UNL students have called ^
St. Paul their church
since UNL began. :f •• f '
Join the tradition! Msum
WORSHIP THIS SUNDAY AT
St. Paul United Methodist Church
12th & M Streets 4 blocks south of campus
WORSHIP SERVICES AT 9:30 & 11 a.m.
I-$ Fast Bucks --
Check Cashing Service
— Check Cashed —
— Cash loans on gold & Silver—
Any KindFrom Anywhere
H I 4354352
Win Up To $1000
— Over 20 different Pickle Card Machines—
'
Saturday
September 26, 1987
8:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
At the Dental College, East Campus
Program & Tours of the Facilities
Join Us for Lunch
I To Register or for more information
I Call 4 72 1363 or 4 72-1364
I UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
I MEDICAL CENTER
I College of Dentistry, 40th & Holdrege, Lincoln, NE 68583
If they won't tell you about it,
then you know it must be great
Purple Passion' Out of the bathtub, into the can,
and onto the shelves of your favorite store
Discover it for yourself
to' World W«l9 Dntilbd P'odueH Compo^y By B»*»'ogt Conctph S* !ov<» M06JIO6 15 Proof
Butch IreTand/DaH^Nebraskan
The Class Acts (clockwise from left) are Juli Burney, Kevin Mattran, Mark Allen and Kathleen
Good.
‘Class Acts’ improvisations
keep comedy up to date
By Geoff McMurtry
Staff Reporter
Onstage, Juli Burney is warming
up the crowd with a few brief minutes
of standup comedy, getting people in
the mood for the work that’s to be
expected of them. There’s something
slightly odd about the floor-to-ceiling
forested background behind her as she
goes into her monologue about being
proud of Lincoln for all it has to offer.
She guides us around the circle tour,
rides with us on LTS and urges us not
to forget just how close we arc to
Wanck’s of Crete.
Just offstage, the other members of
the Class Acts comedy troupe —
Mark Allen, Kathleen Good and
Kevin Mallran — huddle offstage for
last-minutecontcmplationsof the first
sketch — a family going to FarmAid.
Class Acts is nothing if not up to dale,
dedicating last Saturday’s perform
ance to FarmAid III.
Burney is the booking agent for the
Friday- and Saturday-night comedy
shows at the Airport Holiday Inn
lounge. Each weekend she brings in
local openers and national acts.
Burney is also a member of the im
provisation group Class Acts, who
perform one weekend a month in the
lounge.
Seconds into the act, the crowd is
laughing almost as hard as the group
was earlier. Good has become a pu
bescent girl continually whining that
she doesn't want to go if Bon Jovi
isn’t. Bumcy is the harried yet opti
mistic small-town housewife. Mat
tran is Dad — an acid casualty who
thinks he’s going back to Woodstock,
and Allen is especially captivating as
the snotty, obnoxious little brother.
The sketch brings back startlingly
realistic memories of ill-fated family
vacations of the past, w h i le at the same
time it Boats toward the surreal.
A later sketch features Allen in a
reprise of the 10-ycar-old brat role,
this time in a group of kids at the
Nebraska State Fair. Good is a shy
little girl this time, Allen is a tour
guide who barely speaks English, and
Burney is a horrible nightmare of the
loud, obnoxious kid who always had
to tag along with your sister and
embarrassed everyone in sight. When
they get to the petting zoo, several
terrifyingly funny bits of audience
participation arc worked in. Pray it
docsn’t happen to you, but be thankful
if it docs.
Class Acts docs two completely
original, completely different 1 • hour
shows a night. They do a few worked
out, sketches and then take requests,
giving the audience a chance at high
concept.
“We hope for real bizarre things,
real off-the-wall places,” says
Burney. “We want a place from one
side (of the room), people from the
other.**
“We all have different characters
we do,” she said. “We try to keep
current, so people know' what’s going
on.”
“We also like to bring the audience
in,” Maltran said.
Class Acts has been performing as
an improv troupe for three years,
almost two in the current formation.
All four have paying jobs — Burney
teaches theater at Doane, Gotxl
teaches high school, Allen is a barber
and Maltran sells mcn’sclolhcs—but
enjoy performing and getting people
to laugh more than working.
All four have backgrounds in thea
ter and comedy, or both, and all have
done solo standup comedy before.
“Improv doesn't really fit into
standup or theater, but works well
w uh both,” Burney said.
Maltran smiles, then explains
some of the difficulties of asking for
audience requests.
“We don’t usually do the pope, but
we’ll usually try to work everything
in. There’s just certain ones” that
always crop up. Prostitutes, homo
sexuals, the pope, people that belong
in the places ...
“Sometimes it’s difficult if we try
to do current political .. . they don’t
know who the mayor of Lincoln is,”
Maltran said.
“We hate imitations,” Good said.
They all wearily say “Jim and
Tammy” together, as if on cue.
“In the second show we play Im
prov Tag.”
“It gets a lot racier, more risque.”
“There’s a lot more sex jokes.”
What’s Improv Tag?
Two members become characters
in a place. Every 30 seconds or so,
another one runs onstage, laps one of
them, freezing the action. Tapper
trades places with tappecand starts off
on a whole new situation. What
started with a drunk guy’s suggestion
of UCLA cheerleaders in a dog pound
(they made it work better than it
should have) became a little girl in a
mortuary thinking an erect cadaver
was ice cream, which eventually led
through a zoo, a porno photographer’s
studio and a store window with live
nude mannequins. Or something like
that
It ends up having the surrealism ol
a videotape made while watching
cable TV in a drunken stupor at 4 a.m.
with a remote channel changer, but
you laugh a lot more. Stay for the
second show.
While Class Acts can only be seen
about once a month at the Airport
Holiday Inn’s lounge, the motel has
comedy acts there every weekend.
There arc usually two shows each on
See COMEDY on TT
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I FOOTLOOSE & FANCY 1219 P St. 476-6119