Lost for laughs? This Lexington improv troupe gets you there every time

Attending a performance by a madcap comedy troupe like Central Kentucky Improv is like setting out on a road trip with no particular destination in mind. But where will it take you? How will you get there? You have no clue.

Neither do the performers.

There are certain rules of the road — primarily the improv mantra “yes, and,” which commands the actors to agree with whatever their scene partners say and then expand on it, or extend it in some new direction — but there’s no script, no blocking, no preconceived notions of any kind. In short, no roadmap on the way to the City of Laughter.

To some traditional stage and film actors, that sounds like their worst nightmare. “A lot of actors tell me: No way,” says Heather MacDermott Baumann, who co-founded the troupe with Trent Stephens a year and a half ago. “I say, come and try it.”

And so they have. Central Kentucky Improv now trains performers in Chicago-style make-it-up-on-the-spot technique and sets them loose onstage at several venues around town, including the Kentucky Castle, the Ahava Center and a monthly gig at Al’s Bar the second Tuesday of each month, including Dec. 17.

In a typical CKI show, the troupe opts either for a long-form improv (which can be based on a suggestion from the audience or on cues from a monologue performed onstage by a team member) or a series of short-form improv games of the sort audiences will have seen on TV shows like the long-running “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

In one game, Pocket Sentences, audience members write down random sentences on slips of paper that find their way into the scene partners’ pockets. At certain points in the scenes-in-progress, Stephens says, “You pull the sentence out and read it as if it were the next thing you were going to say in the scene, and go from there.”

Then there’s the Bell Game, in which ongoing scenes undergo a series of hairpin turns each time a desk bell sounds. “When you hear the bell, you have to take the last thing you said and turn it into something completely different,” he says. “You might start down one avenue, but after three or four rings of the bell, you’re on the planet Mars and boarding a spaceship. How you got there, who knows?”

It makes for a kind of comedic highwire act without a net.

“Sometimes I’m scared to death,” admits Baumann, who studied and performed for a decade with a triumvirate of Chicago improv troupes — Second City, Annoyance Theatre and especially iO, formerly known as ImprovOlympic, where she trained with the late improv guru Del Close. “It’s not like I like being scared to death, but I feel it’s so important to put yourself out there and see what happens, because the reward is so wonderful when it works out.”

It works out with surprising frequency, even in rehearsal. In one recent practice session, Stephens and team member Leslie Beatty — given only a one-word prompt, “opposites” — launch into a scene featuring an amiably bickering brother and sister with Russian accents arguing about whether their decaffeinated espresso drinks are really decaf, only for the scene to start careening into the comedy stratosphere as the two scene partners keep topping each other with escalating flights of fancy.

The sister’s hands get jittery, she says — which abruptly sends her brother into a story in which they’re flying an airplane somewhere in the sky above the Motherland, with the jittery-hands sister in the cockpit attempting a loop-the-loop — during which she leaves a pattern of white concentric circles in the air — until they run out of gas, requiring an emergency landing in the bitterly cold tundra — at which point, the sister declares, “We could see Sarah Palin from our house.”

“Hello, Sarah!” her brother calls with a neighborly wave.

For Beatty, a veteran of Lexington’s theater scene for a quarter century, the absence of a script is less a burden than an opportunity to keep performing after the medication she took for an illness a few years ago made it difficult for her to memorize lines. “It was really a struggle, so when I found this, it was like, Oh, great, nothing to remember! And you might never see it again. So it’s very fun.”

Her teammate Josiah Correll, an actor who also teaches improv at the University of Kentucky, agrees. “There’s something very freeing about not having to stick to a script,” he says. “It allows you as an actor to be more in the moment, to be listening and to be actually reacting, because you don’t know what’s going to happen next until it happens.”

Eventually, Baumann says, she and Stephens would like to have their own brick-and-mortar theater, where they could do Second City-style sketch comedy and become the catalyst for a larger improv scene in Lexington. In the meantime, CKI has participated in several improv-comedy festivals in cities around the country, including the Del Close Marathon in New York City and events in Atlanta and Asheville, N.C.

Fortunately for the performers, Stephens says, the fear of going onstage without a script — though it never disappears entirely — becomes manageable with experience. “Once you’ve improvised for a long time, that scared-to-death place isn’t so vulnerable,” he says. “You’re out there flying by the seat over your pants, but you know your scene partner’s got your back.”

Central Kentucky Improv

Where: Al’s Bar, 601 N. Limestone, Lexington

When: Second Tuesday of each month, the next being 8 p.m. Dec. 17

Admission: $5 cover