2023 Needs Improvment Battle delivers fantastic performances
For their opening act, the “Old School” team played “God,” a game where one person (in this case Jack Reisman, ’21) can force the actors in a scene to make different choices as they see fit. Presently, the actors are showing off their soupmaking skills to try and get a part in a movie.
A crowd of 11 juniors and seniors dressed as cooks peel back the curtains as they wrinkle their noses in disgust. “Something smells… expired,” they groan in unison before staring daggers into the mass of drama alumni sitting in the audience. With that, the first shot of the Improv Battle had been fired.
The 2023 Needs Improvment Battle, held on May 19, was a competition between the “New School” (current members of the high school’s improv group, Needs Improvment) and the “Old School” (former Needs Improvment members, stretching back to the class of 2006). By embracing its absurdity, the Needs Improvment Battle successfully delivered one of the most entertaining shows of the year.
Drama teacher Mark Vanderzee runs the Battle with a series of improv games, where each group creates and acts out scenes based on a game concept. These games usually focus on limiting something about the actors’ performance, such as requiring them to have their scenes relate to a certain word or action. The Battle is judged by current students and drama teachers who give the scenes points for various aspects of the performance.
The actors displayed a wider range of talents, which made it all the more entertaining. In some scenes, the actors impressed me by cleverly working within the confines of the specific ruleset; in others, they let their creativity shine to create wild scenarios with few restrictions apart from entertainment value. Even the occasional miss never detracted much from the overall experience.
The first major standout activity was “Beatnik Poetry,” where one actor was given two words and had to improvise a slam poetry-style poem that linked the two in some way. Or, in other words, the sort of thing most people have nightmares about. But, the New School and Old School performers (senior Yael Sheffer and Dvasha Solomon ‘19, respectively) were unfazed and performed wonderful poems about the epitome of hippopotami and the biggest cranium in Tennessee—complete with rhyming schemes and the unflappable demeanor of someone who isn’t just making it up as they go.
A few activities later, there was “Scene Dubbing,” in which two actors dub a famous movie scene with original dialogue. The New School scene came out on top, as juniors Griffin Schroeder and John Watson chose to interpret the prompt “Dawn of Creation” as a flirtatious scene between some heavenly figures.
The most impressive activity of the night was the final one, “That Sounds Like a Song Cue to Me,” in which two actors make a scene that they are forced to interrupt with unrelated, improvised songs based on random phrases they said in the scene. In Old School’s take on the game, alumni Jack Reisman ‘21 and Maya Costello ‘21 created a detailed story of two parents with marital troubles cutting cardboard circles for their children’s school projects. They were then interrupted by a rock number about being best friends, a Broadway-style musical number about life being stagnant and a country ditty about trying to convince a woman to drink champagne and go home with them. It was a near-perfect act that should have rightfully carried the Old School team to victory. But, that’s not how the high school’s improv battles work.
The judges rate each scene on a scale of one to five according to four factors. These categories are all incredibly subjective, and the X factor points given by drama teachers Elena Maimonis and Arika Nabutovsky were particularly arbitrary. These points could be literally anything they wanted to call out—and I mean literally. For example, 13 out of New School’s 93 points (14 percent!) came from Maimonis “really liking Griffin’s hair,” and the Old School team lost three points for asking Maimonis how old she is. Those 13 points just barely put New School over the top as, at the end of the night, they won 93 to 91.5.
Counterintuitively, that complete lack of objectivity actually benefited the show. It added to the unexpected nature of the performance that makes improv, improv—you never know what’s going to happen.
Combined with the interactive element of being in an audience that can shape the show as it is being created through making suggestions to the performers, the Improv Battle was so enthralling and dynamic that even at 9:45 p.m., after over two hours of sitting in my chair, I was still sad the show was over and couldn’t see the actors finagle their way out of more of Vanderzee’s minigames.
As someone who saw every major Drama Society show this year, I don’t say this lightly: if I could only choose one BHS show to see in a year, it would be this one. For those who missed the show this year, remember that, even though the seniors are graduating, there is a good chance you’ll get to see them on the Old School team next year!
