OFF LEASH! A Review Dianna Lefas ccSCOOP News All that glitters is not gold. Sometimes it is startling wit—and this is what Walking the Dog Theater’s Improv Ensemble delivered with generosity. Off Leash!, a sparkling night of improbable and impossibly delirious improv, lit up the stage at Space 360 in Hudson on Wednesday night. Off Leash! improv was reminiscent of Victorian parlor games—when the mind is teased to quickness with verbal play. In Wednesday night’s case, among other “tasks,” cast members had to create meaningful spontaneous dialogue around a storyline suggested by an audience member, and the beginning letters of the lines of dialogue had to progress in alphabetical order. Are you with me? The fast pace of the evening held the audience captive – the title Off Leash! being merely a shrewd disguise to the antithesis of what actually transpired on stage

Paul Boothroyd, Nancy Rothman, Eddie Allen, Benedicta Bertau, and David Anderson created a delightful, casual evening bubbling with spirit, which caused the mind to be stretched, teased, educated, sharpened, and enlivened.

The audience howled during one game in which some cast members spoke gibberish and others had to interpret it to create a coherent albeit nonsensical storyline. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I missed you ever since the doctor separated us” was David Anderson’s interpretation of Nancy Rothman’s gibberish addressed to Benedicta Bertau. Bertau’s miffed response, again as interpreted by Anderson, was: “The doctor separated us because I wanted my independence.”

Perspicacious, silly, intelligent, off-the-cuff, quick-witted, Off Leash! was a spontaneous improvisation that seemed to be as much as of a delight to the actors, who were kept on their toes, as it was to the audience. Drawing from a reservoir of Shakespearian-like observations—“We’re not moving. It feels like the world moves with us”—the cast members gave the sense that they were through being serious for the day and were allowing themselves to play, bringing the audience in with them, yet never losing their clever resourcefulness.

But the evening had more than laughs. For a crystalline moment, it had pure, touching emotion when Nancy Rothman created an impromptu poem from a first line suggested by the audience: “I nearly kissed her.” The poem was about her daughter leaving for college and how she resisted the urge to kiss her because she was afraid she might embarrass the girl. The audience was enrapt. You could have heard a have heard a pin drop. Rothman expressed the bittersweet letting-go a parent experiences when sending a child off to college and to independence for the first time.

Singing dialogue, creating a story based on a suggestion from the audience, blending the ridiculous and the absurd to make comical sense, dancing to not music but to vocal percussion provided by fellow actors, and other extemporaneous deliveries accomplished what theater does best: it put us in touch again with our humanity.

The night was a award to all those human emotions, each one rich with varying textures and colors, where comedy is spun out of everyday objects and affairs, where the mind’s self-imposed restrictions are the only barriers to a more creative and enriching world.

If people had to live by their wit and creativity alone, the members of Walking the dog Theater's Improv Ensemble should enjoy a long and rich life.