Arkansas native brings improv show to Argenta

North Little Rock native Brian Jones (center) and his Los Angeles-based Impro Theatre main company castmates — including (from left) Stephen Kearin, Kari Coleman, Nick Massouh and Edi Patterson — will offer full-length improvisational performances Thursday (based on Shakespeare) and Friday (based on TV’s The Twilight Zone) at North Little Rock’s Argenta Community Theater, as part of the 2017 Acansa Festival.
North Little Rock native Brian Jones (center) and his Los Angeles-based Impro Theatre main company castmates — including (from left) Stephen Kearin, Kari Coleman, Nick Massouh and Edi Patterson — will offer full-length improvisational performances Thursday (based on Shakespeare) and Friday (based on TV’s The Twilight Zone) at North Little Rock’s Argenta Community Theater, as part of the 2017 Acansa Festival.

North Little Rock native Brian Michael Jones cut his theatrical teeth as a child in the mid-'90s, in professional productions at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre (as Nibs, one of the Lost Boys, in Peter Pan) and Murry's Dinner Playhouse (in the title role of Oliver!, with now-film-star Wes Bentley co-starring as the Artful Dodger).

That summed up his Arkansas theatrical career. He went on to study at Pepperdine University in southern California and now makes his home out there, with his wife and two kids.

He's co-director of L.A. ­Theatresports, under the umbrella of a Los Angeles-based company called Impro Theatre. He's also a member of its main company, creating completely improvised, full-length plays in the styles of great playwrights, authors and composers.

Jones will lead his Impro Theatre company colleagues to central Arkansas this weekend for two performances, Shakespeare UnScripted at 8 p.m. Thursday and The Twilight Zone UnScripted at 8 p.m. Friday at Argenta Community Theater, 405 Main St., North Little Rock. It's part of the 2017 Acansa Festival.

Nothing is scripted or prepared in advance, Jones says. As with most improvisational shows, the audience provides an idea and the actors take it from there, combining what the company describes on its website as "verbal dexterity and robust physicality to bring character and plot to life in an instant, making each Impro Theatre show unique."

The Thursday night show will consist of a full-length quasi-Shakespeare play -- "one complete play, two hours, with an intermission, Act I, Act II," Jones says. And it's more likely to be a comedy ("we tend to stay away from the tragic storylines," he adds).

The improvisational Twilight Zone will consist of four 20-minute episodes, "so the audience sees four different mini-plays on the same night."

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You won't see Twelfth Night on Thursday nor 'To Serve Man" or any of the other classic Twilight Zone episodes on Friday, Jones says. A lot more work goes into it than that.

"We study the genres in depth; everything we can, we read and absorb," he explains. "For Twilight Zone, you watch every episode and read all of [Charles] Beaumont and [Richard] Matheson" -- prolific writers of Twilight Zone scripts -- "as well and get inside the mind of [Twilight Zone creator] Rod Serling.

"On the night, we get one suggestion and we go. The [Shakespeare] audience sees the play unfold, scene by scene. We don't know what characters we're going to play, we don't know what the plot is going to be, the theme. We don't have anything that's decided other than, 'This is something Shakespeare could have written,' or 'This is a lost episode that Serling never wrote.'"

What are likely to surface, however, are themes that were important to Matheson and Serling: "social justice, identity, isolation, nostalgia, these things pop up throughout all [the] seasons of The Twilight Zone, so these will be cut from the same cloth," Jones says.

"But our shows are absolutely full of mistakes, in full view of the audience; we don't hide it. That's part of the joy and fun of improv. You never want to seem too slick."

Impro Theatre and its components work in many genres. "Jane Austen is probably the most well received one that we do," Jones says.

"Acansa picked Shakespeare and Twilight Zone; we gave them a taster's play of everything," Jones says, "and I think those are two great choices."

He got his taste for improvisation at Pepperdine, where he studied with "a wonderful teacher, Tracy Burns from San Francisco." After he graduated, he got a job on an improvisational TV show and in 2004 signed on with Impro Theatre, which, founded as L.A. Theatresports in 1988, changed its name in 2002. In 2012, after an eight-year hiatus, L.A. Theatresports revived as a separate entity under the Impro Theatre aegis, and has been producing shows separately in Los Angeles.

And, Jones says, he has gone back to Pepperdine, this time as a member of the faculty. As director of the Pepperdine Improv Troupe, "for the last five years, I've been teaching the improv that Tracy taught me." The troupe does shows once a month and entertains roughly 4,000 audience members a year.

He also works regularly as an actor -- his most recent film credit was in the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar!, as one of a group of lovesick singing and dancing "sailors" shooting a film scene.

And he works as a puppeteer and a voice-over artist with the Jim Henson Co., on a show called Unstable Fables, on the film Muppets: Most Wanted and on the very short-lived, as in on the air for just one season, The Muppets on ABC.

"I'm on their roster," Jones says modestly. "I'm a puppeteer they call in when they have 20 puppets in the shot and the main guys can't do them all. But it's still a very small, wonderful family of puppeteers in Los Angeles, that I'm kind of over the moon to even be included in."

He even gets to mix puppets and improvisation in a Henson company stage show called Puppet Up!, which, he says, features "scenes and songs and re-creations of old Jim Henson performances, like on The Ed Sullivan Show -- we re-create those live.

"The audience gets to see anything, they get to see us, the puppeteers, in full body, holding the puppets up; there's a camera center stage and a jumbo screen behind us, so the audience can see two shows in one. They can look up at the screen and see what the people at home would see, and they can look on stage and see the puppeteers behind the magic. It's a great show. I'm really proud of it."

Style on 09/19/2017

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