Mad Hatters

It’s a hot night in July, and the Susquehanna Hat Company is performing at the Squirrel… It’s a hot night in July, and the Susquehanna Hat Company is performing at the Squirrel Hill Happening. A stage is set up on the corner of Forbes and Murray avenues and the group is wedged between a fake cliff – where, for $2, a person can live out a short thrill of adventure or fear – and an exotic petting zoo, where patrons can pet llamas and South Korean roosters.

Just before the performance, math whiz and director Eric Ellis calls people to the stage and the workers themselves line up military style behind him and prepare for spontaneous action. It’s time for the company to sell its wares.

The Hat Company needs few resources to operate. An empty stage, six workers and a healthy dose of imagination. The result? A huge amount of laughs for consumer satisfaction.

Now it should be noted that the Hat Company is not a hat factory nor is it from Susquehanna, Pa. Named after a famous Abbott and Costello sketch, it is what chaos manager and producer Randy Kirk calls “Pittsburgh’s premier improvisational troupe.”

The Hat Company has been in operation for eight years with a rotating conveyor belt of people and talents. Currently there are six members with varying backgrounds, including two theater performers, an accountant and a fifth grade teacher.

Kirk himself became involved after first seeing the company perform at an improv festival three years ago. Besides performing in the Hat Company and “sister participatory and dinner theatre” group called Mystery Most Wanted, Kirk is a recent graduate of Pitt with a degree in creative writing.

“One of the things that makes the group interesting is the diversity of it, and the different things that they do, different people volunteer in different ways,” Kirk said.

Each of the shows run from 45 minutes to two hours, depending on the venue. Kirk said the group does short form improv like on the television show “Whose Line is it Anyway?” in addition to longer improv skits and games that can last as long as 20 minutes. The shows are custom-made to fit a particular audience in a particular locale. When asked to tone down language and subject matter the group will always respectively comply, Kirk said.

“When you do it for a while you get a sense of what your audience is comfortable and uncomfortable with,” Kirk said. “You know how far to push it and when to reign it back so it’s good to play with the restrictions.”

At the Squirrel Hill Happening, the Hat Company performs for 45 family-friendly minutes and creates a soap opera entitled “San Francisco Shoes,” followed by a PBS pledge break offering edible cardboard boxes as premiums and ending with a scientist attempting to eradicate the world in less than a minute. But the Hat Company didn’t create the entire whirlwind performance – it was fueled by audience suggestions.

Despite the low turnout -less than a dozen people – Ellis is optimistic about the performance.

“It went pretty well,” Ellis said. “It was a big physical performance where people stop and look around. Usually in public performances, people don’t stay too long to see the rest of the show.”

Ellis has been an improvisational actor long enough to validate any assertion of performance quality. Having been with the Company since its conception in 1995, Ellis has recently taken the directing reins from former director Steven Werber. Like Kirk, Ellis is also a Pitt graduate who recently obtained an accounting degree.

Both Ellis and Kirk take to the roadways every year to showcase their talents at improv festivals. But the hardest locale in which to sell their product is in their own backyard.

“Improv is a notoriously difficult thing to sell in Pittsburgh,” Kirk said. “It’s odd because it is so open people don’t think about it as an option, but people who come to our show always leave with a good time.”

But the Hat Company has been slowly receiving more attention in the land of steel. They performed for the Pittsburgh Pirates, at Pitt, in clubs like the Rex Theatre and Lava Lounge as well as charity events sponsored by the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force and the Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. The group also performs for private parties and events.

Ellis and Kirk stress that improvisation is a serious art form that can be as dramatic as it is funny.

“We do serious stuff,” Ellis said. “We try to incorporate subjects and levity. But, for the most part, people come to have fun, and that’s what we provide for them.”

Besides incorporating drama into their acts, sometimes-cold reality drifts onto the stage. Ellis and Kirk shared one of their favorite performances. Seven years ago, the troupe performed at the Riverview Jewish Elderly Care Home. Before the show started, a man came up to the stage to announce that Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated. A moment of silence was announced, but afterward, the show went on.

“The first five minutes were the coldest we ever had but, the audience eventually warm up,” Ellis said.

“You can only cry for so long but you can laugh for a while.”