Scapino!’s all about improvisation, director of LSU production says

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Jul 6, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 am

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Indiana University had made it to the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament.

Chris Nelson doesn’t mention the year or who was coaching at the time, but he does say he was working on his master’s degree, and he remembers well the theater department’s performance of Scapino!

“It was my first time to see it,” he said. “The basketball team was playing that night, and they kept announcing the score during the play.”

And it was to be expected, not so much because the Hoosiers were more important than even the most dire emergencies that night. Heck, doctors probably had radios tuned to the college’s sports network in delivery rooms.

Really, would that be a surprise?

Or would it be more of a surprise to learn that the basketball team actually was a part of the play?

“That’s how commedia dell’Arte works,” Nelson said. “It allows for a lot of improvisational acting, and that includes local references and jokes that only the audience in the area would understand.”

So, Indiana was vying for a national championship, which played perfectly into the plot of Scapino! Now, the same wouldn’t hold true for a Baton Rouge performance of the play.

No, references would have to include LSU or maybe even Louisiana politics, because audiences seeing the play in LSU’s Hatcher Hall Theatre mostly would be made up of Louisianians. Indiana humor just wouldn’t work. And that’s as it should be.

For commedia dell’Arte is about the play as it unfolds in a locale, as will Scapino! when it opens Tuesday, July 8, in LSU’s Hatcher Hall Theatre.

The play is one of two in a Studio Show series presented this summer by the LSU Department of Theatre. The cast is small, and the story is family friendly.

“In other words, people can bring their kids,” Nelson, direct or of the production, said.

And though the play is scripted, it does allow for some improvisation.