is a very short list of some of the games we regularly play.

Film and Theater Styles
Fairy Tale in a Minute
Alphabet
Second Chances
Freeze Tag
Slide Show
Gag Tag
Conducted Story
Shakespeare in Hell
Props
Hot Spot
Party Quirks
Sermon
185
Four Square
Greeting Cards
World’s Worst
1 to 4 / 4 to 1

Gag Order was formed in April 2005 by actors associated with the Hendersonville Little Theater, ranging in age from twenties to sixties and by profession from a salesman and a marketing specialist to educators, a singer and a pediatrician and more....We are Leslie, Nancy, Cheryl, Jerry, Jason, Heather, Kerry, Emily, and Paul. We all live, work and play in and around Hendersonville and are active in other civic, church and theatre groups in the community.

Our Performance Calendar

Dirty South Improv Festival
Chapel Hill, NC

Feb. 22, 2008 9 PM


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How to contact us...

e-mail:

Paul at  dinketry@yahoo.com
or
Heather at   eechiehua@msn.com

Want to be on our e-mail list??
contact Jerry at   jercog@msn.com