Sundays in the Park with Stevie Ray
by Kay Miller
Star Tribune Staff Reporter

Turn your heads, kids. This could get ugly. It's 7:30p.m. and Improv in the Park has turned into a contest of wits between improv impresario Stevie Ray and his student, Dion Evans. For 12 years Ray, executive director of Stevie Ray's Improv Company, has presided over the twice-a-Sunday outdoor shows, drawing crowds of 100 to 300 people to the grassy incline east of the Lake Harriet Rose Garden in Minneapolis.
Sun-baked singles, families and couples recline on blankets under shady trees, sipping bottled drinks and eating takeout while shouting out ideas that fuel Ray's goofball improvisations. On this July evening they're watching a takeoff of sitcom comic Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck" routine. Tonight, it seems that all the volunteer actors are accountants. In previous skits, Evans, a treasury analyst at Target, delighted the audience with verbal jabs at Ray. Now the gloves come off.
Ray steps up to the microphone. "If you lack the personality to be a math teacher...you're an accountant." Evans quickly counters: "If you look at the other guy's shoes, and you think you're being extroverted...you just might be an accountant." Ray's not done: "If no one has a follow up question when they ask, 'What do you do for a living?' you're an accountant."
Cultural literacy of the Bart Simpson variety is improv's currency. And people who are oblivious to TV, gossip, news, movies, or current events are likely to get seriously confused. Teens especially admire the rapid-fire show's wit, pace, and irreverence, said Ian Snyder, 13, of Minneapolis, who comes almost every week with his brother Ben, 9. Ian finds inspiration in the creative risks that players take. Ben gets so ramped up by shows that he invents limericks all the way home, said their mother, Kelly Snyder.
OK, show of hands-who's been here before? Ray asks. Three quarters of the 100 people attending the 5p.m. show are fist-timers. The 7p.m. show draws twice the audience, most of them regulars. And what do you people do for a living? "Teacher!" shouts a regular. "Big crowd and one person works," Ray says. "That's why you're coming to a free outdoor show."
Ray uses different players each week, drawing from a few professionals from his company. But most are promising students from his improv classes. They have no idea what set-ups Ray will foist on them. Ray serves as the emcee and humor glue. If a skit bombs, he might have the players shift to another language. It's strange how easily a fake accent-a la Andy Kaufman-turns gibberish funny.
Audience members cheer at their favorite bits: "Jeopardy" (the audience shouts out topics: golf Chinese food, llamas and S-words). "Position the Mannequin" ("Get them to walk by touching them behind the knee"). And limerick contests. "It's a five-line poem that you read on bathroom walls," Ray says. Each troupe member makes up a line on the spot. The topics are ridiculous, the limericks dreadful, and the troupe member who hesitate are lustily booed.
The park setting comes with its own, sometimes amusing occurrences. After last summer's power outages garbled computer settings, park sprinklers went off, sending audience members scurrying. Ray has had to negotiate with white-frocked croquet players who demanded to see his park permit, and contend with weddings erroneously scheduled for his time slot.
"One was a traditional Ethiopian wedding where there was a lot of chanting as they marched past us from 50 yards away," Ray said. "Some people actually thought that we planned it as some sort of joke. 'What about an Ethiopian wedding do you think would be the joke here?"
People frequently come and go during skits, but a couple of weeks ago an older gentleman got up and walked through the middle of a skit. Some speculated that he was miffed by jabs at Republicans ("You might be a Republican if you don't need no stinkin' popular vote"). Turns out the man was just thirsty. After drinking leisurely from the fountain behind the troupe, he walked back through the same scene and took his seat.
Several weeks ago Ray was doing his "Helping Hands" skit-where a short person behind Ray becomes his hands. "We're pretending that we're driving. Out of the blue from the audience comes this parakeet. It took this long fluttering flight and lands on the crotch of my pants looking right up at me." Ray stopped talking. The helping hands paused. The audience howled. Ray put his finger down. The bird hopped on. Together they took a bow.
Shows on a recent Sunday drew visitors from Colorado, North Carolina, Indiana ("Indiana is so boring-we don't have anything like this there!") and Twin Cities suburbs such as Chaska and Mendota Heights. "It's free. It's fun. It's in the park," said Lisa Johnson, 18, who came from Edina with two friends to walk around Lake Harriet and see the show. "It's a great place to be with other people and have a good time, as opposed to 'Let's go to this $60 show at the Ordway,'" agreed her friend Jackie Eastman, 18. "It's something you can do with little to no budget."