By During the weekends, Agnes Arnold teaches a children’s choir. On weekdays she wakes up, takes care of her three children and eats dinner with her family. After that, she drives to a small building in downtown Long Beach, takes the stage and acts out a variety of characters: a woman on a first date, inanimate objects and mermaids.
Agnes is one of 10 people who will be in the upcoming performance, “Grass-fed, free-range sketch show,” a collaboration between the award-winning improv troupe Held2gether and the Long Beach Playhouse.
The annual show brings together seasoned actors and newcomers and challenges them to create original sketches over the course of four weeks, then refine those ideas into a polished performance. The characters and situations are all written by the performers themselves after being given a prompt from Director Darren Held. The prompt can be a simple idea; music, or a person at a party or a prop; a giant lollipop or sword.
After a half hour of working in different teams, actors present their sketches to Held and he chooses the best ones. Then they spend the next month or so tweaking and refining them for opening night just two weeks away.
“Sometimes a simple idea is better,” Held said. “A simple, funny clear concept. Then you can think of all the things that will make it better from there.”
What’s unique about the culture of improv-sketch is the people who make it up. Like Arnold, most of the performers have day jobs. They sit in offices and teach children, then meet up at night, becoming a dozen different characters in the span of hours.
Arnold plays in six of the 12 sketches chosen by Held that is set to perform opening night. Held jokes that she was the lucky charm this year, as it’s her first year in the troupe and trying improv-sketch altogether.
“It’s kind of competitive, because we all want our sketches to make it,” Arnold said. “Then for every night after that, everybody tries to remember what we said. You go home and you try to remember what happened and get ideas to make it better.”
Arnold recalls going home to her husband late at night and practicing her lines in front of him, bouncing around ideas and improvements. The sketches she’s starring in feature her as a multitude of characters.
“That’s the fun part,” Arnold said. “All the characters I play are so different from each other, sometimes I even go into a scene with the wrong accent. Of course it’s easiest to write from stuff you know, because you know how they would react to certain situations. I feel like every sketch I had a part in is my baby.”
Improv-sketch provided something for Arnold that traditional acting could not — a sense of flexibility. After graduating with a masters in business association from Cal State Long Beach, she frequented Hollywood to attend auditions and classes. The two-hour long daily commute became near impossible when she had her first child, then she heard about Held2gether and was introduced to the world of improv.
“I thought okay improv, that means no homework right?” Arnold said. “Because it’s all about the skills you learn in class and you perform those skills live and there’s a sense of thrill in that.”
It seems like this sense of urgency fits Arnold well, as she acts out movements from her sketches and hands her two-year-old son Cheerios in the same breath.
“[Improv comedy] is like a play on drugs,” Arnold said. “You have to develop your character as quickly as possible. You develop their history in two lines then you immediately move onto what they’re dealing with.”
“Grass-fed” is a breed of performance art that combines traditional plays, improv comedy and shorter sketches. While the shows are written and rehearsed by opening night, there is a transformative process to it, one that changes constantly as new ideas are brought out at the last minute. The time frame is also much shorter than most actors are used to, giving them weeks to perfect their original sketches for the audience.
A week before moving into the Playhouse for rehearsals, Held describes the current phase as “panic mode” as performers are still waiting for pieces of their costumes and scrambling to put finishing touches on the musical aspect of the show.
“At this point, nobody’s even laughing during rehearsals anymore because we’ve all heard the lines so many times,” Held said. “You doubt if it’s even funny anymore then you go out to perform it and the audience might find totally different things about it funny than you imagined.”
“Grass-fed” will be have 8 p.m. showings from March 1-3 at the Long Beach Playhouse. Tickets are $10 for Thursday and $15 for Friday and Saturday showings. You can purchase tickets by calling (562) 494-1014 or by visiting lbplayhouse.org.
