Improv comedy troupe Bleach performs a show at Vegas Theatre Company’s Art Square venue every Thursday night. The five-member troupe—Eric Angell, Neil Corso, Kimberly Faubel, Philip Kotler and Tommy Todd, with musical accompanist Faustino Solis—comes to the stage cold, solicits topics from the audience and over the course of an hour, fashions them into unscripted comedy sketches.
What this means is someone’s childhood memory of their grandmother’s cross-stitch could become a mob war over a yard sale painting, or an astronaut trying to pick up women in a bar by bragging he’d built a house on the moon.
That’s what improv’s about, right? But it’s one thing to describe what Bleach does, and quite another to “yes, and” your way to a fleet, funny show week after week. Watching Bleach when the troupe is on its game can be as exciting as watching Cirque acrobats at work; the level of trust required between both types of performers is nearly identical. It gets you wondering: Are there nights when it simply doesn’t fly?
“You know, there aren’t really many bad nights,” Faubel says.
“There are good shows and not-so-great shows, but I never feel like we’re eating it,” Kotler says. “I don’t think there’s anything that forces me to be as present and listening and connected with other human beings than this work. When it’s working, you’re in a flow.”
Faubel continues, “There’s always something magical that happens, because you’re out there discovering things together. I very firmly believe that if we’re having fun, the audience is going to have fun.”
Bleach formed in 2013 on the advice of comic Paul Mattingly. “He was running the improv kingdom at the time, and he said, ‘You guys should do something; you play well together,’” Faubel says. Adopting a stage costume of crisp white shirts and black pants—a playful reaction to the unofficial “improv uniform” of “a black T-shirt and jeans,” Faubel jokes—the name “Bleach” came straight from the laundry room.
“We’d like a cooler [origin] story, but that’s the truth,” Faubel says. “We just gelled and became really, really good friends.”
Every member of the troupe wields a distinctive superpower. Angell is “the wild card,” with a gift for inhabiting unlikely characters: “He can be a turkey sandwich with heart,” Kotler says, “and he makes you care about it.” Faubel says Corso makes you feel “supported and safe. … If you go to a weird place, he’s gonna go into that weird place with you.” Todd is the most seasoned of the group— “I think he’s been doing this 25 years,” Faubel notes—and is “very well-read, very intelligent, and his delivery is just wonderful.”
Kotler lauds Faubel’s talent for bringing together the many disparate threads that form over the course of a show. “Kim is really great at finding connections between characters, or even a f*cking moral of the story,” he says.
And Kotler is a “jack-of-all-trades and master of most,” Faubel says. “And he plays a great bird. He plays a bird pretty frequently—and you should, because you’re if you’re good at something you should be doing it.”
And with that, Faubel finds the moral of this story: Bleach is good at what it does, so the troupe does it and enjoys the hell out of it. And if you trust Bleach with a Thursday night, it will happily pick you up and fly with you.
“Our show is an opportunity to let go completely and trust that it’s going to work out. I don’t think we have that guarantee in so many other ways, “ she says. “[Improv] is a community where we go into this not knowing what’s gonna happen. We haven’t rehearsed; there’s no script, no props, no plan, no plot. But we know that, at the end of the show, we’re gonna have people happy that they came.”
Bleach Presents: Your Show! Thursdays, 8:30 p.m., $15. Art Square Theatre, bleachimprov.com.
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