Improv.

Improv.

It's Wednesday night at Chicago's most venerable coffeehouse, the No Exit. An improv group called Bang Bang has been playing here late on Wednesdays. They're supposed to be hot. They're supposed to be good. They're supposed to have an interesting approach. The Chicago Tribune ran a friendly piece about them in the Sunday arts section.

Which makes what I'm seeing now that much more puzzling. There may be times when these Bang Bang people really are all the things they're supposed to be, but not tonight. They're terrible tonight. More than terrible: They seem utterly and completely clueless. I can't imagine how they might even get to good from where they are tonight.

At least one company member appears to understand. "Let's see some more boring fucking Bang Bang work," he yells from the back of the room. "Let's see some asshole get up there and take me to the moon."

An interesting statement--not only because you don't often see a performer acknowledge failure (or cuss out his fellow players, for that matter) while the performance is still in progress, but also because it suggests something of what that performer expected from the performance in the first place. This Bang Bang guy wanted nothing less than transportation to the moon. You may say the comment was just hyperbole. Based on what I know about the new wave of improvisation in Chicago, I'd say it was dead serious.

Because Chicago's new wave improvisers are themselves dead serious. After more than three decades during which audiences and entertainers alike came to think of improv as another word for skit-style comedy a la "Saturday Night Live," a younger bunch of artists has begun to emerge here with a very different--and much larger--sense of what the form can be and do. These improvisers aren't afraid of a laugh, but they haven't fetishized it as the one goal of their onstage existence, either. For them, improvisation isn't simply a means to a punchline; it's a kind of walking meditation, a process of discovery...a way to get at and disclose everything they didn't know they had in them--funny and otherwise. As Jim Dennen, a director associated with some of the best and boldest new wave shows, says, "We truly have somehow happened upon a way of working where it's not pure anxiety and pure product-orientation. Instead, it's a growing organism, and it lives."

And, Bang Bang's bad night notwithstanding, an astounding...