Hot Monkey Pi
By Jack Helbig
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Napier and his ragtag company, most of them trained at the Improv-Olympic and Second City, created a third camp, one that had room for improvisers who loved the freedom and spontaneity of improv but who also believed you could use it to create an evening-length script that was not a comedy revue. Coed Prison Sluts, the Annoyance Theatre’s first big hit and their still-running flagship show, is now thoroughly scripted but was originally created through improvisation. Ever since that show first opened, in April 1989, nearly every show at the Annoyance (that didn’t involve the Brady Bunch) has been created in rehearsal by an ensemble of seasoned improvisers. And for a time that was enough, as the Annoyance company–then in full rebellion against the Second City folks, who nicknamed them “The Island of Misfit Toys”–churned out one sassy, iconoclastic, hilarious show after another, with names like That Darned Anti-Christ, Your Butt, and The Miss Vagina Pageant.
Some have blamed the company’s decline on the fact that Mick Napier spent so much time last season in New York, directing Amy and David Sedaris’s play One Woman Shoe and working on the cable comedy show Exit 57. And it’s true that without Napier the Annoyance Theatre has drifted. But as the current innovative but flawed show proves, the problem runs deeper than that. Hot Monkey Pi is the first show Napier has directed since Poo Poo Le Arse two years ago, and like Poo Poo it represents a conscious break from the theater’s usual way of creating shows: Napier and company steal a page from revue-style shows and substitute many settings for the single setting of earlier works.
