A Spirited Romp At Go!

By Amy J. Parrent

Thursday nights in October at Go Comedy! Improv Theater end with the two-person improv, "The Die Centennial." A duo of jovial, off-the-wall spirits are celebrating 100 years of death with a look back at some of the highlights, lowlights and lowlifes they have observed from their incorporeal state.
Henry and Agnes Mortelli – James Quesada and Heather Sejnow – failed to receive an invitation to either heaven or hell upon their demise, although they suspect the latter is where they belong. So they wander the world, and into the audience, amiably chatting about a century of very odd observances.
Singling out audience members for brief inquisitions (no actual torture involved), the answers to their questions are springboards to eccentric improvs, using as props a few wigs, scarves and boas which they fling over their clothing, an appropriate approximation of their old turn-of-the-20th-century garb.
There was, they recall, the 1930s torture chamber that didn't seem THAT bad. And a 1950 cheerleading team whose overly elaborate rah-rah-rahs reveal a certain lack of sports knowledge. ("Kick it if you have to – or throw it, if that's your job.")
Quesada has a wonderful strong theatrical voice. Sejnow brings a particularly effervescent and wacky high spiritedness to her ghost, whether she's portraying a torture victim or a sexually starved Slav.
Upon being told by one man in the audience that he'd once been bitten by a horse named Steve, Senjow casually dropped, "Oh, if I had a dollar for every Steve that bit me … I'd have three dollars."
Another audience talk somehow led to a tale of two freezing-cold Russian lovers, and then an aside about the spirits' own disastrous attempts at a post-mortal coupling. Senjow scrunched her face as she remembered with distaste, "There was ectoplasm everywhere."
But the squeamish can be assured, these spirits are more garrulous than ghoulish, and the pair create a fine improv nightcap.

REVIEW:
'The Die Centennial'
Go Comedy! Improv Theater
261 E. Nine Mile Rd., Ferndale
10 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16, 23, 30
$5
248-327-0575
http://www.gocomedy.net