Playful chaos transpires in Riverwalk Theatre’s ‘Lustful Youth’

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For anyone who took an introduction to theater class in college, Riverwalk Theatre’s production of “Lustful Youth” will feel like déjà vu. In such a class, when you aren’t rehearsing your first monologue — or watching someone else rehearse their monologue — you’re playing theater games. The games are a great way for theater newbies to try out vocal techniques, brainstorm, problem solve, practice body awareness and loosen up. Many of the games involve improvisation and mimicking movements.

For the first 10 minutes of Riverwalk’s rollicking farce, my left brain thought, “What the actual hell is happening? Are they making this up as they go along? Why is Tony (Lewis Elson) channeling a villain from a Guy Ritchie movie? Why is Carl (Quinn Kelly) acting like a menacing Curly from the Three Stooges?  Why are they forcing Walt (TJ Kelly), a TV statistician, to write a soap opera if he’s not actually a writer?  Why does a goth pirate queen live in a middle-class neighborhood?  Why does a grown professional have an imaginary friend?” 

Luckily, my right brain won out. “Forget it,” it told me. “It doesn’t matter. Just sit back and give in to the absurdity.”  For 90 confusing, hilarious minutes, I was once again a college student, watching my fellow classmates play improv games.  

Given the personal history between the director, Kait Wilson, and the playwright, Mike Eserkaln, that improvisational feeling makes perfect sense. Wilson met Eserkaln in 2010, when she joined his improv club, Comedy City, in De Pere, Wisconsin. They worked together to develop sketch-comedy vignettes and original plays and musicals. Wilson had seen a production of “Lustful Youth” a few years ago, and the two conspired to bring the production to Lansing. The story revolves around the creation of a TV soap opera, and the product placements in the fictional soap opera script allowed Wilson to add a few nods to local businesses, such as Quality Dairy and Red Cedar Spirits.

This “meta-comedy” is a playground for its tremendously talented six-person cast. With the exception of TJ Kelly, all the cast members play two characters — although Kelly’s golden mullet never stops moving and could almost be the seventh actor. Given the physical nature of the comedy — the slaps, falls and soap-opera-style “down-and-dirty moments” — Wilson brought in a fight choreographer and an intimacy coordinator to help the actors get comfortable with the physicality of their roles. The attention to the physical aspect of this farce has paid off: The cast members looked like they’ve been energetically rehearsing for a Three Stooges movie their entire lives.

I was on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what this wild production had in store. Speaking of seating, this production is in Riverwalk’s Black Box theater, which has an experimental vibe to it. It’s a proscenium stage, and the audience sits quite close to the action. My recommendation would be to get there early to avoid sitting in the first row on stage right (across from the bar). You might get spit on — I’m not joking. As the announcer says at the start of production, “Enjoy the show — and try to keep up.”

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