The 44-Hour Improv Marathon

Publicity image for the 44-Hour Improv Marathon.

The 44-Hour Improv Marathon was the fifth annual Hideout Improv Marathon.

Summary

It was performed in 2013, starting Friday, June 21 and ending Sunday, June 23.

Core Players

• Aaron Saenz
• Christopher "Ceej" Allen
• Jessica Arjet
• Kayla Lane Freeman
• Lindsey Reeves
• Lisa Jackson
• Michael Joplin
• Peter Rogers

Staff

• Roy Janik - Artistic Director
• Ryan Hill - Producer
• Jessie Pascarelli - Assistant Producer
• Cat Drago - Food Wrangler
• Victoria Hawthorne - Food Wrangler
• Ruby Willmann - Sponsorship Captain
• Dave Alley - Photography Coordinator
• Jessica Arjet - Volunteer Coordinator
• Kareem Badr - Planning
• Andy Crouch - Planning
• Kaci Beeler - Design

Schedule

• Friday 5pm (hour 1): The cast performed with teens from The Hideout Theatre's summer camp.
• Friday 6pm (hour 2): Free-form improv from the core cast.
  • This turned out to be a montage, featuring among other things, Day Care for Baby Banes.
• Friday 7pm (hour 3): Start Trekkin': improvised Star Trek
  • This was a story about a pleasure-planet overtaken by a Klingon bent on revenge against the show's captain.
• Friday 8pm (hours 4 & 5): The Fancy-Pants Mashup
  • This one featured a slight change in format: each two-hander included a marathon player and someone from the visiting Fancy-Pants cast.
  • It featured the following guests: Andreas Fabis, Andrew Buck, Cat Drago, Chris Villafano, Chuy Zarate, Dana Yanoshak, Matthew Falkenberg, Patrick Creamer, and Scott Hearne.
• Friday 10pm (hour 6): Parallelogramophonograph presented "The Tab", a montage in which all the characters were blindfolded.
• Friday 11pm (hour 7): Franz & Dave presented "Pine Falls", a surreal television pilot in the style of Twin Peaks.
  • Each marathoner got a character type from the audience at the top of the show; Franz Kafka and David Lynch narrated the story as usual.
  • Like the Twin Peaks pilot, this performance featured an FBI agent investigating the murder of a teenage girl in a northwest logging town.
• Saturday 12am (hour 8): The New Game Project: the audience suggested the names of games, and the players invented and played games with those names.
• Saturday 1am (hour 9): In Our Prime: grounded, dramatic improv, in this case based around an extended family attending a wedding.
• Saturday 2am (hour 10): Past Lives: following a soul through thematically-linked vignettes across history.
• Saturday 3am (hour 11): Cheap Date
• Saturday 4am (hour 12): "The Bat" with ColdTowne: an improv show in the dark.
• Saturday 5am (hour 13): Epic Telescope (AKA "Half-Life in reverse"): a story presented first in one minute, then three minutes, then five, then fifteen, then thirty.
• Saturday 6am (hour 14): Performance with veterans of The Hideout Improv Marathon
  • This featured guests Andy Crouch, Emma Holder, Halyn Lee Erickson, Jason Vines, John Ratliff, Jon Bolden, Kaci Beeler, Karen Jane DeWitt, Roy Janik, and Valerie Ward.
  • In this format, veterans would tell anecdotes of their experiences in the Marathon, and the cast would perform a few scenes based on that anecdote.
• Saturday 7am (hour 15): Student Show
  • This was a set of short-form games.
• Saturday 8am (hour 16): Waterpark, a musical-improv troupe from The New Movement, presented a non-narrative musical-improv show.
• Saturday 9am (hour 17): Dubbed Indemnity: improvising the dialog, sound effects, and soundtrack for silenced TV and film clips.
  • This featured guest Josh Gill.
• Saturday 10am (hour 18): Local Genius Society presented "Video Game", where cards scattered with 'helpful' instructions threw kinks and twists into an improvised story.
  • This was a narrative based around "Disney Place", a knockoff version of Disney World.
• Saturday 11am (hour 19): Charles Dickens Unleashed: improv in the style of one of Charles Dickens' early novels.
  • This was the story of William Barachnal, a young aristocrat who was banished from his family home and, after a checkered youth, became a respected blacksmith in Derbyshire.
• Saturday 12pm (hour 20): Arkay presents JTS Brown.
• Saturday 1pm (hour 21): What's the Story, Steve?: kid-friendly improv, featuring a dog.
  • In this story, Steve was a duke in a fantasy setting who was not invited to the kingdom's most eagerly-awaited birthday party.
• Saturday 2pm (hour 22): Free-form improv from the core cast. (Nicknamed "The Eye of the Storm", this is the exact midpoint of the marathon.)
• Saturday 3pm (hour 23): Girls Girls Girls: improvised narrative musical.
  • This musical was called "DMV", and featured a young lady getting her first driver's license at the local Department of Motor Vehicles.
• Saturday 4pm (hour 24): Pick Your Own Path: improv in the style of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books.
  • The core cast was joined by Content Love Knowles, Thedward Blevins, Mitchell Deane, and Brad Hawkins.
  • The first story, "Fire-Breathing Dinosaurs", featured Jessica Arjet as a young girl who discovered a population of dragons on a field trip.
  • The second story featured Aaron Saenz as a privileged child at a resort-like sleepaway camp who entered a different world while looking for a set of hot springs.
• Saturday 5pm (hour 25): The Amazon & The Milksop presented a series of improvised English Instructional Videos.
• Saturday 6pm (hour 26): The Library: improvisors in several different genres performed a single narrative.
• Saturday 7pm (hour 27): The Knuckleball Now: rapid-fire improv.
• Saturday 8pm (hour 28): Theatresports: two teams of improvisors competed in a series of improv challenges.
• Saturday 9pm (hour 29): Confidence Men: improvised David Mamet.
  • They did "The Variations", a series of two-hander scenes based around an audience-suggested word (in this case, "pencil").
• Saturday 10pm (hours 30 & 31): Maestro: an improv competition with Survivor-style eliminations.
  • This was co-directed by Peter Rogers and Jessica Arjet.
  • The core cast was joined by Scott Hearne, Ruby Willmann, Troy Miller, Cat Drago, Chuy Zarate, and Kaci Beeler.
• Sunday 12am (hour 32): The Black Vault: improvised H. P. Lovecraft.
  • The first story featured Justin Davis as a mountain explorer who brought back an evil elixir to his upper-class family.
  • The second story featured Peter Rogers as a doctor who performed a series of sleep-deprivation experiments with disastrous results.
• Sunday 1am (hour 33): Puppet Improv Project: improv with puppets!
  • The show format was "couples therapy", in which Sara Farr helped a number of puppet couples deal with their relationship problems.
• Sunday 2am (hour 34): Tech Nightmare: wherein the players have to do everything the people in the tech booth tell them to.
• Sunday 3am (hour 35): Big Beautiful Warlock presented Big Beautiful Warriors, a game show with very non-traditional games.
• Sunday 4am (hour 36): Pulp Friction: improv in the style of Quentin Tarantino
• Sunday 5am (hour 37): a secret show, produced by Jason Vines.
  • This turned out to be "Human Clay", where Jason, in character as a Bob-Ross-like sculpture, molded players into various shapes and blew "magic dust" on them that brought them to life for scenes.
  • Roy had made Jason promise not to be *too* cruel to the core cast with his secret format.
• Sunday 6am (hour 38): "The Queen Is Not Amused", wherein Jonathan Monkhouse appeared via Skype, portraying the queen of England.
• Sunday 7am (hour 39): Student Show
• Sunday 8am (hour 40): Care Bear Stare -- The Care Bears came to bring badly animated joy to your lives.
  • In this show, Care Bears based around not-exactly-G-rated emotions solved problems for the core-cast members in a longform narrative.
  • The Care Bears:
    • Roy Janik -- Desperately Cheerful Bear
    • Josh Gill -- Stoner Bear
    • Cat Drago -- My Parents Didn't Love Me Enough Bear
    • John Ratliff -- The Bear of Lost Hope
    • Michael Joplin -- Gay Bear (and later, Bi Bear)
• Sunday 9am (hour 41): The Institution Theater presented "the movie format", an improv montage with screenplay-style scene painting.
  • This story followed a girl in the inner city and her estranged father through a narrative that became increasingly Lynchian over time.
  • Guest performers: Asaf Ronen, Clifton Highfield, Deana Ricks, Justin Davis, Taylor Overstreet, Tom Booker.
• Sunday 10am (hour 42): Fakespeare: improv in the style of William Shakespeare.
  • This version of the show started with a few Shakespearean improv games, and then segue into a narrative.
  • The narrative was based on a Persian attack on Jericho.
• Sunday 11am (hour 43): Bad Boys: a non-narrative montage of scenes.
• Sunday 12pm (hour 44): Free-form improv from the core cast (nicknamed "The Final Countdown").
  • This turned out to be a narrative about a group of Led Zeppelin fans, followed by the usual Q&A with the cast.

Jonathan Monkhouse

British improvisor Jonathan Monkhouse was originally scheduled to play in the 44-Hour Marathon. Due to visa troubles, neither Monkhouse nor his improv partner Chris Mead were able to come to the United States.

Michael Joplin stepped in as Jonathan's replacement in the core cast.

The Saturday 2am slot was originally scheduled for Project2, the science-fiction troupe that both Monkhouse and Chris Mead are a part of.

Media

Photos

• Selected marathon photos by Steve Rogers.
• Marathon photos by Heidi Rogers.
• A photoset by Claudio Fox of hours 1 and 2.
• A photoset by Steve Rogers of hour 3.
• A photoset by Michael Yew of hours 4-5, 38, and 42.
• A photoset by Steve Rogers of hour 6.
• A photoset by Claudio Fox of hours 13-17 and 23-24.
• A photoset by Dave Alley of hours 25-29 and 43-44.
• A photoset by Steve Rogers of hours 30 and 31.
  • A separate photoset of the same hours which is all solo shots of Cat Drago.
• A photoset by Steve Rogers of hour 32.
• A photoset by Steve Rogers of hour 33.

Videos

• Hour 6: Parallelogramophonograph presents "The Tab"
• Hour 7: Franz & Dave present "Pine Falls"
• Hour 19: Charles Dickens Unleashed
• Hour 23: Girls Girls Girls
  • Unfortunately, we were only able to get the first 15 minutes or so of this show.
• Hour 25: ESL with The Amazon and the Milksop
• Hour 34: Tech Nightmare
• Hour 41: The Movie Format with the Institution Theater
• Hour 42: Fakespeare
• Hour 44b: The Marathon-closing Q&A

More Information

• The show's web page.
• Cast announcement from The Hideout Theatre.
• The form for show suggestions.
• The show's sponsorship page.
• The call for marathon volunteers on The Austin Improv Forums.
  • The volunteer schedule.