Never let it be said that the actors in A Drinking Game
refused to suffer for their craft. A live reading of classic movies
turned interactive drinking game, the monthly production features actors
sitting on folding chairs on a minimal, setless stage with their
scripts … and their booze.
They take a swig each time certain
words are spoken — say, “school,” “car” or “sick” — and each time their
character's name is called. There's no secretly spitting the beer back
into the bottle, or feigning sips or substituting water instead. This is
serious, Method acting.
Founder Natalie Lynch's poison of choice
is Jack and Coke, while the rest of the cast prefer beer. Drink slowly,
she advises. Take small sips. “It's a marathon, not a race.”
As
blood-alcohol level increases, it gets harder to read the script.
Cognitive function, not to mention dramatic skill, declines. Lynch
maintains that some actors, especially the more reserved and inhibited
ones, do perform better when liquored up. Others just get liquored up.
“I
do not act better when drunk,” she admits, a critical assessment borne
out in video documentation. She has watched the footage afterward and
been horrified by it. Her accent fades. Her mannerisms devolve into
caricature. Nuance and subtlety disappear. “At a certain point, I'm not
even in character anymore,” she says. “I'm just me.”
The turning
point is usually after intermission, when suddenly all the alcohol kicks
in. By then, it doesn't really matter, though. By then, the audience is
throwing things. This is because the audience drinks, too.
Forget
impolite little coughs or talking during the show. These guys heckle.
They spill beer. They laugh too loudly. They yell. Occasionally, they
vomit.
You might think that there'd be nothing worse for an actor than mayhem in the house. Not so in A Drinking Game. “Guys drunkenly yelling, 'We love you!' any other time would be unacceptable,” Lynch says. “But in this case it's good.”
What starts as a theatrical event turns into a frat party. Weird shit happens. During The Princess Bride, a sword fight broke out in the audience. During Ghostbusters, people lobbed marshmallows and sprayed each other with Silly String. During Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the entire theater got up and started dancing when the actor playing Ferris sang “Twist and Shout.” During Back to the Future,
the power went out around the entire block, right after the Libyans
attack and Marty travels back in time. The actors did the rest of the
performance in the dark, using cellphones for illumination. The show
must go on.
For certain audience members, it really does go on …
and on and on and on. The few designated drivers and other teetotalers
who pay for admission, Lynch says, are saints. “I don't know how they
sit through it.”
For a while, performances took place at the Next
Stage theater in Hollywood. It was as good a venue as any. Not too
highbrow, not so spick-and-span that you'd worry about puking on one of
its 45 seats. Sure, you risked your neck climbing up a couple flights of
stairs to get to the theater (sign that waiver, please!). Sure, guys
occasionally pissed over the edge of the railing when they couldn't be
bothered to wait in line for the restroom. But there was an IHOP
downstairs, where the cast (and its adoring, inebriated fans) could
convene after final curtain. They'd sober up and rehash the gory details
over coffee and pancakes.
Eventually the Next Stage got too small
to contain the growing crowd, so the organizers moved the event over to
Molly Malone's bar. It is no longer BYOB. “But there's nothing to say
you can't get a little tipsy ahead of time and then take very small sips
as you play along,” Lynch suggests.
When she isn't acting drunk,
Lynch does sketch comedy and children's theater. Currently, she can be
seen opposite Muffles the Penguin and Princess Happy in King of the Ice Cream Mountain, in which Lynch stars as the evil Zena, scourge and tormentor of King Bumpygruff. Ice Cream Mountain
is staged on Saturday mornings, after which Lynch proceeds to
Saturday-evening drinking-game shows. Sundays are filled with aspirin.
She
sometimes feels wicked waving goodbye to the little kids as she heads
out for a long night of Jack and Coke, she says on the phone one
afternoon while shopping at Party City.
Lynch is picking up props for the upcoming Drinking Game production of Beetlejuice,
with a shopping list that includes eyeballs, severed fingers, fake
wedding rings, cheap plastic trophies for the costume contest and mini
notebooks that will be transformed into Handbooks for the Recently
Deceased.
“I love the interactive bit,” she says. “I love the idea
of giving the audience something they can play along with. Like, have
you ever seen Blue Man Group? They hand out streamers, and people wear
them as headbands or neckties. As soon as they do that, they decide
they're going to participate. Their whole mentality changes. The show
isn't just happening in front of them anymore. It's something they're
part of. Suddenly they're goofy and not uptight.”
Sounds lovely. But it's possible Lynch's opinions are colored by beer goggles. When they did Goonies,
she was so drunk she couldn't even remember the end of the show.
Recollections of the evening come back in pieces: “By the end of the
show, not only are our sentences slurred, we're making bad judgment
calls.”
She vaguely remembers one actor ripping his entire script into shreds even though he still had lines.
The company mostly sticks to popular films from the 1980s — raucous, irreverent stuff. (A Drinking Game: Leaving Las Vegas
probably won't be coming soon to a theater near you.) The booze,
nostalgia and camaraderie have made for a winning formula, and the
show's fans, of whom there are 604 on Facebook, want more. In an effort
to accommodate them, Lynch and her fellow thespians considered staging
performances twice instead of once a month. Ultimately, however, they
opted against that. Their reasons are both aesthetic and hepatic. “The
cast will die,” she explains. “Our livers couldn't take it.”
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