Weekend nights throughout Wrigleyville find, among other things, a few enthusiastic young people trying to hand fliers to everyone from drunken barhoppers to sushi shack connoisseurs to overexcited Cubs fans.
"Awesome improv show! Great comedy! Come back and see us!"
These are the constituents of Low Sodium Entertainment, a forty-six-member, 2-and-1/2-year-old improv group known for its signature show "Gorilla Theater: Improvisers Must Be Punished." The premise of the show is that three comedians must earn audience approval through a series of games or scenes (what's known in the craft as short-form), or endure humiliating punishments, like imitating phone sex with one's mother.
But lately it's been Low Sodium's guerrilla promotional tactics and sworn street-level warfare that's earning the company disapproval from ImprovOlympic, the venue where the troupe once performed. Months after "Gorilla Theater" finished its run there, Low Sodium members continue to flier just a few steps from the front door.
"We gotta be in front, people have to find us," Low Sodium founder and president Aaron Haber says. "We've had thousands of people see our show [at ImprovOlympic] and they come back and they ask for Low Sodium and the IO says 'Go downstairs for the "Cage Match,"'" a midnight improv face-off that takes place in the venue's second theater.
But ImprovOlympic owner/director Charna Halpern says she hasn't seen many of the show's devotees.
"No one has asked, no one has come," Halpern says. "People want to know where the Annoyance [Theater] is, and we show them. If anyone called and asked, I would tell them."
Now playing Fridays and Saturdays, 11pm, a few blocks south at Stage Left theater, "Gorilla Theater" originally ran Fridays, midnight, at ImprovOlympic. The show ended its eighteen-month stint there in April, when Halpern opted not to renew Low Sodium's contract in favor of putting on a 10:30pm production of the "Star Wars" spoof "The Fandom Menace," which runs well past midnight.
But Haber claims the decision not to renew was only the finale to a series of mistreatments by the ImprovOlympic. The problems began, Haber says, just three months into "Gorilla Theater"'s run, when ImprovOlympic started up the free "Cage Match" in its downstairs theater at the same time "Gorilla Theater" was playing upstairs.
"'What are you doing to me?" Haber recalls saying to Halpern, "'Now you're putting on a free version of the show we're doing for you.' She said 'Oh, I didn't think about it, I didn't realize it was similar.' 'It's gonna hurt both of our businesses, your gonna split the same audience in half!'" Haber complained. "And we went to battle with a free show and we basically won." That is, if winning includes cutting what Haber estimates was an audience of sixty-eighty down to twenty people.
But Halpern maintains that the two shows are different: "Cage Match" is "two long-form improv teams, and Aaron's show is a little game show thing." Most importantly, she adds, not renewing Low Sodium's contract was simply part of the business of running a high-rent theater. "I can't not have a 10:30pm show so he can bring in fifteen 19-year-olds," she explains. "'The Fandom Menace' is a huge hit. It brings in a fortune, and I can't say no."
"I think he's just being paranoid and angry because he never really had an audience," Halpern says. "He didn't really lose an audience, he just never had one."
Haber's countered by running ads in The Onion that take shots at what he sees as the insularity of most improv shows and at "The Fandom Menace" itself. Spring issues of the gag rag featured a Low Sodium ad promising one dollar off the admission price for patrons willing to say "I am not raping George Lucas" at the box office.
"I think the word 'rape' is a harsh word, and to use it in such a flippant manner is a little hurtful," says Jason Chin, creator of "The Fandom Menace." Chin says Haber was under the impression that Chin's show could have run a half-hour earlier on Fridays (allowing "Gorilla Theater" to remain in a midnight slot).
For the time being, "Gorilla Theater" and Low Sodium's other shows have settled into slots at the O Bar and Stage Left, where artistic director Drew Martin says Low Sodium's doing well and is likely to have its contract renewed in October.
The leafleting, he adds, is a good way to target the late-night Wrigleyville crowd, and it takes a lot of motivation.
"They seem to be a hungry, grass-roots, no-holds-barred kind of group."
(Ellen Fox)
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.