You'll feel at home at Dad's

By Jennifer L. Johnson

The good thing about improv comedy shows is that you’ll never go to the same one twice. You never know what you’re going to get — but at Dad’s Garage Theatre in Atlanta, at least you know you’re going to get a good laugh.

After my first trip five years ago, I became addicted to the Friday night show "Murder She Improvised," which tossed together Angela Lansbury’s famous TV show, "Sherlock Holmes," audience suggestions, a truckload of implausibility and one wicked fake mustache.

Now, you might not expect much of any performance you have to watch from weathered auditorium seats on plywood risers inside a windowless warehouse, even if that warehouse is a stone’s throw from Little 5 Points. But I’ve been to over three dozen shows at Dad’s North Highland Avenue location in midtown, and have yet to be disappointed.

So after a two-year absence, I returned to Dad’s Garage Saturday night to see an improv double-feature — Lethal-er Weapon, mocking the buddy cop drama formula, and Mucho Mas, which poked fun at over-the-top Mexican soap operas.

When it comes to improv, you want your actors to be quick on their toes, but it's a simple fact that some people are quicker with that wit than others.

Kevin Gilles — the artistic director at Dad's — is an improv natural. He pulled double-duty in the double-feature Saturday, playing heavily accented bad guys each time — first as a Russian national with a devious plan to take down the country via an illegal hacky sack ring, and then the leader of the Mexican Mafia and father to two very annoying daughters.

Though Gilles’s comedic timing is a thing of beauty, its how he and the other actors are able to respond to each other that keeps the story moving.

The true appeal of watching improv isn't just listening to the jokes that fly back and forth across the stage, it's watching the actors respond to each other when they get tripped up or make mistakes.

Dad’s Garage founder Matt Stanton played lead roles in both 'episodes', but provided most of these snarled situations, giving his fellow improvisers a real moment to shine in some of the funniest sequences of the evening.

"What was it like when the wall fell?" Stanton asked Gilles' nameless Russian bad guy in Lethal-er Weapon. "It was fine," Gilles replied. "I was in Russia at the time. It might have been different if I were in Berlin, where the wall actually was."

It's moments like these that remind the audience that, at Dad's, you're in on the gag.

Ed Morgan — the spitting image of "Saturday Night Live" actor Seth Meyers as an awkward teen — played several characters throughout the evening, including a pleasant teenage athlete, a sarcastic bartender, an overly-concerned Mexican mother (with the help of a prop wig) and an X-box-obsessed stoner. Morgan breaks down that fourth wall with self-aware comments in many of his scenes, noting at one point, "Wow. Am I really talking about the ephemeral nature of springtime weather? This is a really deep conversation for a 17-year-old to be having."

Even better than the improvisers' meta-theatrical comments were the fearless way they approached telling their tales in the hour and a half performance. It was clear that no one involved in Mucho Mas remembered much from their high school Spanish classes.

When Stanton's young rebel asked the 15-year-old Mexican Mafia princess love interest played by Linnea Frye for her name —"¿Como es nombre?" — Frye responded by beginning her telephone number.

I laughed the entire way through the double-feature, even though the actors really hit their mark in their first act. That’s the good and bad part about improv at Dad’s — no matter how many times you go, you’ll never see the same show twice.