Photo by Amanda Kitch, Media Desperado
A high school English teacher by day, writer Kristen Foster performs and teaches long-form improv by night at Baton Rouge's Boomerang Comedy Theater.
I have performed an emergency appendectomy on a squirrel in zero gravity. I have been the bellhop of an ill-fated ice hotel. I have survived the balloon apocalypse, the sneauxpocalypse, and the apocalypse apocalypse (to name a few). But what I have never done, not one single time, is know I was going to do any of these things until the moment I was doing them, on stage, in front of a paying audience.
Improv comedy came to me at a time in my life when, like most newly-minted adults, I was trying to figure out who I was and what I was meant to be. I had just moved to the North Carolina coast to pursue my undergraduate degree when I stumbled into a friendship with members of The Other Side, a local improv comedy troupe. They were unlike any people I had ever met before. There was an uncanny harmony to their interactions—a quickfire back-and-forth banter I’d only later recognize as the “yes, and …” philosophy that is foundational to the art of improv. At the time, though, I only knew two things: I had never laughed so hard in my life, and I needed to learn how to do what they did.
My years performing with The Other Side didn’t give me a cheat code to finding myself, but the experience did provide me with the invaluable opportunity to bolt headlong into uncertainty every Tuesday night with a stalwart group who, no matter what I said or did, would, without question, follow me there. In this environment of absolute trust, I learned to fail without fearing failure. I learned to listen to the person across from me instead of waiting for my turn to talk. But, most importantly, I learned that comedy isn’t about trying to be funny at all; it’s about earnest commitment to often absurd circumstances—and isn’t that what life asks of us every day anyway?
When I moved to Baton Rouge in 2005 for my masters program, I once again felt untethered; however, this time I had a template for reorienting myself. I sought out and soon joined The Family Dinner, Baton Rouge’s longest-running short-form improv comedy troupe. As a result, a city I’d lived in for all of three months started to feel like a place I belonged, rather than just a place I’d landed. That’s part of what improv does: it turns strangers into a support system faster than anything else.
Through The Family Dinner, I connected with the well-established and vibrant Silverbacks Improv Theatre in Lafayette, Louisiana, commuting from Baton Rouge to perform with multiple theatre-affiliated troupes, including the all-female troupe, Rag Tag, and the musical troupe, Tempo Tantrums. Leaning into more specialized forms has allowed me to find additional ways to express myself creatively while forming unique connections over common ground and adding new techniques to my improv repertoire. However, the hour-long drive to Lafayette, while always well worth the time and mileage, led me to seek long-form improv performance opportunities closer to home.
While there will always be a seat for me at The Family Dinner table, they are a short-form troupe built on quick games and ongoing audience suggestions. This highly entertaining, punchline-heavy style is what comes to mind when most people think of improv comedy, and it is the reason The Family Dinner has been going strong for almost twenty-five years. In long form, a single audience suggestion stretches into twenty to forty minutes of interconnected scenes. Characters recur, plot threads take their time paying off, and themes and situations from previous scenes resurface when you least expect them. The result is a more nuanced style of storytelling—one that rewards an audience for listening. They allow themselves to be transported to a completely new place in time and space, with characters who have never been seen before and will never be seen again. There’s no defined game to fall back on in long-form, or trick you can practice to save a scene that’s going nowhere. It’s just a group of people building an entire world in real time and trusting each other to bring it to life and keep it alive.
“If it looks like fun, that’s because it is fun.”
—Sydney Gaskins, member of Baton Rouge Boomerang Comedy Theatre
Travis Noote and Angi Christensen Noote, like me, sought out improv when first moving to Baton Rouge. “When we spend any time in a new town, we always take an improv class,” Travis recalled. So, they took one from what was then the Leather Apron Theatre Company (LATCo.). Then they took another, caught a couple of shows, and soon learned the theatre’s owners were about to shutter their doors permanently. So, Travis and Angi said, “yes, and …” to a new business venture. After creating a bespoke improv curriculum with veteran improviser and instructor, Dr. Nico Zaunbrecher, the duo produced their first shows under the new name Boomerang Comedy Theater (a portmanteau of Travis’s nickname, Boomer, and Angi), in February, 2022.
Their first classes started that June, and I signed up for one of them, but not for long-form, and not even for short-form. I signed up for a stand-up class, the one form of comedy that still scared me. Long-form taught me how to collaborate with an ensemble, short-form sharpened my comic timing, but stand-up offered none of that. It was just the microphone, the silence, and me. However, from the moment I stepped through the door into the cozy dark of that black box theatre, my apprehensions evaporated. Boomerang immediately felt like a room full of people already rooting for me rather than waiting for me to prove myself. It was after this class that I knew I had found my local comedy home, and I have been there ever since, graduating from a student to an instructor of advanced long-form classes.
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Photo by Amanda Kitch, Media Desperado.
Performing improv comedy taught writer Kristen Foster how to fail without fearing failure, and to listen to the person opposite her rather than waiting for her turn to talk.
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Photo by Amanda Kitch, Media Desperado.
Performing improv comedy taught writer Kristen Foster how to fail without fearing failure, and to listen to the person opposite her rather than waiting for her turn to talk.
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Photo by Amanda Kitch, Media Desperado.
Performing improv comedy taught writer Kristen Foster how to fail without fearing failure, and to listen to the person opposite her rather than waiting for her turn to talk.
Angi has a line she tells every incoming class that I’ve adopted with my own students: “I’m not trying to teach them to be funny,” she says, “I’m trying to teach them to be a good scene partner. To listen. To stay open to an idea instead of steering away from it, being present enough to actually notice the person in front of you.” She adds,“Those aren’t just scene skills. They're the same things that foster connection anywhere else in a person’s life, on stage or off.” Travis puts it another way. He says he’s “lost count of how many people who have told him improv was the thing they didn’t know they needed.”
The idea of meeting that intangible need is the framework on which the theatre has built its growing success. It provides a supportive-enough environment that anyone willing to listen, be genuine, and stay coachable can find something on the Boomerang stage that stretches them beyond their own preconceptions of themselves. Travis and Angi strive to dispel the assumption most people walk in with: that improv is an extrovert’s game. In Travis and Angi’s experience, it’s often the opposite. They maintain that introverts tend to be the best listeners in the room, which makes them, more often than not, the best improvisers.
This year, The Boomerang Comedy Theater outgrew its original location on Hearthstone Drive, moving down the road to a new space at 1600 Government Street, across from The Electric Depot. Boomerang’s offerings have grown alongside the space: the theatre now offers murder mystery experiences and team building workshops to private clients and companies in Baton Rouge. “It’s a great time to be here,” Travis says of the new location, which is benefitting from updates taking place on either side of the building. After watching this place turn person after person into slightly braver versions of themselves, I believe him. Renovated storefronts might be revitalizing the block, but Boomerang has been revitalizing the people who walk through its door for years, and I am one of them.
Though the cities and stages have changed over the years, the lessons I’ve learned as an improv comedian have carried me through unforeseen challenges in my professional life as a high school English teacher and my personal life as a parent of teenagers. The audience may not always be watching from the dark, but a classroom of freshmen and two teenagers of my own have made it clear that “yes, and …” works just as well in real life as it does on stage. Some days that’s all any of us can do anyway: show up, say “yes” to whatever chaos walks in the door, and find a way to build something meaningful out of it anyway.
If you’ve ever felt like you needed permission to be a little ridiculous, or just wanted an excuse to make new friends, then I’ll tell you what I tell every stranger who lingers after a show, looking like they want to ask something but aren’t sure what to say. Just sign up. You don’t need to be funny, and you don't even need to want to be funny. You just need to be willing to listen to another person and commit to building something neither of you planned. Sydney Gaskins, a former student who now performs with the house troupe, Something Else, puts it better than I ever could: “If it looks like fun, that’s because it is fun.”
The Family Dinner (Baton Rouge)
Facebook: @familydinnerimprov
The Silverbacks Improv Theatre (Lafayette)
Facebook: @SilverbacksImprovTheatre
Instagram: @silverbacksimprov
Boomerang Comedy Theater (Baton Rouge)
Kristen Foster is a long-form improv instructor and performer at Boomerang Comedy Theater in Baton Rouge. She is a high school English teacher by day and the parent of two teenagers, both of which are roles that provide ongoing improv training.
